RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/bbc-to-investigate-arabic-channel-over-gaza-coverage/

Samir Shah, chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), told Times Radio on May 3 that the broadcaster is investigating anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Gaza War and will commission an independent investigation of BBC Arabic.

BBC Arabic broadcasts 24 hours a day from London and Cairo to the Middle East via TV, radio and internet.

In conversation with Times Radio host Rod Liddle, Shah, who was appointed BBC chairman in March 2024, said, “I think this whole business of how we’ve covered Israel-Gaza is a proper thing to examine thoroughly, which is why we’re … going to get hold of an independent figure to look at our corporation.”

Liddle said: “You’re still reporting from Israel with a whole bunch of BBC Arabic correspondents, some … who have been found to say the most appalling things about Jewish people, such as, ‘We’re going to burn them until none are left.’ You know, isn’t it time to stop using them?”

Liddle was referring to comments by Samer Elzaenen, a regular contributor to BBC Arabic, who posted antisemitic and anti-Israel comment since 2011, The Telegraph reported.

In one post he wrote: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”

Elzaenen is one of several BBC Arabic contributors who have been discovered to have posted antisemitic content.

Ahmed Alagha, who has reported for the British public broadcaster since early 2023, described the Israeli army as “the embodiment of filth” and referred to Jews as “the devils of the hypocrites,” according to a Telegraph report last month.

“The Arabic service, we are looking at it. We’ve been examining it,” said Shah.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/04/27/brace-yourself-new-trump-scandal-could-be-the-biggest-of-them-all-n4939286

President Trump wore a blue suit, and this is very, very bad. If you take your cues from the establishment media, you should be outraged. 

The evil man wore the evil suit at the pope’s funeral, where the Vatican’s dress code “requires men to wear a dark suit with a long black tie.” Trump wore a blue suit with a blue tie. The Vatican didn’t complain, and even the New York Times admitted Saturday that Trump’s attire “did not grossly violate the dress code for the event.” 

Nonetheless, the outrage mill went into high gear over the weekend. Fortune ran a story entitled “The Vatican asked Pope Francis funeral attendees to wear all black. Trump wore a blue suit.” The Independent went with “Trump accused of Pope Francis funeral faux pas after ‘breaking dress code’ then leaving early.” The Wrap: “Donald Trump Roundly Criticized for Wearing Blue Suit to Pope Francis’ Funeral.” Despite its fifth-paragraph admission that Trump’s suit was within the bounds of acceptable attire, the New York Times still thought it worthy of a story: “Trump’s Blue Suit at Pope’s Funeral Draws Attention.” 

Man, Trump was wearing one bad suit! Yet establishment media rules on suits are often complicated. Sometimes suits are innocuous. For years, media propagandists liked to spread the claim that Obama’s tan suit was the “only scandal” of his interminable and catastrophic presidency. The implication was that those stupid Republicans were so partisan, so racist, so unfair and so mean-spirited, but had so little for which they could actually criticize Obama, that they tried to stir up a controversy over his poor fashion sense. (Actually, he looked quite natty in the tan suit.) 

But suits aren’t always symbols of mountains being made out of molehills. Sometimes they’re actual mountains being made out of molehills. The same leftist media that laughed at patriots over their alleged consternation at Obama’s tan suit is enraged beyond measure over Trump’s blue suit. Yet there are a few facts that are inconvenient for the Trump-is-an-insensitive-clod-who-wore-a-blue-suit-to-the-pope’s-funeral narrative. 

One is that Fortune, the New York Times and other outlets that ran with the evil blue suit narrative included photos with their stories that gave the impression that Trump was the only guy at the funeral who had been insensitive enough to wear a blue suit. These photos, however, were carefully cropped so that readers could not see that many, many other men at the funeral were wearing blue suits, including Prince William and Old Joe Biden. Volodymyr Zelensky was dressed once again as if Vladimir Putin might appear from behind a hedge at any minute, Kalashnikov blazing, and the plucky Ukrainian president would have to spring into combat mode. 

https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2025/04/27/shameful-media-attacks-republican-women-as-ugly-and-why-its-about-to-get-so-much-worse-n4939280

EXCERPT:

The first telltale sign is when the media outlets at the top of the hierarchy all begin publishing the same stories. The media industry is a top-down ecosystem; the minnows take their cues from the whales. Even today, you’d be surprised how many small market news directors will religiously tear through The New York Times before assigning any stories.

