RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/this-is-easy-dont-excuse-defend-or-encourage-rioters/

The Left’s privileged commentators don’t have to worry about losing their homes or businesses.

Why do they keep doing it? Decade after decade, generation after generation, progressives keep making the same, elemental mistake: They downplay, excuse, and in extreme cases even encourage urban rioters.

We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a straight stretch of highway with no twists whatsoever. It would take a moral moron to get lost on it, and yet somehow progressives keep managing to do so. This isn’t hard. The people of Minneapolis are right to be angry about the savage death of George Floyd, but rioting will not bring him back or honor his memory, and the riots will make everything even worse. The Democrats and the media should be shouting as loudly as they can: Stop what you’re doing, you’re hurting your cause.

The person closest to Floyd — the deceased man’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross — made exactly this point: “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate” Floyd, Ross told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He loved the city. He came here [from Houston] and stayed here for the people and the opportunities.” She added that people should “know that I understand their frustration” but “I want people to protest in a peaceful way.”

Yet all over the media, progressives are in effect rubbishing these wishes. They support the riots, starting by downplaying the nightmare in Minneapolis as a series of mere “protests” (no, those are what Martin Luther King Jr. engineered — and they worked). Once you’ve reconceived destruction as mere expression, you’ve mentally prepared yourself to take the side of the destroyers.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/chris-wallace-and-the-weekly-standard-i

What is happening to Fox News Channel?

With the exception of its primetime lineup and a few regular contributors, Fox News increasingly is indistinguishable from its cable news competitors. The network, once considered the sole antidote to dominant left-wing news organizations—both print and broadcast—is making a fatal brand mistake: Alienating its customer base.

For nearly 25 years, conservatives have depended on Fox News to report the news in a way that represents their views. Conservatives knew issues, like those surrounding the pro-life movement, could count on fair coverage from the network rather than the scorn and derision they get in mainstream media. 

Even recently, Fox News was the only outlet pursuing the biggest scandal in U.S. political history—how Barack Obama used his government henchmen to infiltrate the Trump campaign and then sabotage his presidency after the election.

But there is a noticeable change in the tone at Fox News. Loyal viewers were outraged by the hiring of Clinton lackey and debate-fixer Donna Brazille last year. Other partisan harpies such as Marie Harf and Jessica Tarlov help “balance” Fox News’ political commentary. And Trump haters on the Right—folks who long ago burned their credibility with rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives—continue to earn air time on the network. I mean, Chris Stirewalt? Really?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/its-not-big-tech-decide-whats-true-daniel-greenfield/

Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all engaged in political censorship. But Twitter went into the lion’s den by stuffing Dem talking points into a Trump tweet under the guise of a fact check. (That is essentially what fact checks are, authorization for Democrat media outlets and partners to determine what can be said and what the facts are.) Facebook’s Zuckerberg took pains to distinguish himself from Twitter’s Dorsey.

Unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg has been careful to reach out to conservatives, which doesn’t change his politics a whit, but he understands that he’s riding the tiger, with Democrats pressing for a Facebook crackdown for not censoring conservatives, and Republicans pushing for a crackdown on Facebook for doing so. I’m not a fan of Zuckerberg, as some of my recent articles make clear, but he’s also in an impossible situation.

Facebook has looked for some sort of ambiguous middle ground, with a bit of fact checking, without giving them too much power, creating a censorship supreme court full of lefties, but throwing in one conservative, all the while making it unclear how much power who really has.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/behemoths-who-control-barr-says-trump-executive-order-on-social-media-companies-will-go-further-if-necessary

Attorney General William Barr praised President Trump for his executive order that could allow federal regulators to take punitive action against social media giants for the way they regulate online content.

Trump’s order rolls back the long-standing legal protection known as Section 230, which spares tech companies from being held liable for the content they allow online and how they decide to monitor it.

Barr said the protection, which was adopted about 25 years ago, has been stretched beyond its original intention of not holding tech companies accountable for the content created by third-party users.

“It’s been completely stretched to allow what have become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material,” Barr said.

“So when they put on their own content, like fact-check content onto other people’s content and when curate their collection, they start censoring particular content, including in many cases the direction of … governments like communist China, they become publishers. They shouldn’t be entitled to the same kind of shield that was set up earlier,” he continued.

The order comes days after Twitter put a fact-check alert on one of Trump’s tweets, linking mail-in voting to increased voter fraud.

Twitter has taken steps to combat misinformation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic to avoid what it deems potentially dangerous medical hoaxes or advice from spreading throughout the public.

Trump has aggressively pushed back on the action, accusing the company of political bias.

Barr said Trump’s order is a strong step in addressing the problem of increased oversight of tech companies on its users and allow Section 230 to return to its original intent.

