RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/

The death of a dynamic and independent free press begins when the mainstream media becomes a propaganda organ for a government. And it was during the Obama regime’s eight long malign years that this process reached its nadir. Now, under Obama’s protégé and current President, Joe Biden, the malignancy continues unabated.

Perhaps the media was once considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long now, the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead a disseminator of leftwing Democrat Party propaganda.

The dread examples of disinformation and misinformation were seen during the last century of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes, but it now increasingly pollutes our own mainstream media (MSM).

The alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN – are unapologetic shills for an increasingly leftwing Democrat party. Newspapers share the same guilt. The New York Times and the Washington Post leading the way in a baleful charge.

It was our 18th century President, Thomas Jefferson, who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become the present demise of a free and vital press. He said:

“If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_price_of_surrendering_speech.html

No one was particularly surprised when Vladmir Putin recently won reelection by a landslide. The near universal reaction could be characterized by a roll of the eyes and a sighed “what do you expect, it’s Russia.” We’ve seen this before, after all — it is his fifth term — but there is something new in its significance for us. What’s changed is the newly fragile condition of our own democracy, making the Moscow “election” emphatically relevant to America. Many are the differences between Russian and American society, but one of those gaps has shrunk with alarming speed over the past decade. Putin’s power has been built on the bones of a free press. America once had a fiercely independent media that was not just the hallmark of our liberty but also the guardian that kept our society free. But our mainstream press has abandoned its sentinel post, leaving America vulnerable as we move toward the most important election in generations. 

The Supreme Court recently cast a spotlight on the health of our free speech when it examined the Administration’s efforts to stifle critics through manipulation of social media. Reports on the hearing, however, missed the fundamental issue. Apologists asserted that there had been no top-down coercion of speech — “nothing to see here, move on.” But the ultimate issue wasn’t that the Administration initiated censorship, it was that our leaders were enabled by the repression of speech that was already endemic in the popular media. The Supreme Court will decide if indirect manipulations violate constitutional protections. Whatever the outcome, we are learning a bitter lesson: the Constitution, in all its brilliance, does not protect us from repression that grows outside government, from within our culture. Free speech relies on the Constitution, yes, but it also relies on our social compact and its moral framework of truth, which is collapsing in vital parts of society.  

Our mainstream media has been surrendering its freedom for years, not by any dictate from the top but by a seismic shift in its values and self-perceived role in society. The process started slowly, long ago, when publishers and editors discovered a gold mine in obsessing over celebrity heroes, then accelerated when they found that a celebrity villain offered the same rewards. They learned to favor sensation over substance, never worried that their chosen villains are not always evil, nor their heroes always virtuous. For them an off-color remark or over-the-top boast from one of their celebrities becomes more important than any substantive dialogue about policy. Why worry about terrorists infiltrating across the border when what the public really wants to hear is how the President blasted the “Neanderthals” who don’t embrace his climate agenda? Thus began the dumbing down of their readers. They taught their increasingly shallow audience that political engagement had nothing to do with liberty or constitutional government, but was simply about loving to hate the villain of choice.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/18/npr_scandal_should_kill_taxpayer-funded_broadcasting_150810.html

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/17/in-true-journalistic-fashion-npr-cant-take-what-it-dishes-out/

Has there ever been a more hypocritically thin-skinned occupation than journalism?

Day after day these relatively uneducated writers piously dish out opprobrium on those they don’t like and then respond like whiny spoiled brats when anyone dares to criticize them.

The latest example of this involves Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who we learned on Tuesday was suspended without pay for having the temerity to complain that this taxpayer-supported enterprise had become hopelessly agenda-driven.

Berliner has worked at NPR for a quarter century and describes himself as a Sarah Lawrence College-educated child of a “lesbian peace activist mother” whose Spotify “listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.”

In other words, he’s a solid liberal. So, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” he writes, “but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.”

That culture no longer exists, he says, a transformation that started in earnest in 2016.

“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes. He goes on to describe how the network’s ideological blinders caused it to swallow the Russia-hoax story whole, mishandle the COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop stories, and how woke dogma infects everything NPR covers.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/04/the_new_york_times_vs_realclearpolitics_150733.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Ten days after the 2020 election, Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, received an email from a New York Times reporter who covers the media. The reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, advised Bevan that his newspaper was working on a story about RCP and asked for responses to various questions and accusations. Four days later, Peters’ critique was published under the headline “A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It.”

The sleight-of-hand was right there in the headline. The New York Times simply declared that RCP “made a sharp right turn,” and suggested it will document how this happened.

