RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/04/14/why-a-former-cnn-producer-shredded-the-media-over-their-covid-vaccine-coverage-n2587950

Steve Krakauer is a former CNN producer and media executive. His recent Fourth Watch newsletter touched upon what we’re all talking about: the COVID vaccine. Specifically, the pause over the Johnson and Johnson vaccine after six women aged 18-48 suffered blood clots six-to-thirteen days after receiving the shot. Nearly seven million doses have already been administered. The risk is still IMMENSELY LOW—but the message is clear and vaccine hesitancy, which was already an issue, has now become another area where the panic peddlers can latch onto though it makes no sense. The experts want us to get vaccinated but then think we’ll just be nonreactive to news that’s packaged to scare us half to death. Is it good that Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no cause of alarm or anxiety for those who have received the J&J shot? Yes, but his credibility balance is negative. The experts have said that impending doom was upon us. Nothing happened. And now, on top of the expert class indirectly peddling vaccine hesitancy with their advice to get the shot but remain in the bunker and in abject terror, the media has also played a part in the hysteria. 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said she’s going to remain hiding even after getting vaccinated. CNN’s Brian Stelter is mad more people, journalists especially, aren’t sharing their vaccine selfies. CNN also published why that could be a security risk. Krakauer noted that whether intentional or not, the media establishment is only fanning the flames of vaccine hesitancy (via Fourth Watch):

Consciously or subconsciously, the media is continuing to drive fear around COVID that undoubtably will lead to vaccine hesitancy. Take MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Sunday. The 7pm host tweeted to her two million followers that, when she’s fully vaccinated, she will be too “scurred” to get on an airplane or do “indoor activities” and that she plans to continue “double masking…for the foreseeable future”…

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/04/14/the-press-is-infrastructure-for-biden-n258786

Sen. John Cornyn came under blistering attack from Washington Post scribe Aaron Blake for having wondered whether President Joe Biden is really in charge, since he’s kept an extremely low profile with the press. Blake took after the senator for implying the Trump spin that old Joe has lost a few mental gears and is something of a “Manchurian Candidate.” “It’s a baseless and ugly bit of innuendo,” Blake wrote.

On Twitter, Cornyn linked to a Politico story in which writer Eugene Daniels noted: “The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters.” He’s had one press conference during his 84 days in office.

One obvious explanation for the Biden strategy is his tendency to insert his foot in his mouth. But it’s also obvious that he has zero fear of his low availability to the press being a problem with “mainstream” reporters, since about 99.96% of them surely voted for him in November.

Most Americans are relieved that the president’s tweets are “unimaginably conventional.” But the press slid back to its Obama-era tone, championing sappy Biden tweets about his love for his wife, “Jilly,” and Jilly’s buying treats at black-owned bakeries. White House chief of staff Ron Klain routinely retweets the “mainstream” reporters, implying that he endorses their helpful pro-Biden spin.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/07/legacy-media-corruption-is-at-the-heart-of-our-national-conflict/

The media’s false reporting about new election legislation in Georgia whipped up a controversy that left millions of people grossly misinformed, frightened voters, mired major corporations in high-stakes public relations frenzies, distracted the political discourse, and furthered the country’s divisions. In short, it’s a perfect example of how the media is fueling our national conflict.

In this case, the media uncritically regurgitated Georgia Democrats’ partisan hyperbole, treating a narrative the party strategically crafted to defeat the legislation as fact and turning it into a long and false national news cycle. That news cycle left the public with an impression that the legislation was objectively racist.

That impression scared and motivated the public, leading employees to pressure executives into action. Worse, the false coverage led millions of people to believe that a major political party representing half the country was seeking to reinstate Jim Crow.

The coverage from our country’s major publications was so bad that after a few days, even liberals like Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and Will Saletan of Slate began pushing back. Those responsible for the bad coverage, which is the bulk of the legacy press, appear to be facing no consequences.

Over at RealClearPolitics, Carl Cannon wrote a poignant column on the offensive absurdity of invoking Jim Crow in this context.

“When Donald Trump likened his being impeached to a lynching, living relatives of Willie Edwards and Emmett Till called this comparison ‘ignorant’ and ‘insensitive’ and ‘offensive.’ They were right,” Cannon wrote. “But now Biden is invoking racist history, and doing it to score partisan political points. Millions of Americans who voted for him hoped they were done having to listen to such blasphemy from the White House.”

