RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/cnn-pandemic-panel-features-obama-officials-greta-thunberg/

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is among the so-called experts joining CNN’s Anderson Cooper for a CNN Town Hall on coronavirus.

The panel is called “Coronavirus – Facts and Fears” and will feature former acting Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Richard Besser, former Obama Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Seblius, climate activist Thunberg, and CNN’s medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Thunberg has been a champion of socialist overhauls such as the Green New Deal and earned her place in the national spotlight for her apocalyptic rhetoric on climate change. It’s unclear how a 17-year-old high school drop out is somehow an infectious disease expert qualified for CNN’s “expert” panel.

Thus far, Thunberg’s only contribution to the coronavirus pandemic was her generous donation of $100,000 to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). After winning a $100,000 prize for her global activism, Thunberg donated the money to children in need. Yes, it’s generous, but it doesn’t qualify her to speak on a panel of experts about coronavirus.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/how-1619-project-destroys-true-moral-meaning-jason-d-hill-0/

Honest patriots of our great republic are upset at the recent bestowal of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project. As most readers might already know, the 1619 project was inaugurated with a special issue in the The New York Times Magazine in August of 2019. Its goal was and remains one of challenging us all to reframe U.S history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia as our nation’s foundational date. The project promulgates the idea that everything that has made America exceptional literally grew out of slavery. It,therefore, establishes 1619 and not 1776 as our nation’s true founding date. The egregious historical inaccuracies of the project and Hannah-Jones’ claims have been well documented. The most egregious among them which the Times has had to minimally correct, included claiming that the American  Revolution was literally fought to preserve the institution of slavery, and that Abraham Lincoln opposed the equality of blacks.

The Project has become part of K-12 school curriculum where children are taught, among other things, that racism and bigotry are an indelible and ineradicable part of America’s cultural DNA, that US capitalism is an evil, exploitative system inextricably tied to imperialism and racial domination and unmitigated poverty. The project leaves out the fact that it is capitalism that single-handedly raised the standard of living for millions of Americans, including blacks, improved the health standards and quality of life for all Americans, and eventually gave rise to a thriving entrepreneurial black-middle class and immigrant class that saw them achieve unprecedented economic parity with their white compatriots that was unrivaled anywhere else in the world.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/protecting-obama/

A review of weekend news coverage and commentary shows that mainstream media have gone into full “Protect Obama” mode.

Evidence released last week — including, but not limited to, House Intelligence Committee transcripts showing that multiple top-level Obama administration officials were lying to the public for three years about Russian collusion — indicates that former president Barack Obama wasn’t merely aware of what was going on; he was hip-deep in what increasingly appears to be one of the greatest political scandals in American history.

For other than the most sycophantic and credulous media personalities, Obama’s involvement isn’t much of a surprise. The August 5, 2016 email from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page stating, “the White House is running this,” followed by the September 2016 Page text to Strzok stating, “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing” suggested the obvious: An operation targeting a presidential campaign and then an incoming presidential administration isn’t a mere freelance effort cooked up by a few rogue FBI personnel in their spare time. An operation of that magnitude and import must be blessed from the very top.

Indeed, the January 5, 2017 White House meeting with President Obama, vice president Joe Biden, FBI director James Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, director of national intelligence James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and national security adviser Susan Rice (which meeting was the subject of Rice’s mother-of-all C.Y.A. emails to herself on Inauguration Day) suggests that Obama wasn’t merely kept informed of the Russia collusion fraud, he was providing direction.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/11/media-find-in-coronavirus-a-crisis-they-cant-waste/

Are we alone in feeling as if the media are enthusiastic cheerleaders of the coronavirus pandemic? We can’t be the only ones who sense the glee with which the news about the body count, the Democrats’ wailing over the president’s handling of the crisis, and the “new normal”  are delivered across our screens. Nor is it possible that no one else is noticing that the states that believe reopening is necessary to survival are being portrayed as communities of rubes who deserve to suffer the sting of mass death.

The coronavirus coverage goes beyond the “if it bleeds it leads” tenet of sensationalized media coverage. It’s a handy means for them to extend the cultural and political divides that have made the 50 states less united than they have been in any of our lifetimes. To paraphrase Col. Nathan R. Jessup, they want COVID-19 death, they need COVID-19 death.

The media elitists are culture warriors of the worst sort . After Georgia revealed in late April its plans to reopen, Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column was headlined “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination.” A few days later, The Atlantic said the state was beginning an experiment in “human sacrifice.” The message is that the red states are lousy with hicks who don’t care about human lives, even their own.

Like all good crusaders, the media aren’t straying from the campaign. Shortly after some restrictions were lifted, The Hill reported: “More than 1,000 new coronavirus cases were diagnosed the day Gov. (Brian) Kemp reopened Georgia.” Other outlets took an Associated Press report and wrote similar headlines.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/pulitzer-prize-and-corruption-history-and-bruce-thornton/

The Pulitzer folks have awarded their prize to the New York Times for the lead essay in its “1619 Project,” a bit of lefty agitprop so egregious that even throwback liberal American historians have ripped it to shreds. This offense comes two years after a joint Pulitzer award to the Times and the Washington Post for its brazenly partisan coverage of the Russian collusion lie cooked up by rogue clerks in the FBI and DOJ. Indeed, this bias is a long tradition for the Pulitzer. The Times’s man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, was rewarded with the prize for helping Stalin  obscure his mass murders, which suited the leftist inclinations of the Times and the Pulitzer board.

