RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2020/09/24/when-the-media-becomes-the-hangman/

The Grand Jury in Louisville Kentucky issued its judgement regarding the Breanna Taylor killing yesterday. It found evidence that the police had properly identified themselves before entering her apartment and that her boyfriend had shot a policeman first, after which they returned fire, killing Ms. Taylor instead of the shooter. Only one of the policemen was indicted and that was for shooting recklessly into a neighbor’s apartment. That policeman’s name was announced to the public and within minutes that information, along with his smiling photograph were on every TV screen in America.

An indictment is not a guilty verdict; it is merely the prelude to a trial and theoretically, Americans are innocent until proven guilty. While this news was released, there were two policemen shot during the Black Lives Matter riot in Louisville – their condition was unreported as of this morning. The rioters were setting fires, screaming, fighting, destroying property in a total state of chaos similar to too many other riots that we have allowed to proceed and then seen televised over the past several months.

During the course of the pandemic, many rules have necessarily changed to accommodate the need for public safety. The riots – stimulated, financed and organized by Black Lives Matter, have been going on across our country for several months. People have been shot, beaten, killed, seen all their worldly goods destroyed along with their small businesses. In some states, the prosecutor has license to seal the name of the indicted person along with the proceedings of the Grand Jury. In light of the stated intention of BLM, we should not allow any state to release any information regarding proceedings involving police misconduct. We already protect the identities of the jurors – we should do no less for our men in blue.

We have seen the mobs descend on people’s homes and neighborhoods for lesser reason than a cop shooting a gun into the wrong apartment. How long will it be before those brave BLM cop-killers go after the man whose identity was splashed across our tv screens as the only indicted person associated with Ms Taylor’s death. This man should have been protected from the wrath of those who are outspokenly dedicated to killing cops. His name and photo should never have been released to the media which may be characterized most accurately as bloodsuckers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-reporting-became-journalism-11600879803?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.

That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”

The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?

If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16444/facebook-holocaust-denial

Researchers say that as they viewed Holocaust-denying pages and posts on Facebook, the social media site’s algorithm promoted even more Holocaust denial content to them….

Facebook takes down such posts only in countries such as Germany, France and Poland where Holocaust denial is illegal.

As the Institute for Strategic Dialogue out in its report, however, Holocaust denial is not about people getting history “wrong”: “This speech seeks not only to minimise the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, but to mitigate criticism of Nazism, and justify ongoing attacks against the Jewish people. Due to the intimate intersection between Holocaust denial and hate targeting Jews, such content should be regarded as inherently anti-Semitic”.

Given Facebook’s public commitment to fighting “hate speech” on its site, Facebook’s refusal to acknowledge international guidelines on anti-Semitic hate speech by reducing Holocaust denial to a mere instance of “getting things wrong” — while using its algorithms to promote Holocaust denial — is clearly unacceptable.

Holocaust survivors have now launched an online campaign, #NoDenyingIt, calling on Facebook to remove Holocaust denying material from its website. “How can somebody really doubt it?” asked Eva Schloss, a Holocaust survivor. “Where are the six million people? There are tens of thousands of photos taken by the Nazis themselves. They were proud of what they were doing.”

Facebook has been promoting Holocaust denial on its platform, according to a recent report by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), “Hosting the ‘Holohoax’: A Snapshot of Holocaust Denial Across Social Media”.

“Holocaust denial has long been one of the most insidious conspiracy theories targeting Jewish communities, with its extremist proponents drawn from across the ideological spectrum, from extreme right-wing to hard left to Islamist”, the report states. “Research has shown that digital platforms have only served to amplify and mainstream this warped strain of thinking in recent years”.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/18/the-mostly-peaceful-lie-gets-a-thorough-well-earned-debunking/

Both Democratic officials and their sycophantic media acolytes have used the slippery phrase “mostly peaceful” to describe the riots that have torn apart America — so much, in fact, that it’s now a cliche. But new reports show just how big a lie “mostly peaceful” truly is.

Just this month, as a CNN reporter stood in front of a burning car in riot-torn Kenosha, Wisconsin, the network’s chyron at the bottom of the screen said “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

Sorry, they were not “mostly peaceful,” or any of the other false euphemisms used to describe the violent anarchy erupting in cities across the country. Clearly, this is another case of journalists caught in a lie by their very own video images.

Many other instances of such journalistic gaslighting have emerged in recent months. For an interesting and comprehensive roundup, read Christine Rosen’s “Mostly Peaceful: The Birth of an Excuse,” originally published online in Commentary magazine.

But not only have we had the sometimes laughable instances of a journalist standing in front of rioting, burning and looting and then describing it as “mostly peaceful” — the equivalent of describing the Titanic’s first voyage as “mostly uneventful” — now we also have data-based studies that show just how violent these “demonstrations” have been.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures.

So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment.

So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment.

Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest.

I love the First Amendment, I support the First Amendment, I have litigated cases defending the First Amendment. I have written and taught about the First Amendment. And I was a law clerk for the Supreme Court when it rendered its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which “protects media even when they print false statements about public figures, as long as the media did not act with ‘actual malice.'”

But I also understand the limitations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. Here is what CNN did.

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