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MEDIA

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SYDNEY WILLIAMS: THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO KNOW

By on October 18th, 2020

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control. Wherever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.”    Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)        Address – American Society of Newspaper Editors 1925

                                                                                                        

For the past ten or more years, I have posted my essays on a blog run by Google. It had always been easy to do; traffic on the Blog was generally slow. It was a way to preserve my essays (besides the paper copies and the ones stored in the cloud and on my hard drive), and as a means to access them by subject through the internet. In recent months, the number of “hits” on my Blog has risen to the range of four to six thousand a month – not a lot in this age we live in, but enough so that Google apparently decided that posting and editing should be more onerous. I have not been blocked, but access for me has become more difficult.

A few days ago, Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a story in the New York Post that showed an e-mail from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, to Hunter Biden, a new board member. The e-mail, dated April 17, 2015, thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to his father, indicating a meeting had taken place between Vice President Biden and Mr. Pozharskyi. Mr. Biden has denied such a meeting took place. The Senate Homeland Security Committee, led by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) is “in the process of validating the information,” as Senator Johnson told the Wall Street Journal. As well, Twitter locked the personal account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, because she had linked to the Post’s story.

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Social Media Censoring Of Biden Influence-Peddling Must End Now

By on October 16th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/16/social-media-censoring-of-biden-influence-peddling-must-end-now/

It seemed perhaps a bit excessive when President Donald Trump referred to Democratic candidate Joe Biden as a “grifter.” But after reviewing the incriminating emails found on son Hunter Biden’s laptop, if anything Trump’s remark might be an understatement.

We’re writing this knowing full well that the progressive apologists for Democratic Party crimes at social media giants Facebook and Twitter probably won’t let this be shared. They’ve basically dammed up the truth so no one can share it, hoping it will all go away.

It won’t. The news is getting out. And it isn’t good for either Joe Biden or his freeloading son. The evidence clearly suggests that both Bidens profited from the vice president’s office during the Obama administration, in essence selling access for cash.

What’s galling is that Biden had heretofore denied any contact at all with Hunter’s many global partners, saying he had “never spoken” to his son “about his overseas business dealings.”

But the newly discovered trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop says otherwise.

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Twitter Operates as Biden’s Censorship Arm A sordid tale of tech giants’ election interference. Joseph Klein

By on October 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/twitter-operates-bidens-censorship-arm-joseph-klein/

Twitter is censoring the dissemination of links to a bombshell news story and user commentary that is negative to the Democrats’ presidential candidate Joe Biden as voters are already casting their ballots less than three weeks before Election Day. On Wednesday, Twitter as well as Facebook blocked access through their platforms to a New York Post story casting serious doubts on Biden’s denials that he had ever discussed his son Hunter’s business dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma while he was serving as vice president. Hunter was raking in lots of money from Burisma while his father Joe was traveling to Ukraine as the Obama administration’s point man there.

The New York Post article published the text of an e-mail reportedly showing a top Burisma executive thanking Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father.” In May 2014, the year that Hunter Biden secured his lucrative position with Burisma for which he had no qualifications other than the Biden name, Vadym Pozharskyi, a top Burisma adviser, e-mailed Hunter asking Joe Biden’s prodigal son “how you could use your influence” on Burisma’s behalf. Less than a year later, on April 17, 2015, Pozharskyi reportedly sent Hunter Biden an e-mail thanking Hunter “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together.” Less than eight months after the date of this e-mail, during a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, Joe Biden by his own admission pressured Ukraine’s leaders to get rid of the Ukrainian prosecutor or face the loss of a $1 billion dollar loan guarantee. That prosecutor claimed he was preparing to investigate Burisma, which would have meant interrogations of members of Burisma’s executive board including Hunter Biden.

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Twitter and Facebook’s Shameful Repression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Story

By on October 15th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/twitter-and-facebooks-shameful-repression-of-the-new-york-posts-hunter-biden-story/

This morning, Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications manager (and, per his bio, a former staffer for Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the House Majority PAC), announced that the social-media giant would begin “reducing” the “distribution” of a New York Post investigation into emails purporting that Joe Biden met with a top executive from the Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings at the behest of his son Hunter Biden.

Bad idea.

In one of the emails reported by the Post, a Burisma executive named Vadym Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for inviting him to Washington to meet with the vice president in 2015.

