RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/a_culture_of_lies.html

Almost everything you are being told to believe by the mainstream media is a lie.

The legacy media has long since chosen sides and will brazenly cover up anything that could reflect poorly on Democrats, yet will assiduously traffic in any and all innuendo, hearsay, and slander that they feel will harm Republicans/conservatives/Trump supporters. They gleefully promulgate prevarication in their unending quest to damage Democrats’ political opponents.

Hatred-addled late night television hosts compete to see who can spout the most ignorant inanities. Colleges and universities no longer care about providing their students a well-rounded, classical education. They care only of indoctrinating them into the anti-West, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian ideology of multiculturalism and Critical Race Theory, or CRT.

Big, multinational corporations now reflexively parrot the false rot emanating from Big Academia. And Big Tech now silences, stifles and cancels anyone who believes in the founding principles of the United States, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. Together they have become the Father of Lies. Don’t believe them.

And what are they lying about, you ask? Virtually everything. They claim that if a White person eats, makes or sells a taco, for instance, that it is a form of “cultural appropriation.” No, it means they like tacos. It is a compliment to the culture that originally produced them. It is the same for White people who are fond of blues music. Is it likewise “appropriation” if a Black person wears Levi’s jeans or anyone outside of China utilizes a printing press? Should Johannes Gutenberg be reviled for making improvements on same?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/losing-an-american-genius/

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it—from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays—live from noon to three—the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week. 

Last week—32 years, and over 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after Rush went national in August 1988—he is gone, at 70 years young. 

By the 1990s he had become the voice—literally and iconically—of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Rush was hated by the Left because he was deadly effective in fighting them, and feared at times by the Republican establishment—because he could also be deadly effective in fighting them. 

Limbaugh had an uncanny sense of what conservative populism could do—such as abruptly end Barack Obama’s control of Congress after just two years, in the sweeping Tea Party midterm election of 2010.  And he also instinctively sensed what it should not do: endorse Ross Perot’s Quixotic third-party surge of 1992 that eventually would split the conservative vote and ensure Bill Clinton the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote. 

Rush was a master comedian. His pauses, intonations, and mock tones were far funnier than those of our contemporary regulars on late-night television comedy. He was a gifted mimic, an impersonator, with as wide a repertoire and as skilled at impressions as the masters of the past like Vaughn Meader, David Frye, and Rich Little. Yet Rush worked mostly behind the mike, without the aid of an on-stage presence. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/24/political-hacks-at-newsweek-run-anti-science-fact-check-on-study-promoting-hydroxychloroquine/

A study by Baylor University Medical Center researchers published in the American Journal of Medicine in January 2021 found hydroxychloroquine is a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The study, which was originally written and posted on the PubMed website in August 2020, says, “When started earlier in the hospital course, for progressively longer durations and in outpatients, antimalarials may reduce the progression of disease, prevent hospitalization, and are associated with reduced mortality.”

After the American Journal of Medicine posted the study in January, it began circulating around the internet with captions and headlines such as: “After 440,000 Americans are Dead — Facebook and American Journal of Medicine Admit Their Stand on HCQ was Wrong — These People Should be Prosecuted.”

In late March and early April, former President Donald Trump endorsed treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine, which was echoed by the August study. Immediately, he received severe pushback from medical journals and associations as well as the corporate media, who warned that hydroxychloroquine has no benefit as a treatment and is even potentially dangerous. This is despite the fact that hydroxychloroquine has been safely used against malaria and various immune deficiency syndromes for decades.

Tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube followed suit by censoring and suppressing anyone who deviated from the prescribed left-wing narrative that hydroxychloroquine is an ineffective and dangerous method of treating the Wuhan virus.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/02/23/house_dems_misguided_effort_to_muzzle_conservative_media_145292.html

On Feb. 24, House Democrats will hold a hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism.” This hearing is a dangerous threat to American democracy and goes entirely against what the Founders intended when they made a free press Americans’ guaranteed First Amendment right in the Constitution.

It’s also just the latest threat against free speech from the left, which has now mainstreamed a despotic desire to use government to cancel conservative speech. Just last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called for Fox News to be on trial for supporting former President Donald Trump. This is the same Kristof who recently began calling for a War on Terror-style campaign against Trump supporters and “the ecosystem that produces them” — completely missing the key difference between the right to free speech and the lack of rights to commit political violence.

