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MEDIA

New York Times Blames Powerful “Rabbis” for Crushing AOC’s Principles

Last week, the New York Times was the subject of uncomfortable attention for its coverage of a House of Representatives vote in favor of helping Israel procure more interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system.

In a piece that spent nearly as much time promoting the anti-Israeli arguments of the eight Democrats who voted against the bill as it did sharing the views of their 210 party colleagues who supported it during the September 23 vote, reporter Catie Edmonson also focused on one Member of Congress who voted “present.”

Along with most other members of the so-called “Squad” of like-minded legislators, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had initially voted against funding for the Iron Dome, which was put into heavy use last May to combat barrages of indiscriminate rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. A short while later, though, she changed her vote from the House floor.

Edmondson had ideas about why the vote was changed:

Minutes before the vote closed, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies before switching her vote to “present.” The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.

Yet again, the Times has published a blatantly antisemitic trope. Though they subsequently removed it from the online version, this ugly smear appeared in the print edition — and it has not been corrected.

It is because of coverage like this that CAMERA placed a billboardoutside the New York Times building criticizing the newspaper’s handling of antisemitism, and calling on publisher A.G. Sulzberger to right the ship.

Media Test Positive For Corrupt COVID Coverage

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/24/media-test-positive-for-corrupt-covid-coverage/

Policymakers and public health officials need to be held accountable for their miserable pandemic failures. So should the media, which have no interest in objective news, and are following an agenda that is both repulsive and poisonous

Among of the media’s favorite stories of the last 18 months are the deaths of the unvaccinated and those who expressed skepticism about the lethality of the Wuhan coronavirus. A recent example is the death of a 40-year-old California woman, who, according to the British Daily Mail, “regularly posted anti-vax, anti-mask content, proclaiming herself a ‘free thinker’ who ‘questions everything.’ ” The mother of four – who also considered herself “unmuzzled” – “had been battling COVID-19 and resulting pneumonia ahead of her passing.”

Tragic as her death was, it would not have been covered by the media had she been vaccinated and cheerfully compliant with lockdown and mask rules. But in the twisted minds of most of today’s journalists, it’s a story that has to be told to boost their vanity. They are our moral superiors.

The glee with which the story is reported is not overt. But like so many others, it was told in a way to lead readers to classify the victim as a backward, anti-science conservative who might even be a Republican and a Trump supporter. It’s part of the left’s agenda to marginalize such people.

Thankfully, there are exceptions to the cruelty. Journalist Zaid Jilani recently told the media to stop shaming those who aren’t perfectly lined up with the left’s pandemic demands and succumb to their coronavirus infections.

“Maybe they were skeptical of vaccines, or masks or something like that, and maybe they got COVID, and they died,” Jilani told Hill.TV. “That’s usually a very sad circumstance, but it’s turned into sort of a celebration, like ‘ha we got the other side!’ ”

“It’s an odd way to think of a virus,” he added.

Americans Need A New Media

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/21/americans-need-a-new-media/
“Today’s journalists are a collection of liberty-loathing progressives, Neo-Marxists, aspiring tyrants, busybodies, and angry juvenile activists”

The news media can be anything they want to be. There are no laws that demand them to be objective, fair, truthful, or accurate. Consequently, we have an army of journalists who are nakedly biased, vainly divisive, childishly spiteful, and purposely destructive. We can only hope our free market economy responds to the great business opportunity at hand before the press and its Democrat allies make doing so impossible as they work to shut down free enterprise.

At one time, long before radio, television, and the Internet, the newspapers in this country were party organs. Wikipedia, citing the work of university researchers, explains that “prior to the 1830s, a majority of U.S. newspapers were aligned with a political party or platform. … This was called partisan press and was not unbiased in opinion.”

The newspapers of the day didn’t pretend to be objective reporters of fact. Their bias was known and accepted. Not a problem.

Today, however, the media, with a few exceptions, try to cover themselves in a veneer of objectivity when in reality they are the modern newsletter of the Democratic Party and the progressive agenda. Those who aren’t part of their tribe are lied to, sneered at, and marginalized by journalists who not only want to establish a political society while killing our civil society, but want to ensure they’re part of the elite that enjoys the privilege and status of power.

From the TV networks to the major daily newspapers to sophomoric gab shows, the media are in the business of lying, covering up and/or ignoring truth that hurts Democrats, instilling fear, creating an environment in which government can more easily control people who already had been freed through revolution, and “othering” and gaslighting dissenters.