If the Post report is to be believed, the Biden-Burisma meeting occurred less than a year before the vice president pressured Ukrainian officials to fire Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor investigating the company that was paying Hunter $50,000 per month for his alleged expertise. That is, by any journalistic standard, newsworthy.

Instead of simply asking pertinent questions, or debunking the Post’s reporting, a media blackout was initiated. A number of well-known journalists warned colleagues and their sizable social-media audiences not to share the story.

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Legacy Media Fall Silent On Bombshell Report Showing Joe Biden Lied About Knowledge Of Son’s Foreign Business By Tristan Justice

By on October 14th, 2020

http://Legacy Media Fall Silent On Bombshell Report Showing Joe Biden Lied About Knowledge Of Son’s Foreign Business By Tristan Justice

Any time a legacy paper drops what they call a “bombshell” report on President Donald Trump, one can safely bet it will end up on the front page of every outlet immediately upon publication.

It happened with the Woodward tapes, where the Watergate journalist uncovered comments the president had been making for months. It happened with a report in the Atlantic, where the magazine published a hit piece based solely on anonymous sources making claims only to be contradicted by more than a dozen current and former White House staff, including fired National Security Advisor John Bolton. And it happened with every minor new detail to emerge in the mainstream media’s Russiagate narrative seeking to indict the president as a Russian agent.

When the New York Post dropped an actual bombshell report on Wednesday morning however, exposing that 2020 Democratic presidential nominee repeatedly lied about what he knew of his son’s potentially criminal overseas business activity, legacy outlets so eager to publish incriminating content on the Trump White House have gone silent.

Emails obtained by the Post show correspondence between Hunter Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian advisor to Biden’s energy firm Burisma show that contrary to Joe Biden’s claims that he never talked business with his son “or with anyone else,” the vice president at the time was indeed introduced to Pozharskyi by Hunter. Hunter Biden was raking in upwards of $50,000 a month in excess compensation for serving on the board of Burisma while his father served as the “public face” of White House policy towards Ukraine.

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THE 1619 CHRONICLES Bret Stephens *****

By on October 12th, 2020

https://mailchi.mp/30f104131355/krd-new-bret-stephens-the-1619-chronicles?e=936

Bret Stephens takes on his own paper’s “1619 Project” in glorious form, exposing the many falsehoods and problems with it. Bravo! KRD

If there’s one word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to The New York Times’s award-winning 1619 Project, it’s ambition. Ambition to reframe America’s conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history. Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly debate to national consciousness.

In some ways, this ambition succeeded. The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

It showed, in a stunning photo essay, the places where human beings were once bought and sold as slaves — neglected scenes of American infamy. It illuminated the extent to which so much of what makes America great, including some of our uniquely American understandings of liberty and equality, is unthinkable without the struggle of Black Americans, as well as the extent to which so much of what continues to bedevil us is the result of centuries of racism.

And, in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

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Don’t Let the Media Win This Election By Frank Miele

By on October 12th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/12/dont_let_the_media_win_this_election.html

“It is hard for anyone who is not chained to a rock to fathom how millions of people can accept the anti-Trump narrative that is projected 24/7 from the studios of CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC and the rest. Don’t these millions of people — these “likely voters,” according to multiple polls — have any perspective?”

The mainstream media have always skewed left in the modern era, but that didn’t mean they were parasitic vampires who fed on the misfortune of others. When Ronald Reagan — the most conservative modern president  elected prior to Donald Trump — was wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet in 1981, the media reported the event as a matter of national and historic significance. There was no glee and no speculation about President Reagan’s karmic responsibility for his near-death experience.

As a young liberal myself then, I experienced the horror of seeing our president shot on camera and the joy of seeing our president and his wife, Nancy, wave from the window of his hospital room several days later. The shooting was a moment of unifying grief, and the rapid recovery was a moment of triumph, not just for President Reagan, but for our people as a whole. Politics be damned.

Fast-forward four decades. Welcome to “Twilight of the Media: The Week of the Vampires.” When Donald Trump revealed that he had tested positive for coronavirus, the media spoke with almost one voice: Trump got what he deserved. That was the beginning of a week that represents what one can only hope is the low point in media distortion and Fake News, but may also justifiably be described as “situation normal.” It certainly made clear to me and many others what is at stake on Nov. 3.

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Are COVID Case Surges More Fake News? By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

By on October 12th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/are_covid_case_surges_more_fake_news.html

Thousands of diagnoses and not many dying.

