RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084

President Trump calls it the “fake news.” I’ve tried to steer mostly clear of that term, but it just gets harder and harder. You keep thinking that it must be possible to turn to some newspaper or TV news channel for just some basic information on what is going on in the world. But it turns out that the desperate effort to come up with something, anything that will defeat the Republicans or the President requires distorting or suppressing even the most basic facts of what is happening.

There were three years of the Russia, Russia, Russia collusion hoax. Has any media outlet that promoted that fraud ever issued any sort of apology or correction? If so, I have never seen it. Ditto for the Ukraine “quid pro quo” that wasn’t. Just this past weekend, Trump gave what I thought was a very decent and unifying patriotic speech at Mt. Rushmore. Here is the text. For every major left-wing media outlet, it was “dark” and “divisive.” Try reading the text and see if you can find that. Could they really think that nobody would read the text?

But then, the significance of Trump’s speech is a matter of opinion. Let’s consider a matter much closer to simple fact: the number of daily cases and deaths from the Covid-19 virus in the U.S. Figures are reported daily, with charts going back to February, at various places, including a site called Worldometers that I have frequently linked. While there are reasons (that I have discussed in several posts) to think that these data might not be fully accurate, they are still the basic data that we all are working with.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-at-mount-rushmore-11593978913?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war

—Los Angeles Times

Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message

— New York Times

Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore

—Associated Press

At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day

—Washington Post

President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/amid-a-pandemic-the-woke-ist-media-are-experiencing-a-psychotic-break

If the press suffered a nervous breakdown after the 2016 election ⁠— and they did ⁠— they are experiencing a full-on psychotic break amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

It is as if the lockdowns and nationwide demonstrations caused media executives to snap, leaving them in a wide-eyed, obsessive frenzy to cleanse society of all problematics, screaming all the while, “Out, damned spot!”

CNN, for example, engaged in explicit political activism this week when it sought to shame companies that have yet to pull ads from Facebook over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s persistent refusal to censor problematic speech.

“These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet,” reads the headline. The report then goes on to name and shame the businesses that have had the temerity to continue to advertise on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

This is not news reporting. This is activism. It is a poorly disguised effort by a major newsroom to pressure companies into boycotting a social media platform that is too committed to political neutrality and too opposed to political censorship for the media’s taste. In any other time and place, the press would have mocked and condemned the CNN article. But these are unusual times. Many journalists today agree with CNN’s shaming tactics and the reasons behind them, and so the Facebook report came and went this week with barely a whimper of objection from our brave Fourth Estate.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/02/if-it-werent-for-double-standards-our

The Marxist blood running in the veins of the media, of celebrities in Hollywood, in nearly every Democratic politician, and unfortunately some weak sister Republicans, demands that we do not question the Left.

Since the death of George Floyd in May, the top headlines every day report that the protests stem from his alleged murder. Though the left-leaning woke media insists on describing the protests as “peaceful,” they have spiralled into destructive rioting and are responsible for deaths, in some cases, at the hands of Marxist opportunists looking to upend our Founders, our institutions, our Constitution, and our way of life. 

An MSNBC reporter standing in front of burning buildings said, “This is mostly a protest, it is not, it is not, generally speaking, unruly.” In the face of destroyed buildings (including a brand new low-income housing unit), looting, lawyers tossing Molotov cocktails into police cars, and the shooting death of David Dorn (a retired policeman who was guarding his friend’s business), the legacy media continues on with this “peaceful change” narrative.

Legacy media, as well as Antifa and some Black Lives Matter activists are little more than opportunists. They can “never let a crisis go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel and now Hillary Clinton like to say. The progressive media understands what this means, and while it’s interesting to see how the news anchors, editors, and writers all seem to have similar talking points, they may only be loosely tied to actual Democratic directives. They don’t really need marching orders anymore. They are so very tightly anchored to the same political philosophies, attitudes, and methods that they speak as one voice even without prompting. As Alinskyite Democrats, they know “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.”

