News Media Sensationalism and Dishonesty

Just reporting the news (if there is any) won't generate ratings as effectively as reporting news items with an emotional twist.  For example, shootings, fires, train derailments, and police standoffs always seem to be "dangerously close" to a school.  With schools only a quarter of a mile apart in the big cities, there's always one near enough to make that connection.

I recall an occasion a couple of years ago when there was a gang-related shooting in east Dallas just after midnight one night, right next to an elementary school, and the next morning there was a reporter on the scene fretting about how the shooting took place "dangerously close" to the school.  But logically, that was the best possible place for a shooting in the middle of the night — when nobody's at school!

Reporters often use meaningless one-dimensional statistics; for example, "Texas leads the nation in big-rig accidents."  (That's a quote from a recent story designed to drum up support for some new state law.)  That makes it sound like the truck drivers on Texas highways are more dangerous than anywhere else.  But Texas has more highway mileage than most other states, and lots of really bad drivers on the road.

But there are more subtle components of media sensationalism that the average viewer hardly notices, at least consciously.  Major market stations spend millions of dollars every year on futuristic news sets, lighting, catchy music, sound effects, visual effects, character generators and various kinds of electronic graphics.  TV newscasts are staged and choreographed as thoroughly as a small-town play.  In the old days, a middle-aged white man sat behind a plain old desk and reported the news.  That's not enough in today's TV market.  The happy news team — representing all race and gender combinations — sits behind a Star Trek desk and reads whatever comes up on the TelePrompter.  They rarely use words that are longer than three syllables.  The high-priced news readers are really good at putting on a phony "concerned" look at just the right time, if Botox permits.  And if you'll notice, they are usually just stating the obvious, and only rarely does anyone speak on a single subject for more than five or ten seconds.


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Dishonesty

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Related topics on other pages:

The New York Times
National Public Radio
The case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin
JournoList
The CBS Memo Controversy of September 2004
Dishonest and misleading stories about firearms.
Dishonest and misleading stories about the environment.




Sensationalism

Weather Channel map
The Weather Channel's Absurd 'Hot' Propaganda.  The Weather Channel is absolutely ridiculous.  The channel's "Weather Across the Country" map on their homepage for September 19 had red colors EVERYWHERE!  Because it's HOT HOT HOT!  No area of the country is experiencing normal weather for mid September, apparently.  Chicago, for instance, was displayed as red to deep orange.  Warm, right?  I can tell you from personal experience:  It was "freezing" on Tuesday, September 19 in Northern Illinois for a day that is still technically summer.  It rained all day and barely got over 60 all afternoon.  I regretted not wearing a jacket to the office.  On this map, Seattle is in "yellow/green" denoting cooler weather, but I can assure you that today in Chicago felt like Seattle ... and it probably felt a lot warmer in Seattle where The Weather Channel said, and showed with color, that it was significantly "cooler." [...] Minot, North Dakota was allegedly 86 degrees today and is in "cool" yellow.  Jacksonville, Florida is one degree higher at 87 and is in "deep red hot."

Ignoring History Means Choosing Windmills Over Whales.  What we do know is that the media will hysterically opine about climate change records.  Except that they'll be wrong (as always).  There's nothing exceptional about the current heat we're experiencing:
  •   Death Valley, California, holds the world-record temperature high:  A whopping 134 F measured on July 10, 1913.
  •   North Dakota hit its historic high of 121 F in 1936.
  •   Montana experienced its highest temperature of 117F in 1937.
  •   Despite being the USA's warmest state, Florida's record high is only 108 F, and that occurred in 1931.

Control Versus Choice.  COVID cases are up.  Hospitalizations climbed 24% last week.  But the media make everything seem scarier than it is.  The headline "Up 24%!" comes after dramatic lows.  Hospitalizations are still less than half what they were when President Joe Biden said, "The pandemic is over." [...] This month, several school districts in Kentucky and Texas closed.  "The safety and wellbeing of our students, staff, and community is a top priority," said the school superintendent in Texas.  But kids rarely get very sick from COVID, and schools aren't COVID hotspots.  Studies on tens of thousands of people found "no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus."  A Lancet study found Florida had the 12th-fewest excess COVID deaths in the country, even though Florida students went back to school without masks relatively soon.

Independent Journalists, the Frontline Workers in the War on Truth.  Truthful and comprehensive journalism is at the heart of whether we will continue to devolve, or whether we regain our national footing.  By their nature, journalists have a platform with the public, and a tremendous ability to influence it; people believing in and then acting on erroneous information yields destructive consequences.  In this way, journalists as a whole advertently support the interests of the Democrat Destroyers; think of the "every man for himself" hysteria stories or the suppression of the efficacy of certain medicinal drugs when COVID first appeared.

In California This Weekend, We Saw, Again, How Easy It Is to Panic Americans.  I am writing this column on a beautiful sunny day in Southern California.  It is a Monday in mid-August, so it is not a national holiday, yet in Los Angeles County, where I live, all the schools and all government offices are closed.  Why?  Because, for the past week, the National Weather Service, state and local authorities, and national and local media have been ceaselessly warning that a tropical storm would hit Southern California on Sunday night and Monday with a "life-threatening" intensity not seen since the last tropical storm hit California in 1939, 84 years ago. [...] Unlike the invisible COVID-19 virus, the reason for panic this time was completely visible.  All these people needed to do was walk outside of their home or hotel — or just look out the window.  Had they done so, they would have seen that steady but moderate rain was falling.  Just rain.  No high winds, no downpour, no storm, not even thunder or lightning.

'Global Warming' Morphs Into 'Global Boiling' as the Global Climate Hoax Turns Up the Heat.  On July 27, 2023, the United Nations turned up the heat on the global climate hoax by declaring "the era of global warming" has now morphed into "the era of global boiling." With typically hysterical rhetoric, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that, "short of a mini-Ice Age" in the coming days, July 2023 would likely "shatter records across the board." [...] This all-too-obvious coordinated drumroll of frightening climate change warnings has become the propaganda technique of choice for international organizations who presume responsibility for controlling Earth's climate.  The only problem with the current theme of the month — namely, that July 2023 was the "hottest" month on record — is that it is NOT true.  But truthfulness is apparently a less worthy goal to the UN, the WMO, and the European Commission than making sure we stop using hydrocarbon fuels, the energy that has allowed modern industrial states to prosper during our good fortune to be experiencing an interglacial warming period.  The whole point of these announcements is to scare people.  "Climate change is here," the UN chief said.  "It is terrifying.  And it's just beginning."

The Editor says...
It's only terrifying if you watch TV, and believe everything you're told.  If you turn off the TV, it's just a hot summer.  Winter will be here soon enough.

Warming-obsessed media wrong again.  There is not much new about media hyperbole in weather reporting, but July's climate alarmism may be more breathless than usual.  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media were inundated with posts containing flaming red maps of Southern Europe and Northern Africa.  [Several tweets]  "July 2023 will probably be the world's hottest month in hundreds, if not thousands, of years," said top NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt.  One Twitter user (with 22,000 followers) claimed, "After the hottest day and week, we are now experiencing the hottest month ever (in about 120,000 years, based on paleoclimatology).  As we keep warming the planet, we will soon experience global temperatures not seen in the past million years!"  When questioned about the justification for his claims, the tweeter responded that scientists had "discovered there was a glacial period, which many people know about from a movie called Ice Age."  Imagine substantiating scientific claims by referencing a Hollywood movie!  Such is the sorry state of critical thought.

The press is trying to scare us about heat deaths to promote its global warming agenda.  We are supposed to be scared because 13 people, mostly older, died from heat in the current hot weather, and we are told that heat deaths are becoming more common. [...] Good journalists who care about informing the public, instead of indoctrinating them to push an agenda, would do some research to put the heat related deaths in perspective.  Sadly, the current crop of journalists seems much more interested in getting the public to capitulate to the radical green agenda to remake or destroy America, instead of informing them.  According to the CDC, the most recent data show an average of 702 people die from heat related illness each year.  To put that number in perspective, around 3 million people die each year from all causes, so less than three-hundredths of one percent of deaths each year are caused by heat.  How many of the 702 would have died from other causes that year?  My guess is, just like with COVID, they had other significant health problems?

'115 Degrees Fahrenheit' screams the New York Times headline.  But in point of fact, instead of seeking to scare people with high temperatures, most of the reporting lately talks about the heat index.  The purpose is to make people think it is warmer than it is. [...] If you Google the question: What is the highest heat index ever recorded, you actually get the highest actual temperature ever recorded which was 134 F. which occurred in Death Valley California in 1913.  A lot of other heat records occurred during the 1930's, so why do they keep telling the public that these are the hottest years on record and then claim that humans, cars, CO2, Coal, methane etc. have caused the high temperatures?

All Of A Sudden, Outbreaks Of Malaria, H5N1, Swine Flu And Monkeypox Are All In The News.  After a bit of a lull, it appears that pestilences are going to start making headline news once again.  Of course that is the last thing that many of us want to hear.  Many Americans are finally getting their lives back to normal after the last pandemic, and a lot of people are hoping that we won't have to go through another for a long time to come.  Unfortunately, the truth is that we have entered a period of history when major outbreaks will be quite common.  In secret labs all over the planet, mad scientists are monkeying around with some of the deadliest bugs ever known to humanity, and as we have seen, it is way too easy for an "accident" to happen.  One of the diseases that our scientists have been playing around with is Malaria, and now there are four confirmed cases in Florida and one in Texas.

Human groundwater usage causing earth to wobble?  According to the pajama boys over at thehill.com, a new study has found that humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the earth that the planet has begun to detectably wobble on its axis.  They admit the "magnitude of the new wobble is slight — a matter of millimeters, which puts it in the same approximate speed category as Earth's slowly drifting continents."  So, perhaps the wobble is actually related to the Earth's slowly drifting continents?  The Hill says the findings, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, purport to "show the extent to which human action — in the form of dam construction, groundwater drilling, and the burning of fossil fuels — are impacting the very position of the Earth." [...] The "scientists" conducting the study allegedly found that, between 1993 and 2010, human society, largely due to agriculture, had depleted 2,510 gigatons of groundwater, the equivalent of half the volume of Lake Huron.  Half the volume of one lake?  Is that really that calamitous?

The Editor says...
The migration of the poles did not begin in 1993, and there is no reason to believe that human activity caused it.  More comments below.

Earth's tilt has changed by 31 inches thanks to humans — and it could make climate change even WORSE, study warns.  Our insatiable need for water may be keeping us alive, but it's shifting the tilt of the Earth, a new study shows.  Researchers in Korea say the removal of groundwater around the world for drinking and irrigation is altering the Earth's mass and in turn making its axis 'wobble'.  According to the team, we've shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted 31 inches (78.5 cm) east between 1993 and 2010 alone.

The Editor says...
Socialists think you're really stupid.  Does anyone believe that anything we do could make the earth wobble?  Does anyone at the Daily Mail understand how big the Earth is, and how little 31 inches is by comparison?  Is anyone harmed by the migration of the poles?  Apparently the article above is sounding an alarm about a 31 inch peak-to-peak excursion over a period of 17 years.  What happened before 1993?  Is there any historical data showing that the poles did not migrate before the industrial revolution?  Even if everything in the article above is true, and it isn't, what would it take to stop the wobble a planet that has a mass of 5.9722 x 1024 kg?  The only reason to write an alarming newspaper article about a non-problem (that can't be fixed even if it is a problem) is deception:  If the writers can convince you that driving your car is destabilizing the whole world, they might talk you into giving up the freedom that your car represents, along with other freedoms.  I suspect the Earth has been wobbling since about 4,000 years ago, a couple of weeks after Noah got aboard the ark.  Note:  ["]The International Latitude Service was created by the International Geodetic Association in 1899 to study variations in latitude caused by polar motion, precession, or 'wobble' of the Earth's axis.["]  How many cars were on the road in 1899?  How many electric power plants were on line back then?

NBC's Chuck Todd Discovers That Black Teenagers Are Shooting Each Other.  Delivering statistics on gun deaths among teenagers, NBC News Chuck Todd discovers that black teenagers are killing each other at a much higher rate than white and asian kids.  Todd is shocked, shocked, at the outcome.  [Video clip]

The media's role in mass shootings.  The past few years have seen long stretches of calm, despite the propaganda from the biased and suspect "Gun Violence Archive," which seeks to label almost every petty crime incident as a "mass shooting" in the mind of the public.  On occasion, the peace is interrupted, with mass shootings taking place at predictable intervals after each miscreant from the previous shooting is elevated in the media to anti-hero status.  This is the well known and well studied phenomenon of media contagion, with each subsequent attack being predictable as clockwork.  So why aren't the nation's socialist media taking responsibility for its actions in causing these tragedies?  Why does it appear that they would rather exploit other people's pain for their political gain than save lives?

