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AP ‘Fact Focus’ Elastically Redefines Terms to Defend Biden The latest “fact-checkers” ploy. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ap-fact-focus-elastically-redefines-terms-to-defend-biden/

Reading the “fact-checkers” in the press sometimes triggers memories of the comic book hero Plastic Man, who could contort into all sorts of shapes. Take the Associated Press, and immigration reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego.

The headline was “Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded.” Spagat had to redefine all sorts of words like “secretly” to defend President Joe Biden’s fly-over-the-border policies.

The Spagat dispatch began: “In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States.”

AP noted that on Jan. 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (if you can call them that) reported “327,000 immigrants were vetted and authorized for travel.” The government flew in more than 67,000 Cubans, 126,000 Haitians, 53,000 Nicaraguans and 81,000 Venezuelans.

Trump said, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown — migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders … It was unbelievable.”

How was this false? Spagat elastically argued, “But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly.” Trump never said “randomly,” or “secretly.” He said “parts unknown.”

Media Gaslight The Public About The Disastrous Biden Transcripts

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/13/media-gaslight-the-public-about-the-disastrous-biden-transcripts/

Soon after the transcripts of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden were released, the mainstream press — as though handed talking points by the White House — said they weren’t nearly as bad as Hur had made them out to seem in his report.

“Paints a nuanced portrait,” says the Washington Post. “Transcript shows nuance,” says The Hill. “The interview transcript is more complicated,” says the Associated Press. “Shows memory lapses, but also detailed exchanges,” says NBC News.

CBS News even dismissed evidence of dementia — “Biden appears to be reaching for words he cannot find. Twice, the phrase ‘fax machine’ eludes him, and he confuses Iraq and Afghanistan for Iran” — by saying that such “missteps appear to be common lapses for Mr. Biden who for years has struggled with names and dates in public speaking engagements.”

So, you see, no problem here.

But read the transcript yourself. It’s not “complicated,” or “nuanced.” As we suspected, it provides the perfect context for Hur’s contention that Biden is an old man with memory problems.

For example, we counted 37 instances where Biden says “I don’t remember” during his interviews with Hur. That’s a lot of nuance.

The transcript also shows that Biden flat-out lied to the public about Hur bringing up Beau’s death, or that Hur asked him when he died. What actually transpired should be deeply troubling to anyone who cares about the nation.

Blaming Israel For the Stampede Deaths in Gaza The uncritical acceptance of Hamas’ claims. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/blaming-israel-for-the-stampede-deaths-in-gaza/

Rushing to judgment, many political leaders, and much of the world’s media, have uncritically accepted Hamas’ claim that the IDF is responsible for the deaths of 104 Gazans on February 29 at a site where a convoy of more on 30 aid trucks was trying to make its way to a distribution point, when thousands of Gazans swarmed over the trucks, trying to loot them and carry off their cargo of food aid. What is not in dispute is that a great many Gazans died, though the Hamas figure of 104 may be an exaggeration. What is also not in dispute is that the IDF fired some shots and that thousands of Gazans swarmed over the aid trucks, trying to loot them. The Israelis say they did not fire into the crowd. First they fired warning shots into the air, and then, when a group of Gazans failed to be dissuaded by those warning shots and continued to move menacingly toward them, the IDF shot “fewer than ten” Gazans. The IDF maintains that the vast majority of those who died did so when they were either trampled upon in the stampede to loot the trucks, or actually fell under the wheels of the trucks that continued to move, albeit slowly, forward. More on this incident can be found here: “US blocks Security Council motion blaming Israel for deadly Gaza aid convoy incident,” Times of Israel, March 1, 2024:

Amid American opposition, Arab nations failed Thursday overnight to get immediate support for a UN Security Council statement that would have blamed Israeli forces for the more than 100 reported deaths as Palestinians in northern Gaza swarmed an aid convoy.

Joe Biden, An American Autocrat (According To The New York Times)

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/08/joe-biden-an-american-autocrat-according-to-the-new-york-times/

The left seems increasingly resigned to the fact that Donald Trump could defeat Joe Biden in a rematch this November. So much so that it is busy speculating about the hellscape Trump II will unleash.

He will destroy democracy. He will rule as an authoritarian. And so forth.

