RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-stonewalls-steele-dossier-disinformation-trump-nyt-washington-post-trump-11638718026?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Why don’t they just fess up and say they’re sorry?” That is the question journalists have asked about the corporate and institutional clients of my crisis-management business. It’s a question media companies should be asking themselves amid the implosion of the Steele dossier. Here we are, a few weeks after the dossier was discredited, and no one has paid a price.

Having had media companies as clients, I’ve found that when they’re under fire, they behave no differently from chemical or drug companies. Why? Because they don’t see coming clean as being in their self-interest.

Among other things, the truth can tarnish the brand and jam them up in court. So they often deny, stonewall, close ranks, and attack their critics. Two things media companies have that other businesses don’t is the ability to deliver news instantly and the mantle of moral authority.

The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the sources of disinformation leveled at our clients. The first factor in a successful disinformation campaign is an audience that desperately wants to believe something. Then you find a plausible allegation that fits the marketplace. Next, you implant an outrageous allegation within the plausible one. Finally, you find a trustworthy person, someone simpatico with media organizations, to let it rip.

tps://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/28/reporters_question_yourselves_146782.html

If you have any doubt about whether the White House press corps has a different standard for President Joe Biden than for former President Donald Trump, consider the press briefings that followed their first physicals as president at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Biden’s physical occurred Friday.

On reflection, Team Trump was too transparent when then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders brought Ronny Jackson, then physician to the president, to the briefing room podium where he answered press questions for nearly an hour in January 2018.

Here’s a sampling of some of the more egregious press questions.

— “Are you confident of his prostate health?”

— “There have been reports that the president has forgotten names, that he is repeating himself. Are you ruling out things like early-onset Alzheimer’s? Are you looking at dementialike  symptoms?”

(Jackson disclosed that Trump had been given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and scored 30 out of 30.)

— “Do you have a life expectancy range for him based on his results?”

— “Did you see any evidence of bone spurs?” — a reference to the cause for Trump’s fifth Vietnam-era draft deferment. (Jackson said the medical team didn’t check for bone spurs.)

— “Did you take a waist measurement for the president?”

— Given Trump’s age, then 71, “Will you give cognitive testing in the future?”

— “Does he take any sleep aids?” (Yes, Ambien occasionally during foreign trips.)

— “How much sleep does he get on average?”

CNN sent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to the briefing. Gupta challenged Jackson for asserting that Trump’s health was “excellent” for his age, given that Trump was taking cholesterol-lowering medication and Gupta saw evidence of heart disease and borderline obesity. (Jackson credited Trump’s health to “great genes.”)

— “Does he watch too much TV?”

— “Do you have any concerns about the president’s use of Twitter?”

— “Is there anyone on the president’s medical team, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist, whose job it is to monitor the president’s emotional state or watch for potential psychiatric problems or indicators of those?” (“That falls upon me,” Jackson responded.)

Not all of the above questions are out of bounds, but the very number of questions about Trump’s mental state was over-the-top. If then Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ plan had been to make the press look like a pack of jackals to the GOP base, she succeeded.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/24/ii-awards-its-first-fool-itzer-prize-to-msnbc-for-its-thanksgiving-coverage/

In our continued effort to point out the ugly media bias that misleads and divides us, we have created a prize that will be occasionally handed out to outlets and journalists that promote the Democrats’ agenda, violate decent sensibilities, tell outright lies, or demonstrate an obvious hatred of America. Our first Foolitzer goes to MSNBC for a rant of the sort that has become all too common this time of the year.

During Saturday’s “The Cross Connection,” host Tiffany Cross turned the screen and the microphone over to a “Cross Connection favorite,” who launched into a tirade about settlers who brought nothing but took everything.

In what appears to be a pre-taped “essay” for the show, Gyasi Ross, identified as an American Indian, lectured viewers on “the mythology of Thanksgiving,” which he believes “closely mimics the mythology of white America.” The idea of “equal exchange” between Native Americans and settlers on what some say is the first Thanksgiving is how America “wants to see itself.”

“I’m still trying to find out what indigenous people received of value” from the first Thanksgiving, he said. “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence.”

Of course, he conveniently ignores the genocide and violence among the tribes before Europeans arrived on the continent, the same genocide and violence that has afflicted humans throughout their history. He also forgets to mention that the first Thanksgiving happened more than 150 years before there was an America, and there’s no acknowledgement that some Cherokees owned black slaves.

