RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On Monday evening, Connecticut’s version of Ground Hog Day emerged, giving two more weeks of lockdown for hair salons and barber shops. Already, Connecticut was the last of the fifty states to ease restrictions. On the same day, the dyspeptic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, criticized the President for obesity. This from a woman of so many face and body lifts that there is little left of her that God and her parents created.

…….

It may be splitting hairs, but President Trump is wrong when he calls out The New York Times and Washington Post for printing “fake” news. What those papers are printing is “slanted” news, articles biased toward a leftist, political ideology. Fake news is fabricated, while slanted news is prejudiced, where a reporter selects what to emphasize, deemphasize or omit based on personal political preferences. Satire (“An obsolete kind of literary composition, in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.”[1]) is a form of fake news. However, with the exception of good satire, both fake news and biased reporting are a disservice to readers seeking truth. It is the latter that is subtler, so more difficult to discern and address. The burden for determining what is real and what is false is the consumer’s, as reporters have abandoned responsibility to readers and viewers.

Owners, publishers, editors and bloggers can spout whatever opinions they choose. This is a free country and that is their right. But when opinions filter into news stories, and news is reported as unvarnished truth, the consequence is divisiveness and a threat to freedom, which relies on a well-informed citizenry.

Professor Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington teaches a course called, “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.” In a phone interview with Michael Rosenwald, printed in the Columbia Journalism Review in the fall of 2017, he said “The average American spends nearly an hour a day on Facebook. Doing what? Mostly spreading bullshit.” Whether that is true or hyperbole, I do not know, but a Pew Research Center survey in 2016 essentially confirmed the trend. It found that 14% of U.S. adults shared news they knew was fake. Other surveys support the contention that people willingly pass on information they know to be fake, if it aligns with their preconceived political opinions; for example, promoting Trump derangement syndrome has become daily fodder for the leftist media.

Fake news should make us all wary. If something seems amiss, it probably is and should be double-checked. But slanted news is a beast of a different kind, especially when it appears in so-called respectable news sources. In a free country, the press has the right to print or report what they will.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/21/trump-is-winning-his-standoff-with-the-press/

Hard as it is to imagine, the mainstream press has grown even more hostile to President Donald Trump during the epochal COVID-19 crisis. Yet Trump’s approval rating is now higher than the sainted Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency. Is the public finally catching on?

Even more unrelenting than the daily death counts and we-are-all-doomed coverage of the coronavirus has been the media’s increasingly hostile – if you can believe that – coverage of Trump during this once-in-a-lifetime crisis. No matter what he does, the press attacks him for it.

Case in point is CBS News’ Paula Reid.

On Tuesday, Reid asked Trump this question: “Mr. President, why haven’t you announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work? You are overseeing historic economic despair. What’s the delay? Where’s the plan?”

This is the same reporter who just six days earlier was complaining that Trump “continues to push to get America back to work even over the objections from his own medical experts.”

The rest of the press corps has been ferociously attacking Trump for pushing to reopen the economy “too soon” with a steady stream of headlines such as:

“Trump Wants to Starve the States Into Opening Before It’s Safe.”

“As Trump urges reopening, thousands getting sick on the job.”

“Trump Foments Anti-Restriction Protests, Alarming Governors.”

Over the past few months, the press has attacked Trump for being too optimistic, for being too abrasive, for taking medications they don’t approve of. They attacked Trump for being a wannabe dictator, and for being too deferential to states. They alleged that Trump wants to “normalize” coronavirus deaths. They speculated that Trump is alienating seniors.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/19/the-american-media-has-betrayed-america/

There aren’t enough disparaging epithets in the English language to adequately describe “journalists” such as ABC Nightly News anchorman David Muir, the dashing 40-something actor who pretends to share important national news with America. Five days a week, Muir recites agenda-driven propaganda as if it were truth, while his allies who run the social media monopolies throttle down, demonetize, shadowban, or flat out censor reports that conflict with his narrative.

One of Muir’s biggest crimes is his façade of objectivity. Unlike the hosts of the cable news networks, such as CNN’s rabid Don Lemon, or MSNBC’s smirking Rachel Maddow, Muir isn’t obvious. He spreads his phony lies and distortions with a straight face, never breaking character. If you aren’t exposed to the other side of his stories, it works.