The mainstream media continuously ignore the weekly shootings in Chicago and other large cities. Two young children died this past weekend in Chicago from the violence, and  at least 16 other people are dead while at least 50 others were wounded in shootings. These people matter too. The children matter. The adults matter. The police who put their lives on the line every day for people in those communities matter.

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/kayleigh-mcenany-trump-white-house.php

This column was clearly meant to trash McEnany but actually highlights her welcome ripostes to the ” calumnists”….rsk

White House press secretaries make a good salary—around $183,000 a year, almost half the president’s pay. But taxpayers are getting a bargain in Kayleigh McEnany, who has taken on two roles: first, as the president’s spokesperson, and second, as a media critic, offering unsolicited but carefully researched and rehearsed critiques of news coverage writ large.

McEnany, a Harvard Law graduate who got her start as a combative Trump supporter on CNN, has been press secretary for less than three months. It’s dicey to make a lot of predictions about her future, given that she is the fourth person to hold this job in three-and-a-half years, succeeding Sean Spicer (182 days), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (705 days), and Stephanie Grisham (281 days). (All of them lasted longer than 11-day White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.)

McEnany got off to a promising start with her first briefing on May 1: “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” she told reporters in the White House briefing room. And then, at the same briefing, McEnany made clear that she, like Trump, sees herself as an assignment editor. She was asked about Michael Flynn’s efforts to pull back on his guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. She responded by telling the press corps that they were, in essence, asking the wrong question, and should instead focus its attention on an FBI agent’s notes (“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie?”) written before the Flynn interview.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/01/why-do-the-media-ignore-good-news-about-the-stock-market-and-economy/

Our TV-based media, so besotted with the far-left progressive agenda they now espouse, no longer seem to care about some issues of great importance – that is, unless they reflect badly on President Donald Trump or Republicans . This double standard is especially true of such bread-and-butter issues as the state of the economy and markets, which have an enormous effect on all Americans, including the so-called progressive ones.

Amid all the nonstop televised gloom and doom over the coronavirus, something strange happened in the second quarter of this year: Stock market prices soared. The Dow Jones Industrial Index jumped 18%, the S&P 500 gained 20% and the tech-oriented Nasdaq surged 31%.

Those numbers, coming on the heels of the pandemic, were good enough to be the biggest quarterly gains in 20 years.

Yet, that boom warranted nary a mention on the Big Three TV networks. For full coverage, you had to go outside to financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, the newspaper where Issues & Insights was started before becoming a stand-alone editorial and opinion site.

We were prompted to mention this by the headline we saw in the reliable and always interesting media watchdog site MRC NewsBusters: “Big Three CENSOR Stocks after ‘Best Quarter’ in 20-Plus Years, Despite Virus Spike.”

“The trend of ignoring news when it’s good continues for the Big Three evening news shows,” the story said, noting that when retail sales soared 17.7% in May, the biggest jump on record, both ABC and NBC ignored it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/01/media_ignores_facts_to_claim_a_trump_gotcha.html

The media keeps going out of its way to fact check President Trump’s claims as false. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is one of many journalists who can’t be bothered with considering the most obvious interpretations of what Trump says. Instead, he ventures into the nonsensical.

Last week, Trump said the 20 most dangerous U.S. cities are run by Democrats; Bump then wrote an article saying Trump erred — by Bump’s count, only 17 of the 20 cities are run by Democrats. Social media mocked Bump’s analysis for quibbling over whether Trump was exactly right or not, but what they failed to point out is that Bump’s underlying numbers are wrong. 

Trump earned Bump’s ire by saying that if you are going to blame anyone for the condition of police departments in American cities, you need to blame the Democrats who have been running them.

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” Trump said last Wednesday. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of twenty. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.” He has made similar statements many times.

The Post’s headline summarizes Bump’s conclusion: “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.”