Category: Media

It’s Important To Be Honest About What Today’s Media Actually Are.

“It’s time to stop acting like these political activists are professionals who do honest journalism. Continuing that pretense is not doing a favor to the public. It’s not true. With very few exceptions, these people are not there to do journalism, and we need to be honest about that with the public. Not everyone is as bad as everyone else, but nearly the entire press corps is somewhere on the Democrat activist scale, from lefty to fringe, from shrewd to clumsy and clownish.”

On Monday night, former President Donald Trump announced the launch of the official website of the 45th president of the United States, 45Office.com.

 

Some questions answer themselves, and these ⇓  are some of them.

Biden’s Gag Order on the Border Patrol.

So much for the new era of White House transparency, I suppose.

Why are we not seeing more outrage from the Washington Post, the New York Times or CNN?

Where are the complaints about the authoritarian muzzling of the media? Even as the major press outlets do manage to mention the situation, shouldn’t they be rebelling against this blackout?

Or is criticism of a Democratic administration still verboten to the point where most of them will quietly sit on their hands?

Dan Bongino to take over Rush Limbaugh’s radio time slot.

Cumulus Media’s Westwood One announced on Wednesday that Dan Bongino will be launching a new radio show during the time slot left vacant by conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh.

The program, “The Dan Bongino Show,” will broadcast 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET in select markets starting May 24, including KABC Los Angeles, WLS Chicago, WBAP Dallas, KSFO San Francisco, and WMAL Washington, D.C.

BLUF:
“Just how many anonymously sourced stories are fraudulent? If it can happen this easily, who is to say it doesn’t happen often? Further, how many of these bogus stories have enjoyed the backing of supposed independent corroboration when, in fact, newsrooms most likely talked to the same person or people?”
President Trump got a lot of flak for calling the media the “enemy of the people.” But it seems like they’ve been doing a good job at proving Trump was right about them.

The Washington Post’s Fake Trump Quote Scandal Is a Lot Worse Than You Think

The media conspiracy against Trump became a lot more serious on Monday when the Washington Post retracted its January story claiming that President Donald Trump had pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud” in the 2020 election and said that he’d be a “national hero” if he did.

A recording of the call definitively proved that the quotes cited by the Washington Post, and then parroted by other outlets, were never actually said by the president.

But, as Becket Adams explains at the Washington Examiner, “the Washington Post’s dud of a ‘bombshell’ isn’t even the most scandalous thing about this episode in media malfeasance.”

The most scandalous thing, Adams, argues, is that several different newsrooms “claimed they independently ‘confirmed’ the original ‘scoop’ with anonymous sources of their own.”

NBC News reported it “confirmed The Post’s characterization of the Dec. 23 call through a source familiar with the conversation.”

USA Today claimed a “Georgia official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters confirmed the details of the call.”

ABC News reported: “President Donald Trump phoned a chief investigator in Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office asking the official to ‘find the fraud’ and telling this person they would be a ‘national hero’ for it, an individual familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.”

PBS NewsHour and CNN likewise appeared to claim they independently “confirmed” the story through their own anonymous sources.

The Washington Post claimed its quotes were confirmed by an anonymous source, and at least five major news outlets claimed to have independently confirmed that Trump said things he never said. “The most likely scenario is ABC, the Washington Post, and others talked to the same person or group,” theorizes Adams. “It’s either that or a bunch of people managed somehow to be wrong about a very specific claim, which is highly unlikely.”

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Washington Post Admits Trump’s ‘Find the Fraud’ Quote Was Fake News

The Washington Post has issued a correction to a January 9 story in which it claimed that then-President Donald Trump had told a Georgia state elections investigator to “find the fraud.” In fact, an audio recording showed Trump said no such thing.

The Post‘s original article was headlined: “‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.” It relied on information from a single anonymous source, described as “an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.”

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

The Washington Examiner reported on Sunday evening:

The Wall Street Journal first published audio last week of the roughly six-minute call on Dec. 23 between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, in which Trump urged her to look for fraud in mail-in ballots in Fulton County, where much of Atlanta is located.

