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MEDIA

The shabby depravity of CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the NYT, et al. By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_shabby_depravity_of_cnn_nbc_msnbc_the_nyt_et_al.html

Everyone paying attention to current events and the political wars that bedevil us all knows that CNN, NBC, and MSNBC are not honest brokers in any sense of the word.  For the eight years of the Bush administration, they verbally assaulted the president all day, every day.  George W. ignored their dishonest, calculated attacks in an effort to remain above the fray.  Bush gave these alleged news outlets a pass by refusing to take them on.  This was a mistake that Donald Trump learned not to repeat.  He has fought back from moment one, with a quick retort or tweet.  The same media and their mouthpieces slavishly idealized Barack Obama and overlooked and or covered up his many crimes and egregious errors in judgment.  For the left media crowd, Obama could have ordered a genocide, and they still would have idolized him.  Obama effectively did sanction the slaughter of Christians throughout the Middle East during his administration; he welcomed many thousands of Muslim refugees and refused refugee status to displaced Christians who were targeted by ISIS.  Christians have been effectively erased from the entire region.

The same media employed all the same tactics to candidate Trump even before he became the candidate.  They mocked him; late-night comics devoted their programs to deriding the man.  Once he became the candidate, they all doubled down and became downright vicious.  When it comes to venomous cruelty, no one tops the Left, in the media and in the entertainment sector.  When focused on a perceived enemy of their regressive progressiveness, they toss aside any sense of decency and go for the jugular.  They become everything we teach our children and grandchildren never to become: contemptible, intolerant snobs.  That is exactly who these persons with a media platform have become: malignant reprobates.  Nothing proves this more than their campaign to convince voters that Trump is unfit for office, mentally ill, etc.  They are dragging out the most Trump-deranged people to diagnose a man they’ve never met.  Obviously, every one of these so-called experts should have his license revoked for malpractice.  For example, Dr. Allen Frances’s guest spot on CNN suggests he may well have been dispatched from Duke for displaying severe mental health problems himself.  Physician, heal thyself!

Journalists Are Having A Meltdown Over Journalism Being Done To Them By Madeline Osburn

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/journalists-meltdown-journalism-done/

After years of doxxing innocent Americans for their political views, mainstream media journalists are now upset that their own racist and antisemitic tweets have been complied by conservative allies of President Trump.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Wright-Piersanti’s archived social media posts were part of the White House’s “aggressive operation to discredit news organizations.”

The Times report decried this tactic, arguing that targeting individuals is acceptable when journalists do it to other people, but not when other people do it to them.

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

The New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger said in a statement to the paper of record’s staff that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

Sulzberger’s concern over the intimidation of journalists fails to address and even excuses the racist and antisemitic views of his own staff, but also fails to acknowledge the mainstream media’s aggressive history of intimidating private individuals because they support the president or hold conservative political views.

Last February, a CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

CNN Guest: Trump Responsible for Millions More Deaths Than Hitler and Stalin Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274742/cnn-guest-trump-responsible-millions-more-deaths-daniel-greenfield

CNN calls this segment, “Two psychiatrists discuss coverage of Trump”.

Most sane people call this, “Two crazy people spew pure insanity on CNN.”

The stars of this circus are Bandy X. Lee, a dubious figure who keeps claiming that she has a duty to warn that President Trump is mentally ill.

But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been “licensed on two continents,” has “excellent credentials,” a “flawless ethics history” and speaks “four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him “resorting to violence”.  Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.” Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”

All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.

With Bandy in the studio, CNN decided it needed someone even crazier to balance her out.

The former chair of psychiatry at Duke University said Sunday during an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter that President Trump may be responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. 

“Calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him,” Allen Frances, the author of “Twilight of American Sanity,” said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “And even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist. Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many million more deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.”

That ending has literally nothing to do with any of the sentences that care before it.

Frances was the chair of the DSM IV task force. Which is the opposite of reassuring. He’s also the author of TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY, A PSYCHIATRIST ANALYZES THE AGE OF TRUMP’.

It’s in all-caps because that’s how sane Frances is.

Michelle Goldberg Mazel Tov, Trump. You’ve Revived the Jewish Left. ‘Only one political party is quite literally inciting white nationalists to shoot up our synagogues.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/opinion/sunday/trump-jews.html

On Aug. 11, more than 1,000 people marked Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, by occupying an Amazon Books store in Manhattan, protesting the technology behemoth’s technical support for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sitting on the floor, they read harrowing accounts of people in immigration detention and recited the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. One of their signs said, “Never again means never again.”

According to organizers, 44 people, including 12 rabbis and a member of New York’s City Council, were arrested. It was one of over 50 Jewish-organized demonstrations against ICE held across the country that day.

A few days later, a corrections officer drove a truck into a row of Jewish protesters who were blocking the entrance to a private prison in Rhode Island where migrants are being detained. Two of the protesters were hospitalized. That demonstration was one of at least 38 organized this summer by Never Again Action, a decentralized group formed two months ago to engage in nonviolent direct action against immigrant detention.