Yet this latest Pulitzer awarded for corrupting two of our esteemed and prestigious institutions is nothing new. What we have been experiencing since the Sixties is the tearing away of the last few shreds of the emperor’s stained and threadbare clothes. As a result, ideological activism has driven truth and critical thinking from both these professions.

First, we should remember that the Pulitzer Prize, like the Oscars, the Emmys, and with a few exceptions the Nobel Peace Prize, is a trade-guild marketing tool, not merit-based objective rewards for true excellence and achievement. Political and ideological preferences are branded by such awards and made into megaphones for publicizing biases for those preferences. It’s no coincidence that the Nobel Peace Prize has historically favored evangelical globalists and one-world anti-nationalists, or enemies of the West like the leftist ventriloquist’s dummy Rigoberta Menchu, and the murderous thug Yasser Arafat.  Watching the Oscars and listening to the winners’ speeches provide a seminar in left-wing platitudes and semi-literate bromides. Or look at this year’s Pulitzer Board members and you will find reporters, media executives, foundation functionaries, and university faculty all of whom are notoriously progressive.

he public overwhelmingly relies on the press to provide them with accurate information and proper context. When it comes to COVID-19, many press outlets are consistently failing to do that. In fact, the reporting on data related to the epidemic has increasingly led to conclusions that aren’t accurate and an audience that is misinformed.

The perfect example was an article from The Hill that told readers Texas was seeing “thousands of new coronavirus cases days after state’s stay-at-home order lifted.” Seems rather obvious that The Hill started with a view that moving into a re-opening phase is a mistake and things are getting worse, and then looked for a way to support that conclusion. This claim managed to mislead readers in two key ways:

(1) Given the incubation period and a lag in testing, new cases that are identified on a certain day are unlikely to have any relationship to policies implemented days earlier.

(2) “New cases” is a very misleading metric because it does not account for increases in testing. The rate of positive tests in Texas has declined significantly.

Mainstream outlets have attempted to tie new cases and deaths to recent re-opening actions in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, despite it being clear that any spike in cases or deaths would not be apparent for weeks after such policy changes. Such actions could lead to a spike in new cases, but trying to tie them to those seen right now is clearly incorrect.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/06/could-media-please-stop-publishing-the-exact-same-nevertrump-column-over-and-over-again/

It is said that the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. In media, NeverTrumpism is writing the same column over and over and expecting the Orange Bad Man to disappear.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: President Donald Trump is unraveling. Oh, you’ve heard it eleventy billion times from the same half dozen “NeverTrump” pundits? Yeah, so has everyone. It’s the same column from the same people published with alarming frequency.

It’s not the pundits’ fault, necessarily. They are who they are, and clearly Trump has broken the part of their brains that used to be able to synthesize new information and develop interesting and compelling arguments. It is, however, the media outlets’ fault for publishing the same dreck over and over.

Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.

In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/06/tell-a-lie-win-a-pulitzer/

Maybe you missed the news that the august New York Times won yet another Pulitzer Prize, this one for its much-debunked “1619 Project.” If you didn’t, we have a question: Is there any better illustration for why Americans now hold the big media in such low esteem?

Nikole Hannah-Jones of the Times won the Pulitzer for Commentary on Monday, proving once again that the American media and its guiding institutions have continued to move far left, and that includes the Pulitzer Prize judges. Among major media, none have made the sinistral shift more determinedly than the New York Times under Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

The 1619 Project is aptly titled. It’s not journalism so much as a twisted piece of progressive propaganda that even now is being imposed on thousands of grade-school students as part of our “education” curriculum. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically true.

The truth is, the essential outlines of the 1619 Project have been knocked down like bowling pins. In its own words, the alternate history proposes “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story.”

As the Times further elaborated, “Out of slavery – and the anti-black racism it required – grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/04/has-china-compromised-every-major-mainstream-media-entity/

Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) record of oppression, corporate media outlets are parroting the authoritarian government’s propaganda, even in the midst of an outbreak the CCP worsened through a cover-up. Many of those media outlets have financial ties to Chinese companies with intense oversight from the CCP.

“You often see representatives from American companies with financial ties to China naturally become defenders of the CCP’s policies and spreading the CCP’s propaganda,” said Helen Raleigh, an author and senior contributor at The Federalist who emigrated from China. “The financial tie means these Americans will be much less likely to challenge China’s human rights record or unacceptable demand such as technology transfer.”

We do not know the extent of editorial oversight from corporations and individuals with financial incentives to placate the CCP, if any. But we know the incentives exist, and that’s worth understanding. Below is a breakdown of financial ties between major U.S. media organizations and the CCP.

The New York Times

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim owns 17.4 percent of The New York Times through the company’s Class A shares. As the largest shareholder, his investment allows him to vote for approximately one-third of the company’s board.

In 2009, Slim loaned $250 million to The New York Times Company, the parent company of the New York Times. That same year, Slim purchased 15.9 million Class A shares of the company.

Slim has regularly conducted business with Chinese companies with overt ties to the CCP. In 2017, Slim’s Giant Motors joined ventures with China’s JAC Motors and began manufacturing cars in Mexico to sell in the Latin America Market. According to Forbes, the goal of selling to Latin America was to circumvent the Trump administration’s trade policies aimed at protecting American jobs — a move that benefited the Beijing in the Chinese-American trade wars.