…

[T]he audio shows that early reports in January about that call, based on anonymous sourcing, misquoted Trump. In those reports, Trump was quoted as urging Watson to “find the fraud,” and if she did so, the investigator would be a “national hero.”

Outlets such as CNN published these quotes, corroborating what was first reported by the Washington Post. While CNN’s version, reliant on a single anonymous source, remains unchanged, the Washington Post stuck a long correction note to the top of its report …

Both CNN and the Washington Post reported previously that state officials said they did not believe a recording of the Trump-Watson call existed, but in recent days both have new reports that say officials found the recording in Watson’s trash folder on her device while responding to a public records request.

Democrats used the phony “find the fraud” quote in the Senate impeachment trial of former President Trump last month.

De Jure and De Facto Censorship: Why We Need to Be Concerned About Both.

The last few weeks have seen dustups over the decision by the foundation overseeing Dr. Seuss’s works (i.e. Dr. Seuss Enterprises) to cease publication of six books deemed problematic, as well as claims that the old Pepé Le Pew cartoon leads to rape culture. These recent incidents add to what appears to be an increasing effort to restrict the availability of controversial books, TV shows and other fictional media, as well as access to social media. These come mostly from non-governmental producers and distributors of such content, often in the context of campaigns of moral outrage playing out on social media. Do these steps amount to censorships or bannings? This question has caused considerable debate and confusion, but it helps us understand what we mean by censorship. It is not uncommon for people to claim, for instance, that Target banning sales of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage or the Seuss foundation’s decision no longer to sell six of his books are basically nothing to worry about, because these decisions were made by private entities, not by government. We are also assured that these decisions don’t really amount to censorship because the materials are still available if people really wish to find them.

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BLUF:
Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse.
As social media empowers uncredentialed people to be heard, society’s most powerful actors seek to cast themselves as victims and delegitimize all critiques.

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

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Providing confirmation, and self identification (it’s nice when they do intelligence gathering work for you, isn’t it?) that universities are domestic enemy institutions that must eventually be eliminated in self defense.

Top digital journalism professor at Columbia calls for censorship of conservative media.

The top digital journalism professor at Columbia University recently called for some center-right news outlets to be censored in the name of cracking down on misinformation.

Professor Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Media, said it is not an infringement of the First Amendment to audit and vet some news outlets to promote a “truthful news environment.”

She made the comments in response to concerns among U.S. Reps. Jerry McNerney and Anna Eshoo, who sent letters to a multitude of streaming companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Charter, Dish, Cox and Hulu, asking them about censoring “misinformation” in the conservative media.

The Democratic senior members expressed that “right-wing media ecosystem[s]” like “Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), and Fox News” must be held accountable for supposed fallacies on their networks and suggested they be booted from these venues.

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Noop. Even after they learn this, they don’t get to lecture anyone.

14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns
Guns aren’t that complicated. Learn a little bit about them before lecturing other people about gun safety.

Guns can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But so are articles about guns written by people who don’t understand anything about them.

There’s sadly no excuse to be ignorant about firearms. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They’re owned and operated safely by tens of millions of Americans each year. Our Constitution guarantees our individual right to possess guns so that we might be able to defend ourselves from those who would violently take away our freedom. Many gun controllers, however — some of whom have bylines for major media organizations — don’t actually know the first thing about firearms.

Here’s a good example of the kind of self-inflicted injury that can result from weaponizing an ill-informed opinion about guns and gun-related paraphernalia, courtesy of Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post:

Unfortunately, Reilly is hardly alone in his complete ignorance of how guns work. Our nation is facing an epidemic of gun-related misreporting. As a public service to those who have opinions about guns but don’t really want to spend much time learning anything about them, I’ve compiled a simple list of 14 basic things everyone should understand before writing or talking about guns.

1) Don’t Lecture Anyone On Gun Safety Until You Understand The Basic Rules

These are rules literally every person should understand, because you never know when you might be in a situation that requires you to handle a firearm. To seasoned gun owners, these basic gun safety rules are gospel. If faithfully followed, they will prevent the likelihood of you ever shooting someone who did not pose an immediate and mortal threat to an innocent person.

