RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76709-a-years-worth-of-media-malfeasance-2020-12-23

Putting one’s finger on the five biggest media failures in any one year is a daunting task. It’s like trying to list the five worst plays during a Detroit Lions football season or Hollywood’s five worst movies of the year — there’s just too much terrible material to sift through.

The Daily Wire’s Hank Berrien, though, has given it a thoughtful effort, while The Federalist’s Tristan Justice took the “easy” way out and built a list of 20 journalistic failures.

As an aside, if there’s a first prize for Photojournalistic Failure of the Year, it has to go to CNN, whose “mostly peaceful” footage of the Kenosha riots was mostly accurate in the same way that Baghdad Bob was mostly credible:

It’s hard to quibble with Berrien’s top five, though one might move them around a bit in order of importance and impact. There can be no argument, though, with his choice as worst of the worst: the media’s utter refusal to cover the Hunter Biden story in the weeks just prior to the election. In doing so, the media didn’t just put its finger on the scale; it put its shoulder on the scale.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/22/why-is-media-stoking-disinformation-campaigns/

Americans need to insist that legacy media be held to account as a treacherous culprit in the mass deception campaigns attributed to politicians, shady public relations operatives, and foreign powers.

Disinformation media campaigns operated by the Russians and the Chinese may also have a domestic origin. It is not what one would think. They don’t come from sleeper cells. Instead, the American legacy media, by way of its greed and lack of accountability, is responsible for the deception. 

Stealth public relations operatives drive conspiracy theories and smear campaigns using the complicit media of record as their echo chamber. Whether you are a supporter of President Trump or you consider him to be a lawless authoritarian is irrelevant because all Americans should be concerned that what is presented as news may actually be part of a paid public relations campaign or a sensation-oriented spin that is not newsworthy at all. 

Often the media is doing the dirty bidding of fringe groups and paid reputation assassins solely to maximize profits, knowing that their malfeasance is relegated to that of a protected class of free speech and free press. Media today is like the clergy in the middle ages—their profession considered sacred and their actions above the law.

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law professor, led a team of researchers that dissected the way information is amplified. Benkler’s team just published its study, which examines President Trump’s alleged “disinformation” campaign against mail-in voting and details the techniques the Trump world used to share Trump’s opinions on the election. Benkler and his team began from the biased position that a difference of opinion on policy questions qualifies as disinformation, nevertheless, the findings inadvertently run contrary to the popular idea on the Left that it is the Russian and Chinese foreign troll factories that are interfering with our elections with “disinformation.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/18/news-reporting-on-crime-isnt-racist-its-essenti

The smart people at Harvard’s Nieman Lab want you to know that reporting on crime is really just another way of perpetuating white supremacy.

Among the many things 2020 has helped clarify is that journalism, particularly the journalism practiced by the corporate media, is in bad shape. From the media’s coverage of impeachment (remember that?), to the presidential election, to the pandemic and the riots and everything else, it has become painfully obvious that the establishment press isn’t interested in journalism as such, but in woke political activism and race hustling.

So no wonder the very smart journalists at Harvard’s Nieman Lab want to “defund the crime beat” because reporting on crime is apparently now racist.

That’s the gist of a recent piece published as part of Nieman’s series on “predictions for journalism 2021.” It’s not so much a prediction as a shoddy argument, though, and it opens with the blanket claim that “Crime coverage is terrible.”

It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve. And because it so rarely meets the public’s needs, it’s almost never newsworthy, despite what Grizzled Gary in his coffee-stained shirt says from his perch at the copy desk.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/12/18/a-second-zionist-jews-exit-from-new-york-times-opinion-page-is-called-disgrace/

A second openly Zionist staffer has exited the New York Times editorial page as the newspaper’s publisher interviews candidates for the editorial-page editor job.

In June, a Republican senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, wrote a Times op-ed headlined “Send in the Troops,” calling for the deployment of the US military to quell what the article called an “orgy of violence” and “rioters and looters” in American cities following the death in police custody of George Floyd. More than 800 Times staff members signed a letter protesting the article’s publication, and more than two dozen New York Times employees called in sick to protest the op-ed.

New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned after the publication of the Cotton article, but others sought to blame its appearance on two Jewish opinion-page staffers, Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein. I covered the episode at the time under the headline “Republican Senator Writes New York Times Op-Ed. Zionist Jews Get Blamed.”

“‘Blame Weiss and Rubenstein’ is the NYT’s new motto, and unlike its previous one, actually accurately describes what the paper aims to do every day of the week and twice on Shabbos,” quipped Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

Weiss left the Times in July, complaining of “unlawful discrimination” and “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” Now Rubenstein has also departed. He did not reply to a message asking why, but Weiss, on Twitter, wrote that he “was hung out to dry by his own colleagues.”