RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/from-media-bias-to-outright-partisanship.php

EXCERPT

In 2004, in an episode that became known as Rathergate, 60 Minutes tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents intended to put President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, back in the early 1970s, in a bad light. The fraud unraveled quickly as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy fakes that were full of substantive errors.

In less than 24 hours after the internet critique of the 60 Minutes story began, CBS News announced that it would conduct an investigation into what had happened. And it did. CBS News hired a former Attorney General of the U.S. to lead the investigation, and the report that he and others authored, the Thornburgh Report, was a devastating account of the dishonesty at CBS. Dan Rather was already gone by the time the report came out, and thereafter CBS fired Mary Mapes, the producer of the 60 Minutes segment, and several other employees.

The key point is that back in 2004, CBS News was seriously embarrassed that it had produced a false news report. It really did want, at least, to be seen as a fair and unbiased news source. And when the fraud was exposed, it took decisive action against the employees who had perpetrated it.

But over the next decade, that changed. Major news organizations have gone from being biased against conservatives to engaging in open warfare against conservatives. In 2016, Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the New York Times, publicly stated that the Times’ approach to covering the news had changed when it came to Donald Trump. No more neutrality, no more objectivity, the Times would openly attack Trump not just in its editorials, but in its news stories.

Shortly after Baquet made that announcement, the Russia collusion story hit the news, and it continued to dominate the news for the next two or three years.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/16/how-the-media-lost-touch-with-reality/

The American mainstream media are losing touch with reality. Journalists are increasingly drawn from elite backgrounds, and newsrooms are coalescing around a woke worldview. The media’s interest in race, gender and sexuality has exploded, while class issues and economic concerns struggle to get a look in. And when stories arrive that disrupt the woke narrative – from the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse to Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax – journalists often find themselves on the wrong side of the truth. How did the American media get into this state? And how can proper journalism recover?

Batya Ungar-Sargon is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. She joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: The woke have this notion that America is a white-supremacist country – that it always has been and it probably always will be. How do you think this notion of America being a permanently white-supremacist state came about?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: As racism and white supremacy in America have decreased, the obsession with race in the mainstream liberal media has absolutely skyrocketed. At the same time as our acceptance for things like interracial marriage has increased, the usage of the term ‘white supremacy’ in the liberal press has absolutely skyrocketed. It’s part of what sociologists call the ‘Great Awokening’. White liberals are becoming more extreme in their views on race than black and Latino Americans, who are much more socially conservative in general and are more moderate in their views on race.

The idea that all white people have white privilege that puts them above all people of colour started in the academy. It started with the postmodernist revolution, critical race theory (CRT), and the application of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist view in the cultural sphere. People will often call CRT ‘Marxist’, but the problem with CRT is an insufficiency of Marxism. There is no materialism in it. There is no class analysis.

This now common view that every interaction is about power is a very academic one. It was mainstreamed into American discourse through the media, which is increasingly populated by highly educated Americans, as opposed to the blue-collar journalists of yore. Today, 92 per cent of American journalists have a college degree.

https://www.city-journal.org/school-shootings-color-coded-parenting-standard-of-the-media

On April 19, 2021, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski suggested in a text to Chicago’s mayor that the parents of two children recently killed in Chicago’s gang activity had “failed those kids.” Kempczinski’s text became public in November 2021, prompting widespread accusations of racism and calls for his resignation. Kempczinski confessed to his white privilege and apologized profusely for holding parents responsible for the fate of their children.

On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.

The divergent reactions to the Kempczinski text message and the Crumbleys’ indictment illuminate the different standards to which minority parents and white parents are held. When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/12/chris-wallace-leaving-fox-news-n1541001

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/12/12/chris-wallace-leaving-fox-news-n1541001

At the end of the Fox News broadcast of Fox News Sunday, veteran reporter Chris Wallace made the startling announcement that he was leaving the network after 18 years.

“It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Wallace said.

Fox News released a statement, praising Wallace, saying, “We are extremely proud of our journalism and the stellar team that Chris Wallace was a part of for 18 years. The legacy of FOX News Sunday will continue with our star journalists, many of whom will rotate in the position until a permanent host is named.”

Wallace said he wants to “try something new” and to “go beyond” politics. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Wallace will join the new CNN streaming service.

There is much turmoil on the news side of Fox News as some of the reporters are pushing back against Tucker Carlson’s series on the Jan. 6 riots. Carlson’s controversial and speculative theories have made several Fox editors and reporters uncomfortable. There are also complaints that many of the opinion segments have crossed the line into conspiracy-mongering and fact-free opinion.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/john-hinderaker-and-joe-concha-speak-restoration-frontpagemagcom/

EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the  Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses  the evolution of media bias, fake news;

Transcript:

John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years.  And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.