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Social media censorship legislation proposed in Kansas

A social media censorship bill, targeting companies like Facebook and Twitter that have been censoring and de-platforming conservative viewpoints, is being considered in Kansas.

According to Dr. Mark Steffen, the Republican State Senator from Hutchinson who is sponsoring the bill, his measure takes a unique approach to work around the Section 230 federal protections social media companies enjoy.

The Social Media Anti-Censorship Bill” SB187 targets the terms of service everyone agrees to — generally without having read them — when they create an account, under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act.

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TV Shows Push Gun Control Myths — in Sync With Biden

Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures. President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday. And the television networks aren’t waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort.

CBS is in a full-court press for gun control on its evening entertainment television shows. The bad guys are always white supremacists who use machine guns — supposedly AR-15s — to commit mass public shootings. Criminals in Mexico supposedly get machine guns from the United States. A father’s desire to protect his family only leads to tragedy when his daughter gets into the gun safe and uses the weapon in a mass public shooting. And guns in the home pose a danger for children. Gun registration is necessary for solving crime.

NBC isn’t to be left out, showing a woman who tried but failed to use a gun to protect herself. Instead, her gun was taken from her and used to kill a police officer. The lesson is that owning a gun will only bring you grief.

And that’s just in the first six weeks of the year. Every show gives an inaccurate impression about firearms, thereby helping in this push for gun restrictions. It’s as though these shows were written by Michael Bloomberg’s gun control organizations. Indeed, the networks are working with these groups. A member of  Moms Demand Action recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed headlined: “Guns are white supremacy’s deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate.” So it isn’t too surprising that show after show portrays neo-Nazis using machine guns to commit mass public shootings. CBS’s “SWAT,” “FBI: Most Wanted,” “FBI,” and” Bull” all push this theme. They often refer explicitly to these guns as AR-15s. Others, such as “Magnum PI” and “NCIS LA,” constantly show criminals using machine guns.

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Rush Limbaugh – and the Importance of Being Hated

James O’Keefe——-

It is with great sadness that I learned my dear friend, inspirational figure, and American radio icon Rush Limbaugh has passed away.

I will never forget what Rush said when someone once asked him about how he handled being hated:

There’s a good reason for the media hating me.  And once I came to grips with that fact, that there’s a reason they should hate me, then it makes sense.  One of the toughest things I had to do was learn to psychologically accept the fact that being hated was a sign of success. 

Most people aren’t raised to be hated.  We’re all raised to be loved.  We want to be loved.  We’re told to do things to be loved and appreciated and liked.  We’re raised, don’t offend anybody, be nice.  Everybody wants total acceptance. Everybody wants respect. Everybody wants to be loved, and so when you learn that what you do is going to engender hatred you have to learn to accept that as a sign of success.  That was a tough psychological thing for me.

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In Must-Watch Clip, Trump Attorney “Michael van der Veen, Citizen” Destroys Media

Saturday night, President Trump’s attorney, Michael van der Veen, appeared on CBS News and was asked about Sen. Mitch McConnell’s comments after Trump’s acquittal. As Bonchie covered earlier, McConnell said that “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” and that Trump is “still liable for everything he did during his period in office.” When he was specifically asked whether he was surprised to hear such a serious rebuke from the leader of the Republican party in the Senate, van der Veen’s expression, tone, and words said it all.

I’m not surprised to hear a politician say anything at all. No.

Crickets. The CBS News anchor, Lana Zak, wasn’t quite sure what to make of the reply. She decided to move forward and attempt to “gotcha” van der Veen, and it doesn’t go well for her at all. This, like Friday’s supercut of Democrats inciting violence, is a must-watch clip for two reasons: one, it’s rare that someone so articulately calls out the media, and two, it’s rare that the media have a guest they’re afraid to just cut off as they speak “their truth.”

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I’ll take ‘As A Post‘ for $500, Alex.

What’s surprising is that she hasn’t deleted all of this in the usual attempt at making believe it really never happened.

How Dumb Are Reporters?