The New York Times took another stab at it Thursday in its daily email newsletter, The Morning.

David Leonhardt, who runs the newsletter, says that a good way to understand how Trump might govern in a second term is to look at his “affinity” for Viktor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, who has become the bête noire of the left.

So, Leonhardt does what journalists always do when they are trying to understand something: they talk to other journalists. In this case, the Times’ Central and Eastern Europe bureau chief Andrew Higgins.

Leonhardt’s first question to Higgins sets the tone for the rest of the newsletter: People often describe Orban as autocratic. But he’s not a ruler who jails or kills his opponents. Can you describe how he suppresses dissent?

The point is to scare readers about what Trump will do if he wins in November.

We can’t say whether Higgins’ portrayal of Orban is accurate — we doubt it’s even close to the mark. But we noticed something in Higgins’ answers. All his attempts to define Orban as an autocratic ruler apply to President Joe Biden, not Trump.

So, as an experiment, we swapped the names from Orban to Biden and replaced other references. We were struck by the results.

But judge for yourselves. Here is Thursday’s The Morning newsletter, updated. (All of our changes to the original are indicated in bold.)

George Soros Set to Control Second-Largest Chain of Radio Stations

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/14/george-soros-set-control-second-largest-chain-radio-stations/

Billionaire and left-wing philanthropist George Soros has been buying up debt to acquire a controlling stake in the second-largest radio broadcaster in the country, Audacy.

Court filings and sources close to the situation told the New York Post that Soros Fund Management has “bought up $400 million of debt in Audacy — the No. 2 US radio broadcaster behind iHeartMedia with stations including New York’s WFAN and 1010 WINS, as well as Los Angeles-based KROQ, according to bankruptcy filings.”

Soros could than have control of more than 220 radio stations nationwide. One Republican insider close to the situation told the outlet that Soros could be trying to have media outlets to potentially influence public opinion during the 2024 election.

“This is scary,” the source said.

Should Soros prove successful, he will likely have a 40 percent stake in the company’s senior debt, which would give him strong control of the company when it emerges from bankruptcy. He will not have a majority.

When Journalism Dies :Sebastian Junger

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/when-journalism-dies/

The truth dies with it

It’s hard to know what to make of the international press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-educated, most have presumably ignored professional opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more money than journalism — and generally don’t get them killed. If you’re smart enough to tease the truth out of the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda of most war zones — and most countries — you’re probably smart enough to do pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the restaurant business. Or flipping houses in Florida. And yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people troop off to make almost no money reporting on the world’s tragedies and failures. I hardly have a friend in the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown up, detained, or threatened with execution. And yet they persist. I’ve lost one close friend and numerous acquaintances to war.

If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it, many will resort to the tired piety that someone must bear witness to the world’s horrors, but let’s have some honesty here. Journalism is one of the most important jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profession is a source of profound pride, but we don’t need to pretend selflessness to have merit. No other profession — lawyer, logger, preschool teacher — bothers to, so why should we? Journalists are some of the most ego-driven people I know, as well as some of the most principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be thought of more accurately as an addiction to having a life of great meaning and consequence. What’s addictive is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a different cloth. Which indeed many of them are.

I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.

Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because we rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather forecasters, safety inspectors, structural engineers, and radiologists all provide unvarnished opinions so that we can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different.

Many Reporters Paid for Covering the Russiagate Story Matt Tiabbi

https://www.racket.news/p/many-reporters-paid-for-covering?

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows.

An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Pushed’ Missouri’s GOP Elections Chief, But You Won’t Hear It From Big Media BY: Shawn Fleetwood

https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/14/leftists-shoved-and-pushed-missouris-gop-elections-chief-but-you-wont-hear-it-from-big-media/

A leftist agitator was arrested last week for physically harassing Missouri Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

Corporate media regularly run dishonest articles hyping concerns about the safety of election officials throughout the country. So, why haven’t they reported on Missouri’s leading election official getting accosted by leftist agitators last week?

The incident in question occurred on Feb. 6, when Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was attempting to enter a venue hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Held at a local business in Jefferson City, the event took place following remarks by Israeli Consul General Maor Elbaz-Starinsky before the Missouri General Assembly.

