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MEDIA

The downfall of Fox News’s Chris Wallace and John Roberts By Andrea Widburg

https://proudpatriots.com/pages/trump-space-force-2-bills?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxam27cqV7AIVyuqzCh1ZtQweEAEYASAAEgKxfvD_BwE

Some men are alphas, like President Trump, and some men are betas, like Al Gore and the sneering, puffing Biden. And then there are men who aren’t even strong enough to be betas. They are, instead, weak, mewling creatures who lack either presence or power, and who then cry about it afterward. Chris Wallace and John Roberts, both employees at Fox News, have exhibited behavior that’s so craven and humiliated themselves so badly in the eyes of Fox News’s core audience that they should be retired immediately.

It all started with Chris Wallace’s stint as a debate moderator for the first presidential debate. Right out of the gate, he failed to stop Biden from interrupting Donald Trump:

I rewatched the start of the debate. The 1st Q went to Trump who gave an uninterrupted 2-min response. Then Biden gave an uninterrupted 2-min response. Then it went back to Trump, whose answer was interrupted 3 times by Biden. If you didn’t like it, blame Biden for starting it.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 30, 2020

Trump immediately realized that Wallace was either weak or biased and proceeded to ignore him. In both estimations, Trump was correct. For the next 90 minutes, Wallace proved himself to be both ineffectual, for he bleated like a lost lamb when he couldn’t regain control of events, and partisan. That partisanship was almost criminal when Wallace failed to force Biden to respond substantively to the question about whether Biden intends to pack the Supreme Court. Trump, a true alpha predator, rode roughshod over the inconsequential Wallace.

Media Gunning For Scott Atlas Because He Keeps Exposing Coronavirus Lies By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/29/media-gunning-for-scott-atlas-because-he-keeps-exposing-coronavirus-lies/

Everything he says is false,’ NBC News quoted CDC Director Robert Redfield as saying of Atlas. That’s just not true, top epidemiologists told The Federalist.

“Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data” about COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague Friday, according to a Monday report by NBC News political reporter Monica Alba.

Within hours, numerous outlets ideologically allied with NBC amplified the coverage. Here are some screenshots of the Google News results for the story just a short while later, but is Redfield’s assertion correct? The Federalist spoke to numerous epidemiologists to find out.“Everything he says is false,” NBC News quoted Redfield as saying of Atlas’s coronavirus recommendations. That’s just not true, top epidemiologists told The Federalist.

“Dr. Redfield is a prominent and respected scientist, so I respect his opinion, but I don’t know what he’s thinking,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and medical professor at Stanford University, in response to the NBC story. Bhattacharya has advised public officials including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on COVID-19 response. “I think the evidence is more strongly with Dr. Atlas,” he continued.

In an interview, Atlas said the constant media characterization of President Trump’s coronavirus response as detached from scientific expertise is “completely false.” He said the president’s policies are informed by infectious disease experts from the world’s top medical and research institutions, including Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis of Stanford University Medical Center, Martin Kulldorff and Katherine Yih of Harvard Medical School, and Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan of Oxford University.

“The extreme comments that have been reported are an attempt to delegitimize me and undermine the president of the United States,” Atlas said, not a dispassionate, science-based position. “There can be different opinions about scientific evidence, but to say I’m citing false information is a lie,” he said later.

Another Pathetic Times ‘Bombshell’ Donald Trump failed to pay taxes on business losses—like every other taxpayer in the world. By Adam Mill

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/28/another-pathetic-times-bombshell/

The New York Times earned a whopping $428.5 million in revenue in just the third quarter of 2019. While its revenue increased when compared to the same quarter in 2018, it’s tax bill declined to just $6.1 million (down from $10.1 million in the same quarter the year prior).

How on earth did this rich corporation manage such a significant reduction in its tax burden after such a flush year? It employed the same tax gimmick that Times reporters would later pillory President Trump for using on his taxes; it only paid taxes on its profit realized after deducting operating costs. 

To ordinary wage earners, it might seem like cheating: Only paying income taxes on income. But that’s just the same dirty game the Times has now claimed to have caught the Bad Orange Man playing. 

The Times clucked righteously that the president failed to pay taxes on his losses. The Times failed to identify any other business in the history of income tax that has ever paid income taxes on losses. But since the Times hates him, it wants him to follow a different tax rule than every other company in the world.

Over the weekend, the Times finally opened the Schrodinger’s box of Trump tax returns. While the box remained closed, it allowed all sorts of idle speculation (masquerading as journalism). 

