RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/behemoths-who-control-barr-says-trump-executive-order-on-social-media-companies-will-go-further-if-necessary

Attorney General William Barr praised President Trump for his executive order that could allow federal regulators to take punitive action against social media giants for the way they regulate online content.

Trump’s order rolls back the long-standing legal protection known as Section 230, which spares tech companies from being held liable for the content they allow online and how they decide to monitor it.

Barr said the protection, which was adopted about 25 years ago, has been stretched beyond its original intention of not holding tech companies accountable for the content created by third-party users.

“It’s been completely stretched to allow what have become really behemoths who control a lot of the flow of information in our society to engage in censorship of that information and to act as editors and publishers of the material,” Barr said.

“So when they put on their own content, like fact-check content onto other people’s content and when curate their collection, they start censoring particular content, including in many cases the direction of … governments like communist China, they become publishers. They shouldn’t be entitled to the same kind of shield that was set up earlier,” he continued.

The order comes days after Twitter put a fact-check alert on one of Trump’s tweets, linking mail-in voting to increased voter fraud.

Twitter has taken steps to combat misinformation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic to avoid what it deems potentially dangerous medical hoaxes or advice from spreading throughout the public.

Trump has aggressively pushed back on the action, accusing the company of political bias.

Barr said Trump’s order is a strong step in addressing the problem of increased oversight of tech companies on its users and allow Section 230 to return to its original intent.

“They are using that market power with particular viewpoints,” Barr said. “That is wrong. It has to be addressed, not only to this executive order, but I think litigation going forward.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/27/gallup-poll-shows-that-no-one-thinks-the-media-is-doing-a-good-job-during-the-pandemic-n433478

“When the American people needed a competent, informed, unbiased media the most, they didn’t get it.”

No one trusts the media. Not left, not right, not those who believe themselves to be centrists. So this Gallup-Knight Foundation survey shouldn’t surprise us when both sides believe the media isn’t doing a good job informing the public of the pandemic.

Also not surprisingly, there is a vast difference in perceptions from the public on coronavirus coverage depending on one’s political partisanship.

The survey shows that Democrats believe the media is downplaying the severity of the crisis while Republicans believe the media is exaggerating the dangers.

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2020/05/27/new-york-media-coronacoddle-cuomo-n2569503

A bevy of bloggers on the right have highlighted one of the most dramatic examples of comparative coronavirus bias: those reckless Southern Republican governors in Georgia or Florida, who allegedly love commerce more than human lives, versus New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, our apparent national lodestar of competence.

The Republicans get the heat; Cuomo gets press conferences broadcast live across the country as celebrities confess their Cuomo crushes. The Republicans are “dangerous,” and Cuomo gets to joke around with his brother, the CNN host.

This tilt is not only in the “objective” press but also in the prestige brands in opinion journalism. Take The Atlantic, which made a dramatic turn by endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016. In a big NPR story, this was celebrated as rare and historic. Their loathing of Donald Trump never fades.

The Atlantic drew major heat for an April 29 article written by Amanda Mull that trashed Gov. Brian Kemp, titled “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” This article was also celebrated with a story on NPR. Mull took credit for the headline and insisted it was accurate. “I think that working-class Georgians, a group that is largely people of color, are being sacrificed to the state’s economy, largely,” she says.

But Georgia’s reopening made The Atlantic look foolish. Coronavirus cases and deaths didn’t surge. They declined. Mull wrote another article, headlined “The Horror of the Coronavirus Data Lag: Some reopening states are already claiming victory over the coronavirus. But the real consequences won’t be clear for weeks,” in which she insisted it was too early for apologies.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/05/26/the-new-york-times-continues-to-pollute-what-used-to-be-journalism-n430112

The Once Mighty Times Is a National Embarrassment

The New York Times is, for better or worse, still the newspaper of record in the United States. That title obviously doesn’t carry the prestige that it once did. The Times has basically won a war of attrition as the newspaper industry across the land continues to fade into irrelevance. If it hadn’t already had such a prominent position in American news consumption, it would be on the verge of disappearing soon too.

The Times just had a particularly offensive Memorial Day Weekend, and I say that as someone who is so used to their biased nonsense that I try not to let it bother me any more.

First — and this may have only offended me — the editorial brain trust at the paper decided to do a gimmicky front page on Sunday that listed the names of Americans  who died from COVID-19. Of course I believe these people should be mourned. What bothered me is that there is a very, very specific group of fallen Americans who we are supposed to remember on Memorial Day Weekend and I found the timing of this to be exceedingly off-putting.

The Times Never Commits Accidental Bias

The timing of the above example was undoubtedly deliberate and intended to deflect from duly honoring our war dead. That was a slight. What the editorial board did to kick off the weekend intended to honor our military dead was egregiously offensive and un-American.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/26/medias-unpunished-lies-hurt-the-nation-far-worse-than-trumps-indefensible-tweets/

The grim joke of the 20th century was that one death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. Well, in the 21st century age of information warfare, one man’s libel is an outrage. When thousands do it, we call that ‘the news.’

Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting Joe Scarborough somehow murdered a young woman who died of natural causes nearly 20 years ago are reprehensible. This is in no way because these tweets defame Scarborough. It’s pretty hard to feel bad for a guy whose media presence enabled Trump’s political rise to the point he openly flirted with running as his vice president before making a comic heel turn against Trump. (In fact, back when Scarborough was playing footsie with Trump, left-wing blogs were trafficking in this repugnant conspiracy.) Trump’s tweets are awful because of how they have thrust the deceased girl’s memory and her family into the limelight.

This letter written by the dead woman’s husband asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to take down the offending Trump tweets is heart-wrenching. It’s exactly the kind of behavior I feared Trump was capable of in 2016 and loomed large in my mind when I made the decision not to vote for him.

