RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/14/the-new-york-times-retracts-the-sicknick-story/

In a quiet but stunning correction, the New York Times backed away from its original report that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by a Trump supporter wielding a fire extinguisher during the January 6 melee at the Capitol building. Shortly after American Greatness published my column Friday that showed how the Times gradually was backpedaling on its January 8 bombshell, the paper posted this caveat:

UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.

The paper continued to revise its story within the body of the original January 8 story: “Law enforcement officials initially said Mr. Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, but weeks later, police sources and investigators were at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.”

What’s missing, however, is how the Times first described what happened to Sicknick. “Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.”

The account of Sicknick’s death was reported as fact, not speculation or rumor. Further, it appears that the anonymous sources were not law enforcement officials but people “close” to the police department—which means they could have been anyone from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to inveterate liar U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser.

Not only was the Times’ untrue story about Sicknick’s death accepted as fact by every news media organization from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post, political pundits on the NeverTrump Right also regurgitated the narrative that Sicknick was “murdered” as did lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

In an outrageous effort to create more favorable optics before the impeachment trial, House Democrats honored Sicknick in a rare memorial at the Capitol Rotunda on February 3. Joe Biden, in a statement issued after Donald Trump was acquitted Saturday afternoon, repeated the lie about Sicknick. “It was nearly two weeks ago that Jill and I paid our respects to Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who laid in honor in the Rotunda after losing his life protecting the Capitol from a riotous, violent mob on January 6, 2021.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-times-is-changing-badly-11613170637?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Untenable was the principle enunciated last week by the New York Times in a kerfuffle over a distinguished reporter who was expelled for uttering the N-word in an innocent discussion of the N-word. Happily for the next victim but not the latest one, the paper has belatedly seen the error of its ways.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. “has done much good reporting over four decades,” said management even as it escorted him out the door. Executive Editor Dean Baquet had previously declined to fire Mr. McNeil over the two-year-old incident, saying it was clear the term hadn’t been uttered in a “hateful or malicious” way.

But that was before a tsunami of intolerance from the forces of tolerance inside the paper. Mr. Baquet announced last week that Mr. McNeil would be leaving after all because “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Oops, it was universally pointed out that the Times then would have to fire itself. A Factiva search shows the paper using the word 1,271 times as far back as 1969 and as recently as a week ago, as it must in covering the world. The new standard, “a threat to our journalism,” was “a deadline mistake and I regret it,” Mr. Baquet admitted on Thursday.

What a mess. I don’t know Mr. Baquet. By all accounts, he’s a fine person and a good reporter, but you know what he’s behaving like here—he’s behaving like somebody who knows he can’t trust his own boss to back him in any decision unpopular with the woke mob.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/12/one-cnn-reporter-cannot-let-go-of-donald-trump-n2584676

They just cannot let him go. They can’t. The liberal media remains addicted to Donald Trump like crack cocaine, and there’s nothing to suggest that this will subside. The 2020 election is long over. Joe Biden is now president—but they cannot let this guy ride into the sunset. Trump is now banned on Facebook and Twitter so maybe more reporters are more willing to write Trump-based stories, but this is moot now. Trump is no longer president, but for some folks at CNN especially, they can’t let him go. It’s getting creepy. They had a slip-up that was rather unfortunate about the Trump impeachment trial. And now, CNN’s Jim Acosta just had to let us know that Trump went golfing yesterday.

Trump is a private citizen. He’s no longer president. He’s in Florida. Yeah, why not go golfing. it piggybacks on another Trump story The New York Times doled out about how he was sicker than originally reported when he contracted COVID last year:

President Donald J. Trump was sicker with Covid-19 in October than publicly acknowledged at the time, with extremely depressed blood oxygen levels at one point and a lung problem associated with pneumonia caused by the coronavirus, according to four people familiar with his condition.

His prognosis became so worrisome before he was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center that officials believed he would need to be put on a ventilator, two of the people familiar with his condition said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfW2paqBQ6g

In the latest episode of “BAD NEWS,” Emily Jashinsky and I discuss: (i) the media’s shameful and transparent use of the Capitol Riots to create the pretext for a coming war on “domestic violent extremism”; (ii) Joe Biden’s view on an “adversarial press”; and (iii) the media corruption exposed by covering up a relationship between a prominent reporter and Biden administration communications offical. 

https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/read-the-column-the-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-read/

Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.

Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.

It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.

A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.

I’ve been thinking about these questions in an unexpected connection. Late last week, Donald G. McNeil Jr., a veteran science reporter for The Times, abruptly departed from his job following the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students. In the course of a dinner discussion, he was asked by a student whether a 12-year old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/nikole-hannah-jones-runs-the-new-york-times/

It doesn’t matter how many times Hannah-Jones embarrasses the paper. She will not be reprimanded, much less removed from her position.

T here is no rule of law in the workplace. Across all industries, star talent is treated differently — and allowed to get away with more — than your average employee. It’s true in the boardroom, in professional sports, and in the newsroom.