According to KOMU, a local NBC affiliate, anti-Israel demonstrators were already in the area and blocking traffic prior to Ashcroft’s arrival. Despite being asked by the Jefferson City Police Department (JCPD) to “clear the roadway,” the agitators “began blocking access to several local businesses, including the private event.” One such demonstrator, who has been identified as 20-year-old Ainslee Harkins, was arrested for trespassing after she “allegedly entered the private event and would not leave.”

Video footage of the incident shows Ashcroft walking by the protesters — who had lined up to block entrance to the facility — upon arriving at the private venue. After reaching the entrance to the building, Ashcroft attempted to open the door but was accosted by some of the demonstrators.

“There’s a lot of yelling and screaming but as I was just walking along the sidewalk, it was fine until I turned left to actually head into the doorway,” Ashcroft told The Federalist. “That’s when they … collapsed around me and [started] shoving me and pushing me.”

Despite being jostled, Ashcroft kept attempting to enter the facility. As he was reaching for the doorhandle, Ashcroft said one agitator — who video footage appears to show grabbed the secretary — told him he was going to “throw me to the ground.”

CNN rearranges the deck chairs… again The network is attempting to put itself at the center of the anti-Trump universe Stephen L. Miller

https://thespectator.com/newsletter/cnn-rearranges-the-deck-chairs-again-bad-press-02-06-2024/

After CNN ousted Chris Licht, who attempted, at least, to moderate CNN’s biased news coverage, the floundering network has found itself in limbo, unsure of how much more it wanted to lean into a professional, “definitely not biased” news infotainment network.

Now, new boss Mark Thompson has signaled a clear direction for the network in this election year: All Donald Trump, All the Time, with changes once again to its morning and midday line-up. All CNN is really doing, though, is shuffling deck chairs around the network as ratings continue to languish behind networks like the History and Hallmark channels.

What Thompson and other CNN executives don’t seem to get is that the brand is the problem, the brand that has found itself in peril over the course of the past six years. CNN can reshuffle the same dishonest media news personalities while attempting to juice the last remaining drops of credibility it’s attempted to fashion over the last thirty years, but all that has gone out the window for a network that still insists on existing as a kind of zombie form of liberalism, that unlike MSNBC, refuses to admit its editorial leanings.

CNN will move Kasie Hunt to mornings now. Hunt (like most current new personalities) made her name as a correspondent during the 2016 presidential campaign, hounding various GOP candidates while ignoring Democrats, which is pretty much a standard résumé requirement to end up in a CNN chair these days.

CNN has also moved former White House grandstander Jim Acosta from a little-watched Sunday daytime show to a little-watched, weekly daytime slot. Acosta will presumably also offer live, breaking-news situations. Acosta famously made his reputation by making Trump administration White House press briefings about him and his questions about immigration and the Statue of Liberty — a topic he has somehow all but forgotten as the country faces a border crisis not seen in thirty-five years, and New York City threatens to deport criminal migrants.

Since Jim Acosta’s attention-seeking antics were rewarded with his own CNN show, his line-up has included a who’s who of Donald Trump’s circus cadre. His regular guest rotations have included George Conway, Adam Kinzinger, Mary Trump and others whose sole existence is to somehow remind everyone how very bad Trump is, and also how much they used to suck up to him personally and professionally.

But Thompson and CNN see an election year coming and are once again attempting to put CNN at the center of the anti-Trump universe, positioning itself as both a Donald Trump elevator network, while trying to maintain Jeff Zucker’s hires of #Resistance. Back then, it sacrificed mainstream cachet for the viewership of fierce partisans — and it’s hoping to repeat the trick eight years later.

Dementia And Double Standards

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/22/dementia-and-double-standards/

Every once in a while media bias is so flagrant, it’s worth pointing out.

At an event in North Carolina last Thursday, President Joe Biden called out for a congresswoman with whom he claimed he’d just been photographed. She was, at the time, in Washington, D.C.

At an event in New Hampshire the next day, presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about Jan. 6.

Guess which mental lapse was ignored while the other was covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, ABC News, The Hill, PBS, and countless other news outlets.

About a minute into his speech about the taxpayer money he’s dumping into high-speed rail, Biden veered off his teleprompter and apparently forgot where he was, or what day it was.

“Where’s Deborah?” he asks, referring to Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington. “Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That’s probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn’t be here, actually. That’s not true. I got it mixed up.”