So there’s your ritual malediction against Trump, necessary though it may be. Please don’t pretend to be outraged when now it must be explained, once more with feeling, why a torrent of new condemnations of Trump’s indefensible behavior will have no effect on his supporters or the political dynamic heading into November and beyond. And don’t confuse that with approval of Trump’s rhetoric or tweets.

https://spectator.us/blame-china-communist-wuhan-coronavirus/

Is Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Hillary Clinton in drag? I ask because when he takes to the pages of the Washington Post to lecture us that ‘It is time to end the blame game’ with respect to China’s role in helping to spread the coronavirus, I could almost believe I was back at that Congressional hearing after Muslim lunatics attacked the American consulate in Benghazi and murdered four Americans, including the US ambassador. The dulcet strains of the then Secretary of State Clinton skirling ‘at this point what difference does it make?’ are ringing in my ears. It’s ‘time to move on’, she said later, just as China’s ambassador half-pleaded, half-warned about the ‘mindset’ urging a ‘decoupling’ of America from China. ‘The United States would not emerge as a winner from this scenario,’ he said.

Ambassador Cui writes that: ‘China has done its best to share information about the virus.’ Ha, ha, ha. In fact, it dissembled about the nature of the virus, obscuring the date of the first cases, insisting that there was no human-to-human transmission, even as, in mid-January, it ordered its consulates around the world to stock up on face masks and other protective gear in anticipation of a global outbreak. Chinese doctors and scientists who tried to sound the alarm early on suddenly disappeared, even as the regime destroyed evidence and stonewalled requests from western scientists for firsthand information about the earliest victims. Ambassador Cui is paid to lie for his country. We do not have to be naive and believe him.

But many of us do. Much of the western media is behaving like the World Health Organization, i.e., like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist party. As Bill Gertz points out in his just-published book How China’s Communist Party Made the World Sick, China’s behavior regarding the coronavirus is like the Soviet Union’s behavior after the deadly explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl. ‘The Chinese lied to cover up a major natural disaster — only now the damage is not simply the irradiation of an area in and around a city in Ukraine. The Chinese have inflicted grave damage on the world economy and put half the world’s population out of work, at least temporarily.’

https://spectator.us/short-guide-justifying-re-lockdown/

Fear is gripping the American public health and media establishments: they are losing control. States are belatedly (and far too tentatively) easing their coronavirus lockdowns, many without having met the absurd CDC benchmarks for doing so. Customers are joyfully returning to previously shuttered restaurants and parks, some even discarding that symbol of subjugation: the outdoor mask.

The mainstream media and health experts are not going down without a fight, however; their newfound power over almost the entirety of human life has been too exhilarating to give up now. Their reaction to the current rebellion provides a glimpse of the strategies that will be deployed during the much-hyped ‘second wave’ of infections this fall in order to shut the economy down again.

The extent of media panic became clear in mid-May. On May 15, CNN checked back in to Georgia, that blackguard state that had started reopening in April without expert pre-clearance, drawing a rebuke even from President Donald Trump. On April 21, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that Georgia governor Brian Kemp was seeking to ‘turn his state into the place to die.’

Three weeks later, things were not looking good for the proponents of indefinite shutdown. ‘Since reopening late last month,’ CNN glumly reported, ‘Georgia hasn’t seen a spike in coronavirus cases.’ Time to change the standards for success: ‘But there also hasn’t been a significant decrease in new case counts,’ the cable channel added. New case counts had decreased — 6 percent over a week — but the drop just wasn’t ‘significant,’ by CNN’s lights. Moreover, CNN pointed out, that downward trend was ‘unsteadily downward,’ as if any set of data does not have daily fluctuations.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/24/the-doctrine-of-media-untruth/

When knowledge, wisdom, independent thought, even basic competence were no longer requisites for success, then the media naturally slid into mediocrity, and mastered networking and obsequiousness instead of valuing independence.

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

Take the strange case of the respective records of liberal New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida counterpart Ron DeSantis. Both states have roughly equal populations, with Florida slightly larger by about 2 million. Both have populations that travel daily back and forth between their respective major cities. Both are major international tourist and travel hubs. Both have widely diverse populations.

Both have large numbers of retirees and long-term-care homes. Yet, New York has suffered 14 times the number of coronavirus deaths as has Florida. Florida is now increasingly open, and on May 19 saw 54 deaths attributed to the virus. That same day, New York was completely locked down and yet saw nearly twice that number at 105 deaths.

One would never know from the media of the contrasting fates of the two states during the epidemic.DeSantis is often rendered little more than a reckless leader who exposed Floridians to needless danger. Cuomo, in contrast, increasingly is deified by the media as likely presidential timber who finesses press conferences in the lively fashion of his legendary beloved father, and iconic liberal, Mario Cuomo.

Yet on the principle of media’s commitment to untruth, the public legitimately could deduce from the hagiographic news coverage that the frenetic Cuomo has proven the most incompetent governor in the nation in dealing with the virus. He sent the infected into vulnerable long-term care homes. He neither applied social distancing to, nor cleaned, mass transit. And Cuomo exaggerated his need for some medical supplies, while neglecting shortages in others.

In contrast, the media furor at DeSantis is a good guide to his successes in both mitigating viral fatalities while charting Florida’s path back to economic normality.

Hagiography of the Unfit and Unprofessional

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-cowardice-and-the-collusion-hoax-11590186850?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

To many hack commentators, “conspiracy theory” has become a term used to make certain kinds of implicit and explicit cooperation unacknowledgeable.

With evidence newly in hand last week, we see that the resources poured into promoting the Steele dossier before the 2016 election were nothing next to those mobilized by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta after the inauguration. Transcripts two years old show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.

Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.

Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.

If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.