RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-8-4-mainstream-media-polls-yet-m

“Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning are Approaching Zero” (Washington Post)

“Donald Trump is approaching his last chance to turn a catastrophic campaign into an ordinarily unsuccessful campaign” (The Atlantic)

“Now Trump is trailing in an average of post-convention poll results for every swing state from the past two cycles…” (Vox)

“Two much-discussed polls by The Times and Siena College that were published last week suggested that in key swing states, as well as nationally, [Trump’s] the limping dead” (New York Times)

“Trump is going to lose – decisively – this fall.” (San Diego Tribune)

“Trump Is Losing Big to [Opponent] in Voter Polls. Here’s How That Will Likely Play Out on Election Day” (MarketWatch) 

“Donald Trump’s Terrible Campaign is Finally Catching Up to Him” (Vanity Fair)

“Trump’s Losing, So When Are Republican Candidates Going to Abandon Him?” (New Yorker)

Some of these quotes are from 2016 and some are from 2020, but it’s almost impossible to tell which are which (Go ahead and guess in the comments, but it’s cheating if you click on the links). 

If you read the mainstream media, you would find it hard to believe that Trump has any chance of winning re-election in November. But then again, they had me utterly persuaded the same was true in 2016.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/0/04/investigative_issues_the_troubling_fact_that_media_fact-checkers_lean_left_124663.html

A growing response to today’s chaotic information landscape sounds inviting and elegantly simple: appoint experts to “fact-check” news stories, blogs, speeches, studies, opinions, and political ads. Information they deem to be false is corrected or even removed from public view, in the name of the public good.

Since Donald Trump’s election these “fact-checkers” have gained increased prominence. Pressure has mounted for news outfits and big tech companies – including Google, Facebook, and Twitter – to police political discourse. At the same time, many people, notably conservatives, are demanding that the tech giants back off such perceived censorship. Tensions on both sides were on display last week as a House Judiciary subcommittee grilled top Silicon Valley executives. 

That discord is likely to persist because in large part the fact-checking solution is illusory. Many such efforts fail because they amount to a circular feedback loop of verification. The fact-checkers are like-minded journalists or often liberal Silicon Valley gatekeepers, who frequently rely on partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives on a wide variety of issues and controversies. This small group of players exerts an oversized influence, using fact checks to shape and censor information.

Twitter recently sparked controversy by taking the unprecedented step of adding a disapproving “fact-checking label” to some of President Trump’s tweets. The social media site publicly explained that Trump’s May 26 posts contained what its fact-checkers deemed to be “potentially misleading information about voting processes.”

Trump had said widespread mail-in ballots in the 2020 election would be “substantially fraudulent.” While the definition of “substantially” is in the eye of the beholder, the United States, in fact, has a long and ongoing history of ballot fraud.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/03/media-silent-as-christopher-steele-hero-spymaster-narrative-crumbles/

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier. That didn’t stop corporate media.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-media-purge/

 The American Left is intensely frustrated by President Donald Trump’s ability to penetrate their monopoly on the news cycle. When the Left is frustrated, it acts out, up to and past the point of violence. A powerful weapon at its disposal is its ability to silence its perceived enemies. Much of the mainstream US media, cowed by the Left, reflexively capitulates to its demands to “cancel” individuals who express opinions that go against Leftist orthodoxy.

In the wake of the riots and destruction that coursed across the US after the killing of George Floyd, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was left with no choice but to resign after allowing the paper to publish an op-ed by US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas). Cotton argued in his piece that the military should be mobilized to restore order, and the airing of such a view is now verboten in the pages of the Times. Similarly, Stan Wischnowski, long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was pushed out of his job for daring to print a piece with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Both were victims not of careful reviews conducted by their papers but of the demands of the mob, which is now in control of the American newsroom. Along the same lines of this trend, Twitter made the executive decision to begin “curating” President Trump’s tweets.

To an extent, these events are simply eruptions coming from a large group of individuals who have not been educated in the norms of liberal democracy, but there is more to it than that. The demand to shame and ultimately silence perceived political opponents reflects the Left’s deep frustration that it has lost its monopoly on the news and is unable to beat Trump at its own game.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-producer-ariana-pekary-letter

A former MSNBC producer wrote a scathing open letter explaining why she recently left the cable news network.

“July 24th was my last day at MSNBC. I don’t know what I’m going to do next exactly but I simply couldn’t stay there anymore,” Ariana Pekary wrote on her personal website. “My colleagues are very smart people with good intentions. The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.”

Pekary provided a number of examples of why she wanted to leave the cable news network.

“It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate.’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day,” Pekary said. “Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”

She then quoted someone she described a “successful and insightful TV veteran” who said: “We are a cancer and there is no cure… But if you could find a cure, it would change the world.”

https://spectator.us/jaccuse-smear-john-kass-chicago-tribune-george-soros/

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’

In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened. If you are a columnist, like John Kass, you might face ostracism from left-wing colleagues, attacks by the reporters’ union, and concessions to the mob by your paper’s editor, Colin McMahon.

The dispute began when the union representing Tribune writers (of which Kass is not a member) decided to go after him, full-bore. Their false charge was…wait for it…Kass’s column was anti-Semitic. Why? Because Kass noted that a major accelerant of urban violence has been the weak response by public officials, especially state and local prosecutors. Some of those prosecutors won office as part of a progressive political movement, specifically focused on winning control of prosecutors’ offices. That quiet movement had met with a lot of electoral success. One of its major supporters and funders is George Soros. Soros’s family background is Jewish.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/eulogy-conservative-warrior-mark-tapson/

Many conservatives were shocked to learn last week that Townhall columnist, pro-life advocate, free speech warrior, and conservative professor Mike S. Adams was found dead at his home in North Carolina.

The author of such politically-incorrect titles as Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel: Confessions of a Conservative Professor (2004), Feminists Say the Darnedest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus (2008), and Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand (2013), Adams toiled in the front lines of the culture war, fighting for the unborn and against the progressive suppression of free speech. His death is a terrible loss for those causes, for the many Christian and conservative students he mentored on a hostile campus, and for patriots all over the country.

Friends and supporters, myself included, could not help but suspect foul play, because the police report on Mike’s death referred to a “gsw” or “gun shot wound” (the investigation is still ongoing, and as of this writing, no cause of death has been confirmed). We considered Mike a fearless warrior, and he had just opted for early retirement after winning a half-million dollar settlement from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, which a jury found had discriminated against him for his Christian conservative beliefs. So suicide seemed unthinkable. It’s painful to admit that a brother-in-arms may have wrestled with and lost an internal struggle of which we were unaware, but until evidence otherwise comes to light, we must come to terms with the fact that he did indeed take his own life.