RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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

Andrew Sullivan calls himself a conservative, although his politics could more accurately be described as “not socialist.” Despite his lean to the left, though, Sullivan made the same discovery that the New York Times’s Bari Weiss did: Unless you embrace completely the Marxism that is now the norm in media outlets, today’s young fascists will force you out.

On Friday, Sullivan explained why he was leaving New York Magazine. According to him, the magazine’s management had been great to him. The problem was that the magazine’s other employees are so far to the left that they cannot tolerate the slightest deviation from the party line. To the extent that Sullivan periodically deviated, they put pressure on the publisher to jettison him. So it was that, when Vox media, which owns New York Magazine, had to fire 6% of its staff because of a drop in revenue, Sullivan was on the chopping block.

In his farewell article, Sullivan explained that he perpetually offended the leftist writers and editors at the magazine, an offense that they internalized as actual physical violence, that he was no longer considered a viable writer:

A critical mass of the staff and management . . . seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

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

The media, entertainers, educators and other Democrats claim they care deeply about bullying, diversity and women.

But they’ve shown very little support when a woman editor was bullied out of the NYT because, heaven forbid, she thought more than one opinion should be in the opinion page of the newspaper.

Bari Weiss Claims Bullying Led Her To Quit The New York Times

There is a lot of pretending going on that the reason the media is so hostile and one-sided today is because of President Trump, but they have been ripping and calling Republicans racists at least since Reagan.

They intentionally bury stories that don’t fit the agenda and will even endlessly attack and run stories, without evidence, to destroy Republicans.

All that seems to matter is getting more power for leftist Democrats and push for bigger government and less freedom for the people.

Most of the media sought to destroy Judge Brett Kavanaugh, with no evidence, while they intentionally buried true stories about Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton. A few stories, such as these, ran. But they got no wall-to-wall coverage the way Kavanaugh did.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/geoffrey-dickens/2020/07/16/top-16-worst-president-american-history-trump-has-rivers-blood

Yikes! Lefty reporters and hosts went nuts over the last few weeks as they attacked Donald Trump as the “worst president in history” whose anti-pandemic efforts have left him with “rivers of blood on his hands.” 

Liberal journalists also distorted Trump’s patriotic speech at Mount Rushmore (that “grandiose symbol of U.S. imperialism”) as an attempt “to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain.”

The following is a top 16 countdown of the most vicious anti-Trump attacks from the ultra-left media over the last few weeks: 

16. President Gets an “F”

Host Wolf Blitzer: “How badly is he [Donald Trump] failing right now in dealing with this spiraling crisis? 

Correspondent Nia-Malika Henderson: “He’s doing terribly. I mean, the President gets an ‘F’ in terms of the handling of this global pandemic.”

—  CNN’s The Situation Room, July 14. 

15. Like “George Wallace,” Trump Pursuing Voters Who Think Wrong Team Won the Civil War