RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/535584-five-examples-of-medias-sycophancy-for-biden-on-inauguration-week

Coverage of presidential inauguration week underperformed already-low expectations, with the usual measured accolades and sober analysis for the incoming president mostly sidelined for fawning praise and outright activism.

The overall theme centered on the premise that President Biden is in essence the second coming of George Washington, who, according to popular lore, vowed never to tell a lie. Anchors and pundits returned to this theme again and again with Biden, who famously dropped out of his first presidential run due to a plagiarism scandal.

Biden also claimed multiple times – including once during last year’s presidential campaign – to have been arrested or jailed when he attempted to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa at the height of Apartheid. After being fact-checked, Biden “clarified” his remarks instead of apologizing, saying he was merely “stopped.” The 78-year-old also told a Black audience in 2012 that then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains,” without any evidence, as many in the media chuckled over the outrageous comment. 

Space limitations make it impossible to share all the examples witnessed this week, so here are the top five examples of the media’s slobbering sycophancy: 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/national_review_and_all_its_many_ways_of_insulting_conservatives.html

The writers and columnists at National Review just had a great week.  Joe Biden was inaugurated, President Trump is gone, and their writers can scratch off their calendars the upcoming rush week at the Lincoln Project frat house and get back to pretending they are conservatives.  It’s been four years since they last parroted the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell if-only-we-were-in-power shtick, and they made up much lost ground with a slew of articles critical of Biden’s first days in office. 

But prior to that, they collectively unloaded on the Trump presidency in a manner that dropped all pretense of detached objectivism (implausible as it was) and chortled with unrestrained glee. 

Here is a recap of some of last week’s articles:

1) Dan McLaughlin calls Biden’s inauguration a “day of liberation” for “conservative thinkers, planners, advocates, and policy-makers.”  Great.  Now they can finally get back to successfully promoting and implementing conservative ideas just like they did back in…back in…remind me again? 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/24/the-washington-post-just-proved-how-desperate-it-is-to-be-kamala-harris-pravda-n1406583

The Washington Post attempted to throw an embarrassing story about now-Vice President Kamala Harris down the memory hole but reversed course after Reason and others exposed the paper’s attempt to become Kamala Harris’ personal Pravda. How embarrassing.

Back on July 23, 2019, when Harris was a lowly senator from California and one of the many 2020 Democratic candidates for president, the Post dared to run quotes from an unflattering interview. How impertinent!

In the original version of the article, Harris compared life amid the rigors of the campaign trail to living behind bars and pleading for food and water.

Here are the first seven paragraphs of the original article, written by Ben Terris and preserved by Reason‘s Eric Boehm:

It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.

She’d been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-echo-chamber-era

“It’s bad that trust in media is down, but even worse that so few in the business seem to think it’s a problem. ”

A day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, the headline in Axios read: “Trust in media hits a new low.” Felix Salmon wrote that “for the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.” The Edelman survey showed overall faith in the press dropping to 46%.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that Republicans hate the press a lot, but Democrats just a little. The Axios story bore this out somewhat, as only 18% of Republicans reported trusting media, versus 57% of Democrats.

Still, 57% of half your potential audience is nothing to brag about, when you’re in the trust business. Other numbers, like 56% of respondents believing journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people,” or 58% thinking that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology… than with informing the public” are more ominous.

Media critics who work in the corporate press, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, seem determined to look everywhere but inward for solutions. The dominant legend in our business is that if Republicans believe in fairy tales like Q and “Stop the Steal,” the traditional press can do nothing but stand its ground.

Sullivan’s reaction to at-times “embarrassing” Inauguration Day coverage was an injunction to reporters to resist the temptation to try to appear more balanced by showing “toughness” with regard to the incoming Biden regime. If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/22/a-cleansing-moment/

“The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.” 

So said Rick Klein and MaryAlice Parks of ABC News. They later changed the wording to “cleaning up,” but the “cleansing” cat was already out of the bag. This calls for more reflection than Klein and Parks were willing to indulge.  

As the late George Carlin observed, America boasts more than 50 brands of breakfast cereal but when it comes to major political parties, the nation is pretty much down to two. That forces some hard choices, as Ted Rall explained in “Hey Lefties, Hillary Clinton is Not Your Friend.”  

In 2016, Marcella Aburdene, then a 31-year-old market researcher with a Palestinian father, told Slate that Clinton “is disingenuous and she lies blatantly,” and would not get her vote. Songwriter Margo Guryan Rosner was irritated by Hillary’s quip about staying home and baking cookies.  

Not all those who rejected Hillary voted for Trump, but here are some Democrats who did: New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, former CIA director James Woolsey, and former Justice Department lawyer Adam Walinsky, who also wrote speeches for Robert F. Kennedy. Trump would not have been elected if many other Democrats had not joined them. 

The Trump movement has a diverse side, so before they call for “cleansing,” Klein and Parks might interview someone like Walinsky, who could explain his decision. Klein and Parks betray no effort to engage any Trump supporter before calling for “cleansing,” a euphemism for deadly violence, as in the Balkans, Rwanda, and other places. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/jawdropping_contempt_for_trump_and_his_voters_from_national_review_star_columnist_kevin_williamson.html

It is sad, but perhaps inevitable that contemptuous, raw class-hatred for Trump voters would be featured so prominently in the National Review almost immediately after the swearing-in of Joe Biden yesterday.  National Review, after all, produced the infamous “Against Trump” issue in January 2016, assembling conservatives from many publications in an effort to derail the nomination of the man who became our 45th president.