Sadly, the media parroted that partisan spin, legitimizing the Democratic Party’s narrative by presenting it under the banner of journalistic neutrality. For a clearer glimpse at the consequences, read this New York Times report on the internal frenzy at corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola, which spent days fumbling to respond under pressure from the media, activists, and staff.

That pressure stemmed entirely from misinformation peddled by the legacy media. Without the media’s legitimization of a partisan narrative, concerned employees wouldn’t have been reaching out, the external pressures of a PR threat would have been negligible, and the corporations could have focused on the business of taking us on spring break and making our mixers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/watch-how-60-minutes-deceptively-edited-ron-desantiss-full-answer-on-publix-vaccinations/

CBS’s 60 Minutes alleged that Florida governor Ron DeSantis enlisted grocery chain Publix to help with coronavirus vaccine distribution because of a campaign contribution, but edited DeSantis’s full response to the allegation.

“Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then you rewarded them with exclusive rights to vaccination in Palm Beach,” a CBS reporter said at a press conference for the governor in Orlando. DeSantis said the reporter peddled a “fake narrative” when she alleged he engaged in a “pay-for-play” scheme.

However, 60 Minutes omitted a key section of DeSantis’s response, in which he states that the first pharmacies to take charge of vaccine distribution were CVS and Walgreens, and were initially tasked with vaccinating residents of long-term care facilities.

DeSantis said that in January the state wanted to expand distribution sites and contacted other large chains with pharmacies.

“You had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more,” DeSantis said. “So we reached out to other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission and we said we’re going to use you as soon as you’re done with that.”

DeSantis has grown in popularity among GOP voters, who view the governor as a potential presidential candidate in 2024 if President Trump decides not to run again.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/a_list_of_questions_that_real_journalists_would_ask_joe_biden.html

When I grew up, despite their general Democrat-leaning bias, journalists still asked probing questions, that saw them seeking information. That’s not the case anymore. When a Republican is the president, the journalists just play “gotcha.” And when a Democrat is in office, especially a senile Democrat, the journalists pose delicately prepared questions that are intended to elicit a planned speech from the president. Mollie Hemingway has done a great service by setting out a list of questions real journalists would ask Joe Biden about the MLB boycott in Georgia.

If you want a perfect example of what passes for journalism nowadays, you can’t do better than the question PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, a hardcore Democrat activist who operates partially on the taxpayer’s dime, and who functions as the straight man, feeding lines to our joke of a president:

You’ve said over and over again that immigrants shouldn’t come to this country right now. This isn’t the time to come. That message is not being received. Instead, the perception of you that got you elected as a moral decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors. How do you resolve that tension and how are you choosing which families can stay and which can go given the fact that even though with Title 42 there are some families that are staying? And is there a timeline for when we won’t be seeing these overcrowded facilities run by CPB when it comes to unaccompanied minors?

Fourteen years ago, a great video came out showing a man being pulled over by the world’s most loving cop. Watch the video and tell me if that cop isn’t indistinguishable from the tongue bath the media give Biden:

The same thing happened when ESPN’s Sage Steele asked Biden what he thought of having MLB boycott Atlanta, a city that voted overwhelmingly for Biden because Georgia had revised its voting laws to require ID for absentee ballots (something common in most states). Biden enthusiastically supported the boycott, an answer he propped up with grotesque lies. Steele just let all that lie there like rotten fish.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-unanimous-knockout-on-media-rules-11617316109?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Local newspapers and broadcasters have struggled, or worse, as cable and social media become more dominant. But they received some good news Thursday as the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s rules letting local media consolidate to compete with bigger players.

The FCC has broad statutory power to regulate broadcast media “as public convenience, interest, or necessity requires.” In the 1960s and ’70s, the agency issued three rules limiting cross-ownership of newspapers, broadcast TV and radio. The intent was to prevent one company from dominating the local news market. This sounds silly today given the digital media dominance and cross-ownership of Big Tech. Nothing prevents Apple from owning news and podcast platforms.

Fortunately, as media markets evolved, Congress in 1996 directed the FCC to review its media ownership rules every four years and repeal or modify those that no longer serve the public interest. The FCC has made several attempts over two decades—most recently in 2017—yet each time has been blocked by Judges Thomas Ambro and Julio Fuentes on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The judges last ruled in 2019 that the FCC’s rule didn’t adequately consider harm to minority and female ownership.