It isn’t just Muir, of course. Other pretenders include CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, who along with her reporters never saw a Spanish consonant that didn’t require a hard roll and NBC’s Lester Holt, who made it his business to debate candidate Trump in the 2016 presidential debates, instead of leaving that job to hapless Hillary. Then there is the mediocrity who reports from the White House for NPR, who thinks everything has to do with race and gender, because flogging that obsession takes no work and reliably builds a career.

For over three years, and only with the occasional exception of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the entire American media establishment, online and offline, has been complicit in spreading lies; despicable, anti-American lies. They spread the Russian collusion hoax for nearly three years, shamelessly exaggerating every smug utterance from the loathsome House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Again and again, they predicted that this time, Trump’s presidency was done for, and when Trump finally was exonerated, they just moved on to the next hoax.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/youtube-removes-glazov-gangs-katie-hopkins-video-frontpagemagcom/

YouTube continues to enforce its totalitarian Deep State obligations diligently. It appears that a recent Katie Hopkins video, produced by a David Horowitz Freedom Center–Glazov Gang collaboration and uploaded to the Glazov Gang channel on April 22, 2020, simply contained too much truth for the Google-owned video platform to handle. YouTube took the video down, stating that it “has been removed for violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”  How exactly anything Katie said violated its “Terms of Service,” YouTube did not explain.

Katie’s video saw U.K.’s valiant freedom fighter unveil Life Under Lockdown in the U.K., in which she shed a sober and telling light on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Katie discussed the dire consequences of socialized medicare under the Covid-19 crisis, the effects of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the “pandemic,” the lockdown’s consequences on the British economy and on British citizens, and much more. Katie discussed all of these issues in a civilized, factual and scholarly manner. And yet her video was still removed.

We reached out to Katie on her thoughts about YouTube’s removal of her video, and she commented:

The most shameful part of the removing of my video is it assumes people are too stupid to be trusted to form their own opinion. @YouTube is saying you are too thick to think for yourselves.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/14/u-s-media-helps-china-spread-propaganda-about-wuhan-virus-and-foreign-policy/

Perhaps still worse than our media providing an open platform for the Chinese Communist Party is its parroting of CCP propaganda.

Communist China talks a big game about the need for “cooperation.” But for several decades, it has continuously worked to undermine cooperation. Perhaps more disturbingly, much of U.S. corporate media colludes with the regime’s deceit.

For the latest evidence of China’s bellicosity, consider recent reporting from U.S. intelligence that Chinese hackers have been attempting to steal intellectual property from U.S. institutions seeking Chinese coronavirus treatments and vaccines. These attempts may have already damaged vaccine research. This is on top of China’s increasingly overt acts of aggression from Taiwan to the South China Sea, and Australia to the European Union.

For the latest evidence of the U.S. media’s complicity, consider a representative example from a May 5 article in the Washington Post. The adopter of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline opened its opinion page to the democracy-defying Chinese Communist Party (CCP), printing an editorial from Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai.

The New York Times did so as well several weeks prior, allowing Tiankai to publish an editorial calling for “solidarity, collaboration and mutual support,” in what seemed to be a coordinated effort with some 100 Chinese scholars, who echoed this call in an open letter. They were joined by many of the media’s close partners in the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishment, nearly 100 of whom who signed a similar letter.

China Again Attempts to Deflect Deserved Blame

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/cnn-buries-its-own-poll-results-on-trumps-favorability-guess-why/

His approval ratings have never been higher, including on Election Day 2016. Plus, he’s ahead of Biden in battleground states.

Well, that’s interesting, I thought, as I noted that the RealClearPolitics homepage stated that President Trump was tied for his all-time high in CNN polling. Then I went over to the CNN homepage for confirmation. Guess what I found?

The main story was about a church that lost 44 parishioners to COVID-19. The second-most prominent story told us that “Grocery Prices Are Soaring” (which is true if you think that a 2.6 percent increase in April should be called “soaring”), the third-most-prominent item told us, “Doctors treating coronavirus patients are seeing odd and frightening syndromes.” Running down the rail on the right we were given such important developments as “Man refusing to wear a mask breaks arm of Target employee,” “CNN Investigates: He’s willing to get Covid-19 to speed up vaccine efforts,” “Five surfers die after huge layer of sea foam hampers rescue” and “How coronavirus spread from one member to 87% of the singers at a choir practice.”

Only after all of this stuff did we learn that CNN has a new poll out, under the headline, “CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump.”