RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/01/09/npr-promotes-pornography-for-kids-n1659974

Conservatives have been calling for the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR) for years now because of its blatant political bias, but now they have a new reason to deprive the news outlet of its federal funding.

This week, NPR published a misleading and disturbing essay by Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, a controversial graphic memoir documenting Kobabe’s journey to coming out as “nonbinary.” In addition to being “nonbinary,” Kobabe has nonsensical “preferred pronouns.”

Kobabe laments in her NPR essay that Gender Queer has become the most challenged book in public school libraries. “Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns,” she wrote. “There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all.”

Related: NPR Releases Hardcore Abortion Porn Audio to Savor on Your Morning Commute

By Kobabe’s telling, the book is challenged because of discrimination. “I was obviously already aware that queer, trans, and nonbinary narratives often receive pushback.” But this is incredibly misleading. In fact, Gender Queer is most often challenged because it contains graphic depictions of minors participating in sex acts — a detail Kobabe conveniently omits in her essay.

She was, however, questioned about the graphic nature of some of the illustrations in an interview with NPR. “Let me ask you this. Some of the criticism is about how explicit the book is. There are some graphic panels where you’re describing some of your sexual encounters. Did you consider doing less graphic versions of those scenes?” NPR’s Claire Murashima asked.

“You know, I really didn’t,” Kobabe said. “I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make.”

Kobabe insists that her book could have been even more explicit. Opponents of the book say it is pornographic — and having seen screenshots of the illustrations, I can say this characterization is correct — which means it has no business in public libraries or school libraries. That NPR is promoting this book and giving a platform to the author, who is clearly a groomer, is disturbing. So, yes, NPR is promoting pornography aimed at grooming young children.

Last year, NPR also broadcasted a segment about “queer” sex education, which, among other things, denounced the “terrible lie” that STDs make one “dirty.”

It’s long overdue for NPR to lose its federal funding. Promoting pornography that targets kids should be the last straw.

https://www.city-journal.org/can-capitalism-save-hollywood

The key point here is not that culture or media should be liberal, conservative, or fabulist, but expansive enough to include all three. Until those in Hollywood and Manhattan realize that their approach is alienating a huge segment of their audiences, their bottom lines will continue to suffer.

After a decade of rapid growth, the nation’s media and entertainment complex is facing retrenchment and, perhaps, a necessary reappraisal. Firms are consolidating. Workers are being laid off at Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, CBS, and other production houses. News media firms like CNN, Gannet, and Buzzfeed are planning similar actions. In 2022, stocks in media companies lost $500 billion in value, and stocks in tech firms, increasingly big players in entertainment and news, suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion.

This decline reflects the growing gap between the legacy media and at least half their potential audience. According to Gallup, overall public trust in the media is lower than it’s ever been; barely one-third of poll respondents express confidence, half the percentage that felt that way in 1978. Hollywood, television, and radio register similarly low levels of support.

Meantime, much of the established media see their primary mission not as informing or entertaining but propagating ideologies. Yet this shift, executives know, is not sustainable according to the most critical metric—profits. “I think in the end no one much cares about politics but they do care about money,” one well-placed executive suggests. “People know that sex and violence sell better than political lectures. In the end, if you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Hollywood and the American news media have been traditionally profit-hungry and market-oriented. Entertainment, in particular, started as primarily an outsider’s industry, forged largely by Jewish immigrants who had worked previously as upholsterers, butchers, furriers, and clothing merchants. Though nepotism kicked in early, many of the early stars were hardly theater aristocracy; early on, many were actually cowboys. The moguls, of course, were rarely on horseback, but they succeeded, as Neil Gabler notes, because they “marketed movies like clothing.”

By contrast, the European film industry has long been dominated by state enterprises and funding. It was seen as a national asset—a way of asserting cultural independence from what the French, for example, saw as cultural colonization from Hollywood. A similar pattern emerged in news media. But while the BBC may have been the most respected name in news, it was U.S. companies—all founded by entrepreneurs like CBS’s William Paley, RCA’s David Sarnoff, and CNN’s Ted Turner—that became the most influential global sources of information. In historic terms, the Russian, Chinese, and European news services never had a chance against their opportunistic American competitors determined to monetize audiences.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/the_media_glosses_over_the_recession_calamity_america_faces.html

Joe Biden’s media supporters keep assuring us that things are getting better with the economy. However, Joe Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, wrote on New Year’s Day of the reality—we are in a recession.  Stop drinking the “we’re OK” Kool-Aid. 

Biden, with help from the Federal Reserve and Congress, wiped out $10 trillion in American wealth in 2022.  This is record-breaking destruction.

Steve Bannon at War Room rolled out a Financial Times chart from earlier in the week showing what an outlier 2022 was when compared to prior years.

The US should be in the right upper quadrant of the chart, but 2022 put the US in the left lower quadrant.  The 2022 situation doesn’t even factor in the effect of the 1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. The data point on the chart reflects the value of assets in stocks and bonds, with no effort to measure other assets like real estate.  It might be worse if other economic measures are considered. 