What's the Real Reason Political Anxiety Is So High?  [#1] Governmental power and control.  The only reason we have anxiety, stress, and worry about what happens in government is because the government is ridiculously, uncomfortably powerful.  If our political enemies (whoever they happen to be) take power, they could exert tremendous control over our lives.  So on some level, a bit of anxiety is reasonable.  [#2] It doesn't help that we're in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.  Media companies come in all shapes and sizes, from corporate juggernauts to independent journalists, and everyone is racing to publish news stories for the public to consume on a constant basis.  There is no more reading the morning paper; we are constantly bombarded with information.  Even if some of this information is positive, it's easy to become overwhelmed and feel anxious as a result.  [#3] Bad media incentives.  It's ironic that the very news organizations publishing stories about high rates of political anxiety are the same ones (perhaps) intentionally stoking those anxieties.  Media companies aren't necessarily incentivized to tell the truth or commit to quality journalism; instead, they're incentivized to get clicks and attention.

Perpetual pessimism:
Huge Rain Finally Comes to Drought-Stricken California, Media Predictably Moans.  It should be good news:  large rainstorms have been dumping huge amounts of rain and snow on the drought-plagued Golden State, and much more is expected.  After draconian water restrictions were placed on many residents last summer — with many forced to watch their lawns disintegrate into a crispy death — one would think all this water would be welcome.  But if you read a lot of the media out there, you'd think storms were a bad thing; we should get rain and snow — just on our terms, not the weather's.

Don't Let Police, Media Mislead You About Fentanyl Exposure Overdoses.  Once again, media outlets are rushing to sow panic by blindly accepting a police department's claims that an officer may have accidentally overdosed by being in close physical proximity to fentanyl, reinforcing the false message that you can potentially overdose on the drug even if you don't intentionally consume it.  This time we head to Tavares, Florida, where the Tavares Police Department distributed to the local press body camera footage of Officer Courtney Bannick appearing to collapse and pass out after encountering what turned out to be fentanyl and meth in a rolled-up dollar bill she found in a routine traffic stop.  Local news outlets lapped it up (the story, not the fentanyl) and the video footage ran on WESH (the local NBC affiliate), FOX 35, and elsewhere.  In none of the initial stories does anybody so much as question whether what they're seeing is actually being caused by exposure to fentanyl.

"Some of the Worst" News Media.  About 15 years ago I co-authored a book about air pollution and the Clean Air Act.  I know — you'll just have to contain your excitement.  One of the things we found was an example of what might be called the reverse Lake Wobegone Effect, i.e., according to local media every local area had "some of the worst" air pollution in the whole country!  Every metro area was below average!  Of course, if every place has "some of the worst" of anything, then no place really does (as the government's air quality data bear out*). [...] Actual EPA data shreds these claims, but environmental advocacy groups (especially the American Lung Association's annual "state of the air" report) produce cookie-cutter press releases claiming that each local area suffers "some of the worst" pollution in America, and the media dutifully repeats these claims.  This is why most environmental "reporters" are really just stenographers for environmentalists.  This ought to be embarrassing for any serious editor or publisher, but there aren't many serious editors or publishers any more.

11 Years Ago, Democrats Got Everything Wrong.  They Are Doing It Again.  On January 8, 2011, shortly after 10:00 AM, Democrat Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 other people were shot.  Six died.  Within minutes, every form of media was set ablaze with speculation. [...] By early afternoon, Jared Loughner a white male, had been identified as the shooter.  Loughner was instantly linked to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  He was linked to the Tea Party and then to the "right wing" generally. [...] By mid-afternoon, a graphic with crosshairs "targeting" Democrat districts was shown on CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post DailyKos, and dozens of other shows and internet sites about every 30 seconds.  The map, they loudly claimed, was definitive proof that Sarah Palin's PAC map had incited Loughner.  Palin was to blame.  The right was to blame.  All Republicans were to blame.  By nightfall, the torches were lit and the pitchforks were out. [...] Almost nothing media initially reported was accurate.  Palin had nothing to do with Loughner's personal grudge against Giffords.  Within weeks, America knew conclusively that Loughner never saw Palin's target map, and that "target maps" have been used for decades.

Hurricane Hysteria, Hype, and Histrionics.  Hurricane season is upon Southeastern America and that means hair-on-fire hysteria from the media and the political left.  After Hurricane Ian ravaged southwest coastal Florida, we have heard nothing but hype from the corporate media, eager to connect every hurricane to catastrophic global warming, climate change, or whatever excuse they are currently using to usher in the Green New Deal and tyrannical top-down control of all aspects of our lives.  Hurricanes are not new and are a staple of southern coastal regions since long [ago].  Yet judging from media histrionics, severe hurricanes are only a recent phenomenon, ignoring hundreds or thousands of years ago when Florida was nothing but a swamp.  Hurricane harpies in the media, practicing one of the Democrats' favorite strategies of never letting a crisis go to waste, were quick to pounce on tragedy for political gain.  Look at some of the headlines, all singing in perfect harmony. [...]

While Reporters Crowded Around Biden's Airport, 12 Suspected Terrorists Were Caught At The Actual Border.  Think America's legacy media can't get any worse at their job?  Think again.  Following reports that Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., would be sending a plane full of illegal immigrants to a local airport in Georgetown, Delaware, near the residence of President Joe Biden, reporters and self-proclaimed journalists flocked to the location of the supposed drop-off on Tuesday, waiting with bated breath for an event they could spin to fit their anti-GOP agenda.  The only problem for the press, however, was that the plane in question wasn't carrying migrants and didn't even land in Delaware.  As reported by left-wing NBC News, "by late Tuesday, no plane had arrived [in Delaware]" and instead "landed in Teterboro, New Jersey," with no migrants "aboard the plane."  "Earlier in the day, DeSantis stoked the coals of speculation by declining to confirm or deny whether the plane would even take off — his administration later refused to say if the plane that landed in New Jersey was part of his program to relocate migrants — in an intentional effort to keep the issue alive," the NBC report claimed, citing an unnamed, anonymous source as evidence of its assertions.

MSNBC Praises 'War Hero' Biden Who Was 'Chopping Wood' in the Mountains 'Til His Country Called.  Do you envision Joe Biden as a war hero?  Do you see him shirtless and sweaty, axing oak for the fire he's busting at the biceps to build?  From the sound of things on MSNBC, it wouldn't be wrong.  Last week on Deadline: White House, host Nicolle Wallace welcomed network contributor and Morgan State University journalism Professor Dr. Jason Johnson.  Discussion turned to the Charlottesville conflict of August 2017, during which a man drove his car into a crowd.  Horrifically, he killed one person and injured several others. [...] Did Joe Biden — who previously held no interest in ascending to the land's highest office — see the shock of Charlottesville as a sign he had to suit up and save America?  It seems Dr. Jason believes so.

Is Extreme Weather Causing the World's Rivers to Dry Up?  A recent CNN article entitled "The World's Rivers are Drying Up from Extreme Weather.  See How 6 Look from Space" purports to argue that rivers such as the Colorado, Yangtze, Rhine, Po, Loire, and Danube are dwindling due to "a painful lack of rain and relentless heat waves." [...] Let's start close to home.  The Colorado River is cited as the first example, and, although CNN attributes its drying to the "historic drought in the US West," they do not suggest that this drought is human induced.  They do mention, however, that "around 40 million people in seven states and Mexico rely on the river's water for drinking, agriculture and electricity."  But an evaluation of the current conditions from the USGS National Water Dashboard indicates, as shown below, that many stream gauge stations in western Colorado and Utah are near normal, and in New Mexico and Arizona, they are above and much above normal.

The vast majority of pharmacology, psychiatry, vaccine science and published research is a complete fraud.  [Scroll down]  As a hilarious example of the junk science lunacy of the climate cult, look no further than the corporate-controlled media which now claims that every country in the world is heating up faster than every other country in the world.  Such a claim is mathematically impossible, yet it has become the default lunatic claim of the climate cult media, regardless of its incomprehensible nature.

CNN'S 'Climate Correspondent' Predicts All Life on Earth Is About to End.  Nearly all media cooperate in disseminating climate change fear-porn.  When hot months come because the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun, temperatures go up.  Changes in temperatures are reported in media with alarm and always denoted on graphics in blood red.  A few days ago, I saw this graphic of July temperatures in Europe.  The split screen shows different colors, although the temperatures are just about the same.  The replies were swift to point out that other stations reported hot weather temperatures as a red graphic in 2017.  In any event, the effect of coloring land in red is to cause people to feel the emotional burn.  Feel the fear.  [Tweet]

NBC Panics Over Climate Change, Blames Manchin for Blocking Biden.  On Monday's NBC Nightly News, after spending the first five minutes of the broadcast panicking over a heat wave in the middle of July, anchor Lester Holt and correspondent Anne Thompson chalked the warm weather up to "climate change" and sought to blame Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) for blocking the Biden administration's radical climate change agenda which would drive inflation up further by pumping more money into the economy.  "This severe weather certainly underscoring the increasing role of climate change and the challenges America faces in trying to combat it," Holt whined before turning to Thompson to give her report.

Weather map colors
Weather forecasts now use a deep, dark red to represent glorious sunshine.  Why?  People are starting to notice some, uh, less-than-subtle psychological conditioning rearing its head in modern weather forecasting.  What was once the smiley, happy face of the sun letting us know we could strip off and run through the neighborhood sprinklers [...] has been replaced with the deepest, darkest red that corporate media graphics departments can create, designed to summon forth notions of hell on Earth.  Observe, back in 1995 — when "John Kettley was the weatherman, [...] — a temperature of 30 degrees celsius was reflected with a gentle orange.  That's 86 degrees to you Americans.  Or "sweater weather" if you're in Arizona.  It wasn't a deep orange.  It wasn't an offensive orange.  It wasn't even as orange as a former President freshly emerging from his tanning bed.  No, by July 2022, the same temperatures (30 degrees), at the same time of year, are reflected with the most sinister red you could imagine.


Can a Crisis Happen If No One Pays Attention?  It's hard to pay attention to fake crises when there's a real economic crises.  Politics as entertainment is most appealing to those who are basically comfortable and aren't worried about basic bread and butter issues.  That's now a smaller demographic than it used to be.  There's also a shortage of actual crises.  People are worried about crime, the actual everyday kind that they might experience, as opposed to the abstract "we need gun control because of occasional mass shootings" agitprop.  The number of actual people whose lives have changed or will change because of the Dobbs decision is tiny.  On the other hand, people are canceling summer plans, moving and scrimping because of crime and the economy.  The pandemic actually affected a lot of people, the current wave of political crises does not.

L.A. Times' 8 'Bombshells' from Hutchinson Testimony Are All Duds.  The establishment media treated the testimony Tuesday of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson at the January 6 Committee as if it were damning for Trump — before her claims began to fall apart.  The fact that Hutchinson was seen actually hugging members of the January 6 Committee, as if they were partners in some joint enterprise rather than investigators seeking the truth, ought to have raised red flags — but did not, until it was too late.  The Los Angeles Times, among others — including Fox News — set aside the basic rules of journalism, accepting as fact the sudden claims made by a witness whose testimony was based entirely on hearsay and who was never subject to cross-examination.  The Times published a list of what it called eight "bombshells" — some of which were soon debunked, some of which remain dubious, and some of which were just a repetition of things that were already common knowledge or that other witnesses had already told the investigation.

Just 5% call abortion [their] top concern.  Abortion, the No. 1 concern in today's media and politics, ranks nearly dead last among areas voters care about as they struggle with paying daily bills, soaring inflation, and interest rate hikes, according to a just-released survey.  While the Supreme Court's decision overruling the 1973 Roe v Wade right to abortion has dominated today's network and cable coverage, the latest McLaughlin & Associates poll said just 5% of voters call it a top concern.  Just below abortion, at 1%, is reviewing the 2020 election, over which the media are also obsessing.

The Hysterical Media Reactions Flow Immediately After Overturning of Roe v. Wade.  As Redstate reported, in one of the biggest and most impactful stories of the last 50 years, Roe v Wade has been overturned by the US Supreme Court.  The leaked draft decision that pushed conversation and outrage for the last several months was real, and it has now been made official.  States now have the right to regulate the brutal practice of abortion as they see fit, a move toward respect for human life and basic morality we haven't seen in this country since slavery was abolished.  It's hard to overstate how big of a day this is for those who have fought so diligently to protect the lives of unborn babies.  No, this doesn't provide a federal ban on abortion, but it does ensure that the federal government can no longer dictate to Americans and their state representatives that they must legalize and support such barbarism.

January 6 committee has hired a former ABC News executive to produce Thursday's 8pm hearing as if it is a blockbuster documentary, report claims.  A former news executive has been recruited by the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to produce the Democrat-led panel's upcoming primetime hearing, a Monday [6/6/2022] report claims.  James Goldston is a former president of ABC News.  Before that he ran the mammoth-sized operations at Good Morning America and Nightline as executive producer.  And he's now an adviser to the group of lawmakers who are set to present their case that Donald Trump's efforts to undermine democracy culminated in the deadly events of January 6, according to Axios.

