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MEDIA

The Media’s Criminal Misreporting on Crime

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/17/the-medias-criminal-misreporting-on-crime/

‘President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

That was ABC News’ David Muir “fact checking” Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris.

Two days later, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of its national crime victimization survey, which showed that the number of victims of violent crime was 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020.

There were almost 170,000 more rapes, 300,000 more robberies, 1.4 million more assaults, 300,000 more claims of domestic violence, and almost 400,000 more crimes with a violent weapon.

This wasn’t a surprise. That same survey showed a significant jump in crime victimization in 2022 – something we noted in this space back in July. (“Now They’re Gaslighting Us About Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’”)

And in January,  the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks crimes in 39 cities, found homicide rates were 18% higher in 2023 than in 2019, aggravated assaults up 8%, gun assaults up 32%, and carjackings up 93%.

Meanwhile, polls keep finding that the public thinks crime is getting worse.

But instead of trying to understand the mismatch, the press just treated the public like idiots.

The BBC’s Israelophobia is even worse than you think A new report exposes the true, shocking extent of the BBC’s moral decay.Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/09/the-bbcs-israelophobia-is-even-worse-than-you-think/

Remember when the BBC went nuts at Nigel Farage over comments made by some of the candidates for his Reform Party? It was in the run-up to the General Election. Farage was taking part in a BBC debate. Presenter Fiona Bruce huffed and puffed at him for half the show about three candidates who’d said nasty things about immigrants, including calling them ‘savages’ who should ‘get off [their] lazy arses’. Looking back, we can see what a load of old cant that was, for the BBC employed far worse bigots than those Reform racists. It employed people who openly praised the worst act of Jew murder since the Holocaust.

A new report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October is a sobering read. It’s outright jarring in parts. Some of it is pretty ‘dog bites man’. Anyone who’s watched any of the Beeb’s pained output since 7 October will not be surprised to learn it has exhibited a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. But they’ll be horrified – I hope – to read that the BBC used journalists who had ‘shown sympathy for Hamas’. Including one who described Hamas’s pogrom as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who appeared to mock the Jewish State even as its citizens were being raped and murdered, saying that ‘Israel… is crying in the corner’.

The Beeb has done many awful things of late. There’s its Brexit-bashing. Its indoctrination of schoolkids with bollocks about ‘white privilege’. Its gratingly woke podcasts, including one asking how ‘white women’ can avoid becoming ‘Karens’. Its transformation of Doctor Who into naff LGBTQ propaganda in an effort to stir the throng from its supposed bigoted stupor. But this – its association with journalists so anti-Israel that one defended a Lebanese reporter who had said ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’ – is surely the worst. We’re paying for this fascist-adjacent nonsense?

The new report is called ‘The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas War and the BBC’. It was overseen by Trevor Asserson, the British-Israeli lawyer. He deployed around 20 data scientists and 20 legal minds to analyse no fewer than nine million words of BBC output from the four-month period of 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024. The researchers claim to have identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Time and again after the 7 October pogrom, they say, the BBC’s output soft-soaped Hamas’s atrocities while depicting Israel as ‘militaristic and aggressive’.

For Republican Candidates, Media Hit Jobs Are a Fact of Life By Becket Adams

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/for-republican-candidates-media-hit-jobs-are-a-fact-of-life/

Media outlets took J. D. Vance’s words out of context and made him look heartless as a result. Should we be surprised?

The press’s coverage of Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has a peculiar quality to it.

Marc Caputo, national political reporter for the Bulwark, last week put it well: The reporting is not merely “negative” but “reliably” so.

Case in point: The Associated Press on September 5 grossly misrepresented the Ohio senator’s response to a school shooting in Georgia in which four people were murdered.

“JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” said an AP headline.

The Hill likewise declared, “JD Vance calls for tightened school security, calls school shootings a ‘fact of life.’”

Here’s what Vance actually said (my emphasis):

I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able.

The Media Lies Add Up For some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/05/the-media-lies-add-up/

The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left-wing and its media.

The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election.

Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.

Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a ‘dream team’ of partisan prosecutors to prove Trump-Russian collusion.