The Times’ story asserted that during the period of counting absentee and late-arriving mail-in ballots, RCP took three days longer than other news organizations to call Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. It noted disapprovingly that we aggregated stories from other news outlets quoting Trump supporters who questioned the election results. It suggested that the RCP Poll Averages were manipulated to be favorable to Donald Trump. Peters focused on RCP staff layoffs in September 2017, and claimed we’d hired partisan Republicans to replace them. He reported that the RealClear Foundation, a nonprofit that supports our journalism, receives contributions from conservative donors. He also called into question a RealClear Investigations exposé naming the whistleblower whose complaints led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Jeremy Peters declined to be interviewed for this rebuttal, though he was courteous about it. Nor did he reach out to me in 2020, beyond contacting Tom Bevan. It didn’t hurt my pride, but I’m the most experienced newsman at RCP; I oversee our original content, I direct our reporters, and I have written more words for RealClear than anyone else.

Nor was there any bad blood between me and the “paper of record.” In the 1980s, the Times credited my groundbreaking coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. In the 1990s, Howell Raines tried to hire me. Three books I’ve co-authored have been positively reviewed by the Times. When I covered the White House for National Journal, the Times’ book editor asked me to review a book about Dick Cheney. I have had friends at that newspaper. Although I’m not famous, I’m not unknown in Washington journalism. What I’m best known for is being relentlessly nonpartisan. If someone is writing about bias at my organization, calling me would have been the obvious place to start.

I shouldn’t have waited three years to respond to the Times but will do so now.

‘Rightward Turn’ and Post-Election Coverage

The thrust of the Nov. 17, 2020, Times article was that RCP had “taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/01/media-tailspin-continues-as-public-trust-in-news-outlets-crumbles-ii-tipp-poll/

Can the U.S. media ever reverse their reputation for dishonesty and bias and end their current tailspin? Given how the public currently views them, the answer is “not likely,” the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggests.

Each month I&I/TIPP Poll asks registered voters from around the country to gauge their trust in the major media that supply them with news, features and other information.

Specifically, two questions were asked:

“Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

And, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, RealClearPolitics, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

Responses to the first question make up the “Traditional Media Trust Index,” while answers to the second are included in the “Alternate Media Trust Index”; 1,419 Americans responded to the national online poll, which was taken from Feb. 28-March 1. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

How well are the media doing their job of informing Americans? Not very, voters overwhelmingly
say. In fact, only one-third (34%) trust traditional media, and six in ten (61%) don’t. A third (32%)
say they have “little trust,” and another 29% have “no trust at all.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nbc-news-officially-bans-republicans-from-working-there/

For the longest time, the media played this game of pretending that it doesn’t consist entirely of a bunch of leftist activists who exist to promote their political agenda and attack those of their political opponents.

The pretense is wearing thin. And who knew that Ronna McDaniel of all people would be the breaking point? But it’s kind of like the way that the media’s attacks on dishwater liberals like McCain and Romney, portraying them as Hitler 2.0 just because they posed a threat to Obama, helped kill the media’s credibility.

The attacks on McCain and Romney made it clear that it wasn’t about “conservatives” or “right-wingers”, the media was out to destroy anyone running as a Republican and would tell the same lies about them.

Now NBC News has officially banned Republicans, even ones like Ronna McDaniel, from working there.

Ceasar Conde, the Chair of NBCUniversal News, issued a statement purging Ronna McDaniel while declaring that, “no organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.”

Conde claimed that McDaniel was hired in order to present “audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints”, but that gets in the way of a “cohesive and aligned” newsroom where everyone shares the same politics.

In his conclusion, Conde claims that NBC News still wants to “seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/18/elon-musk-is-now-more-trustworthy-than-every-major-news-outlet/

Shortly after Donald Trump made remarks at a rally in Ohio, Joe Scarborough posted on X: “Donald Trump’s America. And he is proud of it. Promised another ‘bloodbath’ if he loses again.” The picture was from the Jan. 6 riot.

Soon after, however, Scarborough deleted the post.

We can’t say for certain why, except that he hit the delete button shortly after Elon Musk responded to “Morning Joe” with this comment:
The same can’t be said for almost every other major news outlet, which ran blood-curdling headlines about Trump’s supposed call to violence if he loses. Here’s a small sample:

Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses 2024 election, ramps up anti-migrant rhetoric

Trump says there will be a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election

Trump Says There Will Be a ‘Bloodbath’ and Elections Will End if He Isn’t Reelected

Trump says country faces ‘bloodbath’ if Biden wins in November

Mary Trump’s Dire Warning After Donald Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Remark

An Even Darker Trump: Warns Of ‘Bloodbath’ If Not Elected

In Ohio, Trump warns of ‘bloodbath’ if he doesn’t win election

Donald Trump talks about ‘bloodbath,’ attacks immigrants as he rallies for Republican Senate pick in Ohio