RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/media-fake-news-becomes-a-way-of-life/

The media has decided there’s more emotional satisfaction in failure than in performing the function with which the public entrusts it.

In December 2016, Ben Smith, then BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, wrote a memo to his staff that was meant to be a kind of charter for the dawning of the Trump Era. In truth it spoke to and aimed to speak for the entire mainstream media. Smith would eventually move on to the New York Times, which elevated him to a role as the supervisory voice of conscience for the whole media. But that December, he warned his staff of the danger of fake news, and the need of the media to be accurate and factual:

The information environment itself will become even more central to our coverage:

Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely. Hoaxes will have higher production value. It is, for instance, getting easier and easier to create video of someone saying something he or she never said — a tool both for fake news and false denials.

And powerful filter bubbles will drive competing narratives from parallel universes of facts.

The Times and The Atlantic have minted tens of thousands of new subscribers from across the nation since Trump’s election, readers who want to keep informed, even as their local newspapers shrivel into nothing. The importance of these institutions has lately been increased substantially by their ability to survive, grow, and set trends across a more tightly concentrated media environment. Their staffers have largely defined themselves as part of a resistance to Trump’s administration.

So how is the “information environment” now, three and a half years after Smith’s memo?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tom-cotton-bari-weiss-ny-times-left-political-correctness

The woke mob at The New York Times has claimed another scalp. Earlier this week, opinion columnist and editor Bari Weiss resigned from the paper after being viciously harassed by her colleagues for daring on occasion to express conservative opinions in print.

This is not a one-off event but a trend, as far-left, anti-American forces have consolidated control over some of our nation’s most influential institutions.

Weiss followed in the footsteps of former opinion editor James Bennet, a liberal who was forced to resign by The Times’ publisher for running my op-ed.

I argued that the military could be called out as a last resort to restore public order in cities wracked by violent rioting and looting—an opinion shared at the time by a majority of Americans.

The Times claimed the op-ed didn’t meet its “standards.” (I agree: my op-ed far exceeded its normal sophomoric fare.) But the paper couldn’t identify a single falsehood or error that explained why the op-ed deserved almost two weeks of ritual denunciation and hyperventilation—or why Bennet deserved to lose his job.

Maybe it’s only because the publisher can’t fire himself.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/new_york_times_denizens_respond_to_bari_weiss_resignation_over_bullying__with_more_bullying.htm

 It ought to have been embarrassing for the New York Times to have a top op-ed editor resign with fiery criticism of the paper’s stultifying leftism. In the news industry, it’s pretty rare for anyone to resign, let alone say what the problem was. That’s what happened a couple days ago, when Bari Weiss submitted her resignation to the paper, denouncing the far-left atmosphere of cancel-culture bullying, the signs of which have been pretty obvious for years. After all, not too long ago, this bunch forced the Times’ op-ed boss out merely for running an opinion piece by an elected Republican senator because the snowflake staffers said it made them feel “unsafe.” Weiss had had enough and threw in the towel. Thomas Lifson noted that the letter was likely “historic” in its significance.

Embarrassed? Not in the least. Not at the Times. In fact, plenty of them bit back and got catty. All because what she she wrote. Ms. Weiss writes that she herself faced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” She writes that they “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She adds that she has learned to “brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.'” She has too much grace to mention that her writing about Jews included covering the murders at her hometown’s Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Ms. Weiss’s tenure at the Times became an ordeal. Friendly colleagues were “badgered by coworkers,” she told Mr. Sulzberger.

“My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.” First mean girl out the gate was Hannah Jones, creator of the phony 1619 Project, who had a couple of retweets about Weiss and now has up this counter-claim to victimhood: She also had this screen grab inexplicably up: Then there were the deniers — a collection of whom were collected here: In other words, nothing to see here, Bari Weiss is a liar, no such thing as wokesters taking over, we’re all just objective journalists trying to get at the truth.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/14/americas-pravda-subsidiaries/

By now, you’d think the Washington Post and the rest of the lefty media cohort—which is pretty much the entire American media sans Fox, talk radio, and a handful of online publications—would have learned their lesson. But no.

Each new dawn brings another farcical rant from the mainstream media. Facts be damned, hypocrisy ignored, truth summarily rejected—all in the name of “But Trump!” and “Orange Man bad!” Pravda veterans would be proud and perhaps, even a little jealous, as nobody in the MSM is being forced to propagandize at the point of a gun, with threats of a permanent vacation to sunny Siberia. No, the American news media does all of this of its  own volition.

President Trump gives a speech from the base of Mount Rushmore extolling the greatness of America and our shared history, imperfect though it is, of striving to recognize the equality that demands justice and liberty for all of our citizens. But the Washington Post, apparently with a straight face and zero shame, writes: “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement . . . ” 

Of course, the president made no mention of the Confederacy or its symbols, not even one. Yet the broadcast networks minus Fox News and the rest of the mainstream media followed the Post’s unhinged fabrications as though they think we will favor them over our own eyes and ears.