COVID cases are on the rise, or so we are told daily by a hysterical media. Newspaper headlines scream panic as this recent USAToday article proclaimed, “COVID-19 cases rising in 39 states – 9 months into the pandemic: We are overwhelmed.”

It’s the American people that are overwhelmed. Nine months into masks and lockdowns, with a presidential election just weeks away, facing a daily barrage of doom and gloom from the media. Are cases really on the rise or are these simply positive tests?

The above article, one of many warns, “A startling nine states setting ominous, seven-day records for infections.” 39 states reported more cases in the last week than they had in the week before.

What exactly is a “case”? The USAToday article doesn’t say. Neither do other articles or cable news doctors and other “experts.” Is a “case” simply a positive test?

The CDC answers this question with a “case definition.” A case is not just a positive test. Instead what is needed is, “Presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence.” Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.

Yet what the media trumpets as “surging cases” are only positive tests. There is no discussion of whether or not any of the individuals with positive tests are showing symptoms or are actually sick with the Chinese flu. Or if they are contagious and needing to be quarantined.

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Trump-Hating Journalists Write Fiction, Not News Itxu Diaz *****

By on October 11th, 2020

https://spectator.org/trump-hating-journalists-write-fiction-not-news/

Hardly any journalists get scoops anymore because almost everybody already knows everything. A couple of afternoons ago, in the fruit shop, the lady who has worked there for as long as I can remember greeted me with arched eyebrows and arms locked in pre-election campaign position: “So you’re the one who writes all these fascist articles?” My answer was almost as stupid as her question: “Give me six ripe tomatoes too, if you please.” Information travels faster than my reflexes. And I’m starting to get used to the idea of journalists storming into newsrooms, sweating, bursting with some big exclusive, only to sit down, start writing it up, and discover, crushed, that someone has already been dancing to it for three days on TikToc.
 

The era of the journalism we saw in The Front Page has passed. Walter Burns was a scoundrel, but at least he did it to sell newspapers. These days, the most exciting thing that comes out of any of those old newspaper offices is the tweet of an intern who has published some personal obscenity by mistake on the newspaper’s Twitter feed. And the worst thing is that most of the followers won’t notice the difference. Without a doubt, authorial and analytical journalism is an honorable and pertinent way out of the eternal crisis that long ago left our business looking like Wile E. Coyote, right after the stick of dynamite went off in his face.

Unfortunately, not all the press has chosen to find an honorable way out. I’ve discovered these days, with certain surprise, that fiction-journalism is back, although in a much more tedious version. No, it is not the gonzo journalism of the great Hunter S. Thompson. For that you need talent. No, this is prophetical news. We didn’t see that coming. I would never have imagined that this prolonged crisis of journalism would lead to the horoscopes jumping out of the back pages onto the very front page. The new section chiefs will be witches!

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A New York Times Columnist Wish-Casts Foreign Intervention into U.S. Elections By David Harsanyi

By on October 8th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/new-york-times-columnist-wish-casts-foreign-intervention-in-u-s-elections/

Among the countries he’d invite to interfere in our elections: Pakistan, Somalia, and Venezuela.

Peter Beinart, the newly minted contributing New York Times columnist, recently argued in an op-ed at the paper that Israel should be dissolved, its inhabitants thrown to the mercy of terror organizations such as Hamas and the PLO. Apparently, he has something comparable in mind for the United States.

Calling on the past examples of racist authoritarian Woodrow Wilson, the unapologetic Communist Paul Robeson, Malcom X, Black Panthers, and others, Beinart contends that Democrats might have to summon the U.N. Human Rights Council, a world body teeming with dictators and theocrats, to intervene in what he imagines is America’s “chronic racist disenfranchisement.” Alas, this is the kind of feverish wish-casting that passes for intellectual discourse these days.Here is a sampling of nations Beinart believes should be tasked with overseeing the impartiality of American elections (in no particular order of nefariousness): Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Eritrea, Somalia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Angola, the Congo, Ukraine, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Qatar, and Pakistan.

Russia and China, incidentally, will be added as new members of the U.N. Human Rights Council for the next term, just in time to arbitrate the American election. Or, in other words, Beinart argues that we have a moral obligation to ask the Russians to interfere in the American election — and not through some puerile Facebook ads but as empowered observers here at the bequest of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

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