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MEDIA

Media Rushes to Downplay Explosive Evidence of Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/10/14/media-rushes-to-downplay-explosive-evidence-of-kamala-harris-plagiarism-n4933333

Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.

JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”

The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’” 

That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size.

The Obscene Public Humiliation Ritual of CBS’s Tony Dokoupil Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-obscene-public-humiliation-ritual-of-cbss-tony-dokoupil/

EXCERPTS

The mainstream media has been afire over the past week about a major internal controversy at CBS, where CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil has been called on the carpet, publicly upbraided by his own network, and forced to apologize to his colleagues, all for the crime of asking literary activist Ta-Nehisi Coates a series of challenging questions.

In fact, I already covered many of those angles half a month ago. For those unfamiliar with who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, or the public controversy surrounding his new book The Message — in which Coates, after a ten-day visit to Israel as part of a “Palestine Festival of Literature” junket, concluded pre–October 7 that the Jewish state was illegitimate, identical to the Jim Crow South yet worse, and must be abolished — I invite you to read my piece about him from late September.

To summarize: Coates is an overpromoted naïf with profoundly radical priors and a proud ignorance of history — this is in fact part of his purported appeal, the supposedly untutored “freshness” with which he approaches things — a black autodidact whose ability to write passable prose got him advanced to the forefront of American racial, political, and literary discourse during the ferment of the later Obama era. After accumulating a mountain of elite hosannahs — to the point of literary deification — he ducked out of the public conversation, but has now re-emerged to use that moral capital to plead for the elimination of Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacres.

‘Do You Hear Yourself?’: Vance Blasts ABC Host for ‘Nitpicking’ Trump’s Rhetoric on Immigration Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/do-you-hear-yourself-vance-blasts-abc-host-for-nitpicking-trumps-rhetoric-on-immigration/

Ohio Senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, in an interview on Sunday morning, blasted ABC News anchor Martha Raddatz’s criticism of Donald Trump’s comments on immigration, days after the former president had claimed that Aurora, Colo., has been “invaded and conquered” by illegal immigrants.

Trump’s claim that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has taken over apartment complexes was labeled “grossly exaggerated” by Aurora’s mayor, Raddatz pointed out.

“Well, Martha, you just said the mayor said they were exaggerated. That means that there’s gotta be some element of truth here,” Vance said. “Of course, President Trump was actually in Aurora, Colorado, talking to people on the ground, and what we’re hearing is people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs —”

Raddatz interrupted the candidate.

“Senator Vance, I’m going to stop you because I know exactly what happened. I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes, and the mayor said, ‘Our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns.’ A handful of problems,” Raddatz said.

“Only, Martha? Do you hear yourself?” Vance responded. “Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, not Kamala Harris’s open border? Americans are so fed up with what’s going on, and they have every right to be,” Vance responded. “I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs.”

The Hill Liz Peek: Desperate Democrats cry “misinformation” to silence criticism of Kamala Harris

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4928306-desperate-democrats-cry-misinformation-to-squash-criticism-of-kamala-harris

For days now, the liberal media and its Democratic allies have seemed much more concerned about Republicans spreading “misinformation” than about the real-life suffering of North Carolinians.   

For proof, look no further than this blizzard of headlines — all from Politico:  

“The worst I have ever seen’: Disinformation chaos hammers FEMA”
“After the deluge, the lies: Misinformation and hoaxes about Helene cloud the recovery” 
“Elon Musk is piling onto all the hurricane disinformation, hampering relief efforts” 
“FEMA director on misinformation: ‘Truly dangerous narrative’” 

Politico is certainly not alone, ABC ran with this story on Tuesday: “Ahead of election, experts warn Hurricane Helene misinformation is ‘just the beginning.’” 

CBS contributed this one on Monday: “Misinformation has surged following Hurricane Helene.” 

 That’s the same CBS that reportedly doctored video of Kamala Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to make the Democratic candidate appear more intelligent. So their concern about misinformation is apparently episodic.