Some 22 months later, Mueller found no evidence that Donald Trump improperly won the 2016 election with help from any colluding Russians.

More hysteria followed when Trump was impeached in December 2019.

The left claimed he had pressured the Ukrainian government to look into the family of Joe Biden (then a potential 2020 election opponent) for its corruption with Ukrainian oligarchs—as a condition for releasing military aid designated to Kyiv.

Yet Hunter Biden was paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company to enlist his father, Vice President Joe Biden, for quid pro quo services.

In turn, Joe Biden himself later bragged he had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor, Victor Shokin—who happened to be looking too closely into the various shady schemes of the Biden family.

The deceptions and lies continued.

Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson? Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/09/04/seriously-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-tucker-carlson-n4932223

“Oops!… He Holocausted again,” is one historian’s take on Adolf Hitler and World War II, as presented yesterday on Tucker Carlson’s X show.

FLASHBACK: I used to enjoy the occasional Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News. His content was usually pointed and amusing and delivered with a breezy charm. But I rarely bothered with a Tucker Carlson interview. As an interviewer, too often, I found him strangely incurious and glib instead of breezy.

Carlson’s interview on Tuesday with alleged historian Darryl Cooper — like his interview in April with Reverend Munther Isaac, referenced in today’s flashbacks — was so much worse than merely glib or incurious.

Carlson chose to interview Cooper, whom he endorsed as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” to learn exactly how World War II didn’t happen. According to Cooper — and Carlson nodded along the entire time — Winston Churchill was perhaps “the chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

It’s true that Hitler did not want or expect Britain to fight. He wanted Britain to acquiesce to German dominance of Europe from the Urals to Gibraltar and subsume the UK to Nazi interests. This is all a matter of historical record. Britain could fight or submit — that was Hitler’s choice, not Churchill’s. 

FLASHBACK: Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase “Occupied Palestine” as his location on his Twitter/X profile. He is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority.

As for the Holocaust — brace yourself — Hitler was just being merciful, according to Cooper. “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with.

Here’s the Real Reason Harris Won’t Hold News Conferences Mark Tapscott

https://pjmedia.com/marktapscott/2024/09/03/is-this-the-real-reason-harris-avoids-the-media-n4932193

It’s going on 45 days since Vice President Kamala Harris last held a news conference with journalists, and speculation is rampant about how much longer she will go before convening another such gathering.

Here’s my suggestion: She won’t.

Or if she ever does, such gatherings will be few and far between.

Harris watched President Joe Biden all but ignore the White House press corps for more than three years. When he did deign to stand in front of the journalists to take a series of well-scripted questions, doing so invariably drew attention to his waning cognitive abilities.

But here’s the overlooked fact that is even more significant than the spotlight that shone on Biden’s decline during news conferences: rarely was he ever asked a challenging question by any of the assembled journalists other than Fox News’ Peter Doocy. And even rarer were the tough follow-ups that are essential to getting some semblance of the truth out of most politicians. More often, the questions have tended to be softballs that suggest most of the journalists present are sympathetic to the Biden-Harris administration.

What’s the lesson here that Harris and Democrats are likely drawing? Ignoring the national media is a no-downside proposition for them because, for the most part, the Mainstream Media is in their pockets.

So what really was witheld from CNN’s 41-minute interview with Kamala Harris? By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/so_what_really_was_witheld_from_cnn_s_41_minute_interview_with_kamala_harris.html

Is CNN a news network or a public relations agency?

What else can one conclude but the latter, now that we learn that CNN did a 41-minute interview with Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris, but only released 18 minutes of it to the public, both in its broadcast and in its transcript.

That was its big news scoop, the first major interview of Kamala Harris since Joe Biden was forced to pull out of the race last month.

For a news agency to withold … the news … is strange stuff indeed, given that news is supposed to be what it does, and its bread and butter.

What’s more, experienced journalists, such as Catherine Herridge, have arched their eyebrows over that strange aversion to releasing the news they had actually gathered.
 

Herridge noted that this was what credible news agencies do, they release the full transcripts, even if their final broadcast doesn’t include all the news gathered. The New York Times has called it all the news that’s fit to print. 60 Minutes does an after-hours show for those interested in all the parts of its newsgathering that didn’t make it into their shorter news segments.