Journalist Tries to Crash Uvalde Victim's Funeral, Bikers Have a Different Idea.  The funerals for those killed in the tragic school shooting that occurred in Uvalde, TX, have started to take place.  That comes amidst the relentless politicization of the event by the left and the media — despite the fact that in such a moment, there's typically nothing a family wants more than privacy.  Yet, a "health reporter" from The Houston Chronicle (again, trying to politicize what happened), attempted to crash one memorial in order to take pictures.  Fortunately, a group of bikers, who were there providing security, had other ideas.

The media's role in creating mass shooters gets less attention than it deservesPolitico published an interview last Friday with two criminologists who have studied mass shootings.  Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminology at Hamline University and James Densley is a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University.  Together, they've created a database of mass shootings since 1966 along with a detailed life history of 180 shooters.  Their research points to a number of commonalities among them.  Right away, they highlighted the role of the media and social contagion in these events, suggesting a connection between the Buffalo shooting and the one in Uvalde.

Mass Shootings: The Media Misinformation Campaign.  If there is any maxim religiously observed by the corporate news media, it is this:  "If it bleeds, it leads."  Moreover, if the blood in question gushes from gunshot wounds inflicted by a deranged mass murderer, the major news outlets uniformly portray the crime as evidence of an ever-increasing wave of violence caused not by criminals but by their weapons.  This narrative is a textbook example of misinformation whereby news organizations studiously ignore data and definitions on mass shootings developed by Congress, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement sources.

Was Canada's orgy of self-recrimination over...nothing?  Last year, Canada began an orgy of self-recrimination when researchers claimed to have found a mass grave at a residential school in British Columbia with the remains of more than 200 indigenous children.  The problem is that the ground-penetrating radar used to make this "find" yielded highly suspect results and not a single grave has been confirmed through an archaeological dig.  Now, a group of dissident scholars is calling foul on this entire narrative.

Time Mag is Wrong, Climate Change Will Not Make Food Scarce.  A Time Magazine article ascribes the potential for a major food crisis to two sources:  the war in Ukraine and climate change.  Concerning the latter claim, Time is simply wrong.  While the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian exports have had an impact on food prices, there is no evidence climate warming has or will harm food production worldwide.  The Time piece, titled "The Food Crisis Can't Handle Ukraine War and Climate Change," says the current high grocery prices are merely a sample of an even worse crisis to come.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Health Journalist Revealed the Real Purpose of Masks in 2018: Fear.  Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award winning journalist Laurie Garrett gave a refreshingly honest and clear-eyed assessment of the usefulness of masks in fighting coronavirus pandemics.  Unfortunately, her assessment, given as the Keynote Address at the National Academy of Medicine in December 2018, was given prior to the Covid-19 outbreak.  Garrett, a Council of Foreign Relations member, spilled the beans in a presentation called "From the 1918 Influenza Pandemic to 2009 H1N1 Pandemic to Now:  Is the World Ready to Respond to the Next Outbreak?"  After her presentation, which periodically cast doubt on the historical utility of general public masking around the world, she fielded a question from a member of the audience on such measures.  This was her candid response.  [Video clip]

CNN Claims Pro-Life Supporters Will Turn Violent with SCOTUS Victory, Amish Extremists now Threatening ANTIFA Peacekeepers.  This example is just another example of how the Ministry of Truth operates.  Political violence is speech, unless actual speech is heard from their opposition; then, it becomes violence.  War is peace.  Water is dry, etc.  George Orwell sighs.  Knowing there is an increased likelihood of violence incited by far-left democrat activists and the White House, CNN moves their advance narrative engineering team into place to lay the blame for violence at the feet of their political opposition.  With Roe v Wade potentially being overturned, Amish extremists are now going to lay siege to the peaceful assembly of ANTIFA in DC, or something equally stupid.  [Video clip]

Was the Alito Opinion Leak a Distraction?  This Conservative Radio Host Thinks So.  According to Wayne Allan Root, a conservative radio host who is also a brilliant writer, it was the result of something more sinister:  it's meant to be a distraction from the bombshell that Dinesh D'Souza dropped in "2000 Mules," his documentary about the voter fraud that he contends took place in 2020. [...] While a good point, Root isn't the only one claiming that this is a coverup, with others saying that the leak was actually an attempt to cover up the recently released Pfizer vaccine data, another sacred cow for the mainstream media, social media censors, and leftist Fauci-enthusiasts.

NBC Host Suggests Republicans Are Nazis.  Elon Musk slammed NBC News on Monday [5/2/2022] in response to a rant from a far-Left MSNBC host who claimed that Musk bought Twitter and turned it over to "the far-right."  MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who has compared non-Muslims to "cattle," tried to downplay America's far-Left by claiming that they only want to "give us free health care and free childcare" while claiming that the far-right "wants to give us white supremacy and no democracy."

CNN Analyst Melts Down Over Musk's Purchase of Twitter.  The same leftists who claimed social media isn't censoring conservatives are melting down over Elon Musk's decision to buy Twitter.  Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion dollars last week and the left is not taking it well.  Musk has stated that he believes 'free speech' on social media should match the law of the country.  "I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law," Musk said.  The Biden Regime is so frightened over Musk's decision to buy Twitter that they responded by creating an Orwellian, unconstitutional "Ministry of Truth."  Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election so Joe Biden is working overtime to make sure he has full control over the internet.

The Media's Latest Attempt at Creating Another COVID Panic Is Beyond Pathetic.  Unlike liberal America, everyone has learned to live with COVID.  It's endemic.  It's going to be here forever.  Haven't had COVID, you're lucky.  You might get it; you have the rest of your life to catch 'rona.  Others who've had it should be prepared to get it again.  It is what it is, folks.  It's the latest edition to cold and flu season; COVID will just be the third person at the party.  It's seasonal.  Get over it.  Take your stupid mask off.  We have therapeutics and vaccines.  The era of lockdowns is over.  Philadelphia idiotically reinstated their indoor mask mandate.  NO ONE followed suit which shows you where everyone is now.  The upcoming 2022 elections have also played a part. [...] And these clowns wonder why everyone is sick of this circus.  It's damaged kids psychologically beyond repair.  The mental health crisis for adolescents is going to be a nationwide epidemic, but at least they wore masks, right?  Liberals' abuse of children in schools over COVID shouldn't shock anyone.

It was Watergate until it wasn't.  During the Trump presidency, I observed the following rule about breaking news, especially negative ones about President Trump.  I would hear the news and wait a day or two.  Why?  Because there was a good chance that the news would turn out to be fake news.  The latest example was the famous "phone time gap."  Where was President Trump during those hours?  Was he hiding in the basement planning the attack on the Capitol?  The media went crazy, from another round of experts to outrageous speculation.  Some even brought up the tired line about this being "worse than Watergate."  How did it turn out?

Oops! Another 'walls closing in' narrative about Trump hiding phone records with a 7-hour 'gap' falls apart.  A couple days ago, the press was wildly celebrating the demise of Donald Trump over Jan. 6 matters.  They breathlesslyclaimed there was a seven-hour stretch of congressionally subpoenaed phone records that was missing from the White House transcripts on Jan. 6. It had to have been removed.  There had to be a coverup!  It's the coverup that'll getcha.  The walls were once again closing in on Trump.  Gotcha. [...] Worse than Watergate, they hollered.  Except that ... oops, they actually found all of the tapes.  There was no gap.

What the Forever Crises Are Really About.  Thomas Hobbes wrote that people are willing to surrender their liberties to government out of fear.  Fear is what compels us to flee to the foot "of the mortal god" that is the state for the promises of protection and security.  Free us from the danger of harm is the impetus of the slow growth of authoritarian government that becomes totalitarian government over the course of time: government's totalizing control over all aspects of our lives.  And what has the century of perpetual crisis revealed?  Precisely this.  If we consent to the government solution in all these crises, we will be free from the danger and harm that threatens our lives.  So we are inundated by the media and the rhetoric of our politicians with the constant threats which rely on a sense of fear to surrender our liberties.  If we do not, then they employ the fear of social and moral shaming:  how dare you not have compassion for your neighbor or grandma!

Another 'Walls Are Closing on Trump' Story Has Collapsed.  How many of these stories do we have to endure from the liberal media before they understand that Donald Trump is not going to be indicted on anything.  The "walls are closing in" stories are too many, but each one has the same ending:  Trump wins.

Former News Executive Reveals the Government 'Warning' Given to Networks to Air Covid Propaganda.  The Covid pandemic response beginning in 2020 was one of the most sweeping cases of media propaganda in world history.  Governments not only lied to the masses ("15 days to slow the spread," e.g.) and made dubious claims based on poor evidence ("mask up" to end the pandemic), but it censored even civilians for doubting the mainstream narrative.  Now, a former news executive at international network Sky News, as well as a veteran of ITV, has come forward to reveal what news audiences have only previously been able to surmise:  Some news networks must have been ordered to adhere to the government's pandemic narratives or risk serious consequences (such as losing broadcasting licenses and other reprisals).  Mark Sharman revealed his disturbing insights into the astoundingly coordinated media coverage of the Covid pandemic in a sit-down interview on British channel GBN's "The Lockdown Inquiry" with host Dan Wootton.

Anyone Else Starting to Get a Bad Feeling About All This Ukraine Worship?  Two things can be true at the same time:  Ukraine is being mauled by vicious invaders, and globalists are laying the foundation to leverage this crisis that they've been building up for months.  The alacrity with which the establishment has thrown its full weight behind the plucky Ukrainian rebels is setting off all my alarm bells. [...] I know a stampede when I see one.  We're still in the death throes of the last one, COVID-19.  Before that, it was Black Lives Matter.  There was also the dreaded Jan. 6 "Insurrection" and Russian Collusion in there somewhere.  The ruined lives, fraud, wealth transfers, and costly infrastructure from those pushes are still stacked up all around us, but Big Global has such an effective machine in operation at this point that they can keep hitting us with ginned-up crises before we have a chance to clean up the mess from the last ones.

The Truth About Biden's Fake War With Russia.  Biden tried to be FDR and failed at that.  Now he's settling for playing a senile elderly JFK.  If you watch 5 minutes of CNN or any cable news network, you might believe that we're on the verge of war with Russia.  That's what the same people who claimed that President Trump was working for Putin want you to believe.  Their new war with Russia is as real as Russiagate.  Democrats want to fight Russia to the last Republican.  They aren't about to fight a real war.  Their fake wars with Russia are an attack on Republicans.  Russiagate came after Democrats spent eight years giving Putin everything he wanted as Hillary toted a Reset Button from a swimming pool and Psaki posed in a sickle and hammer hat.  And that was just what we knew about.

The Unbearable Racism of COVID.  The media like to say that "COVID has struck minorities harder than other races" or, as the Washington Post has it, COVID "ravages" minorities rather than other races.  This is a loaded and utterly dishonest statement, and one with racist undertones to boot.  First of all, COVID is not an agent that decides to "ravage" one race rather than another.  Actually, COVID does not "ravage" anyone.  One contracts COVID, as one would any other disease, and one does so in a number of ways and situations.  Second, there's that word "minorities."  By this the media do not mean minorities in the sense of those who constitute a minority of the population, as do all races, depending upon how and where they are counted.  What they mean are blacks and Hispanics, but primarily blacks.  And among blacks, they do not mean IBM executives or sports billionaires — they mean poor blacks.  The media goes out of its way to find individuals of partially African descent who are unsuccessful, and it then claims they are the victims of "systemic racism."  In truth, they are no more "victims" than is any one of us.  Every person alive has faced challenges.  Some have faced them and surmounted them; others have not.

"The View" Panel Accuses Clarence Thomas of Being a Race Traitor, Says 'He Doesn't Represent the Black Community.  What is Clarence Thomas?  An amazingly thoughtful and intelligent Supreme Court justice?  A hero of sorts that overcame the disadvantages of his upbringing, the prejudices of his time, and the damage done to his career by affirmative action and ended up at the very top of the legal system?  Well, yes, those are both correct answers.  But the jabbering parrots on "the View" didn't arrive at that answer.  No, according to those bitter, cackling hens, Clarence Thomas is a "race traitor."  Yes, they really said that.  Oh, and they implied that Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor to women.  Those comments, indicative of the hate-filled nonsense that suffused the entire segment, are both truly reprehensive and are quickly becoming mainstream thought on the left, which is firmly committed to the radical ideology of CRT and remains stuck on other grievance studies.

Danish Newspaper Apologizes For Publishing Official COVID Narratives Without Questioning Them.  In August, Germany's top newspaper, Bild, apologized for the outlet's fear-driven Covid coverage — with special message to children, who were told "that they were going to murder their grandma."  Now, a newspaper in Denmark has publicly apologized for reporting government narratives surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic without questioning them.  "We failed," reads the article's headline from tabloid Ekstra Bladet, which goes on to admit that "For almost two years, we — the press and the population — have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities' daily coronavirus figures."