Years ago, I had a lot of fun with the New York Times Corrections section, which documented the fact, day after day, that the paper’s reporters and editors had little knowledge of mathematics, science, literature or history. The gaffes that appeared in the Times were stunning to anyone with a halfway-decent education.

I have been off that beat for a while, but our reporters’ educational deficiencies continue to amaze. Thus we have NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who tried to one-up Ted Cruz. Bad decision. Cruz described the Democrats’ farcical impeachment proceeding as “like Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mitchell sought to correct Cruz:

Heh. Cruz and many others explained that Faulkner got the line from Shakespeare, a writer of whom Mitchell apparently is unaware. Mitchell tried to retire from the field with her ego intact:

Here’s the thing, though. No one who studied Faulkner even superficially could fail to understand that the title of The Sound and the Fury was a Shakespearean reference. This was explained in every freshman English class where Faulkner’s book has been taught.

Here’s why: The full Shakespeare quote, from MacBeth, says that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Why did Faulkner choose that Shakespeare quote for the title of his book? Because the first section of The Sound and the Fury is, in fact, a “tale told by an idiot.” It is a narrative by a character named Benji who lacks normal mental capacity. He describes many things that he does not understand–other people playing golf, for example–and the art of that section of the book is for Faulkner to write it so that Benji doesn’t understand what he is seeing, but we do.

This is all undergraduate English stuff, and no one could study Faulkner in college without the origin and significance of The Sound and the Fury being explained. And, if you didn’t take English classes in college, as Andrea Mitchell perhaps did not, you could just Google it.

In short, by trying to match wits with Ted Cruz, Andrea Mitchell revealed herself as a person who knows little or nothing about either Shakespeare or Faulkner. That isn’t necessarily disgraceful, except that 1) she shouldn’t have picked a fight with a very smart guy from a position of ignorance, and 2) her fallback position, claiming to be a Faulkner scholar, made her look dumber than ever. Deservedly.

This is all trivial, except for one fact: the politicians, reporters, writers, editors, “intellectuals,” college professors and so on who try to intimidate you with their claim to be smarter and more knowledgeable than you, are, with only occasional exceptions, frauds.

UPDATE: I am sorry to report that Andrea Mitchell (who is allegedly noteworthy only because she is married to Alan Greenspan, maybe we should return to describing her that way) majored in English literature at Penn. So she has no excuse for being ignorant of both Shakespeare and Faulkner. Maybe she skipped class a lot, I don’t know. But one way or another, she failed to get the most basic education. And now she is trying to export her ignorance to the rest of us.

That is pretty much the story of the 21st century.

Here’s BLM and Antifa chanting “burn it down” in D.C. over the weekend. Wanna take bets on how many news outlets covered it?

 

On Saturday night, BLM and Antifa took to the streets of D.C., threatening to “burn it down” if their demands weren’t met.

After shouting for a bit and giving speeches on New Racism™, the crowd began heckling patrons enjoying their dinner.

Apart from its incendiary rhetoric, the demonstration stayed largely in “mostly peaceful protest” territory and no arrests were made despite some scuffles with police.

With that being said, approximately this👌 many news networks covered the news that a large mob of angry peeps were marching through D.C. saying they want to “burn it down:”

Considering the continuing National Guard presence in the city, the installation of permanent fencing, and non-stop rhetoric about the bad actors who broke into the Capitol last month…

Why do you think the media is being silent about this?

Las Vegas Sun Finally Releases Biden’s Anti-Gun Interview

Those who stay involved in the efforts to defend the Second Amendment have always known President Joe Biden is, to put it lightly, no friend to gun owners. During his campaign for the White House last year, the legacy media did everything they could to conceal that fact. The Las Vegas Sun recently revealed that it went so far as to bury an interview with candidate Biden that showed not just his disdain for our right to keep and bear arms, but his utter lack of comprehension of reality.

The interview took place on January 11, 2020, and was published last week—more than one year later—with the paper noting they “felt the interview was worth publishing to give readers a better idea of where Biden will lead the country.” Perhaps it would have been more helpful to their readers to have published the information BEFORE the 2020 election, rather than after, so they actually knew the views of Biden when they cast their ballot for President.

