RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/09/01/msm-re-writing-of-bidens-afghanistan-tragedy-already-in-high-gear-n1474445

We have been watching the hacks in the American mainstream media prop up Joe Biden for a very, very long time now. Throughout his unremarkable decades in the United States Senate, Biden got the standard amount of biased favor from the MSM. When he was one heartbeat away from The Lightbringer’s job, the MSM really stepped up and spent a lot of time pretending that Biden was more than just a goofy spaz.

Ever since he cemented the Democratic nomination for president last year, the MSM has been working 24/7 to create a fictional Joe Biden that is competent, thoughtful, and deserving of being the most powerful man in the world.

As Biden’s stunning incompetence was laid bare for all the world to see by the nightmare in Afghanistan, even his most loyal media lapdogs were finding it difficult to keep up the charade, which I covered in my Morning Briefing a full week before the horrific ISIS-K attack at the Kabul airport. Here is an excerpt from that:

We will no doubt soon be back to a place where all of the usual horrible suspects in the media are fawning over Biden’s every lazy drool, but he and his pals are definitely taking a bit of a break this week.

Well, less than a week after the tragedy at the airport, the break is over.

The professional propagandists in the MSM are now circling wagons I didn’t even know they had in an effort to revise the immediate history of our ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/30/ii-tipp-poll-are-woke-media-deepening-americas-divisions/

When it comes to the media, Americans’ overall trust has been waning for some time, as numerous surveys show. But the decline isn’t uniform among all groups. Even before the recent crisis in Afghanistan, which brought renewed criticism to the media, a clear split over the trustworthiness of the U.S. media emerged, data from our latest I&I/TIPP Poll confirms.

That includes a wide divergence of opinion by gender, race, region, political ideology, schooling, and even income, showing a nation divided not just by its politics and ideology, but by how it views its basic news and opinion sources.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site’s tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.

After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.

Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.

“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.

“Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop,” Marchionni added. “It has no place in any context within this organization.”

Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”