The chief complaints about Trump centered on style…and class.  But graciousness in victory apparently is not an element of civility that appeals to Kevin Williamson, a talented wordsmith and star at what was once the flagship publication of the conservative movement.  You may recall that  roughly half a year before the February 15, 2016  “Against Trump” issue appeared, Williamson descended to vitriol with a June 16, 2015 column on Trump’s announcement of his candidacy in the Trump Tower lobby titled, “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” explicitly dehumanizing him.

Yesterday, he bookended his Trump coverage by returning to an insult that, if he had applied it to Trump’s predecessor, would have gotten him deplatformed and condemned to ignominy (ask Roseanne Barr).  In “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter,” Williamson broadened his contempt for Trump into an attack on the voters who dared to reject Williamson’s views and voted Trump into office, and then added millions to their ranks and voted for his re-election.  They are all morons, you see, toothless, rural semi-humans whom Williamson calls “Cletus,” no doubt after a character on The Simpsons, described by Fandom as “a stereotypical redneck[.]”

As ratings tank amid hostile coverage of former President Donald Trump, Fox News is purging its newsroom in an attempt to salvage the network’s fading brand. Political editor Chris Stirewalt, a NeverTrumper, and several digital editors were fired Tuesday; on Election Night, Stirewalt defended the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a move that infuriated the president and Fox News viewers. (The outcome of Arizona’s election wasn’t finalized until late November.)

“Though the network never backed off its Arizona call, and followed other major news outlets in calling the entire election for Biden days later, Stirewalt soon apparently found himself on the outs at Fox News,” the Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Fired staffers attempted to spin the purge as higher-ups ridding the network’s digital arm of “real journalists” who don’t hold a political agenda. Anonymous ex-employees told the Beast it “was part of the network’s larger effort to pivot its website from straight-news reporting to right-wing opinion content in the mold of Fox’s primetime programming.”

Fox News has been bleeding viewers since November, quickly losing its perch in the cable news rankings. Conservatives have long viewed Fox News as the only channel to offer a counterbalance to the biased cable and network news channels that overwhelmingly mimic the Democratic Party’s company line while vilifying conservatives and Republicans. But its tone and coverage dramatically shifted during Trump’s presidency making it almost indistinguishable from left-leaning competitors such as CNN and MSNBC.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace is widely disliked; Martha MacCallum just lost her 7 p.m. show to a rotating cast of hosts. A few days after Election Day, Bret Baier deleted an innocuous tweet promoting his 6PM p.m. show after more than 22,000 people responded to the tweet with harsh criticism of Fox News’ election coverage. Anchor Sandra Smith was forced to clarify an off-mic moment whenafter she mocked one of Trump’s lawyers who correctly pointed out that networks don’t decide presidential elections.

Even the network’s marquee names such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity now trail the evening lineups at CNN and MSNBC for the first time in years. Conservative competitors One America News and Newsmax are vying for Fox’s disgruntled viewers.

https://www.nysun.com/national/one-one-issue-us-is-united-the-press-failed/91395/

Concerned about deep political divisions ripping apart the United States? Relax — there’s at least one issue on which there’s an emerging consensus across the political spectrum.

That is that the press has failed.

President Trump, in his remarks on January 6 before a mob of his supporters disrupted Congress, said, “We don’t have a free and fair press. Our media is not free. It’s not fair. It suppresses thought. It suppresses speech, and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country.”

It was not just Trump and the Republicans expressing this view. President Obama, in a statement on “today’s violence at the Capitol,” said, “for two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth — that this was not a particularly close election and that President-Elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.”The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, returning to the Senate floor after the disruption, denounced what he called “a demagogic president, the people who enable him, the captive media that parrots his lies.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times Magazine, tweeted, “Trump placed open white nationalists all throughout his admin from the beginning and we — mainstream media, polite society — normalized that and we should all be absolutely appalled.” She named one “mainstream media” outlet in particular: “MSNBC was running Trump’s speeches in full and giving platform to disinformation trolls from Trump Administration almost his entire presidency.”

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/charlie-martin/2021/01/17/why-was-parler-censored-by-its-competitors-n1390205

I’ve been a big fan of Medium, although I’ve learned quickly that there are certain “publications” — essentially sub-blogs — that it’s best to avoid. Today I saw a piece published two days ago, The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse, that addressed how Parler was censored and destroyed by Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon, and then warned that Parler won’t be the last.

The given reason, of course, was that people were saying violent things on Parler and all the bien-pensants are, of course, shocked, shocked that this was “permitted.”

It might be different if the double standard weren’t so glaring. As Amazon was canceling Parler’s hosting — in apparent violation of their contract — they were selling “Kill All Republicans” tee-shirts, and it turns out that while Twitter and Facebook were canceling Parler, the actual mob was coordinating on Twitter and Facebook.Amazon sells “Kill All Republicans” shirts while censoring Parler.

Last year, before the election, Twitter and Facebook suppressed a mainstream newspaper for publishing the Hunter Biden story, as well as suspending hundreds of individuals’ accounts. Twitter eventually said it was a mistake weeks later and restored the New York Post account, and after the election, we found that the “Russian disinformation” story was a lie. But the damage was done and the story that might’ve turned the election went basically unpublicized, which Joe Concha at The Hill called “a dereliction of duty.”