Just the other day, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Branch, relying on multiple indicators, declared that we have a recession. This information is no surprise, but it raises questions about what’s happening at the rest of the Fed’s branches.

https://www.city-journal.org/democracy-under-siege

The impending collapse of democracy—that’s not small beer. So imagine the alarm of New York Times subscribers when, on October 3, an essay titled “Democracy Challenged” appeared in the newspaper with the subhead, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.”

If the New York Times wishes to limit gun ownership in America, articles like this can hardly be said to help. Before leaving the house the day the article was published, I opened our front door as slowly as I could, motioned to the family to stay in place until I had peered up both ends of the street, and then instructed everyone to walk behind me as we all moved as noiselessly as possible toward the sidewalk and our several destinations. “Do what you can to save representative democracy in America!” my wife whispered to the kids as they set off for school.

I am joking, of course. The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/19/david-french-yes-the-dispatch-takes-money-to-help-leftists-keep-the-internet-conservatism-free/

David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.

“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch became a paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”

As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016. By 2020, more than 50 publications including French’s The Dispatch agreed to do Big Tech’s dirty censorship work. Throttlers like The Dispatch are tasked by Facebook “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”

The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/16/corporate-media-can-stomp-and-cry-all-it-wants-its-special-twitter-privileges-are-ending/

Corporate media ‘journalists’ are crying like children because they no longer get special permission to dox their political enemies.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, corporate journalists freely persecuted their political enemies by posting their identities and locations to enable in-person harassment, but not anymore. This week, Musk decided he’s no longer allowing anyone, including journalists, to jeopardize people’s safety via Twitter, and he began temporarily suspending the accounts of offending members of the press. 

“Everyone’s going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.

The crackdown on doxxing is personal for Twitter’s CEO. On Wednesday, Musk reported that his 2-year-old son named “X” was followed by a “crazy stalker” who had mistaken X for Musk. According to Musk, the stalker blocked the car driving his son and “climbed onto the hood.” The incident motivated Musk to suspend several high-profile journalists guilty of doxxing.

This caused the corporate media to fly into hysterics. “Elon Musk censors the press,” said one CNN headline.” “[U]nprecedented,” stated the flabbergasted Axios. “Twitter suspends journalists who wrote about owner Elon Musk,” alleged The Associated Press. “Musk has begun banning journalists who have criticized him on Twitter,” whined Washington Post TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz.

All this outrage is performative. Firstly, Musk made it clear why the journalists are suspended, and it’s not because they “criticized” him, as Lorenz said. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” wrote Musk.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/what-twitter-files-say-future-journalism

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s decision to share internal records with a trio of independent journalists spawned stories about how Twitter executives worked to invent justifications for content decisions they’d already made on ideological grounds.

But it also feeds into a story about how Twitter itself, and other platforms, like the subscription service Substack, have decentralized the media so effectively that individual voices can drive the news in ways once reserved for legacy outlets .

Journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger each combed through reams of Twitter emails, message chains from the workplace communication tool Slack, and screenshots to publish five sets of analyses on Twitter. Their final products took the form of lengthy Twitter threads about how Twitter suppressed stories on Hunter Biden’s business dealings during the 2020 election and how the company ultimately decided to ban former President Donald Trump permanently.

The journalists all had several things in common: They all run popular Substack pages, they have all written pieces in the past for legacy media outlets like the New York Times, and they all have large Twitter followings.

The least-followed of the three, Shellenberger, still had more than 357,000 Twitter followers before he posted his batch of the so-called Twitter Files. He now has more than 480,000. Taibbi started December with less than 750,000 Twitter followers and now boasts more than 1.5 million.

And perhaps most importantly, all three have been outspoken about what they see as the excesses of the Left on cultural issues such as speech and corporate influence.

“To me, the media’s response to the Twitter Files is itself a scandal,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/13/abc-cbs-and-other-corporate-media-black-out-coverage-of-twitter-files-story/

Corporate media outlets have all but refused to cover the unfolding “Twitter Files” published by independent journalists including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi throughout the last week. According to Grabien, a news clipping and transcribing service, a search of its database finds that among the three major networks — ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News — the words “Twitter Files” have been discussed on air a collective total of one time since Dec. 2, the day Elon Musk announced the release of the first batch.

When it comes to cable network coverage, CNN and MSNBC have mentioned the words “Twitter Files” just 13 times and 17 times, respectively, since Dec. 2, compared to Fox News’s 374 mentions of the keywords. A Monday search on CNN’s website for “Twitter Files” turns up zero search results for any coverage of the independent journalists’ ongoing investigations.

The media blackout is odd, considering that the first five parts of the ongoing series have covered some of the corporate media’s previously favorite topics such as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and Twitter’s subsequent banning of former President Donald Trump, which have received in-depth coverage for the last two years.

Other significant findings uncovered in the documents Musk turned over to Weiss and Taibbi include the role former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker played in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the tech company’s frequent secret meetings with federal intelligence agencies in the run-up to the 2020 election. While most Americans are not frequent users of Twitter, the company’s relationship with government intelligence agencies and its apparent influence on federal elections is undeniably worthy of major network coverage.