RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-attack-the-powerless?token=

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online.

The USA Today reporters went far beyond merely reporting how this fundraising was being conducted. They went so far as to tattle to PayPal and other funding sites on two of those defendants, Joe Biggs and Dominic Pezzola, and then boasted of their success in having their accounts terminated:

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Biggs fundraiser was listed as having received $52,201. Pezzola had received $730. Biggs’ campaign disappeared from the site shortly after USA TODAY inquired about it….

Friday, a USA TODAY reporter donated to Pezzola’s fundraiser using Stripe. Stripe told USA TODAY it does not comment on individual users. A USA TODAY reporter was able to make a $1 donation to Pezzola’s fundraiser using Venmo, a payment app owned by PayPal. After being alerted by USA TODAY, Venmo removed the account. 

Soon a PayPal account took its place. PayPal caught that and removed it, too. 

Wow, what brave and intrepid journalistic work: speaking truth to power and standing up to major power centers by . . . working as little police officers for tech giants to prevent private citizens from being able to afford criminal lawyers. Clear the shelves for the imminent Pulitzer. Whatever you think about the Capitol riot, everyone has the right to a legal defense and to do what they can to ensure they have the best legal defense possible — especially when the full weight of the Justice Department is crashing down on your head even for non-violent offenses, which is what many of these defendants are charged with due to the politically charged nature of the investigation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/bidens-lie-filled-press-conference-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden’s March 25th press conference was his first since taking office. He lied so often during the hour or so he spoke and fielded questions that even the New York Times had to take notice.

“We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming,” Biden claimed, referring to families of migrants illegally crossing or seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

“False,” declared the New York Times. “Federal officials recorded about 19,000 encounters with families at the southwestern border in February. Of those, about 7,900 families, or 42 percent, were expelled, far short of a majority.” The Times also cited an Axios report that the expulsion rate was 13 percent during the previous week.

Biden claimed that former President Donald Trump eliminated the funding for aid to the Central American countries that Biden had helped put together as the Obama administration’s vice president. The purpose of the aid, Biden said, was to get at the root causes of why migrants were leaving those countries. “What did Trump do? He eliminated that funding,” Biden said. “He didn’t use it.”

“False,” declared the New York Times again. “President Donald J.Trump did not completely eliminate the aid that Mr. Biden cited,” the New York Times explained. The Times’ fact-checker pointed out that aid to Central America was set by Congress at $505.9 million in the 2021 fiscal year (which began during Trump’s term) and that the aid that Trump temporarily suspended in April 2019 was restored in October 2019.

The New York Times also said that Biden had “exaggerated” when he claimed that Trump had “shut down the number of beds available.” Calling this an exaggeration was too kind. Biden was lying once again. The Times’ fact-checker noted that the monthly bed capacity grew to over 16,000 by December 2018, and that by Trump’s “last full month in office, in December 2020, monthly bed capacity was more than 13,000.” There were some reductions during the pandemic to comply with coronavirus protocols while Trump was in office – health precautions that the Biden administration is throwing to the wind as it tries to cope with the huge surge of illegal unaccompanied minors that its open border policy has invited.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/29/report-media-reported-only-bad-covid-news-until-trump-lost/

A study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research finds that coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic by the domestic press was overwhelmingly negative. More negative than the international press. More negative than the local press. And more negative than the science. But then a funny thing happened after President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.

Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University did a content analysis of tens of thousands of COVID-19 news stories to look at the levels of negativity. What they found was that 87% of the stories published by the top 15 news sources in the country were negative in tone. That compares with 50% of international news sources, and 64% for scientific journals. They also found the mainstream media were 25 percentage points more likely to be negative than more general U.S news sources.

What’s more, this overwhelming negativity included even “areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.” And, the researchers determined, the mainstream media coverage was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.”

In other words, the national press in the U.S. was putting a negative spin on everything COVID-related. (The study is titled “Why Is All COVID News Bad News?”)

Those 14 top news sources tracked by the researchers, by the way, included only two that might be considered conservative – Fox News and the New York Post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/media-suddenly-much-less-interested-guy-busted-w6-daniel-greenfield/

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.
And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.
A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.
Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.
According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.
Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.
Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show.
Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

When this story first broke right after the Boulder supermarket shooting, the media thought it had a train full of narrative. But the Boulder shooter turned out to be a Syrian Muslim forcing the media to play defense while telling everyone not to pay attention to the identity of the shooter.

And the guy with all those guys in the Atlanta Publix? He doesn’t fit the narrative either.

A 22-year-old accused of taking six guns and body armor into a busy Atlanta grocery store will remain in jail after waiving his first appearance hearing Thursday.

Rico Abednego Neequaye Marley faces 11 felonies after authorities said he walked into the Atlantic Station Publix on Wednesday afternoon armed to the teeth. He was arrested after a shopper spotted him with a rifle in the men’s restroom about 1:30 p.m. and alerted the store’s employees, Atlanta police said.

According to an incident report, Instacart shopper Charles Russell entered the restroom and heard “clicking sounds” coming from a bathroom stall.

Marley has the expected record for a member of the Democrat base.

Jail records show Marley was arrested by Chamblee police on a simple assault charge in January 2018. He was arrested again four months later on a theft by receiving stolen property charge in DeKalb County, court records show. 

Sorry guys, just an ordinary criminal. Not at all the Trump voter you were looking for. Better luck next time.

