RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/how-american-journalism-died/

“The news as we once understood it is dead.It has been replaced by the un-news: a political narrative created by partisans who believe the noble ends of destroying Trump justify any biased means necessary — including destroying their own reputation and craft.”

Media partisans believe that destroying Trump justifies any biased means necessary.

In 2017, the liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University found that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump administration was negative. The center found similarly negative Trump coverage at other major news outlets.

The election year 2020 has only accelerated that asymmetrical bias — to the point that major newspapers and network and cable-news organizations are now fused with the Joe Biden campaign.Sometimes stories are covered only in terms of political agendas. Take COVID-19.

The media assure us that the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic has been a disaster. But their conclusions are not supported by any evidence.

In the United States, the coronavirus death rate per million people is similar to, or lower than, most major European countries except Germany.

When the virus was at its worst, before the partisan campaign of this election year heated up, the governors in our four largest states had only compliments for the Trump administration.

Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California and Republicans Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida effusively praised the administration’s cooperation with their own frontline efforts.

The most recent conclusions of impartial heads of federal agencies responsible for coordinating national and state policies are about the same.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/12/a-collection-of-liars/

How quaint this admonition from Dr. Johnson seems today: “Accustom your children constantly to this,” Johnson told Boswell; “if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.”

Where is Dr. Johnson when we need him? How well could we profit from his scruples when it comes to the question of truth. For we live at a time when truth is everywhere under attack. I am not talking about anything arcane or polysyllabic: just plain, factual truth, as in “The battle of Agincourt took place in October 1415” or (more generally) “the documents support my claim and do not support his” or “the police station has been torched; this is not a peaceful protest but a riot.”

It is perhaps easy enough to discount some of the more florid examples of the assault on truth. I daresay that few sensible people take seriously the claims of Holocaust deniers. What is significant, however, is the way in which such extreme doctrines tend to be dismissed. Increasingly, they are repudiated not as pernicious falsehoods—the response that Dr. Johnson would have insisted upon—but as more or less unfortunate “perspectives” or “points of view,” the gospel being that everyone is “entitled” to his own such hobbyhorse, no matter how flagrantly at odds with the truth it might be. Never mind that such an attitude not only disparages truth but also erodes the legitimacy of serious opinion.

There are no doubt many reasons for this development. One important reason is the degree to which Western intellectual elites—in the media, the world of culture, and above all in the academy—have reneged on their commitment to truth. This abdication has a long and complex heritage. And it comes in many forms and degrees of finality, from various modes of trial separation to, in extreme cases, irrevocable divorce. 

Downgrading Facts

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/09/11/exclusive-ag-barr-rips-national-media-as-a-collection-of-liars-over-riot-coverage-n2576070

Wrapping up a three-day tour in Chicago, Phoenix and Cleveland Friday, Attorney General Bill Barr took on the media during an exclusive interview with Townhall.

“They’re basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media. They’re a collection of liars and they know exactly what they’re doing. A perfect example of that were the riots. Right on the street it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals and they kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons, and they were lying to the American people. It wasn’t until they were caught red-handed after essentially weeks of this lie that they even started feeling less timid,” Barr said on the flight back to Washington Friday afternoon.

“The press has dropped, in my view – and I’m talking about the national mainstream media – has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth. They’re very mendacious about it,” he continued. “It’s very destructive to our Republic; it’s very destructive to the Democratic system to have that, especially being so monolithic. It’s contributing to a lot of the intensity and partisanship.”

For months major news networks have portrayed riots across the country as “peaceful protests.” CNN ran a chyron of a reporter standing in front of a burning Kenosha business that read, “Fiery but mostly peaceful protest.”

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/jeffrey-goldbergs-socialist-newspaper/91252/

History, we see, is up to her old tricks. This time she was summoned by Paul Sperry of the New York Post, who put out on Labor Day a tweet with a note saying: “BACKGROUND: The author of ‘The Atlantic’s’ discredited hit piece on Trump was raised by socialist parents who sent him to socialist camps in the Catskills. Jeffrey Goldberg … later worked for a socialist weekly newspaper in New York.”

This scoop, by one of the Post’s star scribes, was forwarded by a press reporter of the Times, Marc Tracy, to another of the Gray Lady’s scribes, Ben Smith, with the subject line: “you should forward to Lipsky.” Mr. Smith did so, adding his own comment, which, including the salutation, read in full “!!”. We took the slammers to mean that Mr. Smith was enjoying the ironies of the situation.

For Mr. Sperry is right that Mr. Goldberg worked for the Forward in New York. So, for that matter, did Mr. Smith. The paper is the English-language weekly successor to the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward that was founded in 1897 by socialists. We, meaning our editor, were, in 1990, the founding editor of its English paper. We edited it for a decade. Our headstone may yet say we hired both Smith and Goldberg.

It happens, though, that we are several kiloparsecs to the right of the socialists. We had come to the Forward from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, where we were hired because we happily hewed, as we still do, to the principles of free minds and free markets. Then again, too, we’d long admired the Forward, which guided millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants over the cultural bridge to America.

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/journalisms-new-propaganda-tool-using-confirmed-to-mean-its-opposite/

EXCERPT

It seems the same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.

So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.

Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”

In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.