Dr. Nicole Saphier throws cold water on media's 'flurona' fear mongering: 'It's no surprise'.  Fox News medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier appeared on the network's "Fox and Friends" Thursday to shed light on what some are calling "Flurona," a medical condition so named for those who have been diagnosed as having COVID-19 and the flu simultaneously.  Host Ainsley Earhardt laid out examples of the condition, noting that the CDC has reported only 79 cases of the double infection so far in the entire nation.  Dr. Saphier said, "I love the way that the media loves to sensationalize something, and I guess this will be our new headline for the next month."  She explained that the "Flurona" is not a new mutagenic or variant of the COVID virus, rather it's simply part of getting sick.

German Paper Apologizes for Scaring Kids With Panic-Driven Coverage of Covid.  In a shocking example of media honesty, the editor-in-chief of Germany's top newspaper, Bild, has apologized for the news outlet's panic-driven coverage of the China flu.  He specifically singled out children who were told "that they were going to murder their grandma."  Editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt videotaped his apology and told the children of Germany he was sorry for Bild's coverage, which was "like poison" and "made you feel like you were a mortal danger to society." [...] You won't see this in most news reports, but the Delta variant of COVID is less dangerous than the variant that China released in 2019.  It has caused far fewer deaths and hospitalizations.

Brilliant Video Shows How Media, Joe Biden and Govt Health Officials Drove the Omicron Fear Narrative.  The Omicron doom and fear narrative became a parody of itself.  One brilliant videographer has put together a mashup showing what took place in the past ten days.  It all started with ultra-progressive Harris County, Texas, Judge Lina Hidalgo holding a dramatic press conference to report that an unvaccinated man in Houston, who was in his 50s, had died from the omicron variant.  However, only one journalist actually called the hospital to check the claim and discovered what progressive Judge Lina Hildago claimed was actually false.  There was no unvaccinated 50-year-old man who died from Omicron in the hospital.  It was all made up by the judicial version of AOC.  Unfortunately, once the media, medical establishment and politicians had that press conference soundbite, from a judge — not a doctor, they were off to the races.  This video brilliantly shows what happened next.  [Video clip]

Inside the Omicron fear factory.  The official response to the Omicron variant provides a case study in the deliberate manufacture of fear. [...] We hear constantly that 1,300 people are dying a day from Covid.  By comparison, about 2,000 people die each day from cancer, and 1,600 from heart disease.  Their deaths get no coverage.  Covid was the leading cause of death in the US only in January 2021, even among those eighty-five and older.  Since then, it has ranked as the third most frequent cause of death both in the overall population and in the elderly.  To read the press coverage, however, you would think that nothing approaches Covid in fierce lethality and that all public resources should be directed to stopping its spread, no matter the costs to the education and socialization of children, to physical and psychological health, and to economic opportunity.

The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn't Normal, It's Psychotic.  Omicron is here, and with it comes death and destruction — unless, that is, you cancel Christmas, hide in your homes, get all the boosters, double mask, and demand to see negative Covid tests and proof of vaccination for anyone who darkens your doorstep.  Any precautions, no matter how seemingly outlandish, are seen as justifiable to protect yourself from this new and terrifying variant.  So it is, anyway, with a disturbingly large number of reporters and commentators in the corporate press, whose coverage and individual responses to Covid have become increasingly divorced from that of the rest of America.  To watch CNN or read The New York Times, you'd think omicron was the most deadly strain of the virus to date, poised to overwhelm hospitals and leave a trail of death behind it.  The reality, which most Americans have readily grasped, is just the opposite:  Omicron appears to be the least dangerous strain of the virus yet.  After five weeks of omicron's spread in South Africa, where the variant first appeared, the news is encouraging: mild to nonexistent symptoms, hospitalization rates nine times lower than previous surges, and extremely low rates of severe illness and death even though only about a quarter of the population is vaccinated.  Here in the United States, only one person has died from the omicron variant thus far, even though omicron cases accounted for nearly three-quarters of new infections nationwide last week.

Professional sports again prove the folly of vaccines and 'COVID protocols'.  Some of the healthiest people on the planet are being managed by some of the dumbest people on earth.  According to Vice, the NFL is now a "COVID superspreader."  With the playoffs beginning in almost exactly one month, there are — as of this writing (the list has been growing daily) — nearly 100 (out of approximately 1700) players on the NFL's COVID-19 list.  Tellingly, Vice notes that "Sixty-five players have tested positive in the last two days, including a single-day record on Monday of 37 new cases."  So again we have an "outbreak" among those who've merely "tested positive" for the Wuhan Virus.  The Vice article goes on to mention how the NBA and the NHL are dealing with "outbreaks" of positive Wuhan Virus tests.  Without one mention of a player who's actually sick, seven times the Vice piece uses the phrase "tested positive" or a close derivative.  Several more times Wuhan Virus "test" or "testing" is mentioned.  No mention of hospitalizations, no mention of deaths, just "tests."  What's more, over 94% of NFL players are "vaccinated" (that definition keeps changing).

MSNBC's Heilemann Claims '30 Million People Right Now' Ready to Take Up Arms for Trump.  MSNBC network national affairs analyst John Heilemann said Sunday [12/12/2021] on NBC's "Meet the Press" that there were "30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms" for former President Donald Trump.

Actor Denzel Washington Infuriates the Leftist Media Because he Tells the Truth About Race in America.  Hollywood has avoided discussing racial issues with several black Hollywood actors for a long time, when they slip up and ask someone like Denzel Washington their race-baiting questions they quickly get destroyed.  Listen as time and time again the legend himself, Denzel, doesn't fall for the race-baiting and instead flips it back to people being individuals, not a collective as the commies and socialists in the USA are hoping for.  [Video clip]

PBS: Kids Are Justified in Feeling Panic Over Climate Change.  On Wednesday's show PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff relayed results from a poll commissioned by PBS NewsHour and Generation Lab, finding that substantial percentages of children believe climate change will effect important life issues for them later on like having children or where they live.  The show then devoted eight minutes to the issue by showing a pre-recorded piece by correspondent William Brangham.  One high school student featured in the piece, Sofia Palau, recalled suffering from panic attacks, and having difficulty studying for the ACT because she kept thinking of the "impending doom."

The Editor says...
The main reason kids have any concern about the climate is that they've been soaking in alarmist propaganda dispensed by the public schools and outlets like PBS.  Today's world-wide average temperature is indistinguishable from 75 years ago.  There is no impending doom.  There is no crisis.  There is no emergency.  There is no reason to be afraid of carbon dioxide.  Many other things should be of greater concern than next year's weather.  Wasting taxpayer money on PBS, for example.

Chicago Tribune Throws Gas on 'Racism' Fire.  [Scroll down]  [The] "World's Greatest Newspaper" slogan later disappeared from the front page [of the Chicago Tribune] on December 31, 1976.  Had it not, this week would have prompted its immediate removal, as the 2021 lame version of the Tribune foisted an incendiary and poorly-sourced news item on readers with the headline "Study shows any contact with police may be detrimental to health, well-being of Black youth."  Call me crazy, but it seems to me that in a city that is already the undisputed Murder Capital Of America (thanks, Lori Lightfoot) and which this week actually saw demonstrators picketing and demanding the removal of the CEO of McDonald's for the "microaggression" of implying gangbangers may not make good parents... a newspaper throwing gasoline on the "racism" fire is probably the last thing any responsible publication would do. [...] The entire basis of this article is a "study" printed in September in the Journal Of The American Medical Association's Pediatrics Review... not exactly a voice of reason.

A Flood Of Superficial Climate Reports.  This past week, the Biden administration doubled down in its campaign against climate change with the release of a suite of four reports, on national defense, financial risk, homeland security, and migration.  These reports all start with the common premise that the climate crisis is now upon us in full fury.  Moreover, they also all insist that the issues at hand are nonpolitical, and that the objective at all times is "to be guided by the best available science and data."  To say the least, however, the claim looks hollow, given that none of these reports offers any data whatsoever to support its major contentions. [...] Sadly, instead of asking any hard questions, these reports just take the worst-case scenario for granted and move on.

The crafty language of climate alarmism.  When really bad, damaging weather hits it is normal to declare a federal disaster.  This which allows Federal agencies to take certain actions, including loans and tax relief.  This is done at the county scale.  So [The Washington Post] looked at all of the disaster declarations in the last three months and determined the cumulative fraction of the US population that lived in those counties. [...] The stretching begins when they report their study.  First we get the headline, which is all that most people will read.  Here is the main headline:  "Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer"  This assumes that somehow every person living in every county "experienced" the local disaster.  The number of people that physically experienced these disasters is actually quite small.  In some cases, like flash floods, most of the county never knew it had happened until they heard the news.  In the hurricane cases a lot of people were not there, while others simply watched it rain really hard.  Losing electricity, while unpleasant, is hardly experiencing a disaster.

Media Test Positive For Corrupt COVID Coverage.  Policymakers and public health officials need to be held accountable for their miserable pandemic failures.  So should the media, which have no interest in objective news, and are following an agenda that is both repulsive and poisonous.  Among the media's favorite stories of the past 18 months are the deaths of the unvaccinated and those who expressed skepticism about the lethality of the Wuhan coronavirus.  A recent example is the death of a 40-year-old California woman, who, according to the British Daily Mail, "regularly posted anti-vax, anti-mask content, proclaiming herself a 'free thinker' who 'questions everything.'"  The mother of four — who also considered herself "unmuzzled" — "had been battling COVID-19 and resulting pneumonia ahead of her passing."  Tragic as her death was, it would not have been covered by the media had she been vaccinated and cheerfully compliant with lockdown and mask rules.  But in the twisted minds of most of today's journalists, it's a story that has to be told to boost their vanity.  They are our moral superiors.

ABC Takes Victory Lap After Smeared BP Agents Are Put on Desk Duty.  Border Patrol was already stretched dangerously thin but on Wednesday [9/22/2021], ABC's World News Tonight celebrated their job getting harder as multiple mounted agents were ordered to "administrative duties" after the rabid left and liberal media smeared them with lies about using "whips" on Haitian migrants.  As NewsBusters had documented all week, ABC anchor David Muir and correspondent Kenneth Moton were committed to parroting the ignorant White House talking point about how the images were "horrific."  "This scene along the southern border tonight.  Texas Governor Greg Abbott using state-owned vehicles to create what he's calling a 'steel barrier,' with the migrant crisis on the border.  And there is news tonight involving some of those Border Patrol agents seen on horseback, confronting migrants," Muir announced in his opening tease.

There Are No Bathrooms at the Border, and Other Shocking Revelations.  Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles  State Media  Times was literally shook to discover just how "dismal" things have become in migrant camps along the border.  I don't mean to make light of the harrowing conditions at the border.  Regardless of the cause, it's not nice to witness humans in peril, even of their own making.  What I am making light of is the L.A. Times and their ilk finding a "story" in the obvious and calling it news.  The very obvious truth is and has always been the same:  there aren't restrooms at the border.  It's not because the United States hates desperate immigrants or even desperate Haitian immigrants or the despotic coyotes who exploit them.  There are no bathrooms at the border because bathrooms don't belong in the middle of nowhere. [...] It obviously comes as a shock to people like Molly Hennessy-Fiske, who clearly have not spent much time in the middle of nowhere and thus do not understand that bathrooms don't grow in the wild.

Nicolle Wallace Tells Brian Williams Current Deadly Covid Surge is Like a 9/11 'Every Two Days'.  Anchoring coverage of 9/11 memorials on Saturday, MSNBC's Brian Williams and Nicolle Wallace discussed the historic significance of masks at the events and covid overall in comparison to the terror attacks of that terrible day.  Williams brought up the subject by way of mentioning the ever-present covid masks.  "Are you ever struck by the thought that on the 40th, 50th anniversary we will look back, perhaps, at some of these pictures and be reminded, oh, yeah, that's when we were all wearing masks?" he said to Wallace.  "That's when even our presidents and former presidents had to wear masks in public because of our uncontrolled pandemic in 2021?"  "Well, I think there are so many parallels to how much more difficult it is to do any of the things that anyone who has spoken today has done, to call the country to a higher purpose," Wallace replied.  "You've got politicians and prominent folks in the media outraged by steps that a president, not too many presidents after the one we heard from today, would try to save his country from an unthinkable death toll."

The Editor says...
[#1] There is no "uncontrolled pandemic."  If you turn off your television, you won't see sick people anywhere, and your life will return to pre-2020 normal in no time.  [#2] I'll take my chances with the relatively small "death toll."  Tyranny is worse than disease.  Diseases eventually go away.  Tyranny does not.

CNN Host, PBS Star Agree 1/6 Is As Big as the Civil War, World War 2.  As we have all learned from Joe Biden's presidency, the phoniest/baloney-est claim from liberals is that they have a deep desire for national unity.  There is no unity in compromise, only in surrender to the Left.  At the end of Sunday's [9/5/2021] Reliable Sources, fill-in host John Avlon interviewed the PBS gasbag Ken Burns, asking him about national unity, and he's as phony as Biden.  This is CNN, so Avlon demands unity in exaggerating the January 6 riot:  [Video clip] [...] How does anyone compare the January 6 riot to World War II or the Civil War?  It's like comparing Hiroshima to the Portland riots.  Liberals love to pose that they are against "partisan echo chambers."  They actually say this with a straight face on CNN... and on PBS.