So we started the website Power Line in 2002.  And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time.  And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible.  Their email addresses were public.  And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond.  And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories.  Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source.  But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen.  Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.

Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred.  “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light.  It was a complete fraud.  The documents were fakes.  And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/09/are-media-now-taking-orders-straight-from-the-white-house/

If you needed further proof that the big media are deeply biased toward the political left, look no further than the recent secret meetings held by the White House with some of its favorite news outlets. Why? To get them to spin bad economic news. And, given the generally low ethics and political bias of their profession, they’ll no doubt willingly do so.

Three top Biden officials appear to be spearheading the effort. Angry at what they see as unfair coverage of Biden’s supposed economic successes, they have decided to hold sub rosa sessions and phone calls as part of an “outreach” to the national media.

The media are of course willing to be used. After all, President Joe Biden’s administration is the furthest left in our nation’s history in the scope and content of its policies.

From the open border that has brought in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to naming out-and-proud Marxist nominees to key administration posts, from COVID lockdowns that have divided our nation but not stopped the Wuhan bug, to non-stop “stimulus” spending that has set off the worst inflation in decades, Biden literally has nothing to brag about, as we noted earlier this week.

President Jimmy Carter can now rest easy. He’s no longer the worst president of the postwar era. Biden is.

The White House decision to reach out to the media apparently came after a Dec. 3 rant by leftist Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who claims the media are treating Biden worse than they treated President Donald Trump — a laughable idea on its very face, given Biden’s spectacular failures on issue after issue, and the nonstop vitriol and scorn directed at Trump during his four years in office.

The three officials — National Economic Council Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti and port czar John Porcari — felt the bang-up job they were doing wasn’t getting through to the public.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-stonewalls-steele-dossier-disinformation-trump-nyt-washington-post-trump-11638718026?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Why don’t they just fess up and say they’re sorry?” That is the question journalists have asked about the corporate and institutional clients of my crisis-management business. It’s a question media companies should be asking themselves amid the implosion of the Steele dossier. Here we are, a few weeks after the dossier was discredited, and no one has paid a price.

Having had media companies as clients, I’ve found that when they’re under fire, they behave no differently from chemical or drug companies. Why? Because they don’t see coming clean as being in their self-interest.

Among other things, the truth can tarnish the brand and jam them up in court. So they often deny, stonewall, close ranks, and attack their critics. Two things media companies have that other businesses don’t is the ability to deliver news instantly and the mantle of moral authority.

The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the sources of disinformation leveled at our clients. The first factor in a successful disinformation campaign is an audience that desperately wants to believe something. Then you find a plausible allegation that fits the marketplace. Next, you implant an outrageous allegation within the plausible one. Finally, you find a trustworthy person, someone simpatico with media organizations, to let it rip.

tps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/28/reporters_question_yourselves_146782.html

If you have any doubt about whether the White House press corps has a different standard for President Joe Biden than for former President Donald Trump, consider the press briefings that followed their first physicals as president at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Biden’s physical occurred Friday.

On reflection, Team Trump was too transparent when then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders brought Ronny Jackson, then physician to the president, to the briefing room podium where he answered press questions for nearly an hour in January 2018.

Here’s a sampling of some of the more egregious press questions.

— “Are you confident of his prostate health?”

— “There have been reports that the president has forgotten names, that he is repeating himself. Are you ruling out things like early-onset Alzheimer’s? Are you looking at dementialike  symptoms?”

(Jackson disclosed that Trump had been given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and scored 30 out of 30.)

— “Do you have a life expectancy range for him based on his results?”

— “Did you see any evidence of bone spurs?” — a reference to the cause for Trump’s fifth Vietnam-era draft deferment. (Jackson said the medical team didn’t check for bone spurs.)

— “Did you take a waist measurement for the president?”

— Given Trump’s age, then 71, “Will you give cognitive testing in the future?”

— “Does he take any sleep aids?” (Yes, Ambien occasionally during foreign trips.)

— “How much sleep does he get on average?”

CNN sent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to the briefing. Gupta challenged Jackson for asserting that Trump’s health was “excellent” for his age, given that Trump was taking cholesterol-lowering medication and Gupta saw evidence of heart disease and borderline obesity. (Jackson credited Trump’s health to “great genes.”)

— “Does he watch too much TV?”

— “Do you have any concerns about the president’s use of Twitter?”

— “Is there anyone on the president’s medical team, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist, whose job it is to monitor the president’s emotional state or watch for potential psychiatric problems or indicators of those?” (“That falls upon me,” Jackson responded.)

Not all of the above questions are out of bounds, but the very number of questions about Trump’s mental state was over-the-top. If then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ plan had been to make the press look like a pack of jackals to the GOP base, she succeeded.