RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-obscene-public-humiliation-ritual-of-cbss-tony-dokoupil/

EXCERPTS

The mainstream media has been afire over the past week about a major internal controversy at CBS, where CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil has been called on the carpet, publicly upbraided by his own network, and forced to apologize to his colleagues, all for the crime of asking literary activist Ta-Nehisi Coates a series of challenging questions.

In fact, I already covered many of those angles half a month ago. For those unfamiliar with who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, or the public controversy surrounding his new book The Message — in which Coates, after a ten-day visit to Israel as part of a “Palestine Festival of Literature” junket, concluded pre–October 7 that the Jewish state was illegitimate, identical to the Jim Crow South yet worse, and must be abolished — I invite you to read my piece about him from late September.

To summarize: Coates is an overpromoted naïf with profoundly radical priors and a proud ignorance of history — this is in fact part of his purported appeal, the supposedly untutored “freshness” with which he approaches things — a black autodidact whose ability to write passable prose got him advanced to the forefront of American racial, political, and literary discourse during the ferment of the later Obama era. After accumulating a mountain of elite hosannahs — to the point of literary deification — he ducked out of the public conversation, but has now re-emerged to use that moral capital to plead for the elimination of Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacres.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/media-maintains-wall-of-silence-on-first-gentleman-metoo-scandal/

Here’s the scorecard so far.

Doug Emhoff, Kamala’s powerful lawyer hubby, admitted to impregnating his nanny during his first marriage. The status of the child is unknown, but there are allegations that she suffered a miscarriage.

A recent report described Emhoff hitting an ex-girlfriend in public. The media refused to report on the allegation and only reported on Emhoff’s denial of the allegation.

Half of the political world focused Wednesday on a Daily Mail report that second gentleman Doug Emhoff “forcefully slapped ex-girlfriend for flirting with another man” at Cannes in 2012. Others (including Semafor) haven’t matched the reporting, and as of Wednesday evening the incident didn’t appear in The New York Times or top outlets. But the allegations are a dominant narrative in conservative media: Megyn Kelly’s coverage had more than 150,000 views on YouTube, while Trump aide Stephen Miller demanded answers. In a statement to Semafor, a spokesperson for Emhoff said “this report is untrue,” and that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”

It’s striking that “half of the political world” is focused on an allegation the media won’t report on.

Instead, the media is reporting on such urgent stories as “Doug Emhoff On Andy Samberg’s ‘SNL’ Impression: “I Approve”, “Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff to visit Arizona” and “Michael Stipe, Jason Isbell Tell Doug Emhoff Why They Endorse Kamala Harris”.

Isn’t journalism awesome?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rachel-maddow-smears-vance-as-a-fascist-speech-squasher/

The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to only do her show one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%?

For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable “news” host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today’s politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today’s Republicans. It’s like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it’s not.

On Sept. 30, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.

Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?

We’re supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that “Harvard hates America” has been around for decades, and it’s been true for decades.

As Vance put it, “You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-blames-trump

The New York Times devotedly follows the cardinal rule of liberalism—never blame the victim!—at least for officially designated victims of American racism and classism. Slavery, for example, not higher rates of criminal offending, is responsible for blacks’ “unequal involvement in the criminal justice system.” If unwed mothers are poor, the reason lies in heartless welfare rules, not in the decision to have a child out of wedlock.

But when it comes to Donald Trump, victim-blaming is de rigueur. According to the Times’s premier Trump-basher, Peter Baker, Trump is responsible for the attempted assassinations against him. “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” writes Baker in today’s lead print story. Trump “inspires” the attacks against him. It is hard to imagine this line of thinking applied to other victims of assassination attempts—Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, for example—but it is as tautologically true in their case as in Trump’s.

Baker recycles the fiction that MAGA supporters, inflamed by Trump’s fulminations regarding Haitian peticide, made bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio. (In fact, as Ohio governor Mike DeWine revealed, the menacing came from bad actors abroad.) But relentless Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy, has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.

The elite press’s inability to escape its ideological bubble and to apply neutral standards of analysis could not be more acute. That inability is as responsible for today’s political hatreds as anything Trump has ever said.

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.