It's the old "phony struggling against the wind" act.
Weather Channel Busted In Their Coverage Of Hurricane Ida:  Utility Worker Trolls Fake News Reporter.  On the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some forecasters said Hurricane Ida would be as intense as last year's Laura and the Last Island Hurricane of 1856.  Both were among the strongest storms on record to make landfall in Louisana.  According to CNN, about half a million people were without power in the region. [...] The situation is already serious and there is no need for the media to make things [appear] even more serious.  A quick clip caught a man doing a cartwheel during Weather Channel reporter Jim Cantore's live shot on Sunday amid Hurricane Ida. [...] In another video, Jim is looking like he is on his last legs but the situation at the moment is probably not that serious as a utility worker trolls him.  [Video clip]

Chicken little is real.  A recent front-page headline in my local paper read as follows:  "County bordering on high virus transmission rate."  A doctor with a large regional health system was concerned that the COVID-19 transmission rate had increased by 37% in one week and stated, "A transmission rate above 5% from the prior week is very scary."  It seems useful to provide some context regarding numbers such as these, considering all the numbers being thrown around regarding COVID-19, the apparent push to create a panic over the Delta variant of COVID-19, the obvious push for everyone to get vaccinated, and the fact that the United States is ranked so poorly in math and science.  The first number to be considered is the 37% increase.  It certainly looked pretty bad, but percentages do not always provide an accurate picture.  The county-wide cases went from 11 to 15 during the week in question, an increase of four cases.  So, a 37% increase does not seem to be all that concerning given a population of over 91,000 people.

MSNBC Contributor Spews HATE: Fox News Is Al Jazeera, Trump Is Bin Laden.  Jonathan Capehart's Sunday show on MSNBC devoted a segment today [8/1/2021] to slamming Fox News for its coverage of the January 6th Capitol breach.  And NBC contributor Dean Obeidallah slimed Fox News as Al Jazeera and analogized Donald Trump to the greatest mass-murdering terrorist in US history.  When columnist Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts asked what people would sacrifice, Capehart responded by claiming that Fox News and Republicans on Capitol Hill "have sacrificed their soul."  A bit later, Capehart, somewhat out of left field, blurted out that "whiteness is a [...] drug."  But capping all the inane commentary was Dean Obeidallah.  He said that Fox News is "the Al Jazeera of America after 9/11."  Plumbing even more absurd depths, Obeidallah claimed that President Trump is "the Osama bin Laden of January 6th."

The Panic Pandemic.  The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half.  The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans — typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions.  The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation's guiding institutions. [...] The panic was started, as usual, by journalists.  As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images:  the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.  The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that — unless drastic measures were taken — intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer.  The British researchers announced that the "only viable strategy" was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.  This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the "consensus" among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics.

Dear Reporters:  The Capitol Riot Was Not 9/11, and the story is not about the media.  There is a faction of the news media that seems stuck on January 6.  They need to get some perspective.  And political hucksters who claim that the Capitol riot was worse than the September 11 attacks deserve all the derision they get.  One symptom of the January 6 fixation is a recent Vice article entitled, "'So, So Angry': Reporters Who Survived the Capitol Riot Are Still Struggling." [...] Get over yourselves.  The Capitol Hill press corps are not the first people to deal with a traumatic event and be expected to keep doing their jobs.  This was not the worst of those, and some of those other events were also wholly or partly the work of political actors.  Ask any of us who went through September 11.

Pandemics are staged on Television.  When a new epidemic is launched and promoted, despite the lack of good science and good evidence, it is jacked up on television screens.  Images begin to flow:  An emergency medical vehicle on a street.  EMT personnel, in hazmat suits, load a man strapped down to a stretcher, into the van.  On another street, a man collapses on the sidewalk.  We see a quarantined man sitting inside a huge plastic bubble on a third street.  Cut to an airport lobby.  Soldiers are patrolling the space among the crowds.  Cut to a lab.  Close-up of vials of liquid.  Camera pulls back.  Techs in light green scrubs are placing the vials into slots of a table-top machine.  Auditorium — a man on a platform, wearing a doctor's white coat, is pointing a wand at a large screen, on which a chart is displayed, for the audience.  Back to the street.  People are wearing face masks.  These images wash over the television viewer.  Meanwhile, the anchor is imparting his prepared meaning:  "The government today issued a ban on all travel into and out of the city... hundreds of plane flights have been cancelled.  Scientists are rushing to develop a vaccine..."  The television audience has an IMPRESSION of knowing something.

The Left Is Now Scaremongering The COVID 'Delta Variant'.  COVID-19 infection rates are down.  Deaths are down.  Vaccinations are up.  So what's the response from the left?  It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.  The left's bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined "Red America's COVID Problem," in which the Times writes that "COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older" and that it's rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.  "No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties," the Times goes on.  The Washington Post's increasingly leftist "conservative" columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that "Red states are dangerous to America's health."

Washington Post reporter troubled by 'racist legacy' of some birds.  According to The Washington Post, it's hunting season for cancel culture and its latest targets are "racist" birds.  The Post ran an expansive report on Thursday, titled "The racist legacy many birds carry," focused on the "birding community," which apparently is having a difficult debate "about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers."  "Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies," Post environmental justice reporter Darryl Fears began his piece, noting she was hired to "break down barriers" at the Georgia Audubon nature preserve.

The Editor says...
Lots of places and things are named after badly flawed people.  Get over it.  The people insisting on renaming them all are at least as badly flawed.

Someone Needs to Do a Wellness Check Over at CNN.  You'd think a "news" network that exists to shill and promote the party that gained power in the 2020 election would take a deep breath, but things have only spiraled further for the liberal outlet. [...] CNN and the media at large have reached the point of complete derangement.  They see doom and destruction around every corner, well, unless it's coming from any facet of the left.  In that case, they'll make excuses for torching cities and killing cops.  Regardless, imagine waking up this morning and putting together that homepage and thinking you are emotionally healthy?

How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings.  The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings.  However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered.  Whereas suicides are treated as somber tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11.  There's a detailed discussion of the shooter's life story, motives and methods.  Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.

Oprah's new AppleTV+ show says celebrities aren't like the rest of us.  If you want to know what's going on in the world, don't (really, don't) look at the New York Times or Washington Post.  From them, you get only Democrat partisan spin.  Instead, check out the Daily Mail, an enlivening mix of news and gossip that, despite grammatically awful writing, manages to get a lot of information (and dreck) across.  What it succeeded in doing on Friday was to reveal the mental damage that affects so many of the celebrities who opine about and dangerously affect America's values.  AppleTV+ has released a series of interviews between Oprah and Harry (the prince formerly known as Prince) in which we are given a pathetic insight into the mind of a marginally intelligent, minimally informed man who tragically lost his mother in the most explosive way.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that he has emotional issues or that he married a woman who knows how to manipulate all of them.

If There's Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?  If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and "concerned" NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.  An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona's Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland's Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.  Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount "ludicrous" because "the election is over."  And MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only "dangerous," but also the "end of democracy."

Are Covid Fatalities Comparable with the 1918 Spanish Flu?  [Scroll down]  It is common to invoke comparisons with the 1918 Flu Pandemic, as that was an extremely devastating virus that rocked the world.  The article makes multiple references to the 1918 pandemic but there are a couple that raise interesting questions for further investigation.  The first point is as follows, "Combined with deaths in the first few months of this year, Covid-19 has now claimed more than half a million lives in the United States.  The total number of Covid-19 deaths so far is on track to surpass the toll of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 nationwide."  Comparing the death counts between the 1918 Flu and Covid-19 without adjusting for population growth is extremely misleading.  In 1918 the population of the United States was roughly 103 million, while near the end of 2020 it stood at roughly 330 million.

The True Lunacy of Reparations.  With race relations apparently having a permanent place in the headlines and radical race activists doing all they can to keep us at each others' throats, we once again have the race-baiters out there calling for — you guessed it, reparations.  And when I say "back in the headlines," I mean that the "racial tensions" are a story because the media have a massive vested interest in keeping them in the headlines.  One of the media's goals is to keep Americans angry and believing that we all hate each other, because the headline "Everyone Is Getting Along Today" doesn't sell newspapers or advertising space and doesn't generate the Almighty Click.

Derek Chauvin — The great white defendant.  Cable channel HLN has covered the trial from gavel to gavel.  When bumping in and out of commercial breaks, HLN displayed a graphic, accompanied by foreboding music, showing two fists tearing an American flag in half, with the caption "America's Very Soul Is on Trial."  Black Lives Matter activist Maya Echols, in a since-deleted TikTok video, said:  "If George Floyd's murderer is not sentenced, just know that all hell is gonna break loose.  Don't be surprised when building are on fire.  Just sayin'."  And Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., says she is "hopeful" of a conviction, but if not, Waters said:  "We've got to stay on the street and we've got to get more active, we've got to get more confrontational.  We've got to make sure that they know we mean business."  No, America's "very soul" is not on trial.

Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails.  The mainstream media is pushing a non-stop narrative of covid mutation hype.  We hear about UK and Brazilian variants on a weekly basis, and the assertion has been that surely, these variants will be more infectious and more deadly that the original virus.  There is still no proof whatsoever to confirm this, but the globalists only care about planting the idea in people's heads.  They only care about reigniting the fear.  My feeling is that this strategy is going to fail, at least in the US.  Too many Americans are aware of the con game, and a new virus threat is not going to have the same effect as Covid-19 did in the early months of the pandemic.  None of us really knew what we were facing back then, and caution was a practical response.  Today, we know for a fact that covid is not a concern for the vast majority of the public.  Media attempts to amp up the threat will be ineffective, but they will of course still try.

Coordinated propaganda:
Major News Outlets Pledge to Begin Calling 'Climate Change' a 'Climate Emergency'.  A number of major news organizations worldwide, ranging from Scientific American and The Columbia Journalism Review to The Guardian and Al Jazeera, have signed a pledge to begin referring to "climate change" as a "climate emergency" in their reporting.  "Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term 'climate emergency' in its coverage of climate change," the publication announced Monday in a tweet to its 3.9 million followers touting "the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape."  "We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We're Going to Say So," the headline of a Scientific American commentary published Monday declares.  Claiming that that climate change is "the biggest environmental emergency to beset the earth in millennia," the piece announces the name change:  "Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term 'climate emergency' in its coverage of climate change."

CBS reportedly paid $7M for Prince Harry, Meghan Markle interview.  CBS reportedly paid more than $7 million for the rights to air Oprah Winfrey's highly anticipated tell-all interview with Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle.  The two-hour interview, set to air at 8 p.m. Sunday [3/7/2021], cost the network a pretty penny — likely somewhere between $7 million and $9 million, the Wall Street Journal reported.  CBS bought the lucrative rights — the network is charging $325,000 for every 30 seconds of commercial time — from Winfrey's Harpo Productions, and can also license the interview in international markets.  A spokesman for the Sussexes' told the Journal they were not paid for the interview.

Press focuses on Ted Cruz, ignores the building crisis at the border.  The media is intent on reporting on Ted Cruz's one-day trip to Cancun, because it wants to divert attention from Joe Biden's intentional destruction of America.  It is the same reason they lied that Biden was a 'moderate' during the election and why they buried the stories of all the Biden family corruption while they were effectively campaigning and de facto contributing to Biden.  The truth would have destroyed Biden.  The media manipulated and colluded in the election more than Russia or even China has ever done.  Biden is violating his oath of office to uphold immigration laws while flooding Texas and other states with illegals, including many violent criminals, yet Cruz should resign because he left the U.S. for a day?

Fake News Wannabes.  We had a pretty good snowstorm the other day.  I switched on the local news when I got up, naively imagining that they would give me a little useful information in between their usual dire warnings not to leave my home.  For the first time that I can remember they weren't much interested in ice or snow.  They were concerned, instead, that the weather not deter me from going to my local vaccination center.  They wanted to educate me, too, that today was the first day of Black History Month, that blacks die at three times the rate of whites from COVID-19, and that the black vote was suppressed in the recent election.  You remember that election?  The same one that the same station had declared, with smug satisfaction, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won easily.  On the following day, a glutton for punishment, I watched these journalistic titans show a teaser for their upcoming investigative report — on the topic of the rise of extremism in America.  I didn't need to actually watch to know that they would not be talking about Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  Their extremists are my friends and neighbors.  The American middle class.  You know — that majority far-right fringe.