The Middle East: A Story of Journalistic Failure by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20871/middle-east-journalistic-failure

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.” — Zoheir Mohsen, Trouw, March 31, 1977.

“The founding of the PLO, now known as Fatah had nothing to do with the desire for statehood, throughout the charter it states, again and again, its sole goal is the destruction of Israel, nothing more, thus started the Palestinian Narrative, they needed a story behind their need.” — Timothy Benton, February 14, 2019.

Arabs who fled during the fighting had likely assumed, based on broadcasts they were hearing, that leaving the area would make it easier for the Arab armies to kill the Jews. The plan presumably was to return soon to collect the spoils and take possession of a swiftly-conquered land.

When the Arab armies were defeated, and some of the people who had fled tried to return, they were told they had not been loyal and were refused admittance. It is the Arabs who fled, and their descendants, who now call themselves Palestinians. They are simply Arabs who fled Israel at the time and were not allowed back.

Neither the Palestinian Authority in the West bank nor Hamas in the Gaza Strip nor the Palestinians in general are seeking a two-state solution. They are quite openly seeking a one-state solution: displacing Israel.

Comparisons to England and Ireland fall way wide of the mark: even at the height of Ireland’s “Troubles”, no one ever claimed that England belonged to Ireland and that everyone who was not a Roman Catholic should leave.

The land that comprises Jordan, according the Balfour Declaration, was officially pledged as “a national home of the Jewish people.” Jordan, therefore, is rightfully Occupied Israel.

Kamala Harris, Scourge of Iran? Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-scourge-of-iran/

Paper of Record says it’s unclear whom Iran wants to win the presidential election because Biden and Harris ‘have taken a tough line with Iran.’ Seriously?

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran was behind the recent hacking of the Trump campaign. In reporting that news, the New York Times adds the following (my italics):

Iran’s government has shown signs of becoming increasingly aggressive in recent months, because it sees the outcome of the elections as “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests,” the [U.S. intelligence] officials said.

They did not specify which, if any, outcome Iran might favor. In 2018, Mr. Trump scrapped an agreement reached in the waning days of the Obama administration to limit and monitor Tehran’s civilian nuclear development program in exchange for easing economic sanctions.

But leading Democrats, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, have also taken a tough line with Iran, the chief sponsor of Hezbollah and Hamas.

According to the Times, then, it is not clear which American presidential candidate Iran might prefer to see prevail. That, we’re to believe, is because Biden and Harris — whose administration continues to insist that Iran only has a civilian nuclear program — have “taken a tough line with Iran,” which, after all, is “the chief sponsor of” two brutal anti-American terrorist organizations.

Down here on Planet Earth, however, Biden was vice president in the administration that put Iran on a glide path to nuclear weapons by inducing the jihadist regime’s agreement to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — that was so one-sidedly in Iran’s favor that the administration would not submit it to the Senate as a treaty.

NPR Proves They Despise Trump 162 Times The malicious, hopelessly partisan prestige press. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/npr-proves-they-despise-trump-162-times/

How do voters know the prestige press is hopelessly partisan? For three weeks, Kamala Harris has been refusing all requests for interviews or press conferences, and that goes unpunished. Donald Trump held a press conference, and he was absolutely punished.

Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio demonstrated their ultraliberal tilt for the millionth time — at least that’s how it feels. NPR political director Domenico Montanaro organized a team to pore over Trump’s Aug. 8 press conference transcript and “found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone — and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”

This scandalous figure had all that Glenn Kessler energy from The Washington Post. Remember when Kessler made a database that identified 30,573 “false or misleading claims” from President Trump? When Joe Biden was elected, he proclaimed the Database Days were over. Kessler proclaimed on MSNBC, “I assume the Biden presidency will be a lot like the Obama presidency, and that they will be responsive, and will be able to quickly back up what they’re saying.”

The crucial word there is “assume.” Democrat journalists assume Democrats tell the truth.

This piece was eagerly shared on X by leftist die-hards, from movie star Mark Hamill to “comedian” Dean Obeidallah to MSNBC host Katie Phang.