As an institution, the press has been almost wholly taken over by a collection of liberty-loathing progressives, resentful leftists, neo-Marxists, aspiring tyrants, busybodies, bitter scolds, elitists, anti-Americans, and angry, juvenile activists – a composition identical to that of the Democratic Party. For those who doubt this, consider the Democrats’ recent proposal to subsidize left-leaning newspapers with taxpayer money.

Enough. 

The TIME 100 is a confederacy of dunces Prince Harry looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/time-100-confederacy-dunces-meghan-harry/

To be chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people is usually an accolade worth fighting for. Yet this year, it seems to be the celebrity equivalent of the booby prize. Cockburn imagines that it was put together by various subversive elements within the publication who hoped to see the mass ridicule that its various choices, both of subjects and of writers, have led to. They will not be disappointed.

That an airbrushed photograph of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, takes pride of place in the ‘Icons’ section says all that you need to know. He, poor boy, looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video, while she — quite literally — is wearing the pants. But it is the text about them by a celebrity chef named José Andrés beggars belief. ‘They turn compassion into boots on the ground…they give voice to the voiceless through media production.’ Dear God. Chef Andrés would be best advised to remain in the kitchen, sharpening his knives, if this is the level of his insight.

But he is not even the worst offender. The parade of sycophancy goes on and on, until the cumulative effect is almost hysterical. ‘She’s a saintly, even godlike figure’, Miley Cyrus gushes about Dolly Parton. David Beckham — a man not known for his Wildean command of the English language — writes of the footballer Tom Brady that ‘What I and his many friends also see is a great human being, a great father, family man, friend and partner.’ Rep. Liz Cheney is described by Cindy McCain as ‘the rarest species of politician yet, the ambitious officeholder who risks her office to speak the unwelcome truth to her own side’. And at a time when Joe Biden’s reputation is plunging into a new nadir, it is droll to see his one-time rival Bernie Sanders praise him for ‘restoring faith among ordinary Americans that their government can work for them, and not just for wealthy campaign contributors’.

There is the odd note of discord to all this mush, such as Nancy Gibbs saying of Donald Trump that his ‘only rule is ruthlessness; he sees norms as opportunities for vandalism, a window left open in our intricate constitutional structure that he can crash through’. But generally speaking, TIME offers a toothless roll-call of empty praise and prissy platitudes that will do little other than bolster the considerable egos of those featured. It is a list that lacks imagination and daring, and seems to have been designed merely to troll the American public.

All Cockburn can say is that if this motley selection are really the hundred most influential people in the world today, then hasten on, climate change, and lay waste to humanity before it’s too late.

The New York Times Labels Hunter Biden Laptop Story ‘Unsubstantiated’ By Isaac Schorr

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-new-york-times-labels-hunter-biden-laptop-story-unsubstantiated/

Last October, the New York Post published a bombshell story based on emails recovered from a laptop that Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop.

The emails suggest that Biden introduced his then-vice president father to an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while he was sitting on the firm’s board. At the time of the meeting, Joe Biden was running the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy as vice president.

The Post also reported that laptop contained incriminating photos of the younger Biden and that the laptop had been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In a controversial decision decried by the right and hailed by the left, Twitter flagged and censored the Post story.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Twitter will not be held responsible for a campaign finance violation in connection with the decision, which has been deemed a business — rather than a politically motivated — decision by the Federal Election Commission. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has called the initial decision to censor the article a “mistake,” and did eventually reverse it.

Curiously, though, the Times describes the Post’s story as “unsubstantiated” without doing any of the work required to actually discredit it. Indeed, the “unsubstantiated” descriptor is tacked on without any supporting evidence suggesting that the Post’s reporting was erroneous. No such evidence is referenced in the Times’ reporting, nor in anyone else’s, though “Russian misinformation” was a common refrain from Democrats last October.

To the contrary, most reporting that has followed the Post’s opening salvo has confirmed rather than contradicted it. Even Hunter Biden himself admitted in April that he had “no idea” if the laptop was his and conceded that it was “certainly possible” that it was.

Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America? By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/why-isnt-the-attack-on-larry-elder-the-biggest-story-in-america/

A white woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of our largest state, and the media shrug.

D o a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on the New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story entitled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of California, by hurling an egg that touched his head.

