RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/30/bidens-media-campaign/#slide-1

In which the media were the campaign.

It is often said that a free press is necessary to the maintenance of a free republic. It is less frequently said that, in order for this to be true, that press must be both virtuous and useful. The American press is certainly free — freer than any press has ever been in the history of the human race, in fact — but it is not virtuous and it is not useful. Until it changes, it will continue to invite the mistrust and opprobrium to which it has of late become accustomed. As for the free republic . . . well, we’ll see.

It is no great overstatement to say that, in the 2020 presidential election, the media did not so much cover the Biden campaign as they were the Biden campaign. What, had they been officially charged with that task, would they have done differently? During the last year, major outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR got into the habit of prominently featuring any news that could plausibly hurt President Trump while assiduously refusing to run stories that might have hurt Joe Biden. Thus it was that the story about Hunter Biden’s exploits in China was smothered without any good explanation other than that it might serve as a “distraction” (well, yes) and that it could possibly be a plot, while a relatively inexplosive New York Times story about President Trump’s taxes was blasted out with abandon. Thus it was that the coronavirus was deemed to be simultaneously so lethal as to warrant the shutting down of Trump’s campaign rallies and so benign as to have no effect through mass protests. Thus it was that a fairly dull Tom Cotton piece arguing for the deployment of the military to help quell riots was deemed too radical for a New York Times opinion page that had recently invited contributions from Vladimir Putin and the Taliban, and would later run a submission from an anti-democracy apparatchik of the Chinese Communist Party, and that had run a piece by Charles Blow arguing that “white women” liked to “use themselves as instruments of terror,” there being “too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.”

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/09/report-big-tech-media-stole-the-election-by-burying-biden-china-scandal-n1132603

In the critical weeks before Election Day, Big Tech and the legacy media took extreme measures to bury the unfolding story of Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s personal ties to his son Hunter’s notorious business deals in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Facebook and Twitter suppressed a New York Post story even before a fact-check, and legacy media outlets refused to cover the story even as evidence mounted. According to a blockbuster new poll, this unprecedented suppression of a bombshell story arguably cost President Donald Trump his reelection.

A Media Research Center (MRC) poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates found that 36 percent of Biden voters were not aware of the evidence behind claims that Joe Biden was personally involved in his son Hunter’s business deals with China. Thirteen percent of those voters (4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that if they had known the facts, they would not have voted for Biden.

Such a shift away from Biden would have given Trump the election, according to MRC’s analysis of the preliminary — and contested — election results predicting a Biden win. Had the Biden-China story seen the light of day, Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.

“It is an indisputable fact that the media stole the election,” MRC President Brent Bozell argued. “The American electorate was intentionally kept in the dark. During the height of the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, the media and the big tech companies did everything in their power to cover it up.”

Bozell noted that Twitter and Facebook limited sharing of The New York Post‘s bombshell report, while legacy media outlets largely ignored it. After the Post story failed to get the kind of traction many expected it would, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, came forward with firsthand knowledge — and evidence — tying Joe Biden to the notorious deals.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/obsession–how-the-media-keep-us-ignorant/

Many people of all political persuasions, including myself, find much of the mainstream news opinionated and biased. Negative media coverage of President Trump, for example, ran as high as 99 percent in May.

This slanted news does serious damage to our republic. It’s divisive, but it also causes ignorance. Two days ago, I met a man in his mid-30s who gave me a blank look when I mentioned the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s hard drive. When I asked another woman, a Democrat, what she thought about the possibility of Joe Biden having dementia, she had no idea what I meant.

But there is a threat to an informed citizenry as great as prejudicial reporting: negligence. The MSM not only keeps us in the dark by their bigotry and their deliberate omission of certain stories, but also by their inability to broaden their reporting.

Since January, the media has focused continually on the pandemic sweeping the globe. They’ve battered us with statistics, with terrible stories of nursing home deaths, and with arrests made when a church or business opened, news seasoned with the opinions of “experts.”

The Black Lives Matter Movement with its protests and riots occasionally nudged aside the pandemic as worthy of reporting, but generally coronavirus remained front and center in the headlines. The nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court dominated the news for a few days, and with the election season, those who watch televised news find themselves now in a storm of opinions, polls, and speculations.

Meanwhile, this hurricane of headlines has swept away events taking place around the world.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/523692-the-anonymous-saga-ended-with-a-dud-a-perfect-example-of-the-problem-of

There will be many incidents from the past four years of the Trump era that will erode the public’s faith in the press to provide fair, accurate information — all the nonsense from the Russia collusion story, pings in Prague, the Steele dossier mess, false promises of what would be in the Mueller report and more. These will leave lasting, damaging marks.

But no story better exemplifies the core problem with the media’s anti-Trump instincts to elevate every crumb of a story to an 11 out of 10, only to be let down consistently for their exaggeration or outright falsehood, than the saga of “Anonymous.”

For those who don’t remember the drama that gripped Washington and the Acela media (located along Amtrak’s Acela rail corridor between D.C. and New York City), The New York Times published a column in September 2018 from someone identified as “Anonymous,” whom the Times described as a “senior official inside the Trump administration.” The column, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,’’ detailed the work that the author and others in the administration supposedly were doing to undermine President Trump’s agenda. 

Guesses of who the author was started flowing in. RealClearInvestigations thought it was Victoria Coates. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and current CNN contributor, thought it was Kirstjen Nielsen, based on her use of commas in her resignation letter. But most guesses on Twitter and throughout the media rose to higher ranks. Mike Pence? Nikki Haley? CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote, in retrospect, a spectacularly wrong column titled “13 people who might be the author of The New York Times op-ed.” His arguments included names such as Kellyanne Conway and John Kelly, then some of the top advisers to Trump, as well as “Javanka” and Melania Trump. Dripping with innuendo, it was sure to grab a ton of clicks from CNN’s audience and throughout the #Resistance mediasphere.

And then, this week, we got the big reveal. “Anonymous” was Miles Taylor — a name that is likely literally anonymous to you to begin with.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitters-living-censorship-11604263210?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

When social-media companies sanction political speech they don’t like, they always point to one policy or another that was supposedly violated. The truth is they are often making up the rules as they go.

Twitter admitted as much Friday when it finally agreed to unlock the New York Post’s account after freezing it on Oct. 14 as punishment for reporting on Hunter Biden’s business dealings that were exposed on his abandoned laptop computer.

“Our policies are living documents,” the company said in explaining its decision to stop blocking the newspaper. Initially, Twitter said the Post’s Biden story violated a policy against “content obtained without authorization.” That was absurd, as leaks of one kind or another are ubiquitous in modern political reporting.

Once that rationale collapsed, Twitter said it “decided to make changes to the policy,” and stopped preventing users from sharing the Post story. But it maintained that the story still violated the policy in effect at the time the Post tweeted it, so the newspaper’s account would remain locked until the offending tweets were deleted.