Why?

Because that’s how they were trained. 

As a practical matter, it empowers the larger media outlets to set the national agenda, because this ecosystem gives their stories legs: First The New York Times will report on it; then the mid-tier and low-tier ones echo it; then The Times will circle back with a follow-up story about how this is a huge deal in the heartland — citing those mid- and low-tier outlets’ stories a few days later.

It’s incestuous, self-serving, and won’t work indefinitely, but it guarantees a story will stay in circulation for at least a week — and with just a little luck, much longer than that. 

Either way, in today’s 24/7 media culture, a week is an eternity. You can do a lot of damage in a week.

The second sign is when the same stories all echo the same themes. When a mainstream media thought leader, like The New York Times, NBC News, or The Atlantic gives a story their “seal of approval,” it’s kind of like the phenomenon with the ugly dude and the hot girlfriend: That editorial “spin” has already won the support of their industry’s A-Listers.

If you’re a low-rung journalist with ambition, it’s awfully tempting to hop aboard that bandwagon and cry “One of us!” — and so, lots of ‘em do. (Hey, they wanna work at The New York Times one day, too.)

When three or more A-Listers in the mainstream media release the same story with the same theme, it means you’ll be hearing about it for no less than a week. If the story fails, it’ll go away.

But conservatives don’t get to decide if a story fails! 

That takes us to the third sign: Stories that animate liberals will always be elevated. This usually means that liberal causes, politicians, and policies will be promoted and conservative ones trashed, but not always. Sometimes, liberals like to read about doom-and-gloom — that “The End Is Nigh!” (They’re pessimistic by nature and enjoy doom-scrolling.)

But no matter what, the stories and spin will always reflect a VERY leftwing worldview.

Why?

Because the media is VERY liberal and they’re primarily concerned with impressing each other. 

https://www.theeditors.com/p/wall-street-journal-fuels-sanders-socialism-gabriel-zucman-billionaires?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

My morning Wall Street Journal had a box on the front page with a graphic headlined “The Rich Get Even Richer,” teasing a news article inside under the headline “Richest of Rich Gain $1 Trillion.”

That eight-paragraph article on page two included six paragraphs that contained mention of or attribution to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. The page-two graphic, which is bigger than the story, is also attributed, in fine print, to “Gabriel Zucman, analysis of Forbes, Fortune, and Federal Reserve data….”

This is garbage on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start.

For one thing, Zucman is just one economist of many, and he’s not super-credible. The New York Times reported in 2020: “Other economists, including some who held top jobs under past Democratic presidents, have attacked Mr. Zucman and Mr. Saez over their research methods, their policy conclusions and their data. Conservative economists say their proposals would cripple economic growth. Last year, the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government voted to offer Mr. Zucman, 33, a tenured position. But Harvard’s president and provost nixed the offer, partly over fears that Mr. Zucman’s research could not support the arguments he was making in the political arena, according to people involved in the process.”

For another thing, the present tense of the front-page and page-two headlines isn’t supported by this year’s reality, at least to date. The richest of the rich have taken a hit this year so far owing to the stock market downturn related to the Trump tariffs, Congress’s slow motion on a tax cut bill, the Federal Reserve’s decisions to stop cutting interest rates since Trump’s inauguration, or whatever else you want to blame it on. Zucman wants to talk about how much richer the rich got in 2024 because it supports his policy agenda of raising taxes, but he doesn’t want to talk about how these same people saw their wealth plunge in 2025 because so much of their assets are at risk, tied up in stock of companies that they built. The Journal items would have been good headlines four months ago. Now, they read like old news. And anyone who has been on one of those Forbes lists can tell you how reliable or unreliable they are. They are not exactly chacarterized by super-high high precision. When I was at the New York Sun we once figured out that Forbes was counting Michael Bloomberg as worth $5 billion when the real number was more like $20 billion. In its prime, the Wall Street Journal did its own research on this stuff, rather than rely on some left-wing economist’s regurgitation of numbers from Forbes. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in social science research.

