RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-the-medias-campaign-privilege-11567551611

The Trump era has seen an erosion of the distinction between journalism and partisan politics, with much of the mainstream media in open opposition to the president. “Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator . . . to announce his candidacy,” New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote in August 2016.

Three years later, the holiday continues. Slate last month published a leaked transcript of a staff “town hall” at the Times. “We built our newsroom to cover one story,” executive editor Dean Baquet told employees, explaining that the paper’s narrative “went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character.” The new story, he said, “requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred.”

Mr. Baquet makes the Times sound like an advocacy organization working against Mr. Trump’s re-election. Such organizations are regulated by campaign-finance statutes. So are other corporations, for-profit or nonprofit, that engage in electioneering speech. But those laws exempt media organizations, provided they are not owned by a political party, committee or candidate.

The justification for this favored treatment is the media’s “unique” role in public discourse and debate. But that has changed—and not only because the media have become more partisan. “With the advent of the Internet and the decline of print and broadcast media,” the Supreme Court observed in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), “the line between the media and others who wish to comment on political and social issues becomes far more blurred.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/30/24_hours_of_media_malpractice.html

In the Trump era, it increasingly appears that journalistic standards are on life support. Consider, if you will, what a day in the life of contemporary journalism now looks like.

Late Tuesday afternoon, some conservatives on Twitter started grumbling about an article the Washington Post published that morning. The op-ed in question accused best-selling conservative author J.D. Vance of being racist, and otherwise tried dubiously to connect the dots between mainstream pro-life advocates and white supremacists. At a speech in July, Vance said the following: “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.” Washington Post contributor Marissa Brostoff characterized the remark by saying, “Vance did not spell out exactly who was included in the word ‘our.’ He didn’t need to.” Her clear implication was that Vance was referring to the fact he only wanted to have white children. This would be news to Vance, since he’s married to a woman of color, and his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” ­– a movie version, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, is in post-production – is a very critical look at the mores of poor white Americans.

And Vance did, in fact, spell out exactly what his pronoun referred to. A couple of sentences earlier in his remarks, which Brostoff didn’t bother to read closely, he makes it clear he’s referring to all Americans. Low birth rates are a serious concern in Western countries for many reasons, including the need to sustain liberal welfare policies, which have nothing to do with racism.

President Donald Trump’s personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, is no longer part of the administration as of Thursday, according to reports.

The 27-year-old’s sudden resignation reportedly came after the president discovered that she shared details about the Trump family and Oval Office operations at a recent off-the-record dinner with reporters in New Jersey, according to a New York Times report that cited two anonymous sources familiar with the departure. Politico later confirmed the exit.

Westerhout was reportedly deemed a “separated employee” immediately after Trump learned of her actions and would not be allowed to return on Friday to the White House, the Times reported.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the director of Oval Office operations’ departure. Westerhout’s desk sat outside the Oval Office since the first day of Trump’s presidency, according to the Times.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/27/three-poll-results-on-trump-the-press-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about/

How do you cover a poll that shows satisfaction with the economy, despite all the harrumphing about an impending recession, is much higher than it ever was under President Barack Obama? Or reveals that views on race relations are actually better today than three years ago? Or shows that most think the political system is being shaken up in a good way?

Answer: You don’t. That is, if you’re a mainstream media outlet and the poll is your own.

Here’s the scary headline NBC News ran on the poll it conducted with the Wall Street Journal and published over the weekend: “’A deep and boiling anger’: NBC/WSJ poll finds a pessimistic America despite current economic satisfaction.”

The really important finding, according to NBC, was that “70% of Americans say they’re angry at the political establishment.”

But it turns out that this anger level is unchanged since October 2015. That means the “deep and boiling anger” was happening under Obama. Why isn’t that the headline?

Sure, you can say that the anger has continued under Trump. But the story we’ve been told repeatedly for two years is that Trump is responsible for the current climate of hatred and discord. The fact that the poll debunks this narrative is newsworthy.

The NBC reporters covering their own poll ignore another newsworthy finding. More people feel good about race relations today than they did under Obama.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/26/our-tawdry-untrustworthy-fourth-estate/

The ongoing affair between the nation’s top law enforcement agency and the news media resulted in another hookup last week when CNN announced the hiring of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI.

McCabe, a vocal Trump foe who opened a criminal investigation into the sitting president of the United States in May 2017 during his short stint as acting director, was fired by the FBI last year for lying to federal investigators.

He played a key role in concocting the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; wrote a book filled with animus toward the president; and remains under a grand jury investigation. Last week, McCabe’s lawyers met with federal prosecutors who are deciding whether to indict him for perjury.

So, of course, CNN hired him last week.

“They Literally Know Nothing”

Once upon a time in America, journalists embraced their role as the nation’s whistleblowers; the so-called Fourth Estate could usually be trusted to expose government corruption and name names. A generation of J-school graduates strived to be the next Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward, digging for their own Watergate moment. 

But that all changed in 2008 with the candidacy of Barack Obama. The press served as a bodyguard for the 44th president, overlooking major abuses and failures during his tenure; suggesting that any legitimate criticism of Obama or his policies was rooted in racism; and regurgitating any administration-fed talking point as fact.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s “mind-meld” advisor, admitted as much when he told a reporter how the White House brainwashed the media: “The average reporter we talk to is 27-years-old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes bragged to the New York Times magazine in May 2016.  “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Then along came Donald Trump. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274740/ny-times-1619-project-puts-slavery-center-americas-bruce-thornton

Last week the New York Times embarrassed itself twice. First, a transcript was leaked of editor Dean Baquet’s exhortation to reporters that the Russian-collusion fiction having been exploded, they now needed to focus on the endemic “racism” and “white supremacism” of Trump and his supporters in order to defeat the president. Next, as the “theory” behind this partisan journalistic “praxis,” the self-proclaimed “paper of record” announced the “1619 Project,” a series of articles and essays showing “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

Both incidents definitively reveal that the cultural bacilli that erupted during the Sixties have at last destroyed the minds of some of our most prestigious and powerful institutions. More important, such a degradation of history is one of the preconditions for the plague of tyranny.

The first point to make is that neither the blatant bias of the Times––nor its aim “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 [the year the first black slaves came to America] as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story”––is new. Like most of progressivism, both are manifestations of the zombie ideology that for nearly a century has been attacking our political and social order.

The political bias of the media, especially the New York Times, was apparent even before the Sixties.