But never mind. He’s on a roll.

“That genocide and violence is still on the menu, as state-sponsored violence against native and black Americans is commonplace, and violent, private white supremacy is celebrated and subsidized,” Ross continued, seamlessly moving on to a wild claim that “from Ahmaud Arbery to Trayvon Martin, white Americans are still killing native and black Americans with no fear of reprisal.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/my-permanent-suspension-twitter-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: Below is Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov’s explanation of his recent permanent suspension from Twitter:

On Thursday morning, Nov. 18, 2021, at 2:39am Pacific, Twitter informed me that my Twitter account had been permanently suspended. The reason they gave me was that I had violated Twitter’s “COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy.”

The offending article they cited that I had posted was Pfizer Confirms COVID-Vaccinated People Can ‘Shed’ Spike Proteins And Harm The Unvaccinated – from vaccinesafety.info. The article is factual and backed up by verified and credible sources. Twitter gave me zero information on what exactly is misleading in the article.

This permanent suspension is a culmination of a long history of Twitter punishing me for violating their leftist One-Party line. Just recently, for instance, on Oct. 25, 2021, Twitter informed me that they had locked me out of my account because I had violated their “rules against hateful conduct.”

My “hateful conduct” involved me entering the discussion over Twitter suspending Rep. Jim Banks’ Twitter account because he had called Dr. Rachel Levine, the transgender Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary, a “man.”

I tweeted the story with an honest question that was on my mind: Does it matter if Rachel has a penis or not? I honestly thought — and continue to think — that this is a legitimate question in the context of Rep. Banks’ punishment.

I was subsequently informed that I had to delete the Tweet in order to get my account back. I decided to delete it – so that I could return and continue to ask many similar questions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/17/looks-like-joe-biden-just-lost-the-new-york-times/

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

And even more remarkable is what comes next. Irwin writes:

You can draw a direct line from a specific policy decision that Biden and congressional Democrats made this past winter to some of the inflation happening now.

In designing the stimulus that Congress passed in March, Biden’s administration went big, with $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief — on top of a separate $900 billion package that passed three months earlier. Put the two together, and $2.8 trillion in federal money has been coursing through the economy this year while economic activity has trended only a few hundred billion dollars a year short of what mainstream analysts would consider full health.

The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore. 

But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

In April, for example, a USA Today “fact check” told readers that COVID-19 was “to blame for spike in lumber prices, not Biden.” In June, it ran another saying that “Rising gas prices due to high demand and low supply, not Biden’s policies.”

The next month, AP declared that “House GOP falsely blames Biden for gas prices.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/16/please-stop-trusting-anything-the-mainstream-media-report/

America’s mainstream, or legacy, media have an agenda. It’s not to subjectively report the truth but to further leftist ideas and policies, all of which are toxic. The press’ disinformation campaign to prop up critical race theory is yet another example of its effort to deceive, manipulate, and divide on behalf of the party it is constantly shilling for.

A new study from the American Enterprise Institute found the media focus on schools teaching the history of slavery and racism, and largely ignore the “bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity.”

AEI’s Frederick M. Hess “examined all news accounts addressing CRT published over a one-year period by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today),” and several “influential education press outlets.” All are news accounts. None are opinion pieces.

“Given that this admittedly revolutionary worldview is what motivates many objections to CRT-influenced pedagogy, one would expect news accounts to routinely address it,” Hess writes in “Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/washington-post-corrects-removes-reporting-steele-dossier

The Washington Post did something many other liberal outlets have failed to do and corrected previous reporting that relied on the discredited Steele dossier that accused former President Donald Trump of an extensive conspiracy with the Russians.

“The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusan American businessman as a key source of the ‘Steele dossier,’ a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump,” Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote. 

“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as ‘Source D,’ the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele,” Farhi continued. 

The post added editor’s notes, amended headlines, removed sections identifying Millian as the source and deleted an accompanying video summarizing the article. 

“Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident,” Farhi wrote. “The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as ‘Source E,’ has never been substantiated.”

The Post’s correction came as other news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, have been criticized for failing to adjust reporting after Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the Trump-Russia probe further discredited the already-shaky dossier.