How your Washington news gets distorted by media priorities.  You may not see much news coverage on the world's 100,000 airplane flights that land safely every day.  Let one of them crash, however, and you'll see smoldering wreckage and sobbing relatives for 24 hours.  It's the same in news coverage of U.S. politics.  Now for the first time in memory a research team has examined thousands of news interview transcripts and documented what might seem an obvious but very important conclusion:  Extreme views and words by far get the most attention, air time and views online.  People who speak in moderate tones with reasonable views pretty much get ignored or forgotten. [...] The lesson in all this — especially for House members who must campaign every two years — is that being the mouthiest, loudest, most extreme interview and speaker is the way to get noticed by mass media.  And they often stage conflict and confrontations to obtain media attention.

California, land of delusion.  The latest verbal gymnastics our local San Francisco Bay Area, 11 o'clock news team tried and failed to explain was why, when COVID cases are rapidly plummeting, we are not opening the state.  There are only five counties that have "graduated" out of the deadly Purple Tier as of this morning [2/21/2021].  After months of touting the so-called crisis in ICU capacity, now we get no mention of that issue.  Instead, we're treated to ten minutes of proud stories about massive new vaccination sites.  These are immediately followed by stories about the lack of available vaccine doses.  It's almost funny.  We are exhorted to do our duty and get vaccinated, for the common good, if we can find any vaccine.  I know people who desperately wanted it and had to drive for hours to locate doses.  Personally, I wouldn't get the vaccine.  But that's another story.

Expect Overheated Climate Reports Advancing Radical Energy Agendas.  Don't be either surprised or alarmed to see lots of authoritative-sounding "hottest time ever" media reports in advance of President Biden's pledge to recommit America to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and support for his all-out war on fossil energy aimed at eliminating carbon emissions from electricity by 2035, and achieving "net-zero carbon emissions" by 2050.  An example appeared in a January 26 Wall Street Journal editorial "World's Ice is Melting Faster than Ever" citing "a new satellite study" which concluded that global melting had dangerously accelerated 65% between 1994 and 2017.  The research was conducted by a team of legitimate scientists from the U.K.'s University of Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modeling, the University of Edinburgh, University College London and an Edinburgh-based climate data company called Earth Wave Ltd.  Where the study conclusions go feverishly wrong concerns altogether unsupportable speculations that the melting was "driven by rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions."

Something's in a nosedive.  Scary news stories are the norm in the Age of COVID.  Earlier this month, on January 2, 2021, The Hill reported that experts at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) predicted 150,000 deaths by the beginning of February.  Just one problem:  Recent data suggest that the worst of the pandemic is over.  In the interest of unity, let's analyze the COVID data on daily new cases and deaths from the New York Times — in particular, the seven-day moving averages.  Using a moving average is important since there are obvious reporting problems from the relevant state agencies.  The raw daily data have a suspiciously consistent saw-tooth pattern.  There is an unrealistic drop on weekends and holidays and a corresponding explosion during mid-week.  Using the seven-day moving average effectively eliminates the reporting problems by incorporating data over the prior week.  Looking at the curves for new cases and deaths, the NYT data show something perplexing.  As seen in the graphs, the curves are going the wrong way for nightmare scenarios.  According to the NYT data, the IHME's January model's prediction of 150,000 deaths is a fantasy.

First Duty of the Press:  Make It About Race.  Even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the media felt the need to pile up the false accusations.  Their first order of business was to turn it into a story about race.  The Trump riot has as little to do with race as any story in 21st-century America.  COVID, immigration, tax cuts, the stimulus — I could come up with a racial angle for any of those.  Your assignment:  Make the siege at the Capitol a story primarily about race relations.  You, a normal person, one week later: I'm stumped.  But to our media, the main point to be made about the riot was:  Can you imagine what would have happened if black people had done that?

NBC nonsense
Imagine being this detached from reality.  This installment of unhinged hysterics comes to us from NBC News.  ["]WASHINGTON — After last week's deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, members of Congress are expressing something once unthinkable:  that some of their own colleagues may be endangering their lives.  Not in a rhetorical sense, but in a direct and immediate way.["]  Yes, some Democrats in congress are genuinely worried that their conservative colleagues are going to actually murder them.


Do Not Believe These People.  Maybe I'm just cynical, which I know I am, but every single time one of those teleprompter-reading TV personalities masquerading as journalists use a phrase like "It's a sad day" or "It's impacted all of us," I want to throw up.  There has never been a phonier, less trustworthy group of people with more influence in history.  When idiots stormed the Capitol building, the pearl clutchers went into overdrive with the "this is horrible to see" and some "this is a tragedy" talk.  Yes, both are true, but does anyone believe they actually feel any of it personally?  Why would anyone care about a country when they hold half its citizens in contempt?

News readers consider themselves heroes, until the moment they consider themselves victims.
Jim Acosta goes after Trump supporters: 'A number of us received death threats... we feel endangered'.  CNN's prima donna White House correspondent Jim Acosta became a household name not for his reporting, but for his politically-motivated clashes with President Donald Trump.  Acosta has also targeted the president's supporters, only to then complain that he was receiving death threats, which helped ensure that he remained the center of attention.

The worst-case scenario is the only one that sells newspapers, books, or cable news.
MSNBC Doom and Gloom Doc:  Don't Get Overly Optimistic About the Covid-19 Vaccine, We're in For a "Decades-Long Battle".  MSNBC rolled out a doom and gloom doc Thursday morning [12/24/2020] who warned Americans not to get overly optimistic about a Covid vaccine because we are in for a "decades-long battle."  Dr. William Haseltine promoted his books on Covid as he fear-mongered.  Dr. Haseltine doesn't want Americans to forget about Covid and go on with their lives because he has books to sell.

How dumb would you have to be, to believe this?  So dumb that you'd intentionally watch CNN?
CNN's Sciutto:  Trump Not Conceding Could Put America in 'Potential Danger' for Another 9/11.  CNN anchor Jim Sciutto said Wednesday on CNN's "Newsroom" that President Donald Trump's refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election could put America at risk for a terrorist attack like the 9/11 attacks.  Co-anchor Poppy Harlow asked, "Yes or no, are the actions of the president is taking now putting this country in danger?"  Former Bush administration assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith said, "Clearly, it's not great for our democracy."  Sciutto said, "Yep, that's it fair.  Let's put some teeth on that if we can for a moment because they are sitting members of Congress who were around in their positions at the time of 9/11, and the 9/11 commission report specifically cited the shortened transition after the 2000 election for having an impact on national security.  I'm quoting here, 'It hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.'[...]"

The Editor says...
Whose fault was that?  Who tore all the "W" keys off the White House typewriters in January 2001?  It wasn't a bunch of Republicans!  This whole argument is a red herring anyway, but the Left could at least come up with an honest analogy.

COVID Panic Porn is Meant to Suppress Trump Vote, But It May Do the Opposite.  Right on schedule, the panic pornsters are shrieking in unison that COVID-19 cases in the United States are on the rise.  Virtually overnight, dozens of stories have appeared in the press, on the internet, or broadcast on the nightly news about the renewed danger. [...] Grim-faced broadcasters on CNN and MSNBC might as well be wearing death masks as they solemnly intone the latest numbers of those who test positive.  They even throw in the story of an untimely death or two to add a human interest element to their tale of woe.  Somehow, however, they never find time to mention that mortality rates are way, way down.  It's always how we're all going to die from the China Virus.

'Truth' Over Facts.  In his memoir, Banana Sunday, the late British newspaperman Christopher Munnion described his first encounter with what was then called New Journalism.  This was a style of newswriting that got going in the 1960s and 1970s.  It was more like long-form fiction than conventional reporting. [...] The new style of journalist came to the story with a narrative in mind.  He was a storyteller who would provide the reader with a sense of what it was like to be in the story, at least the story the writer wanted to tell.  As Munnion explained, the journalist showed up with a prepared narrative and then went around looking for people, events, and images to fill in the details.  The facts were mere ornaments to decorate the story, not the point of the story.

Vile Scarborough:  You're 'Un-American' If You Vote for Trump.  While most left-wing journalists try to channel all their anger at President Trump, they will occasionally go straight to the punch and just start attacking people who support him.  On Tuesday morning [10/20/2020], the co-hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe scolded American voters who dare, for any reason, to vote for Trump.  With Election Day exactly two weeks away, and millions of Americans already voting, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski decided it was time to launch a brutal verbal assault against Trump supporters.  Apparently triggered by Trump speaking publicly about the Biden family's alleged corruption on Monday, Scarborough whined that it's unacceptable to vote for him for any reason.

QAnon: The Media's Latest Obsession.  Big media has had multiple obsessions during President Trump's first term.  From Stormy and Avenatti to the myriad tell-all books about Trump, his administration, and his family.  From Russia and an innocuous phone call to Ukraine, to his taxes and how many scoops of ice cream he is served.  These are all red herrings, a way to pick at Trump while studiously avoiding serious policy issues, what he is actually accomplishing as president, promises made becoming promises kept.  The latest obsession is QAnon, in the media and recently at the NBC town hall event.  Despite being billed as a question and answer session, it was more of a debate between President Trump and NBC's partisan newsreader Savannah Guthrie.  Of all the issues facing America in 2020 and of concern to voters, QAnon is not on the list.  Yet she laser focused on QAnon starting with[,] "Let me ask you about QAnon" to which Trump responded, "I know nothing about QAnon."  Rather than moving on to the economy or healthcare, she obsessively persisted, insisting that Trump denounce "the fringe conspiracy theory."

The End of Covid Hysteria.  Most of the nation was stunned by the news that Donald and Melania Trump had contracted COVID. [...] The amount of insanity and hysteria poured into Trump's diagnosis by the Democrat/media complex the rest of the weekend was almost funny to watch.  Did his doctor lie?  Did he lie?  What about the 25th Amendment, the procedure of presidential replacement, the coming election, the pending Supreme Court appointment, the number of people surrounding him who were infected?  How dare he take a five-minute ride with Secret Service agents to thank his well wishers!  Non-stop around the clock hysteria.  Almost none of it was helpful, and most of it was true as believing the sky is falling.  Gotta love our responsible, fact-driven media.

Corporate Media Is Vomiting Trump Coronavirus Reporting All Over The Bed.  The latest news cycle over President Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis illustrates yet again how destructive the U.S. corporate media are to national unity and a clear understanding of reality.  While we are all aware that COVID-19 can be a truly devastating and deadly disease for some, despite the volume of media coverage dedicated to it in the past seven months, the American public still lacks crucial context for understanding Trump's diagnosis.  Not only has major media coverage not brought clarity, but it has also, as usual, obscured reality.  This is especially harmful to a story with such significant potential ramifications for the nation and world.  As the president himself has alluded to in his post-diagnosis social media posts, it's common knowledge that the Wuhan virus hits the elderly especially hard.  Trump is 74.  Yet even among his age demographic, surviving the disease, not death, is by far the norm.

Here Were CNN's WORST Moments Immediately After Trump's COVID Diagnosis.  Throughout Friday's early hours, CNNers repeatedly expressed best wishes to President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump after having tested positive for the coronavirus.  But behind those best wishes, CNN not only levied their usual, poisonous rhetoric, but plenty of subliminal levels of apocalyptic brainstorming, gloating, and calls for a return to global lockdowns.  Perhaps worst of all, it led off CNN analyst and former Obama flack Sam Vinograd claiming the President's diagnosis could "be the most dangerous moment that the U.S. government has ever faced."  No word on why the Civil War, Cuban Missile Crisis, four presidential assassinations, September 11, 2001, or two World Wars tested America and her government less.

Please spare me the maudlin rhetoric about Ginsburg's 'tragic' death.  The insufferable Chris Wallace of Fox News kept referring to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as "tragic" on yesterday's [9/20/2020] edition of Fox News Sunday.  While I am full of sympathy for her family, loved ones, and friends who all have lost someone they deeply mourn, I cannot see how her death is "tragic" — unless one is a partisan Democrat fearing loss of control of the Supreme Court.  Justice Ginsburg lived to a ripe old age and remained active until almost the very end of her life.  As even President Trump stated, she lived an "amazing life" and lived it to the full until the end.  We all are mortal!  Dying itself, while sad for those left behind, is not a tragedy.

What Has 2020 Taught Us?  [Scroll down]  Then the riots started.  Then the fires, the hurricanes, the election.  I do hope that with all this practice we've learned courage, and that we've learned we must depend on God and His infinite mercy.  We cannot fight this on our own.  We also should have developed an antipathy towards the media.  They have been culpable in spreading and stoking these fears.  They have twisted statistics, adulterated the language, slung clueless accusations, and propped up asinine excuses for the violence.

Eyes Are Rolling After 'Journalist' Jon Karl Equates Covering Trump Rallies to Taking Family Trip to Fallujah.  Every once in a while, the masks completely slip off and supposedly objective journalists accidentally reveal in no uncertain terms what their political colors to their readers and viewers.  Such was the case earlier this week when former White House Correspondents' Association president and ABC News White House correspondent Jon Karl talked to National Journal, which did a story on how "the White House press corps finally drew the line" Sunday on covering President Trump's indoor campaign rallies, which they apparently find hazardous to their health in the age of the Wuhan coronavirus.