“Might it shed light on the president’s connections to Russian money, interests, indebtedness?” Forbes speculated in April 2019. “Democrats say they are concerned the White House could pressure IRS agents to go easy on Trump’s returns, and that they need his tax documents to understand how seriously the agency is vetting them,” Politico reported in July 2019. 

Media’s Wuhan Lies Lengthen, Deepen By Trevor Thomas ******

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/medias_wuhan_lies_lengthen_deepen.html

Because they’ve made a god of government, there’s seemingly always another low to which liberals will stoop in order to help slow, sleepy Joe defeat Donald Trump in November.  Many of these lows involve the numerous nefarious reactions to the Wuhan virus.  Make no mistake about it: we have suffered an unprecedented loss of jobs and businesses, the shutdown of schools, entertainment, and hospitals; the mandating of masks and “social distancing”; and the like, not because of a global pandemic, but because of our foolish and unprecedented reaction to a global pandemic. 

In other words, much of what was “unprecedented” in the fight against the Wuhan virus was simply unnecessary.  As Tim Black at Spiked recently put it, because of what leftism has wrought worldwide, we have turned a pandemic into an apocalypse.  Mr. Black writes: 

To varying degrees, political elites, screamed on by the media, have responded to the threat posed by this virus as if it is world-ending. As if it demands the complete reorganisation of social and economic life around the supreme principle of safety. As if there is no way back. They treat it not as a nasty virus that poses a significant but manageable health risk to certain sections of the populace. No, they treat it as a god-like judgement on the old structures of social life, now deemed, in the jargon of the day, unsafe and unsustainable. 

This is what is unprecedented. Not the novel virus itself. But the panicked, fear-laden and, in some quarters, gleefully apocalyptic response.

Because viruses are simply going to virus — not at all unprecedented — in order to keep the fear and the panic high, American leftists in politics, academia, and the media must regularly lie.  This is especially the case as the lockdowns drag on and as the actual evidence contradicts what those who have a vested interest in keeping the Wuhan virus fear level high and the lockdowns in place are telling us. 

Probably the most repeated lie in this evil episode is the near-endless reporting on Wuhan virus “case counts.”  As has been noted multiple times, these reports are filled with numerous deceptions.  The drive-by media in my home state of Georgia again provide a clear example. 

WaPo beclowns itself criticizing Trump’s Middle East peace deal By Michael Berenhaus

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/wapo_beclowns_itself_criticizing_trumps_middle_east_peace_deal.html

In “A lopsided Middle East strategy” (9/19/20), The Washington Post editorial board is critical of the current administration for supporting our allies over those that want to do us harm.  If the Post calls that lopsided, I’ll take it!

Further, The Post says a “negative” of the recent “Abraham Accords” is the “reinforcement of harsh authoritarian rulers” in the region.  Those “authoritarian rulers,” our allies, have been “authoritarian” for decades.  Nary a word of objection about their dictatorship style in the past until Israel makes a deal with them, brokered by the president.

The Post postulates that “Mr. Biden would surely also resume US pressure on Israel to pursue a settlement with the Palestinians.”  But Mr. Biden has been around long enough to know that no amount of pressure on Israel has pushed the Palestinians to say yes to a multitude of generous peace offers.

The Washington Post missed the mark on pretty much every sentence in its comprehensive editorial, which is surprising, since even their columnists supported this deal and the outcome of it with fervor.

When the Media Becomes the Hangman By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2020/09/24/when-the-media-becomes-the-hangman/

The Grand Jury in Louisville Kentucky issued its judgement regarding the Breanna Taylor killing yesterday. It found evidence that the police had properly identified themselves before entering her apartment and that her boyfriend had shot a policeman first, after which they returned fire, killing Ms. Taylor instead of the shooter. Only one of the policemen was indicted and that was for shooting recklessly into a neighbor’s apartment. That policeman’s name was announced to the public and within minutes that information, along with his smiling photograph were on every TV screen in America.

An indictment is not a guilty verdict; it is merely the prelude to a trial and theoretically, Americans are innocent until proven guilty. While this news was released, there were two policemen shot during the Black Lives Matter riot in Louisville – their condition was unreported as of this morning. The rioters were setting fires, screaming, fighting, destroying property in a total state of chaos similar to too many other riots that we have allowed to proceed and then seen televised over the past several months.