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/26/usa-today-fired-diversity-editor-jumped-conclusions-identity-boulder-shooter/

When authorities in Boulder, Colorado named the supermarket shooter this week, there were a whole lot of people on the left who had egg on their face. That’s because many had wrongly assumed the shooter must be white. I wrote an entire post based on a Twitter thread just collecting some of the many blue checked lefties who made this mistake.

One of the most conspicuous people to make this error was Hemal Jhaveri. As Dave Rubin pointed out she had tweeted this about the shooting: “It’s always an angry white man. Always.” Only in this case, it wasn’t.

Jhaveri isn’t just some rando leftie on Twitter. She was the Diversity and Inclusion editor at USA Today Sports. Today Jhaveri wrote a piece on Medium explaining she was fired shortly afterwards.

On Monday night, I sent a tweet responding to the fact that mass shooters are most likely to be white men. It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online. It was a careless error of judgement, sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet.

By Tuesday morning, after the shooter was identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, several high profile alt-right Twitter accounts picked up the tweet as an example of anti-white bias and racism against whites…

There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me, and by the end of the day, USA TODAY had relieved me of my position as a Race and Inclusion editor.

Was her firing reasonable? To be honest, I’m not sure. On the one hand I’m against canceling people over tweets, especially old tweets someone put up when they were a dumb teenager.

On the other hand, I do think there are times when someone’s tweets are not compatible with their job. For instance, I think the SF School Board made the right call to strip Alison Collins of her leadership position based on her tweets about Asians. Collins hasn’t really apologized and hasn’t deleted the tweets. She clearly still believes Asians use “white supremacist thinking” to “get ahead.” And that’s just not a tenable position to hold if you are part of a district that is 30% Asian people.

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2021/03/26/wapo-fact-check-yep-biden-told-whoppers-even-cheat-sheets/

Perhaps those who predicted a four-year hiatus in media fact checks on the White House should take heart in this game effort from the Washington Post. After yesterday’s press conference, their fact-check team dissected Joe Biden’s statements and found that he “made a number of incorrect statements or made claims that lacked important context.” Not only did they refute several of them, they included most of those rebuttals in this video posted last night.It’s a start, anyway:

This includes one of the most egregious of the lies Biden offered — the idea that Donald Trump deliberately chose to starve children to death at the border rather than let them in:

“Well, look, the idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, that if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side — no previous administration did that either, except Trump.”

Biden claimed, without apparent evidence, that children “starved to death” in Mexico under President Donald Trump’s 2019 policy allowing border officers to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to locations in Mexico as their claims are adjudicated in immigration courts. Asked for evidence of such deaths, a White House official referred to reports of “widely reported treacherous conditions at camps along the border on the Mexican side that formed as a result of the Trump Administration’s use of the Migrant Protection Protocol, more commonly known as ‘Remain in Mexico.’”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yellow-journalism-turns-blue-11616711532?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

“Yellow journalism” means a sensationalized press. Perhaps it is time to introduce “blue journalism”—the new media practice of abandoning standards to work seamlessly with the progressive left against any opposition.

A case study is the attempted political assassination of Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. The press has never liked most Republicans. Yet for most of Mr. Johnson’s decade in the Senate, it’s generally described him as what he is: an outsider businessman and fiscal conservative with a focus on deficits and spending. “Wisconsin’s senior senator is a numbers guy, a believer in the power of facts and figures,” wrote Milwaukee Magazine in his first term. In recent years, serving on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he’s developed a reputation for oversight.

Compare that with the recent onslaught. “Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence In Government,” read a New York Times news headline, over a story that called him the “Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.” “Ron Johnson’s Crazy Train Is Somehow Getting Even Weirder,” snarked Vanity Fair. “Ron Johnson Is a Racist,” opined the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker. Mr. Johnson is “inciting fear” the Post’s Michael Gerson added. The paper’s “fact checkers” assailed his “misleading data” and “unscientific take.”

What’s this all about? From the Times story, it amounts to this: Mr. Johnson has refused to brand everyone present in Washington on Jan. 6 as “insurrectionists”; he’s continued to note that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests led to rioting, looting, arson and death; he held hearings on treatments for Covid and 2020 election integrity; and he’s declined, for now, a Covid vaccine, given he had the disease last year and decided to let others go before him.

None of this is remotely conspiratorial or even controversial. Mr. Johnson’s real offense is refusing to roll over to the progressive and public-health police and continuing to ask tough questions.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/23/cnn-ratings-collapse-without-bad-orange-man/

Since former President Donald Trump’s departure in January, CNN lost nearly 50 percent of its prime-time audience.

While Fox News only saw a 6 percent drop in ratings, other cable news outlets and corporate media publications also saw a significant decline in their viewership and readership after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. MSNBC was one of the many left-leaning networks that lost more than 20 percent of its audience. The Washington Post and New York Times also suffered “plummeting” website traffic.

“The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February,” an analysis in the Post concluded. 

This drop in readers and viewers comes after corporate media outlets obsessed over Trump for four years, often pushing bogus narratives meant to hurt the president’s standing with Americans as well as his re-election chances. Trump predicted the recent decline of “fake news” readers and viewers as early as 2017.

“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because, without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” Trump proclaimed.

Leftist mouthpieces at CNN such as Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta were often quick to take aim at Trump when he was in office, spending much of their coverage on criticizing his administration and agenda.