“They are using that market power with particular viewpoints,” Barr said. “That is wrong. It has to be addressed, not only to this executive order, but I think litigation going forward.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/27/gallup-poll-shows-that-no-one-thinks-the-media-is-doing-a-good-job-during-the-pandemic-n433478

“When the American people needed a competent, informed, unbiased media the most, they didn’t get it.”

No one trusts the media. Not left, not right, not those who believe themselves to be centrists. So this Gallup-Knight Foundation survey shouldn’t surprise us when both sides believe the media isn’t doing a good job informing the public of the pandemic.

Also not surprisingly, there is a vast difference in perceptions from the public on coronavirus coverage depending on one’s political partisanship.

The survey shows that Democrats believe the media is downplaying the severity of the crisis while Republicans believe the media is exaggerating the dangers.

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2020/05/27/new-york-media-coronacoddle-cuomo-n2569503

A bevy of bloggers on the right have highlighted one of the most dramatic examples of comparative coronavirus bias: those reckless Southern Republican governors in Georgia or Florida, who allegedly love commerce more than human lives, versus New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, our apparent national lodestar of competence.

The Republicans get the heat; Cuomo gets press conferences broadcast live across the country as celebrities confess their Cuomo crushes. The Republicans are “dangerous,” and Cuomo gets to joke around with his brother, the CNN host.

This tilt is not only in the “objective” press but also in the prestige brands in opinion journalism. Take The Atlantic, which made a dramatic turn by endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016. In a big NPR story, this was celebrated as rare and historic. Their loathing of Donald Trump never fades.

The Atlantic drew major heat for an April 29 article written by Amanda Mull that trashed Gov. Brian Kemp, titled “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” This article was also celebrated with a story on NPR. Mull took credit for the headline and insisted it was accurate. “I think that working-class Georgians, a group that is largely people of color, are being sacrificed to the state’s economy, largely,” she says.

But Georgia’s reopening made The Atlantic look foolish. Coronavirus cases and deaths didn’t surge. They declined. Mull wrote another article, headlined “The Horror of the Coronavirus Data Lag: Some reopening states are already claiming victory over the coronavirus. But the real consequences won’t be clear for weeks,” in which she insisted it was too early for apologies.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/05/26/the-new-york-times-continues-to-pollute-what-used-to-be-journalism-n430112

The Once Mighty Times Is a National Embarrassment

The New York Times is, for better or worse, still the newspaper of record in the United States. That title obviously doesn’t carry the prestige that it once did. The Times has basically won a war of attrition as the newspaper industry across the land continues to fade into irrelevance. If it hadn’t already had such a prominent position in American news consumption, it would be on the verge of disappearing soon too.

The Times just had a particularly offensive Memorial Day Weekend, and I say that as someone who is so used to their biased nonsense that I try not to let it bother me any more.

First — and this may have only offended me — the editorial brain trust at the paper decided to do a gimmicky front page on Sunday that listed the names of Americans  who died from COVID-19. Of course I believe these people should be mourned. What bothered me is that there is a very, very specific group of fallen Americans who we are supposed to remember on Memorial Day Weekend and I found the timing of this to be exceedingly off-putting.

The Times Never Commits Accidental Bias

The timing of the above example was undoubtedly deliberate and intended to deflect from duly honoring our war dead. That was a slight. What the editorial board did to kick off the weekend intended to honor our military dead was egregiously offensive and un-American.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/26/medias-unpunished-lies-hurt-the-nation-far-worse-than-trumps-indefensible-tweets/

The grim joke of the 20th century was that one death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. Well, in the 21st century age of information warfare, one man’s libel is an outrage. When thousands do it, we call that ‘the news.’

Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting Joe Scarborough somehow murdered a young woman who died of natural causes nearly 20 years ago are reprehensible. This is in no way because these tweets defame Scarborough. It’s pretty hard to feel bad for a guy whose media presence enabled Trump’s political rise to the point he openly flirted with running as his vice president before making a comic heel turn against Trump. (In fact, back when Scarborough was playing footsie with Trump, left-wing blogs were trafficking in this repugnant conspiracy.) Trump’s tweets are awful because of how they have thrust the deceased girl’s memory and her family into the limelight.

This letter written by the dead woman’s husband asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to take down the offending Trump tweets is heart-wrenching. It’s exactly the kind of behavior I feared Trump was capable of in 2016 and loomed large in my mind when I made the decision not to vote for him.

So there’s your ritual malediction against Trump, necessary though it may be. Please don’t pretend to be outraged when now it must be explained, once more with feeling, why a torrent of new condemnations of Trump’s indefensible behavior will have no effect on his supporters or the political dynamic heading into November and beyond. And don’t confuse that with approval of Trump’s rhetoric or tweets.