The mainstream media, having exhausted any trace of objectivity after eight years of fawning coverage of Obama and three years of attacking Trump, now proudly spins leftist propaganda without even pretending to do anything else. When called on their left-leaning bias and their war on the truth, they cry “But Trump!” And if that’s not enough to justify their fabrications then perhaps you’ll get, “But Fox News!”  

Recently, the Washington Post Style section (and you’re thinking, “Who the hell in Washington has any style?”) ran a column headlined, “The data is in: Fox News May Have Kept Millions from Taking the Coronavirus Threat Seriously.” Seriously. The esteemed author reports on a study by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Misinformation Review which makes all sorts of breathless claims wrapped in shiny academic nerd speak about Fox News and Sean Hannity in particular. 

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Dear A.G.,

It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times. 

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.

I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/10/brazen-lying-is-medias-latest-escalation-in-campaign-against-trump/

As if orders went out from a central director, nearly every major media outlet flat-out lied about President Trump’s speech.

When Sen. Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1996, his speech hit on the themes of “honor, decency and straight talk.” He proudly mentioned the great Republican Abraham Lincoln and explicitly denounced racism.

“The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you — tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise,” Dole said.

The speech was held up in 2016 as an example of how wonderful Republican candidates for president used to be before Donald Trump. So it’s interesting to also look back at how this speech was received by its critics. For example, then-Senior White House Adviser George Stephanopoulos called it “partisan, negative and divisive.”

Fast-forward 24 years to the present. Once again a prominent Republican gives a speech with themes of honor and decency and straight talk. Once again the prominent Republican explicitly and repeatedly denounces racism. The Republican praises Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton, Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope.

And once again critics claim that the speech is “dark and divisive.”

But this time the commentary and narrative-shaping pushback that used to be left to Democratic activists such as George Stephanopoulos are now handled by corporate media activists like, well, George Stephanopoulos. OK, maybe it’s not such a significant difference after all. But it’s still noteworthy that the corporate media activists are doing what used to be left to official party activists.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/08/the-press-is-already-trying-whip-up-a-new-pandemic-panic/
Oh, no! With the planet still unlocking and some parts still tightly buttoned down, and with the world economy plummeting, “China Researchers Discover New Swine Flu with ‘Pandemic Potential,’ ” blares CNN. “Scientists Say New Strain of Swine Flu Virus Is Spreading to Humans in China,” shrieks the New York Times. Say it ain’t so!

Okay, it ain’t so. Not in any meaningful way. The media should go back to “murder hornets,” or find another asteroid with a chance in a zillion of hitting Earth.

The virus in question, G4 EA H1N1, is genetically descended from the H1N1 swine flu that caused what the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in 2009. G4 shows “all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus,” said a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

But … there are a few little caveats.

First, while the Times says the virus “is spreading silently in workers on pig farms in China,” that means pigs-to-humans and that’s been going on for so time. “This is not a ‘new’ new virus; it’s been very common in pigs since 2016,” tweeted Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “There’s no evidence that G4 is circulating in humans, despite five years of extensive exposure. That’s the key context to keep in mind.”

Okay, but it’s a swine flu !!! Um, yes, pigs appear to play a role in most strains of flu, along with birds. Specifically, the massive swine farms of China are “mixing bowls” to produce new flu strains.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/bret-stephens-the-gray-lady-and-the-great-a
A small piece of advice for anyone preparing a submission to the New York Times: do perform a thorough background check on each and every person you intend to cite.

A spike in the level of outrage on Twitter is by no means a rare event. Regular users are accustomed to glancing over at the “Trending” tab to see who or what has raised people’s hackles that particular day. It is not so common, however, for that type of spike to be generated by something published in America’s newspaper of record, still less an instance of outrage that should prompt the editors of said newspaper to issue a major correction and an “Editor’s Note.”

Many will recall that Twitter went into meltdown on June 3, after the New York Times published a bellicose op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) titled “Send In the Troops.” But this is not what I have in mind. The event to which I’m referring took place at the end of last year, and although it is but one squall in a vast and tempestuous sea of online indignation, I believe it offers some valuable insights into cultural trends in the English-speaking world.

The kerfuffle began when Bret Stephens—whose journalistic career, even before the event in question, had not been completely divorced from controversy—published a column titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius.” In the column, Stephens argued that the reason Jews have made such outsized scientific and cultural contributions is not that they are smarter than other groups, but rather that they have benefited—over the course of their history—from certain beliefs, practices and traditions. These would include being asked “not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree” and understanding that “everything that is intangible—knowledge most of all—is potentially everlasting.” In fact, the column’s original subheading was “It’s not about having high I.Q.s.” (Stephens even went so far as to say “what makes Jews special is that they aren’t,” suggesting that explanatory coherence was not his primary concern.)