It’s almost as though a memo went out to Democrat-friendly media allies, prompting a concerted pushback against criticism of the Biden-Harris White House’s response to Hurricane Helene. It’s not surprising. 

The pile-up of delayed, tone-deaf and embarrassing responses to the devastating storm from the administration and Kamala Harris has been damaging; her team is desperate to contain the damage. 

Media Maintains ‘Wall of Silence’ on First Gentleman #MeToo Scandal “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/media-maintains-wall-of-silence-on-first-gentleman-metoo-scandal/

Here’s the scorecard so far.

Doug Emhoff, Kamala’s powerful lawyer hubby, admitted to impregnating his nanny during his first marriage. The status of the child is unknown, but there are allegations that she suffered a miscarriage.

A recent report described Emhoff hitting an ex-girlfriend in public. The media refused to report on the allegation and only reported on Emhoff’s denial of the allegation.

Half of the political world focused Wednesday on a Daily Mail report that second gentleman Doug Emhoff “forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man” at Cannes in 2012. Others (including Semafor) haven’t matched the reporting, and as of Wednesday evening the incident didn’t appear in The New York Times or top outlets. But the allegations are a dominant narrative in conservative media: Megyn Kelly’s coverage had more than 150,000 views on YouTube, while Trump aide Stephen Miller demanded answers. In a statement to Semafor, a spokesperson for Emhoff said “this report is untrue,” and that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”

It’s striking that “half of the political world” is focused on an allegation the media won’t report on.

Instead, the media is reporting on such urgent stories as “Doug Emhoff On Andy Samberg’s ‘SNL’ Impression: “I Approve”, “Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff to visit Arizona” and “Michael Stipe, Jason Isbell Tell Doug Emhoff Why They Endorse Kamala Harris”.

Isn’t journalism awesome?

The Forever Hate Even on the anniversary of the 10/7 pogrom, the media can’t bring itself to honor dead Jews. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-forever-hate/

We are at the first anniversary now of one of the most grotesque episodes of ancient savagery wreaked upon the modern world: the October 7 attacks in Israel which left over 1200 innocents dead and many more wounded and/or taken hostage by the subhuman terror organization Hamas. But instead of solemn, worldwide commemoration of this ongoing nightmare, with unified sympathy and support for the Israeli victims and survivors, we are treated to the Left-wing counter-narrative of pro-Hamas, anti-Zionist protests and opinion pieces in the news media demonizing the Jewish state and drowning out the echoing cries of the Israeli dead.

Over the course of the last year, details and evidence of the massacre unfolded in eyewitness accounts, documentaries, and even video and testimony provided by the gleefully sadistic terrorists themselves. Decent people everywhere who dared to look found themselves staring into the bottomless abyss of Evil.

But the Left-dominated news media are not decent people. They burn with a forever hate for Jews and the Jewish state, and cannot bring themselves to see the terrorism of Hamas as anything less honorable than “resistance” against an oppressor state – a white oppressor, of course, because that’s how the reductive lie of identity politics works: Jews are perceived as oppressors and the so-called Palestinians are perceived as the oppressed, so Jews must be aligned with “white” or “bad” and the Palestinians with “black” or “good.” History, facts, truth, nuance – all of that must be cast aside so as not to undercut the simplistic, neo-Marxist power dynamics through which the woke view the world.

Rachel Maddow Smears Vance as a Fascist Speech-Squasher Is what the MSNBC host does really “news”? by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rachel-maddow-smears-vance-as-a-fascist-speech-squasher/

The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to only do her show one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%?

For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable “news” host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today’s politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today’s Republicans. It’s like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it’s not.

On Sept. 30, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.

Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?

We’re supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that “Harvard hates America” has been around for decades, and it’s been true for decades.

As Vance put it, “You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland.”

