RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/newsweek_and_cnn_accuse_trump_of_attacking_protesters.html

Voters must similarly rely on information provided by the Fourth Estate to make informed decisions on Election Day. A strong argument can be made that fake news and distorted news that defrauds citizens is ethically identical to election fraud. This is, in turn, a strong argument for holding media outlets to the same ethical standards as the U.S. Military Academy’s Honor Code and disregarding sources that don’t measure up.

The U.S. Military Academy’s Honor Code states, “Cadets violate the Honor Code by lying if they deliberately deceive another by stating an untruth or by any direct form of communication to include the telling of a partial truth and the vague or ambiguous use of information or language with the intent to deceive or mislead” (emphasis is mine). Lying is cause for expulsion because military professionals must rely on the accuracy of information with which they are provided.

I once regarded Newsweek and CNN as mainstream news sources, their recent actions have lost my trust.

Newsweek: Police Use “Chemical Agents” on “Protesters”

Newsweek reported, “Virginia Police Use Chemical Agents on Protesters After City Dump Truck Set on Fire,” which reinforces Media Bias/Fact Check’s assessment that Newsweek is not only left-biased, it gets a rating of “Mixed for factual reporting due to multiple failed fact checks by IFCN fact-checkers.”

The sensationalistic headline conveys the impression of First World War Germans in gas masks and spiked helmets, along with Dr. Poison from the Wonder Woman movie, spraying peaceful demonstrators with chemical weapons, although it is at least honest enough to stipulate that a city dump truck was set on fire. Only when we read the body of the article do we find the details. The “chemical agents” — nonlethal tear gas, of course — were used after one or more arsonists (not “protesters”) set the truck on fire and, in addition, rioters committed other violent felonies as well.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/another_company_stands_up_to_the_cancel_culture_mob.html

For quite a while now, we’ve been treated to the demoralizing and unedifying spectacle of media outlets and corporations bowing down to the mob’s cancel culture demands. Authors have been banned, editors fired, Trader Joe’s products renamed, statues dragged down, and much more, merely because spoiled, entitled, college-educated snowflakes, secure in their victimhood, have said that words or products hurt their feelings and made them feel “unsafe.”

Thankfully, after the first shock of this Maoist attack on American institutions, some are beginning to recover their backbone. First, Goya Foods stood up to the mob. Then Red Bull refused to back down. And now the Wall Street Journal has declined to allow its baby journalists to hold its editorial page hostage.

The back story to the Journal’s courageous stand is that 280 employees in the News department signed a letter to the publisher, Almar Latour, criticizing the paper’s opinion pages. The letter is a marvel of Orwellian writing. It opens by expressing support for the First Amendment and then spends three pages explaining why the paper’s opinion page needs to stifle itself because it publishes material with which the letter’s signatories disagree. Not coincidentally, they invariably disagree with conservative content.

The greatest offender, according to the letter, was Heather MacDonald’s piece about a pair of academics’ cowardly decision to withdraw from publication a study showing the absence of systemic racism when it came to the police shooting blacks in America. The academics wanted to withdraw the piece because MacDonald had relied on its findings. (NB: MacDonald had not twisted the results; she had merely relied on them.)

MacDonald wrote about this academic game in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, something the letter writers found unacceptable. Indeed, the MacDonald article caused psychic pain greater than any snowflake should have to bear:

Multiple employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain this Opinion piece caused them during company-held discussions surrounding diversity initiatives…. If the company is serious about better supporting its employees of color, at a bare minimum it should raise Opinion’s standards so that misinformation about racism isn’t published.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-note-to-readers-11595547898

We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages. But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.

In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.

It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.

As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/22/new-york-times-hyped-korean-report-actually-shows-kids-are-not-spreading-coronavirus/

In an incredible redux of when they hyped the Christian Drosten fake paper claiming children were highly infectious — when his math actually showed the opposite — the New York Times and Chicago Tribune pushed screaming headlines that a new Korean government report proves children ages 10 to 19 are highly infectious.

The Korean government report, based on data from March and ignoring all newer research, does make that claim, with qualifications, in its narrative summary. Its actual math, however, shows exactly the opposite. Do the elite newspapers even bother to consult anyone numerate?

As Professor Francois Balloux of the University of Lausanne Genetics Institute immediately replied, the New York Times writer completely misunderstood the report.

In fact, the report found that it was extremely rare for children to bring an infection into the home. It found that just 2.7 percent of potential “index cases” (first case in the home) were under age 20. Imagine twisting that into a call for school closures. It’s astonishingly reckless.

The report also did no genetic mapping and therefore was unable to determine true index cases. The paper itself says, “[W]e could not determine direction of transmission.” Contrast that with the contact tracing study from Iceland, which mapped haplotypes to determine direction of transmission and found it was almost always parent to child.

The supposedly highly contagious 10-19 group had only 3.7 contacts per potential index patient, which is dwarfed by the adult categories. This report, to the extent it tells us anything, indicates children play no significant role in community transmission, consistent with all of the most recent research.

You’ll also notice the number of potential under-age-20 “index cases” in the report is 153, not the 65,000 suggested by the New York Times’ dishonest sub-headline.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/new-fbi-notes-re-debunk-major-nyt-story-highlight-media-collusion-to-produce-russia-hoax/

The FBI official who ran the investigation into whether the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election privately admitted in newly released notes that a major New York Times article was riddled with lies, falsehoods, and “misleading and inaccurate” information. The February 2017 story was penned by three reporters who would win Pulitzers for their reporting on Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

The FBI’s public posture and leaks at the time supported the now-discredited conspiracy theory that led to the formation of a special counsel probe to investigate the Trump campaign and undermine his administration.

“We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Russian Intelligence Officials]. . . . We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials,” former FBI counterespionage official Peter Strzok wrote of the Feb. 14, 2017 New York Times story “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” That story, which was based on the unsubstantiated claims of four anonymous intelligence officials, was echoed by a similarly sourced CNN story published a day later and headlined “Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign.”

Strzok’s notes are the latest factual debunking of these stories, which were previously shown to be false with the release of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report finding no evidence whatsoever in support of the Hillary Clinton campaign assertion that Trump affiliates colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. A report from the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General on just one aspect of the investigation into Russia collusion — FBI spying on Trump campaign affiliates — also debunked these news reports.