Donald Trump might have thought he was going to lure Jewish voters to the Republican Party with his lock-step alliance with the Israeli right. Instead, by attempting to use American Jews as mascots for an administration that fills most of them with horror, he has spurred a renaissance on the Jewish left.

New progressive Jewish groups are forming. Older ones, like New York’s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, one of the forces behind the Amazon action, are growing; once-sleepy organizing meetings have become standing room only. Jewish Currents, a left-wing Jewish publication founded almost 75 years ago, was reborn last year with a new cadre of writers and editors who speak to the millennial socialist zeitgeist.

Obviously, American Jews have long leaned liberal, and have always been overrepresented in progressive movements. But there’s a difference between leftists who happen to be Jewish and explicitly Jewish left-wing activism. “People who may not have been that close to Jewishness, they feel suddenly like it’s very important to express who they are as Jews in the context of their activism and in the context of their collective memory,” said Arielle Angel, the editor of Jewish Currents.

Smearing Steven Menashi CNN and MSNBC distort another judicial nominee’s views. By The Editorial Board

https://www.wsj.com/articles/smearing-steven-menashi-11566761235

The Trump Administration is nominating more federal judges, and right behind comes the character assassination. The latest target is Steven Menashi, a highly regarded appellate lawyer who was acting general counsel in Betsy DeVos ’ Department of Education and now works in the White House counsel’s office. He was tapped this month for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Progressive groups have been orchestrating a smear campaign in coordination with their media allies. Rachel Maddow opened the assault this month with a MSNBC monologue suggesting Mr. Menashi is a white nationalist. Her evidence? A 2010 article Mr. Menashi wrote for a University of Pennsylvania international-law journal that defended Israel as a liberal democracy and Jewish state.

Some on the left argue that Israel’s “right of return” immigration law for Jews is illegitimate because it excludes other groups. Mr. Menashi disputed this by describing comparable laws in Germany, Greece and Finland, which have welcomed back displaced nationals. He noted countries like India and Ireland take a special interest in their ethnic diasporas, and that this doesn’t diminish their democracies.

Ms. Maddow said this amounts to a “high-brow argument for racial purity.” After all, Mr. Menashi drew on that noted herrenvolk theorist Hannah Arendt, the Jewish chronicler of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who once wrote that human rights “has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.”

Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the “fringe of racial thinking.” If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe.

The Tragedy of the Times The loss of advertising dollars is why a newspaper spends its credibility sucking up to readers. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tragedy-of-the-times-11566596465

Thank you, Dean Baquet. Readers who complain about articles they don’t like, and who assume they are written under pressure from advertisers, could do worse than to study recent comments of the New York Times executive editor.

Mr. Baquet was secretly recorded at a staff meeting. A transcript was posted at Slate.com. But he has made similar points publicly. The gist: It’s readers nowadays who pressure newspapers to toe a line. Publishers pine for the era when advertising dollars insulated us from such pressures.

Under fire from its public for an anodyne and accurate headline about Donald Trump after the El Paso shootings, which the paper later changed, Mr. Baquet almost pleaded with his crew: “We are an independent news organization, one of the few remaining. . . . Our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden. They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president.”

If he meant a newspaper’s job is to report the facts and arrange them in a logical fashion regardless of the howling winds of reader prejudice, he’s right. Unfortunately it’s not clear this is what he meant.

To his credit, the Times has been one of a few news organizations that have refrained from labelling Mr. Trump a racist, as if this quality can be factually determined between the lines of his tweets. What Mr. Baquet is up against was illustrated by one of his own reporters, quoted in the Slate transcript saying, “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.”

Left-Wing Institutions Mainstreaming Hatred By Fletch Daniels ****

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/leftwing_institutions_mainstreaming_hatred.html

The contrasting reactions of conservatives and liberals to the news that libertarian philanthropist David Koch died and that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is suffering from a serious health problem highlight a fundamental difference between them.

Liberal Reaction to Death of Koch

Prominent liberals exploded in vicious joy at the news that Koch had died.  Perhaps the worst reaction was Bill Maher, who said, “F‑‑‑ him…I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”  An outlier?  Hardly.  His audience roared its approval.

Bette Midler got in on the act, wishing his brother were also dead.  She echoed Maher’s profanity-bomb language and directed it at Kay Cole James, the black American leader of the Heritage Foundation, showing once again that no insult directed toward a minority is too vile when it comes from a liberal.

Social media are on fire with these types of screeds from these tolerant Americans who regularly lecture and project at Republican lack of civility. 

Whatever you think of his policy positions, David Koch should not have been a particularly controversial figure.  He was a successful business leader who gave billions to charity.  He was neither hateful nor petty.

He once said, “I really want to put my money to work making the world a better place.” 

His primary crime?  He supported Republicans, the one offense that still infuriates the Left.