Cooke: The Oprah Interview Eliminated All Pretense — the Press and Harris Are on the Same Side By Sarah Schutte

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cooke-the-oprah-interview-eliminated-all-pretense-the-press-and-harris-are-on-the-same-side/

National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said the upside of Kamala Harris’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was that viewers got to see clearly the case of “an interviewee and an interviewer who were manifestly on the same side.

“I really do appreciate,” he said, “that the press is at long last cut out the pretense in that Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Democratic Convention and endorsed Harris. And that is the default position of most journalists, but they’re just not honest enough to make it clear.”

Cooke pointed out that the interview, in which Harris was asked how she would bring down prices, “really verged into metaphysical . . . almost poetry. And Winfrey sat there and said, ‘Yes, yes, mm, mm, mm, mm, yes, mm.’

“It’s absurd,” Cooke said. “I am aware by now that people are voting against, and that they are going to pretend, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, that their candidate is therefore fine, but they’re not, they’re not fine. Kamala Harris is not an acceptable candidate for president of the United States. She can’t answer elementary questions. She can’t talk. And the reason that she can’t talk is because she can’t think. . . . The mouth follows the mind.

“There are lots of people in this country with whom I strongly disagree who are able to present their worldview in a manner that is comprehensible and even compelling. But she is not one of them.”

Why Do Media Think Democrats Are Worth Cheating For?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/20/why-do-media-think-democrats-are-worth-cheating-for/

It would be helpful to voters to know that a “whistleblower” says ABC rigged last week’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But outside of conservative media, it’s being largely ignored, because the legacy press covers its own and as zealously as it does the Democratic Party. Whether the claims are true or not – the existence of the whistleblower remains unconfirmed – the mainstream media’s loyalty to Democrats is uncomfortably similar to the relationship Pravda had with the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.

To quickly recap, the unnamed whistleblower said ABC agreed to fact-check Trump while ensuring “Harris would not face comparable scrutiny.” The plan was so detailed that “various people were assigned to fact check observations it was perceived candidate Trump would make during the debate.”

“In fact,” says the whistleblower, the “Harris campaign required assurances that Donald Trump would be fact-checked.”

These agreements were reached on calls that the Trump campaign was not a part of although all discussions regarding the rules and negotiations were supposed to include both sides.

The affidavit also says Harris was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions that would be asked, nevertheless “covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.”

There were also issues that could not be raised – Joe Biden’s health; Harris’ performance as San Francisco’s district attorney; her brother-in-law and “key campaign adviser” Tony West, who allegedly “fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers” – since they would reflect poorly on Harris.

“I have observed a pronounced bias against Donald Trump within ABC News,” the affiant continues, while also noting “many” ABC employees “questioned the clear bias that is well known throughout the company.”

Heather Mac Donald Trump Made Them Do It The New York Times finds victim-blaming repellent—except when the victim is the former president.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-blames-trump

The New York Times devotedly follows the cardinal rule of liberalism—never blame the victim!—at least for officially designated victims of American racism and classism. Slavery, for example, not higher rates of criminal offending, is responsible for blacks’ “unequal involvement in the criminal justice system.” If unwed mothers are poor, the reason lies in heartless welfare rules, not in the decision to have a child out of wedlock.

But when it comes to Donald Trump, victim-blaming is de rigueur. According to the Times’s premier Trump-basher, Peter Baker, Trump is responsible for the attempted assassinations against him. “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” writes Baker in today’s lead print story. Trump “inspires” the attacks against him. It is hard to imagine this line of thinking applied to other victims of assassination attempts—Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, for example—but it is as tautologically true in their case as in Trump’s.

Baker recycles the fiction that MAGA supporters, inflamed by Trump’s fulminations regarding Haitian peticide, made bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio. (In fact, as Ohio governor Mike DeWine revealed, the menacing came from bad actors abroad.) But relentless Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy, has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.

The elite press’s inability to escape its ideological bubble and to apply neutral standards of analysis could not be more acute. That inability is as responsible for today’s political hatreds as anything Trump has ever said.