I rolled my eyes and put the newspaper away. The editorial page is so strong—Ruth Wisse!, etc.—that I cut the news columns some slack.

Then I opened up X on my phone and saw Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, making a talking point out of the Journal story.

“Today in America, the rich are getting richer & working families are struggling. What is Mr. Trump doing about this? He’s getting ready to give tax cuts to billionaires while making it harder for Americans to access the Medicare, Social Security & veterans benefits they earned,” Sanders posted, with a screenshot of the Journal story and the “WSJ” logo.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/larry-david-mocks-trump-as-hitler-in-the-ny-times-now-but-the-paper-fawned-over-adolf-in-33/

“Imagine my surprise,” writes left-of-Stalin-himself “comedian” Larry David in a New York Times op-ed Monday, “when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.”

Although Larry has looked about 105 years old for the last couple of decades and could be even older, he wasn’t actually reporting on something that happened to him. He was mocking and indirectly excoriating his fellow leftist Bill Maher for meeting Trump and speaking honestly about the meeting, telling the world that Trump really wasn’t the evil monster of leftist propaganda.

Yeah, wow, what an amazing new comedic idea: Trump is Hitler! Larry, how did you ever come up with this fantastic analogy that no one on planet Earth has ever thought of before? As PJM’s own Scott Pinsker put it, Larry David’s op-ed was “astonishingly tone-deaf” as “became the 500 millionth member of the left to think it’s clever, witty, and daring to compare President Trump to Adolf Hitler.” Scott called it (correctly) the “dopiest, sleaziest NYT op-ed in years.”

It could, in fact, be the dopiest, sleaziest, most tone-deaf New York Times article of any kind since July 9, 1933, just over five months after Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and years after his virulent antisemitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide. On that day, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Kamala Harris during her campaign and of Old Joe Biden during his presidency. It bears more than a little resemblance to Larry David’s imaginary dinner with Hitler, but it is all too real.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she turned out to be an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, for she appears to have been something of a Hitler fan. In the presence of this man whose name has become today synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator. A shock of straight hair falls over his forehead.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/23/the-press-is-back-in-full-frenzy-mode-but-this-time-nobody-is-listening/

You’d think the mainstream press would have learned a lesson or two after committing so many embarrassing mistakes in its effort to “get” Donald Trump and cover up for Joe Biden over the past eight years. But no. It’s already back to its old and terrible habits.

Shortly after the election, Vanity Fair published a story that led with this admonition to the press: “Every outrage and insult can’t be a five-alarm fire, as it’s critical for the media to stay focused on the most serious threats to America’s democratic institutions.”

Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson cautioned her colleagues to “watch and restrain headlines on stories that are needlessly hyperbolic or over-the-top negative.”

Brian McGory, former Boston Globe editor, said it’s “time to cover his actions and policies, his successes and his failures. To do it through as conventional a lens as possible, while not normalizing mayhem, and a willingness to acknowledge when things go well.”

But instead of heeding this advice, the mainstream press went right back to its frantic Trump-hating roots.

https://www.aol.com/larry-david-skewers-bill-maher-185528885.html

Larry David doesn’t sound happy about Bill Maher’s dinner with President Donald Trump.

The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, 77, published a satirical essay in The New York Times on April 21 that appeared to be a response to Maher’s recent meeting with the president at the White House.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Maher and David for comment.

The fictional piece was written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed that the Nazi leader was so personable, despite having been a “vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning.”

David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the article, but the language he used closely mirrored the way the “Real Time” host spoke about his dinner with Trump.

“I found the whole thing quite disarming,” David’s essay read. “I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human.”