RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yellow-journalism-turns-blue-11616711532?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

“Yellow journalism” means a sensationalized press. Perhaps it is time to introduce “blue journalism”—the new media practice of abandoning standards to work seamlessly with the progressive left against any opposition.

A case study is the attempted political assassination of Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. The press has never liked most Republicans. Yet for most of Mr. Johnson’s decade in the Senate, it’s generally described him as what he is: an outsider businessman and fiscal conservative with a focus on deficits and spending. “Wisconsin’s senior senator is a numbers guy, a believer in the power of facts and figures,” wrote Milwaukee Magazine in his first term. In recent years, serving on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, he’s developed a reputation for oversight.

Compare that with the recent onslaught. “Assaulting the Truth, Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence In Government,” read a New York Times news headline, over a story that called him the “Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.” “Ron Johnson’s Crazy Train Is Somehow Getting Even Weirder,” snarked Vanity Fair. “Ron Johnson Is a Racist,” opined the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker. Mr. Johnson is “inciting fear” the Post’s Michael Gerson added. The paper’s “fact checkers” assailed his “misleading data” and “unscientific take.”

What’s this all about? From the Times story, it amounts to this: Mr. Johnson has refused to brand everyone present in Washington on Jan. 6 as “insurrectionists”; he’s continued to note that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests led to rioting, looting, arson and death; he held hearings on treatments for Covid and 2020 election integrity; and he’s declined, for now, a Covid vaccine, given he had the disease last year and decided to let others go before him.

None of this is remotely conspiratorial or even controversial. Mr. Johnson’s real offense is refusing to roll over to the progressive and public-health police and continuing to ask tough questions.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/23/cnn-ratings-collapse-without-bad-orange-man/

Since former President Donald Trump’s departure in January, CNN lost nearly 50 percent of its prime-time audience.

While Fox News only saw a 6 percent drop in ratings, other cable news outlets and corporate media publications also saw a significant decline in their viewership and readership after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. MSNBC was one of the many left-leaning networks that lost more than 20 percent of its audience. The Washington Post and New York Times also suffered “plummeting” website traffic.

“The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February,” an analysis in the Post concluded. 

This drop in readers and viewers comes after corporate media outlets obsessed over Trump for four years, often pushing bogus narratives meant to hurt the president’s standing with Americans as well as his re-election chances. Trump predicted the recent decline of “fake news” readers and viewers as early as 2017.

“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because, without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” Trump proclaimed.

Leftist mouthpieces at CNN such as Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta were often quick to take aim at Trump when he was in office, spending much of their coverage on criticizing his administration and agenda.

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

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JPCA) is a bait-and-switch attempt that claims to help conservative news sources but would instead purge them from the marketplace of ideas.  Congress should reject it for the freedom-killer it is.

JCPA would give media companies — broadcast and print — an exemption from federal antitrust laws, so they can operate in a coordinated fashion to negotiate prices that social media companies like Facebook would have to pay them to carry their content.  It would ensure that these tech billionaires would have to direct some of their riches into content providers.

But that’s a Big Boys’ game, where the major players could decide whom to let into their club.  Smaller outlets would be left out in the cold, and the market would suffer.

This is because almost all of the Big Boys are liberal.  For print, there are the New York Times and the Washington Post.  For video content providers, you have the networks, CNN, and MSNBC.  The twin star performers owned by News Corp — Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal — are some of the only ones to the right of the 50-yard line.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-biden-appointees-troubling-views

Columbia law professor Timothy Wu wonders if the First Amendment is “obsolete,” and believes in “returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:

Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reconsidering-times-v-sullivan-11616454219?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

EXCERPTS

“In any case the Silberman opinion ought to inspire some reflection about the low state of the media and its ideological conformity. The survival of a free press depends in part on the First Amendment. But in the long run it also requires support from a public that wants it to be free. A press that violates its privileges with impunity, born of legal protection from a dubious constitutional interpretation, is more vulnerable than righteous journalists think. ”

On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that many in the media have taken a bad turn in recent decades—often under the protection of the actual-malice standard. The public agrees, judging by opinion surveys on collapsing trust in the press.

Think of the way the media trashed the Covington, Ky., high school student for his silence and half smile as he was assailed by an adult after a pro-life rally in 2019. The Washington Post and CNN settled the young man’s lawsuits, but would the outlets have shown more caution without the protection of Times v. Sullivan?

Or recall Sarah Palin’s suit against the New York Times for claiming in 2017 she had incited the deranged man who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011. The editorial was clearly false, the editing process was remarkably slipshod, and the Times ran a correction. A judge tossed the suit under the actual-malice standard until the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it, and it is now headed for trial.

Judge Silberman also has the liberal press in a lather because he called them out for one-sided bias. He says the New York Times and Washington Post “are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” and that most of the press follows their lead. He says the Journal news section “leans in the same direction,” which we think is wrong. The guiding ethic of our reporters is to play the news straight.

The judge cited our editorial pages, along with Fox News and the New York Post, as rare exceptions. But he noted they are controlled by “a single man and his son”— Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch —and that many Democrats are calling for the giant tech platforms to censor news from conservative publications. He says a press so one-sided is dangerous to democracy.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/project-veritas-wins-early-round-

A New York judge slammed The New York Times for blurring the lines between news and opinion. The paper had attempted to get a defamation lawsuit against it dismissed on the grounds that, among other things, its reporters were just expressing their personal opinions when they disparaged the investigative journalists at Project Veritas.

The judge ruled the lawsuit can go forward, finding that Project Veritas showed sufficient evidence that The New York Times may have been motivated by “actual malice” and acted with “reckless disregard” when it ran several articles against the investigative journalism outfit.

“[I]f a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is factor opinion, that it is opinion,” Judge Charles Wood of the New York State Supreme Court said in his March 18, 2021 ruling.

The lawsuit stems from The New York Times’ coverage of an explosive video released in September purporting to show illegal voting practices within the Somali-American community in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s congressional district in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The video was based on Snapchat videos bragging about ballot harvesting posted by Liban Mohamed, the brother-in-law of a city council candidate named Jamal Osman. Project Veritas describes the video in its lawsuit:

Mr. Mohamed displayed a vast number of ballots littering his car’s dashboard while boasting in Somali, ‘[n]umbers don’t lie! You can see my car here is full. All these here are absentee ballots. Can’t you see? Look at al these, my car is full,’ and ‘[j]ust today we got 300 (ballots) for Jamal Osman.’ In another video, Mr. Mohamed filmed himself exiting an apartment complex with his hand stuffed with voters’ ballots and baosting, ‘[t]wo in the morning. Still hustling.’

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.