Again, people reading this already knew how anti-gun Biden is, but many others did not. We always thought that one of the purposes of the media was to get information that may not be widely known out to the public, especially when that information may better inform voters about candidates they may be considering supporting.

When seeking the Democrat nomination, Biden and his fellow candidates did everything possible to try to position themselves as the most anti-gun candidate. But after securing the nomination, Biden stopped talking about his anti-gun agenda, and most in the media stopped mentioning it. The Biden-Trump debates didn’t bring up guns, and neither did the vice-presidential debate.

The failure to discuss such an important topic seems odd, considering the Sun’s contention that “public sentiment for (gun control) is growing and support for the NRA is weakening.” If that were true, wouldn’t it be important to note the stark difference between Biden—an avowed anti-gun politician with a decades-long record of opposing the Second Amendment—and Donald Trump—a strong supporter of the right to keep and bear arms?

The truth is, most Americans do not believe in Joe Biden’s agenda of targeting lawful gun owners, and the media knows it. That’s most likely the reason this Sun interview didn’t see the light of day until now.

It may also explain why anti-gun lobbying groups spent millions on electing candidates while rarely actually mentioning gun control until they got called out on it.

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Newsweek Caught Stealth Editing 2015 Article to Smear Tom Cotton on “Ranger” Issue

We’re getting into scary territory if the media will just edit or erase anything that contradicts the truth of a Republican’s past or make Democrats look bad.

National Review covered Salon’s hit piece on Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), which tried to accuse him of lying about his military record.

But there’s a small part in the National Review article that should drive everyone mad.

At Salon, Roger Sollenberger claimed that completing Ranger School does not make one an actual Ranger. He also insisted that the military agrees with him. I emphasized the important part:

In his first run for Congress, Cotton leaned heavily on his military service, claiming to have been “a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and, in a campaign ad, to have “volunteered to be an Army Ranger.” In reality, Cotton was never part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the elite unit that plans and conducts joint special military operations as part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

Rather, Cotton attended the Ranger School, a two-month-long, small-unit tactical infantry course that literally anyone in the military is eligible to attend. Soldiers who complete the course earn the right to wear the Ranger tab — a small arch that reads “Ranger” — but in the eyes of the military, that does not make them an actual Army Ranger.

Newsweek jumped on Salon’s back with its own article about Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) telling Cotton that he wasn’t a Ranger if he didn’t wear the 75th Ranger Regiment beret.

Someone better put Crow in touch with retired Command Sergeant Major Rick Merritt because he said he knew of plenty of Rangers who served in other regiments.

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The Left Eats Itself: Petition Inside NPR Accuses Them of a ‘White Supremacist Culture.’

We’ve seen some of the nation’s largest liberal newspapers boil over in internal turmoil over race, so it’s only natural it would happen at National Public Radio. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner cited a manifesto for an “antiracist future” and the “transformation of public media” published at Current, a website for public broadcasting employees and insiders.

Organizer Celeste Headlee boasted on Twitter on Friday that she has over 450 signatories to this “vision” statement, which declares, “White supremacist culture and anti-blackness shape the policies, norms, and standards of public radio.”

It added, “They determine whose opinions are valued, whose voices are heard, whose stories are told and taken seriously, who is promoted, and whose resume never gets a second glance. Historically, black on-air talent are told their dialect and speaking voices do not fit the public radio prototype. There is a strong bias against journalists who have a distinct ethnic or regional tone in their vocal delivery.”

NPR’s All Things Considered had black co-anchor Michelle Morris and then black co-anchor Audie Cornish. Weekend All Things Considered stars black anchor Michel Martin. NPR added a “Code Switch” project in 2013 to pacify the desire to talk endlessly about race, and that included a promotional interview in August with the author of the book In Defense of Looting. But go ahead, suggest NPR is hopelessly “white supremacist.”

“It’s time for a new kind of journalism: anti-racist journalism. We hope to tear down public radio in order to build it back up,” it said. The media coverage should “center the most marginalized” and serve those who “have been traditionally underserved by corporate media.”

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