But as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains for the Court in FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project, the Third Circuit decision was itself arbitrary and capricious. Despite soliciting public comment on minority and female ownership, the FCC “had received no countervailing evidence suggesting that changing the three ownership rules was likely to harm minority and female ownership.” He adds that the Administrative Procedure Act imposes “no general obligation on agencies to conduct or commission their own empirical or statistical studies.”

Justice Clarence Thomas points out in a concurrence that Congress didn’t require the FCC to consider minority and female ownership. The Third Circuit judges thus had no authority to require it to do so. Congress’s broad delegation to the FCC to regulate local media markets to promote whatever the agency views as the “public interest” deserves judicial scrutiny. But for now the 9-0 decision is an embarrassing rebuke to the plaintiffs and errant judges who couldn’t get a single Justice on their side.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/matt-taibbi-msnbc-joe-scarborough-russia-hoax

Taibbi accuses MSNBC of ‘suckage’ that ‘was visible from space during the key years of Russiagate’

Journalist Matt Taibbi took MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to task Monday after the “Morning Joe” host suggested that critics of the mainstream media’s Russian collusion narrative are on Vladimir Putin’s “payroll.” 

On Monday, Scarborough panned a statement sent out late Friday by former President Donald Trump that asked “Where’s Durham?” in reference to the ongoing into the origings of the Russia investigation by former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Scarborough then took aim at those who were critical of the media’s coverage of the unsubstantiated narrative, which was heavily led by MSNBC.

“I’m amused by so-called reporters who are- I don’t know if they’re useful idiots for Russia or if they’re on Russia’s payroll,” Scarborough began. “I don’t know and I don’t really care, but there are some gifted writers who spend all night and day trying to dig through, looking for instances of where the press screwed up on Russia stories, pushing this ‘Russian hoax’ fallacy.”

“It’s just- it’s a joke because if you look at the totality of it, if you look at the totality of everything that happened, the media screwed up at some points and sometimes they screwed up badly, but more often than not they got it right and they get most of it right,” the MSNBC host continued. 

Taibbi, a vocal critic of the media’s Russia coverage during the Trump years, fired back in a piece published on his Substack in which he challenged Scarborough to invite him on “Morning Joe” for a debate.

“Implying that anyone who didn’t buy into the moral panic on Russia was a traitor was a fairly constant theme in media and politics in the last four years, with NBC’s smear of Tulsi Gabbard as a ‘favorite’ of ‘Russia’s propaganda machine’ being one of the ethical low points of the era. Why should Joe Scarborough be above the same tactics?” Taibbi asked before invoking other journalists critical of the media, including Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, and Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/big-media-and-big-tech-collude-control-thought-joseph-hippolito/

Nothing exemplifies the corporate collusion to control thought better than an article in the New York Times’ opinion section.

Charlie Warzel, one of the Times’ opinion writers, argues that conventional critical-thinking skills become useless when confronting the massive amount of information available online. Instead, Warzel advocates simplifying the process by limiting internet browsing to one or two trusted sources — such as Google or Wikipedia — to evaluate quickly whether a subject warrants further research.

But FrontPage Magazine reported in “What if the ‘Conspiracy’ is Real?” that Google and Wikipedia manipulate information that contradicts their political agendas. Both did that to Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow who produced a documentary showing in detail how President Donald Trump’s opponents stole last year’s election on Joe Biden’s behalf.

Warzel describes an idea devised by Michael Caulfield, a professor whom Warzel interviewed. Caulfield distilled the findings of two other professors, Stanford’s Sam Wineburg and the University of Maryland’s Sarah McGrew, into a process he calls SIFT: Stop, Investigate (the source), Find (better coverage) and Trace (claims to their original context).

“The four steps are based on the premise that you often make a better decision with less information than you do with more,” Warzel wrote. “Also, spending 15 minutes to determine a single fact in order to decipher a tweet or a piece of news coming from a source you’ve never seen before will often leave you more confused than you were before.”

While Warzel discourages professional researchers from using SIFT, he believes it provides an essential advantage for the average information consumer, who can be overwhelmed when evaluating online claims from various parties.

“What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments,” Warzel wrote. “A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content.”