During the course of the pandemic, many rules have necessarily changed to accommodate the need for public safety. The riots – stimulated, financed and organized by Black Lives Matter, have been going on across our country for several months. People have been shot, beaten, killed, seen all their worldly goods destroyed along with their small businesses. In some states, the prosecutor has license to seal the name of the indicted person along with the proceedings of the Grand Jury. In light of the stated intention of BLM, we should not allow any state to release any information regarding proceedings involving police misconduct. We already protect the identities of the jurors – we should do no less for our men in blue.

We have seen the mobs descend on people’s homes and neighborhoods for lesser reason than a cop shooting a gun into the wrong apartment. How long will it be before those brave BLM cop-killers go after the man whose identity was splashed across our tv screens as the only indicted person associated with Ms Taylor’s death. This man should have been protected from the wrath of those who are outspokenly dedicated to killing cops. His name and photo should never have been released to the media which may be characterized most accurately as bloodsuckers.

Before Reporting Became ‘Journalism’ Writers subdued their egos and encouraged readers to think. Nowadays it’s all about arousing emotion. By Lance Morrow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-reporting-became-journalism-11600879803?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.

That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”

The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?

If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”

Facebook Promotes Holocaust Denial by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16444/facebook-holocaust-denial

Researchers say that as they viewed Holocaust-denying pages and posts on Facebook, the social media site’s algorithm promoted even more Holocaust denial content to them….

Facebook takes down such posts only in countries such as Germany, France and Poland where Holocaust denial is illegal.

As the Institute for Strategic Dialogue out in its report, however, Holocaust denial is not about people getting history “wrong”: “This speech seeks not only to minimise the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, but to mitigate criticism of Nazism, and justify ongoing attacks against the Jewish people. Due to the intimate intersection between Holocaust denial and hate targeting Jews, such content should be regarded as inherently anti-Semitic”.

Given Facebook’s public commitment to fighting “hate speech” on its site, Facebook’s refusal to acknowledge international guidelines on anti-Semitic hate speech by reducing Holocaust denial to a mere instance of “getting things wrong” — while using its algorithms to promote Holocaust denial — is clearly unacceptable.

Holocaust survivors have now launched an online campaign, #NoDenyingIt, calling on Facebook to remove Holocaust denying material from its website. “How can somebody really doubt it?” asked Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor. “Where are the six million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing.”

Facebook has been promoting Holocaust denial on its platform, according to a recent report by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), “Hosting the ‘Holohoax’: A Snapshot of Holocaust Denial Across Social Media”.

“Holocaust denial has long been one of the most insidious conspiracy theories targeting Jewish communities, with its extremist proponents drawn from across the ideological spectrum, from extreme right-wing to hard left to Islamist”, the report states. “Research has shown that digital platforms have only served to amplify and mainstream this warped strain of thinking in recent years”.

The ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Lie Gets A Thorough, Well-Earned Debunking

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/18/the-mostly-peaceful-lie-gets-a-thorough-well-earned-debunking/

Both Democratic officials and their sycophantic media acolytes have used the slippery phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the riots that have torn apart America — so much, in fact, that it’s now a cliche. But new reports show just how big a lie “mostly peaceful” truly is.

Just this month, as a CNN reporter stood in front of a burning car in riot-torn Kenosha, Wisconsin, the network’s chyron at the bottom of the screen said “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

Sorry, they were not “mostly peaceful,” or any of the other false euphemisms used to describe the violent anarchy erupting in cities across the country. Clearly, this is another case of journalists caught in a lie by their very own video images.

Many other instances of such journalistic gaslighting have emerged in recent months. For an interesting and comprehensive roundup, read Christine Rosen’s “Mostly Peaceful: The Birth of an Excuse,” originally published online in Commentary magazine.

But not only have we had the sometimes laughable instances of a journalist standing in front of rioting, burning and looting and then describing it as “mostly peaceful” — the equivalent of describing the Titanic’s first voyage as “mostly uneventful” — now we also have data-based studies that show just how violent these “demonstrations” have been.

Why I am Suing CNN by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures.

So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment.

So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment.

Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest.

I love the First Amendment, I support the First Amendment, I have litigated cases defending the First Amendment. I have written and taught about the First Amendment. And I was a law clerk for the Supreme Court when it rendered its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which “protects media even when they print false statements about public figures, as long as the media did not act with ‘actual malice.'”

But I also understand the limitations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. Here is what CNN did.