Yet even awareness of this truth is not enough to prepare you for the curious case of Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times. Time after time, Hannah-Jones, creator and compiler of the Times’ 1619 Project, is allowed to publicly embarrass the paper in the public sphere with her juvenile behavior, and to sow discord within it by showing utter contempt for her colleagues. And time after time, she emerges from the turmoil untouched, leaving a trail of discarded journalists in her wake. Even more significant, her signature achievement and the worldview it represents have become the de facto governing documents and principles by which the Times makes personnel decisions.

Most recently, this power dynamic was exemplified by the Times’ firing of longtime science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. and its reaction to Hannah-Jones’s doxxing of Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium. McNeil was let go after a story about his use of a racial slur — ironically in the context of discussing when it should merit cancellation, not while using it maliciously — resurfaced. The “incident” occurred in 2019, and upon investigating it, the Times deemed it unworthy of punishment. In the new, post-1619 Project newsroom, however, McNeil needed to be expelled after more than four decades at the paper. According to Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the Times would “not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” And yet, Hannah-Jones had used the epithet on Twitter in the past, and she has been not just tolerated, not only celebrated, but venerated. When Sibarium reached out to Hannah-Jones for comment on this double standard, she posted his polite email request — which included his phone number — on Twitter in an attempt to shame him.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cair-leader-shares-social-media-posts-islamist-who-joe-kaufman/

Now that Hassan Shibly has resigned his position as Executive Director of CAIR-Florida, after his wife’s accusations of domestic violence, it has left CAIR-Florida Communications Director Wilfredo Ruiz in the top leadership position of the group, at least until the group names a new Executive Director. This should result in extra scrutiny for Ruiz, beginning with his recent social media postings copied from Muslim extremist Abdur Rahman al-Ghani, who refers to Jews as “demonic” and “the children of Satan,” and Ruiz’s own anti-Semitic ramblings. Up until now, Ruiz’s radical activity has been ignored by news networks that continue to interview him. Why?

Wilfredo Amr Ruiz has been with the Florida chapter of CAIR, since December 2011. CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was created, in June 1994, as part of a US Hamas network led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook, who was deported from the US in 1997. While with CAIR, Ruiz has also served as legal counsel for the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), a group that was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in July 2010, for promoting “venomous” anti-Semitic material on its website. Besides being its lawyer, Ruiz founded AMANA’s Puerto Rico and Connecticut chapters.

Since 2017, Ruiz has been involved with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the US arm of South Asian Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), and is now a representative for ICNA’s WhyIslam. ICNA has advertised Hamas and Hezbollah on its website, and in December 2017, ICNA organized an event featuring Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. For decades, ICNA has harbored and placed in its top leadership Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, a JI militant who was sentenced to death, in absentia, for the December 1971 murders of 18 people in Bangladesh.

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/06/no-really-fox-fire-lou-dobbs/

“Lou Dobbs retweets attacks on Fox News. “Fox is Finished.” “Fox is in a race with itself to the bottom.”

Cashiering the most ardently pro-Trump host on American television makes no sense in that context. If anything, you would think they’d have wanted Dobbs to do an extra hour of “greatest president ever” propaganda every night — or even switch him over from Fox Business to MacCallum’s old slot on Fox News. Remember, Dobbs isn’t just a star of Trumpist media, he’s so tight with the former president that Trump reportedly would patch him through on speakerphone during White House meetings to offer his take. “John Kelly once told me that he learned to watch Lou Dobbs to understand what the president might think or say about a topic,” said WaPo reporter Josh Dawsey this morning.

You don’t shed a guy like that lightly. Even Fox Business staffers were surprised by his cancellation, according to the Post.

The universal suspicion is that Fox dropped the hammer in response to the defamation suit Smartmatic filed against Fox and Dobbs on Thursday, but that doesn’t fully add up. If Fox were in the process of dumping all of its anchors who’d entertained theories about Smartmatic’s machines being rigged, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo would be gone too. In reality, Bartiromo is getting a tryout in MacCallum’s former 7 p.m. slot on FNC and Pirro just launched a new show (about castles in America, of all things) on Fox’s streaming platform. Fox doesn’t seem poised to dump either of them; on the contrary, it’s giving them more work.

Plus, as a matter of basic PR, it would look exceptionally weak for Fox to flush Dobbs within 24 hours of Smartmatic’s suit being filed. As John said, it feels like an admission of wrongdoing in context: “The bad man did a little slander, fine, but we’ve gotten rid of him now so we shouldn’t have to pay.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-timess-internal-mob-takes-down-another-of-its-own/?utm_source=recirc-%5BSCREENSIZE%5D&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Earlier this week, I wrote at length about the growing tide of illiberalism in the United States. This morning, I was forwarded an email sent out by the management team at the New York Times that illustrates precisely what I was talking about. For sake of clarity, I will quote the whole thing, starting with the preface:

———- Forwarded message ———
From: NYT Mail <*@nytimes.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM
Subject: A Note From Dean and Joe
To: All Company Employees <*@nytimes.com>

Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know that Donald McNeil Jr. will be leaving the company. Donald joined The Times in 1976 and has done much good reporting over four decades. But we feel that this is the right next step.

We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.

Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.

Donald has offered a statement to his colleagues, which is below.

— Dean and Joe