If Elder were a Democrat, the attack would have been instantly and with good reason dubbed racist. It would not only be front-page news, it would be just about the only news you were hearing about today on CNN and MSNBC. Charles Blow, Perry Bacon, and Jamelle Bouie would each be writing the first in a series of angry columns about it. So would Gail Collins, Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Goldberg, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ezra Klein. We would be treated to multiple news analyses about the history of the usage of gorilla tropes against blacks. Joy-Ann Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon would be doing hour-long broadcasts on the attack, convening panels discussing just how the attack pulls the scab off racism in America, and proves we have so much work left to do in dealing with the problem. Vox would commission a series about California’s grim history of racism dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Asian-American and Latino writers would hasten to explain that California’s historic hostility to all sorts of persons of color is as traditional as its Tournament of Roses parade. Three-thousand-word essays about the brutal, unknown history of lynchings in the Golden State would be published in The Atlantic and/or The New Yorker. Al Sharpton, exhibiting a combination of exhaustion and despondency, would be a guest on half a dozen cable TV shows.

NEW COLUMNIST AT THE WSJ?

BlackRock’s China Blunder George Soros  September 7, 2021

Pouring billions into the country now is a bad investment and imperils U.S. national security.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackrock-larry-fink-china-hkex-sse-authoritarianism-xi-jinping-term-limits-human-rights-ant-didi-global-national-security-11630938728?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State George Soros- August 14, 2021

In his quest for personal power, he’s rejected Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-deng-xiaoping-dictatorship-ant-didi-economy-communist-party-beijing-authoritarian-11628885076?mod=article_inline

Where are the apologies for spreading ‘harmful misinformation’ about fake ivermectin overdoses in Oklahoma hospital? By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/where_are_the

Rachel Maddow still has her blue checkmark on Twitter.  The ultra-rich (reportedly earning $30 million a year in her new MSNBC contract) news commentator gleefully spread a false story that rural hospitals and ambulances in Oklahoma were backed up because so many ignorant rubes were overdosing on ivermectin horse medicine.  Some were even losing their vision.

It is all part of a campaign to demonize ivermectin, and totally false.  The original story appearing in Rolling Stone was as fake as that magazine’s University of Virginia rape hoax.

So where’s the accountability?  There is no tag from Twitter calling this misinformation.  No sign on Maddow’s Twitter feed that she takes responsibility for spreading a false story that could lead to people not taking an effective medicine.  Why, people could miss a life-saving treatment.  This is the sort of thing where the left cries, “Blood on your hands!” when there is an opportunity to criticize a conservative.

Disclaimer: I am not a physician and do not offer any medical advice.  Always consult your doctor before taking any medication.

And the fact is that, despite the AMA calling for an end to use of ivermectin for COVID — because people self-administering the drug have overdosed (as happens with aspirin all too frequently in suicide attempts) — it has been endorsed by medical authorities overseas and can demonstrate remarkable effectiveness.

HIGH NOONAN Scott Johnson

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/09/high-noonan-3.php

Noonan is a sore subject of long standing with me. She makes my skin crawl.

Noonan joined the crowd turning on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. Noonan wasn’t just unfair, she was also cowardly. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”

Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together. She wrote of Obama just before the election:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections.

He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

In a sense, Obama delivered, but in another sense Noonan got everything wrong. Obama certainly changed the direction and tone of American foreign policy, yet the change failed to yield the results Noonan anticipated. He betrayed allies and sold out to enemies for good measure, but for nothing in return.

Noonan then turned on Obama. In “The unwisdom of Barack Obama,” Noonan condemned Obama on one of the grounds she had supported him in 2008. It had dawned on her: “His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment.”

NPR Trashes Free Speech. A Brief Response In an irony only public radio could miss, “On the Media” hosts an hour on the perils of “free speech absolutism” without interviewing a defender of free speech. Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brief-response

The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

I always liked Brooke Gladstone, but this episode of On The Media was shockingly dishonest. The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as “speech absolutists” (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU’s mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.

This was already an absurd and bizarre take, but what came next was worse. I was stunned by Marantz and Powell’s take on Brandenburg v. Ohio, our current legal standard for speech, which prevents the government from intervening except in cases of incitement to “imminent lawless action”:

MARANTZ: Neo-Nazi rhetoric about gassing Jews, that might inflict psychological harm on a Holocaust survivor, but as long as there’s no immediate incitement to physical violence, the government considers that protected… The village of Skokie tried to stop the Nazis from marching, but the ACLU took the case to the Supreme Court, and the court upheld the Nazis’ right to march.