The Editor says...
The left-wing news media wants everyone in America to live in constant fear of the coronavirus (and the rioters, and the Russians, and 5G telephone service, and earthquakes, and hurricanes).  They want Americans to believe that it's dangerous to walk into a crowd without a face mask.  I'm not buying it.  It wasn't unsafe a year ago, and it's not unsafe today.  From where I'm sitting, it appears that the coronavirus crisis, if there really was one, is over now.  As soon as the presidential election is over, the news media will forget all about it, because America can go back to (the old) normal at any moment — just as soon as somebody sends out the "all clear" decree.

The Truth About Slavery.  We are continually misled by progressive propaganda on the issue of race.  Misinformation bleeds over to the conservative realm as well.  The media, Hollywood, and academia are consumed with race, tribalism, and hatred for our Founding.  The real agenda here is power, divide and conquer to pursue some ill-conceived Utopia.  The truth is that violence is part of the Left's playbook.  They are opportunists and provocateurs ready for any excuse to attack our freedom.  Much of the violence we see is a planned political strategy taking advantage of the crisis du jour.  Racism is not our Achilles Heel.  It is the ubiquitous manipulation and exploitation of race and racism that threatens our way of life.  Political operatives masquerading as journalists feed the hate 24/7.

The Black New Deal: 1) Abolish Welfare 2) Incentivize The Nuclear Family.  [Scroll down]  The time for black complaints is over.  Slavery happened in America like it has happened in every culture around the world since the beginning of time.  Slavery has been prohibited in the West, and apart from communist China and parts of Egypt, most of the East.  Moreover, as recent studies have shown, racial police brutality has declined to the point of statistical insignificance.  The raison d'etre for the Black Lives Matter organization is a rounding error.  Recent spikes in crime aside, broadly speaking, America has never been safer.  So why does everything feel worse?  For one, media and technology.  Mainstream media, citizen journalism, and nonstop social media all contribute to the sense that our racial divide is at the root of all evil.

MSNBC's Biden Backers Demand Voters End Trump's 'Reign of Terror'.  On Sunday afternoon's MSNBC Live with Alex Witt, during a discussion of President Donald Trump's use of federal agents to counteract rioters in Portland and how it might impact this year's presidential election, MSNBC contributor and liberal historian Jon Meacham conflated segregationist Democrat George Wallace with non-segregationist Republican conservatives like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.  After Meacham encouraged viewers to vote against President Trump's "reign of terror" in November, MSNBC Republican Michael Steele agreed with him and encouraged Democrats to turn out to vote against the President.

The Left is signing up citizens to physically remove President Trump from office if he loses.  The left continued to spread the narrative that President Donald Trump may refuse to leave the White House if he loses the election in November.  And left-wing political commentator and Young Turks host Cenk Uygur added to the conspiracy theories on Tuesday [7/21/2020] as he, too, offered a way to rid the country of the president in case the United States military "does not remove him from office" after a supposed loss in November.

Media Malpractice on COVID Numbers.  COVID-19 data are and have been all over the map since this entire mess gained steam earlier this year.  It has gotten to the point that any "numbers" presented as news are suspect at best and fraudulent at worst.  Is this media incompetence or malpractice?  Ignorant or deliberate?  Fox News ran a constant side bar in the early days of the pandemic, with U.S. death counts, much in the way cable news business shows run a ticker of the Dow or S&P 500.  How morbid, but it provided fodder for media talking heads to run around like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, waving their arms and screaming in panic.  Now that death counts are dropping to the point that they blend in with normal birth and death statistics, the media have predictably pivoted to case counts as their new hair-on-fire statistic to stoke fear, keep the economy shut down, and hopefully banish their nemesis back to the land of Mordor, also known as Mar-a-Lago.

The Press Is Already Trying To Whip Up A New Pandemic Panic.  Oh, no!  With the planet still unlocking and some parts still tightly buttoned down, and with the world economy plummeting, "China Researchers Discover New Swine Flu with 'Pandemic Potential,'" blares CNN.  "Scientists Say New Strain of Swine Flu Virus Is Spreading to Humans in China," shrieks the New York Times.  Say it ain't so!  Okay, it ain't so.  Not in any meaningful way.  The media should go back to "murder hornets," or find another asteroid with a chance in a zillion of hitting Earth.

Not dying is bad for headlines.  As the bumpy COVID-19 path back to normalcy bounces along, you would never know that we were headed in the right direction.  Teasers on television and headlines in newspapers report a "surge" in new cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations.  The teasers and headlines fail to mention that the most important measure of our progress in getting ahead of the virus is the number of deaths recorded.  The fact that the rate of fatalities to infection is very low now is seldom if ever mentioned. [...] The CDC data show that as of July 1, 2020, death in people younger than 25 is less than 170 out of a total of 120,000.  It is almost non-pronounceable to state a fatality rate — too many zeros after the decimal point.  My point is this:  if you are young and healthy, you have nothing to fear from the coronavirus except the fear-mongering from the media.

The Huge Law Enforcement Scandal that Cries Out for Justice.  In the American Thinker (June 30), Jack Cashill offers an eloquent plea for an Atticus Finch to take up the cause of George Zimmerman in suing those responsible for perpetrating the Trayvon Hoax.  There is another case, also in Florida, awaiting its Atticus Finch, the product of an earlier moral panic, the now largely forgotten "mass sex abuse in daycare" hysteria.  These cases, replete with lurid charges the media mindlessly and breathlessly disseminated in the 1980s and '90s, are today widely recognized as a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers.  Despite this, one victim remains incarcerated.  Frank Fuster has now served thirty-five years in prison for a crime not only that he did not commit, but that never happened.  His first parole hearing is scheduled an unbelievable 114 years from now — in March 2134.

Media Begging for a 'Second Wave'.  The media is churning out countless alarmist stories each day about the threat of COVID-19 and the dangers of societal reopening.  "Risk of new lockdown rises with fear of second COVID-19 wave," writes Reuters, as one example of the genre.  These stories generally incite, rather than inform.  They cherry-pick facts and lack context.  Only when the COVID picture is viewed in perspective are people able to make wise decisions about their actions.  It should be safe for society to continue broadly reopening while directing resources to specific at-risk populations, such as nursing homes and prisons, which are more vulnerable.

Don't fear a coronavirus spike.  Mainstream media are sounding the alarm about coronavirus cases spiking across the South and West.  They're distorting the facts to cause panic, instead of reporting the whole truth.  Gov. Cuomo is piling on, accusing states that have reopened of playing politics instead of acting "intelligently." Sorry, but "intelligent" isn't the word that describes his administration's pandemic response.  He caused carnage by forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients.  He also has no good answer for why New Yorkers unfortunate enough to catch the virus had a worse chance of surviving it than people in other states.  The Empire State ranks 48 out of 50 states for survival rates.  Dodging accountability for these [...] facts, Cuomo is bragging about his results and bashing President Trump for encouraging states to reopen.  Cuomo is flat wrong:  The US daily death count from the virus is down nearly 80 percent from its peak in March.  It's telling that the likes of Cuomo and his media allies don't focus on death and hospitalization rates anymore, but almost exclusively on infection rates, to build their doom-and-gloom scenarios.

Brad Parscale:  Campaign Was Not Duped, Media Scared Supporters from Tulsa Rally.  Trump 2020 Campaign Manager Brad Parscale on Sunday [6/21/2020] berated the media for savaging the campaign's small crowd size in Tulsa on Saturday, despite boasting a million campaign ticket requests beforehand.  "For the media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting but typical," Parscale wrote in a lengthy statement to reporters.  "And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media for events when they don't do their full jobs as professionals."

Pandemic to Protests:  Coverage Shifted But Outlooks Didn't.  After three months of wall-to-wall television coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost overnight the live infection dashboards and often-uttered phrases like "social distancing" have all but disappeared, replaced with images of a nation in racial turmoil.  How are the major cable news channels covering the protests and what do their different narratives teach us about how the media frames national events?  The data provide some clues.  Since late February, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have spent at least 15% of their daily airtime on the pandemic, based on data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project.  CNN displayed a live dashboard of infection and death counts a total of nine hours a day, seven days a week.  As much as half of all news coverage worldwide mentioned the virus.

How do we explain the many thousands of Americans who believe they are entitled to steal?  Night after night, we have watched thieving thugs break windows of small and large businesses, charge into them, and run out with as much merchandise as they can carry. [...] It is very likely that they are proud of themselves.  The media certainly support them, seem to give them permission.  Why do the media do this, support the rioters?  Ratings, of course.  They love riots, cherish their power to get them going.  They love filming the looting without any police presence to stop it.  Do they care about the lives of the business-owners that are destroyed in the process?  Not one bit.  There is not an anchor or guest "analyst" on CNN or MSNBC who feels an iota of compassion for the victim of the destruction wrought by these riots.  To a person, they lend their on-screen approval to the rioters.

Imagining covid-19 under a normal press.  [The New York] Times embraced abnormalcy in August 2016 when it demanded journalists abandon objectivity when covering Donald John Trump.  The Times demanded that journalists treat every statement by him as a lie that he must somehow prove.  The Times also demanded that journalists no longer seek his side of the story when reporting the news. [...] The Pandemic Panic is on the press, not the president.  The press has politicized the covid-19 response.  A normal press would have been careful and balanced in its reporting.  This press is loony.  At one press briefing four different reporters in four different ways asked the president if calling the Chinese Virus the Chinese Virus was racist.

Showboating With 100,000 Dead.  On May 27, the American coronavirus death toll rose to six figures:  100,000 lives lost.  That's a very sad number, made sadder when we ponder that the virus prevents loved ones from saying goodbye in person and makes any funeral an extremely small event.  America's largest national newspapers have all made dramatic front pages out of the number.  The New York Times came first on Sunday [5/24/2020], filling its entire front page and three more pages with names of the victims.  USA Today followed on Wednesday with an entire front page in black and white and photos of the dead.  The Washington Post waited until we reached the horrible number but still printed some stories on the front page.

Carlson: Liberal Media Are 'Thrilled' with Division, Want People to 'Hate One Another'.  Between Wednesday [5/27/2020] and Thursday nights, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson was in rare form when discussing the riots in Minneapolis supposedly in appropriate response to the heinous, police-involved killing of African-American man George Floyd.  Carlson didn't mince words, noting that "news organizations like CNN" want Americans to "hate one another" and wondering if liberals would still support rioting if it involved destruction of their property.  On Wednesday night, he reminded viewers of how "[r]ioting is a form of tyranny" and "oppression," but "CNN welcomes it, however, in fact encourages it" since rioters are instead called "protesters."  Carlson added (as he would on Thursday): "America is a diverse country.  Diverse countries only survive if the groups within them can coexist peacefully and thankfully, almost everybody in America wants to coexist peacefully."  However, he noted that liberal media outlets like CNN don't seem keen on that: "[N]ews organizations like CNN do not want that and that's why every day they work hard to fan racial resentment to make different groups distrust and hate one another."

Trump wins the lockdown wars.  President Trump has won the lockdown wars as coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses are eased across the country, so far with few signs of dire health consequences for the population.  Just weeks ago, the question was whether to reopen, with the first states to press ahead accused of engaging in human sacrifice and killing their residents to appease the "Trump death cult."  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked, "How many will die for the Dow?" as recently as Thursday [5/21/2020].  Now, the debate is primarily over how quickly and to what extent reopening should take place, with the stragglers mainly blue states.

CNN Becomes Unhinged Because Trump Decided to Golf... Without a Mask.  CNN has made a name for themselves as one of the most anti-Trump networks out there.  After all, they heavily pushed "Russia!  Russia!  Russia!" When Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion took place between the Trump campaign and Russia, CNN focused their coverage on Ukraine and a supposed quid pro quo.  Then it was impeachment.  Anything that is anti-Trump can be found on CNN.  So it's no surprise that one of their photographers captured pictures of President Trump golfing *GASP* without a mask on Saturday.  Not only was he golfing with a few other people but he was riding in his own golf cart.

Liberal Media Hypocrisy Never Ends.  If you watched CNN or MSNBC you'd probably think you're going to die. [...] Daily, viewers and readers are told they're going to die, that Republicans want them to starve and Democrats are their only hope... and they believe it.  They all believe it.  If it's unproven and scary, there is no shortage of media outlets lining up to spread that story.  Is there a link between coronavirus and Kawasaki disease, and inflammatory illness the strikes children?  Journalists have no idea, but there is no shortage of stories about how there might be.  Words like "tied to," "believed caused," and "possibly linked" are common in headlines trying to scare [...] parents thinking about going outside as their states reopen.  Lacking evidence used to stop a story from being run, now it's the basis for them.

Limbaugh says the media is using their climate change playbook on coronavirus reporting.  Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh compared the coronavirus to climate change and accused federal health officials and the national media of using a global pandemic to scare American citizens.  "It seems like every day we get some new scare tactic from some supposedly credible source," Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated program Thursday.  "And what generally happens is after some reporting of what everybody would consider good news, in less than a day, a couple of stories come along, maybe three, that try to throw cold water on the good news and make it sound even worse than it was the day before — and that's what this is."