Kristof’s dangerous rhetoric joins that of other influential mainstream media figures who are targeting media they deem too friendly towards Trump. Washington Post columnist Max Boot wants cable companies to cut off Fox, and MSNBC commentator Anand Giridharadas suggests that the outlet shouldn’t even exist. 

Freedom of expression is essential to a flourishing democracy, which is why I oppose unconstitutional limits on free speech. It’s why I supported the rights of liberal groups like the Brennan Center to oppose my nomination to the Federal Elections Commission 20 years ago even though they said things I felt were often unfair and sometimes untrue. Kristof has the right to publish his views if they are peaceful, just as Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh have said things that Democrats don’t like. Calls to shut down a major news source like Fox, or even its smaller allies in the conservative media world, whether through corporate deplatforming or government force, cross the line from opposing ideas to undermining our civil society.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/if-the-media-had-investigated-cuomos-covid-response-the-way-they-did-cruzs-cancun-trip-thousands-of-new-yorkers-could-still-be-alive?itm_source=parsely-api&utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email

This week, with historic winter storms knocking out power for millions of Texans, Senator Ted Cruz traveled with his family to Cancun for a beach vacation. Shortly after photos of Cruz boarding a flight hit the internet, two things happened. 

First, social media went into a frenzy. The beach trip instantly became the number one trending topic on Twitter, with reporters, media personalities, commentators, and others lambasting Cruz for his ill-timed journey.

Second, the legacy media began digging for more details regarding the trip. Who else had gone? What hotel were they staying in? How long was the trip originally scheduled to last?

Soon, the full force of the American media apparatus was deployed. Hordes of photographers wandered the Cancun airport hoping to catch a glimpse of Cruz on his return voyage, while investigative reporters began reaching out to close friends and neighbors of the Senator’s wife, Heidi, in a quest for more information. 

Within 24 hours of the first photos emerging, reporters had obtained transcripts of text messages sent between Heidi Cruz and her closest friends, which shed light on the trip. 

Meanwhile, members of the legacy media breathlessly searched for answers from Cruz’s staff, demanding to know further details of the trip and posting hourly updates of their findings. 

As the specifics of the trip emerged, and the media firestorm intensified, Senator Cruz boarded a return flight for Houston, issuing a statement apologizing for his decision and the timing of his getaway, saying it was “obviously a mistake.” 

The saga served as an impressive reminder of the investigative capabilities of our news media, and the impact that dogged reporting can have on the decisions of policy makers. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/18/the-new-york-times-brazenly-false-fact-check-about-trumps-impeachment-trial/

The New York Times has published a “fact check“ by Linda Qui declaring that Donald Trump’s lawyers “made a number of inaccurate or misleading claims” during the Senate impeachment trial. In reality, much of the article consists of flagrant falsehoods propagated by Qui and the Times.

‘Inciting Violence‘

With regard to Trump’s speech on the day of the Capitol Hill riot, Trump attorney Michael van der Veen said: “Far from promoting insurrection against the United States, the president’s remarks explicitly encouraged those in attendance to exercise their rights peacefully and patriotically.”

That statement is demonstrably true, as the transcript of the speech shows that Trump asked his supporters to go “to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Qui, however, alleges that his attorney’s statement “is exaggerated” because Trump “used the phrase ‘peacefully and patriotically’ once in his speech, compared with 20 uses of the word ‘fight’.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims

“One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.”

What took place at the Capitol on January 6 was undoubtedly a politically motivated riot. As such, it should not be controversial to regard it as a dangerous episode. Any time force or violence is introduced into what ought to be the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, it should be lamented and condemned.

But none of that justifies lying about what happened that day, especially by the news media. Condemning that riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was. There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists. The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.

Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago. And anyone who tries to correct these falsehoods is instantly attacked with the cynical accusation that if you want only truthful reporting about what happened, then you’re trying to “minimize” what happened and are likely an apologist for if not a full-fledged supporter of the protesters themselves.

One of the most significant of these falsehoods was the tale — endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month — that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8 in an article headlined “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” It cited “two [anonymous] law enforcement officials” to claim that Sicknick died “with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress” and after he “was struck with a fire extinguisher.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/video-whats-fox-news-frontpagemagcom/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Investigative Reporter Peter Barry Chowka.

Peter discusses What’s Up With Fox News?, providing his findings after his investigations and analysis.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting

Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting.

The digital age exploded this business model. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. The survival of the rest remains an open question.

Led by the New York Times, a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall. This approach carried its own risks. The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm.