RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-something-dying-in-darkness-at-the-washington-post-11615926067?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Misleading media coverage about Donald Trump and his supporters has been so common in this era that perhaps it no longer qualifies as news. But it can still do harm to public understanding of national events.

The Washington Post has recently made a significant change to a story it published in January, which now carries the following notice at the top:

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” …The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

The Post was forced to amend its story by last week’s publication of a recording of the phone call by the Journal’s Cameron McWhirter.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bombshell-correction-sums-up-the-political-medias-corruption/

As long as liberal subscribers value partisan porn over accuracy, this woeful trend won’t change.

L ast week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece detailing a six-minute call — with audio — between then-president Donald Trump and the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator, Frances Watson. At the time, Watson was conducting a forensic audit of 2020 mail-in ballots in a few Georgia counties.

This week, the Journal’s reporting precipitated the Washington Post to offer a correction to their initial story that went like so:

Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

There is, of course, a crucial difference between a president instructing an investigator to “find the fraud” so she can become “a national hero” and a president telling an investigator he believes she will find fraud if she looks. To contend that Trump was “misquoted” or that the quotes were “misattributed” is to critically understate the dishonesty in the original story. Indeed, it is fair to say that the quotes were fabricated by someone, not misattributed, and then they were published by every major news outlet in the country as a verified fact. Even the Post’s headline for its follow-up — “Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia’s chief elections investigator” — intimates that the tape merely helps in updating the initial reporting rather than completely decimating it.

The single anonymous source used for the story seems to be Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whose office was under pressure from the president at time. Fuchs still claims that the story accurately portrayed the spirit of the conversation that was relayed to him, maybe by Watson. The tape tells a different story.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often?token=ey

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

The New York Times’ May, 2017 announcement of Robert Mueller as special counsel stated explicitly that his task was “to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials” and specifically “investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/the_washington_post_confessed_to_a_very_big_lie.html

On Monday, conservatives were outraged when the Washington Post, in a teeny little paragraph appended to a major story from January, admitted that the core of the story was a lie based upon false quotations. I find myself surprisingly unmoved. First, this is par for the course for the modern, Pravda media. Second, as long as there are no consequences, and there never are, it’s irrelevant that the Washington Post behaved in a morally corrupt, fraudulent way.

This example of moral turpitude from the Washington Post began on January 9. That was when the paper published an “exclusive” entitled, “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.” The word “obstruction” is extremely important in that title because the Washington Post wrote this allegedly expose as the house was debating whether to impeach Trump for the events of January 6 – and of course, for daring to question the fact that doddering Joe, who barely emerged from his basement and had a vice presidential candidate even his own party couldn’t stand, got more votes than Trump did.

The allegations in the article were explosive. Amy Gardner alleged that, during a telephone call to a Georgia election investigator, President Trump pressured the investigator to make up fake evidence that would overthrow the results of the election in Georgia:

President Trump urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a “national hero,” according to an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-wont-be-silenced-by-the-left-11615848103?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Leftists who want to memory hole last summer’s political violence immediately started lecturing me that the 2020 protests were mostly peaceful. Apparently they’ve forgotten that, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 570 leftist protests became riots last year. Twenty-five people lost their lives and 700 law enforcement officers were injured. Braying about “peaceful protests” offers no comfort to those victims or the other innocent Americans whose homes, businesses and property were destroyed. The same people fail to see the damage they do by pushing a narrative designed to portray the 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump as potential domestic terrorists or armed insurrectionists.

We should all be disgusted at the cynical way antifa and other leftists hide behind the banner of equality—a goal we all share—even as they carry signs calling for an end to America or talk of burning cities down. It was also sadly predictable that liberals would hurl the accusation of racism. This isn’t about race. It’s about riots. The rioters who burned Kenosha weren’t of any one ethnicity; they were united by their radical leftism.

Their politics, together with their taste for violence—so different from the Trump supporters I know personally or the Trump rallies we all saw carried out peacefully—should concern us. There’s a reason why the boarded-up windows in the downtowns of major cities came down soon after Joe Biden won the election: Nobody was worried what Trump supporters would do if their guy lost; they were worried about what Biden supporters would do if their guy didn’t win.

Unfortunately, much of the media have lost any sense of fairness and objectivity. They shed all pretense of being unbiased the moment President Trump won the 2016 election. As a result, approximately half of America simply doesn’t trust the mainstream media or rely on what it reports. An unbiased free press is essential in a democracy, but the censorship of conservative perspectives in today’s cancel culture is antithetical to freedom.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/no_youre_not_imagining_the_medias_pravdaization.html

Matt Taibbi is that rare breed – an honest leftist journalist. And make no mistake about his leftism, for this is a man who thinks Noam Chomsky is a great thinker. Despite that serious ideological confusion on his part, Taibbi understands something profoundly important in American politics; namely, that our media has become completely corrupt, and more closely represents the media in Soviet Russia than the media in a free country with a First Amendment. If you haven’t yet, you must read his article, “The Sovietization of the American Press.”

Taibbi, who has collected examples of Soviet newspapers over the years so he knows whereof he speaks, says that, in 2021, there is nothing to distinguish the American media from the Soviet press. The important point he makes about the Soviet media is that its world was divided into heroes and enemies. The governing Communist Party was heroic and anything or anybody that challenged it was part of a vast, evil conspiracy aimed at destroying this heroic party.

After giving examples of the fatuous superlatives that the Soviet media heaped on communist politicians and their actions, Taibbi points out that there is little difference between those words and what we see in today’s reporting now that Biden is in office:

There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive and serious work — most are performative — but the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an exception. Chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.

In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy raised by four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The 450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and consideration than it has thus far received.

The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkick’s Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who testified were naturally in favor because this bill (they have been heavily lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way (the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in favor of anything that weakens Google).

While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden’s historic victory for America

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/criticizing-public-figures-including?token=eyJ

“Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.”

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).