RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/federal-judge-one-party-control-of-the-press-and-media-is-a-threat-to-a-viable-democracy/

The control of major media by one political party is a dangerous threat to the country, a federal judge warned in a blistering dissent that called for courts to revisit libel laws that generally protect the press from being held liable for their reporting.

“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news,” wrote Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit for the Court of Appeals. “It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”

Silberman argued that it’s time for courts to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan, which has shaped press law in favor of media outlets for more than five decades. The New York Times and the Washington Post “are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” Judge Silberman wrote in his March 19 dissent.

He said that orientation also controls the Associated Press and most large papers in the country, including the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe. “Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet,” Judge Silberman added.

Silicon Valley also has “enormous influence” over the distribution of news and it “similarly filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party,” wrote Judge Silberman, highlighting the shocking suppression of stories about Joe Biden and his family when he was running for president.

In that case, Twitter and Facebook censored media outlets that reported accurately about the Biden family’s dealing with foreign entities. Twitter suspended users, including sitting White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for merely sharing accurate information, and prevented people from sharing the information privately on its platform. Facebook said it would censor coverage of the Biden family corruption pending a “fact-check,” an unprecedented privilege given to Biden in the closing days of one of the closest presidential elections in history.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/tyler-o-neil/2021/03/21/leftist-media-bias-is-a-threat-to-democracy-judge-warns-in-scathing-dissent-n1433938?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=582

Laurence Silberman, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, urged the Supreme Court to overturn the key defamation precedent New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), in part because the legacy media has become a threat to American Democracy. Silberman dissented from a court panel’s majority opinion in Tah and McClain v. Global Witness (2021), which ruled that Global Witness did not violate defamation law in falsely accusing Liberian officials of taking bribes from Exxon.

Silberman (a Reagan appointee) argued that the NGO Global Witness had clearly defamed the Nigerian officials by accusing them of taking bribes from Exxon when in reality the officials had only received bonuses from their employer, the National Oil Company. Silberman accused his fellow judges, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (an Obama appointee) and Judge David Tatel (a Clinton appointee), of “employing legal jiu-jitsu,” creating new arguments to get Global Witness off the hook for defamation.

“In the revisionist view, the National Oil Company bribed its own agents and employees to do their jobs. Tellingly, the Majority offers no motive for a bribe,” Silberman argued. “After observing my colleagues’ efforts to stretch the actual malice rule like a rubber band, I am prompted to urge the overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Defamed MAGA Hat Covington Boy Finally Wrestles Money Out of The Washington Post

Citing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Silberman argued that New York Times “was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law. The holding has no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication.”

Silberman admitted that in 1964, the press may have needed the protection of New York Times v. Sullivan in order to cover the civil rights movement in a hostile and racially segregated South, but he argued “that power is now abused.”

“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions,” Silberman warned. “Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas. It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.”

“Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s. (I do not mean to defend or criticize the behavior of any particular politician). Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” Silberman noted. He added that these papers set the “orientation” of coverage for the Associated Press and most large papers across the country.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-illustrating-how-they

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-illustrating-how-they?token=eyJ1c2VyX2

Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it.

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

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.