Conservative Reaction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg News

Saturday also broke the news that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suffered from a malignant tumor on her pancreas.  President Donald Trump’s reaction to this terrible news about someone who has been a fierce critic?  He said, “I hope she does really well.  I’m hoping she’s going to be fine.  She’s pulled through a lot. She’s strong, very tough.”

Bill Maher on David Koch Death: ‘I’m Glad He’s Dead’ and ‘I Hope the End Was Painful’ By Rick Moran

SHAME ON HIM!! RSK

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bill-maher-on-david-koch-death-im-glad-hes-dead-and-i-hope-the-end-was-painful/

Bill Maher made his bones in the entertainment world as a comedian. He should have stuck with stand-up.

His monologue from Friday’s Real Time on HBO simply can’t be believed:

Fox News:

“Real Time” host Bill Maher minced no words Friday night regarding the news that Republican megadonor and billionaire philanthropist David Koch had died at age 79 following a long battle with cancer.

“F— him… I’m glad he’s dead,” Maher said.

“And now, some funeral news to report. Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died .. of prostate cancer,” Maher said during his opening monologue, sparking some applause from his mostly liberal audience.

“I guess I’m going to have to re-evaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.”

The HBO star joked that Koch’s family expressed gratitude that he “lived long enough to see the Amazon catch fire” and that condolences poured in “from all the politicians he owned.”

“As for his remains, he has asked to be cremated and have his ashes be blown into a child’s lungs,” Maher quipped.

After briefly acknowledging the “harsh words” he had for Koch and predicting condemnation, Maher doubled down on his disdain for him and his brother, Charles Koch.

“He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades. So f— him, the Amazon is burning up, I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”

Forget ideology. Forget politics. How does a civilized human being get to the point where voicing such sentiments is believed to be accepted by anyone in society — even political allies?

Thinking such thoughts is bad enough. Most of us would be ashamed of ourselves for celebrating anyone’s demise and hoping “the end was painful.” It’s barbaric. The words are disconnected from conscience in a way that makes Maher less human.

CNN Hires Fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as Contributor By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-hires-fired-fbi-deputy-director-andrew-mccabe-as-contributor/

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe is joining CNN as an on-air contributor, the network’s media reporter Oliver Darcy announced Friday.

McCabe was fired from the FBI in March 2018 after the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed that he’d repeatedly lied under oath to investigators about his role in leaking information on the bureau’s Clinton Foundation investigation to the Wall Street Journal. The Inspector General referred the matter to the U.S. attorney’s office for investigation and McCabe may still face criminal charges.

The 21-year FBI veteran maintains his innocence, arguing that he was misunderstood and tried to correct the record. He filed suit against the Trump administration in U.S. District Court in Washington earlier this month, alleging that his dismissal was “politically motivated and retaliatory.”

President Trump routinely disparaged McCabe as a political partisan during his time in the administration, often invoking his wife, Jill McCabe, who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in Virginia as a Democrat in 2015.

Netflix Debuts Its Obama Manifesto By Armond White

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/netflix-documentary-american-factory-obama-manifesto/

The media celebrate the arrival of the new ministers of propaganda.

This week’s widespread media blitz heralding Netflix’s broadcast of its first Obama-endorsed presentation, American Factory, was more than synchronicity. It felt as though U.S. publicists and journalists collectively exhaled their relief at finally regaining the bully pulpit.

Reviews of American Factory, a doc by indie veterans Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, were not reliable accounts of the film’s quality. Its lack of focus following a Chinese manufacturer’s takeover of a former General Motors plant in Ohio — a move that fails to relieve working-class anxieties but, instead, predicts job-market doom — didn’t faze flacks and reviewers. The media class saw Reichert and Bognar’s facile, generalized survey as a chance to take on President Trump’s trade policy; many jettisoned film critique to try their hand at economic and moral analysis instead.

Those in power have usurped the old bromide “speaking truth to power.” They now speak rhetoric to the masses.

This deliberate misinterpretation of American Factory was, in fact, amplification of the political design that, no doubt, was always part of Netflix’s game plan when it signed Barack and Michelle Obama jointly to an impresario contract. (The monetary figure remains undisclosed, but the timing of Netflix’s offer corresponded with the Obamas’ well-publicized $65 million publishing agreements, proof of the media industry’s enthusiastic support of the former White House occupants in their role as cultural influencers.)

The Netflix-Obama nexus is stranger and more significant than American Factory itself. Calling their curator unit “Higher Ground,” Netflix and the Obamas remind us of Michelle’s fraudulent 2016 campaign boast “When they go lower, we go higher.” What could be lower than an ex-president and his mate perpetuating a counter-offensive to the successive administration? Could Juan and Evita Perón, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu have matched the divisiveness — or such wealth and potency — implicit in that lofty moniker? The Hollywood-Obama collusion was first apparent when Michelle made an Oscar telecast speech in 2013.