CNN's Brian Stelter Melts Down Over Conservative Media Exposing Russiagate Conspiracies.  Call it a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, CNN's Brian Stelter suffered an on-air meltdown Sunday [5/10/2020] over conservative media paying any attention to arguably the largest spy scandal in American history instead of breathlessly covering ongoing public health pandemic, which, center-right outlets are still doing.

The Editor says...
I think this exposes the real purpose of the coronavirus hysteria:  The media-induced virus panic is deflecting attention away from the Obama spying scandal, just as it comes to light in the middle of an election year.

CNN, MSNBC Suffer EPIC Meltdowns Over 'Nuts,' 'Terrifying' Flynn Decision; 'The Fix Is In!'  In a Thursday afternoon that felt like a trip back to life before the coronavirus pandemic, CNN and MSNBC were not only apoplectic over the Department of Justice dropping its case against retired General Michael Flynn, but despondent over the "demoralizing," "destructive," "nuts," and "terrifying" "injustice" that signaled "the collapse of the Justice Department" and "the rule of law."

The Media Racket And The Coronavirus Numbers Game.  The coronavirus is real, and tens of thousands of people around the world have died from it.  But it is not the pandemic we were told it was going to be.  That's not a complaint.  If anything it's gratitude.  Thank God it hasn't been worse.  Unfortunately, in the build-up to our current reality, the media noticed something — their ratings were up.  Obviously, people were tuning in to find out if they were going to die or not.  Telling them it was highly unlikely that they would only drive them back to their old viewing habits and away from cable news.  Print media found the same thing with their traffic.  This terrified Democrats too, with CNN and MSNBC, along with most newspapers, firmly in their camp and eager to spread fear and blame, something had to be done.  They broke out the boxes — a running total, always on screen, of cases and deaths which, without context, can only scare.  The context is never, ever given.

COVID-19 [is] turning out to be huge hoax perpetrated by media.  A recent Stanford University antibody study estimated the fatality rate from the virus is likely 0.1% to 0.2%.  The World Health Organization (WHO) had estimated that the death rate was 20 to 30 times higher and called for isolation policies.  On which version do you think the media focused? [...] The media has been hyping COVID-19 since Day One, alarming Americans to the point where they voluntarily went along with shutting down the entire economy — a mistake that will likely reverberate for a decade or more.  Even as U.S. states begin to re-open — based on the data, which shows a far lower fatality rate than reported and a much wider spread of the virus — the media continue to report on what they deem frightening numbers over the deadly virus.  They aren't, and it isn't.  COVID-19 is a bad flu at worst.  And the media should be held accountable for telling us otherwise before they knew the facts.

The Most Tragic Case of Governmental, Medical, and Media Malpractice In the History of the World.  [Scroll down]  The little real anecdotal evidence accidentally seeping into mainstream media indicates that the actual fatality rate in our nation from COVID-19 is less than the fear-merchants are displaying on their "Death Dashboards."  Potentially, far less.  Unbiased professional reporting could tell us the real numbers.  But then, that's the rub.  Much of the liberal mainstream media signed up for team "Doom and Gloom" from day one.  At first, they did so to create as much fear and panic as possible so they could use COVID-19 as the mother of all click-bait cash cows.  Once that was accomplished, many in that same liberal media chose to keep the fear-mongering going as a political tool.

A CNN journalist pens a fascinating insight into the left's dystopian worldview.  On April 7, Bill Weir, CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent, had a son.  Weir wrote an open letter to his son telling him that he was born into Hell on Earth, also known as the modern Western world.  The letter perfectly encapsulates everything the left hates and wants to see destroyed. [...] Weir is a tragic figure because he has eyes but cannot see.  The real tragedy, though, is that people like Weir, through the power of the media, drive too much of America's political agenda.

Chris Cuomo's coronavirus performance shows he is an insecure blowhard.  On Monday [4/20/2020], CNN posted video of pseudo-newsman Chris Cuomo "finally" emerging from self-quarantine in his Southampton basement — despite Cuomo having been out and about in East Hampton just last week, getting into a fight with a "jackass loser fat-tire biker" who dared to ask why an infected Cuomo was breaking quarantine.  Without a face mask.  "Who [...] are you?" Cuomo replied.  "I can do what I want."  Yes:  If we've learned anything about Chris Cuomo these past three weeks, it's that he's an insecure, self-important, entitled blowhard who suffers in the shadow of his much more accomplished and respected brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The Left Is an Existential Threat.  The March 2020 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the "existential threat" to the Earth posed by global warming, despite the fact that no significant global warming seems to be taking place.  With its appealing cover art — an image of the Earth tied up in a plastic trash bag — this issue is just what I'd expect from a liberal outfit.  It's typical of climate alarmists to begin by assuming their premise:  warming is an existential threat because, well, it is.  And anyone who questions that premise is a criminal.  Just what is meant by "existential threat" is a bit vague.

Chuck Todd Is Wrong (Again): There Are Huge Downsides To The Media Being Overly Alarmist.  There are no costs associated with being "overly alarmist" in the face of a global pandemic, "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd claimed on Sunday.  His comment encapsulates the attitude of the media and other elites as they drive people and state and local governments deeper into a panic that has resulted in the loss of tens of millions of jobs, the likely permanent closures of hundreds of thousands of businesses, a general inability to pay rent and other monthly bills, a lack of treatment for non-coronavirus health problems, the closure of churches and schools, the exacerbation of disparities by socio-economic status in educational attainment, disruptions to the supply chain, and the destruction of trillions of dollars of American wealth. [...] The problem is that the experts who are being listened to so carefully are solely focused on minimizing mal effects from the coronavirus, all other considerations notwithstanding.

President Trump needs to set the country free now.  For weeks now, nearly every media outlet has behaved as though the Covid19 virus was a cause for celebration.  They broadcast the numbers like they show the stock market or election returns.  It is positively ghoulish.  Even Fox News, which used to have more sense, has capitulated to the hysteria; that network, too, is all in on manufacturing panic and fear.  They are engaged in panic-mongering.  They are encouraging the wholesale destruction of the American economy.  The worst are hoping and wishing for that outcome.  That is how much they are willing to sacrifice to see the president defeated.  The American mainstream media is the most dangerous enemy of America.  There can no longer be any doubt about that fact.  For nearly four years, they have worked hand in hand with the Democrat party to do whatever harm it can to this country if it will take Trump down and out.

Does America need Journalists?  Here's a free tip for the media:  If you don't want to be accused of bursting with glee over America's misfortune, it is generally helpful to not cheer America's misery while doing all in your power to amplify and extend it. [...] Here are a few obvious suggestions.  For one, a journalist's reporting on the current crisis would show some sense of proportion and would weigh tradeoffs between protecting America's physical and economic health, since they can't be uncoupled.  In the long run, economic destruction if allowed to proceed unabated will do far more damage than the virus can ever achieve. [...] What we have are the media that cried wolf, completely incapable of informing when an actual crisis shows up since their faux outrage is always cranked to max power, even if indeed they wanted to inform.

Trump's not scaring people about the coronavirus:  The media are.  I understand critical reporting, but if anyone is guilty of scaring the public, it's the national media.  They have reported on this pandemic and the administration's response to it as though it were something out of the Book of Revelations.  Every single death is characterized as an avoidable tragedy — something that we should have been able to stop if not for an inept president.  In fact, the experiences of many countries not led by Trump has been strikingly similar.  The truth is that no one, not the president, not scientists, and certainly not the media, has a firm grasp on what will happen with the coronavirus.  So far, we've identified trends in how it affects people, and we have some projections about how bad things will get, but that's about it.

Trump's Kiplingesque Coronavirus Leadership.  [Scroll down]  The yellow journalism storm hit hurricane strength when Fox's Tucker Carlson told the Trump base that America would end unless the president came forward with a comprehensive national plan.  Even then, President Trump's next proposals were moderate.  They mostly loosened government rules restricting private medical responses and still emphasized federalism and decentralization.  But in the face of the media blizzard and Congress' belief that spending trillions was the only way to "do something," all Washington agreed on the need to throw trillions of their borrowed money at the crisis and exert drastic new controls.  The executive finally accommodated to this panic.  Even then, he expressed hope that extreme controls would last only for a limited time, setting the restrictions for 15 days.

Fear and Panic for A Purpose — The Coronavirus Evolves Into "The Blue Plague".  The "Blue Plague" is an intentional effort by various interests to create fear-porn amid the American population by intentionally hyping a mass hysteria about the coronavirus.  In many ways the Blue Plague is exponentially more dangerous than COVID-19 itself.  Earlier today [3/26/2020], The New York Times became the epicenter of the Blue Plague by stating people in hospitals throughout the city were dying, as desperately under-prepared and under-equipped doctors and nurses could not find ventilators for thousands of arriving patients in a state of panic.  This was/is incitement at its worst.

Explosion of leftist hate aimed at Dr Birx after she demolishes media's panic narrative.  Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has proven to be a voice of reason in a time of crisis — much to the angst of the hostile, anti-Trump media.  The hair-on-fire media is pushing a panic-inducing worst-case narrative in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, focusing on predictions of alarming increases in those who contract the Chinese virus while reporting on dwindling hospital supplies and do-not-resuscitate orders allegedly being discussed to free up more beds.  Yet, Birx stands calmly before the American people at the nightly press briefings and reminds agenda-driven journalists of a little thing called facts, beseeching them to be more responsible in their reporting.  "There is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion," she implored.

We Should Start Mocking The Media More; Two Suggestions They'd Hate.  The corporate political news media in America is an absolute disgrace that deserves something far less respectful than criticism.  They deserve mockery.  If you're paying attention and I don't blame you one bit if you're not, then you know that our nation just watched the corporate media in America 1) create a national panic meant to inflict economic and social destruction that they could weaponize and use against President Trump, and 2) further bolster that attempted domestic terrorism by siding with the Chinese Communist Party's every lie and attack on our nation and the Trump administration.  As if the last four years of being useful idiots for Russia and doing everything they can to stoke division, distrust and discord in America weren't bad enough — the corporate media in America, aka the swamp's marketing arm, are now actively trying to create economic and social carnage in America while literally cheering on the Chinese Communist Party's attacks on our President and nation.

The Manchurian Media.  Last Thursday [3/12/2020], the Media Research Center assembled a video clip of the media melting down over Republicans correctly noting the origin region of the coronavirus, screaming that it's rrrraaaaaccccccism and/or xenophobia to refer to it as either "the Chinese Coronavirus" or "the Wuhan Virus" — along with 35 times the media referred to the virus as "the Chinese Coronavirus" or "the Wuhan Virus." [...] I'm pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn't intend for The Manchurian Candidate to be a how-to guide.  But if the media were paid Chinese agents, could they do more to harm this country than they're already doing now?

A little perspective helps.  What's worse?  The rapid spread of a novel virus which originated in China or the media hysteria created and broadcast around the world?  If it was the intent of the American media to create a state of fear and panic, they've succeeded brilliantly.  The dissemination of information pertinent to the virus has morphed into a murky river of rumors, innuendo, outright lies and blather proffered by pundits who are neither doctors nor experts on much of anything other than opinionating.

If It Bleeds, It Leads:  The Morbidity Of The News.  New York Magazine ran an article in 1989 titled "Grins, Gore, and Videotape — The Trouble with Local TV News" by journalist Eric Pooley.  Pooley was angry about the quality of the stories being published locally and the sheer volume of stories whose subject matter was grim and menacing.  Pooley said, "The thoughtful report is buried because sensational stories must launch the broadcast:  If it bleeds, it leads." The media in and of itself is a physical manifestation of our primal desires and fears, and they take great joy in using it for their own political purposes.  Most likely, the populace is the very cause of the demand.  Ever notice the number of rubbernecking motorists who slowdown in order to see something on the other side of a road or highway, often the scene of a traffic accident.  It's the same thing with this Covid-19 outbreak.  If it bleeds, it leads, and they are doing their best to panic America.

Here's Why the Deep State and Wuhan Virus Are Like White on Rice.  The Democrat-media complex and their Deep States allies have elevated the Wuhan virus crisis to virtually a mass hysteria over the past couple of weeks.  Their goal is transparent, of course:  to instill fear, to tank the economy, and to ascribe blame for everything on President Trump as a means of setting the table to take him out in the November election since their impeachment farce (and other gambits) have failed to get the job done beforehand. [...] This is precisely the reason why the Democrats and their lickspittle media are weaponizing the Wuhan virus crisis.  It is yet another overt attempt on their part to take out the president.  Compare their hysterical actions over the past few weeks to the virtual silence during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu epidemic.  Obama didn't even declare a national emergency until over 1,000 Americans had died of the disease, yet President Trump has been repeatedly castigated for his supposedly "chaotic response" to the Wuhan virus.

'Trump's Chernobyl': Media Wuhan Virus Hysteria Stokes Public Panic.  Since the coronavirus came on the horizon, media figures have been stoking panic, leading to mass shortages of basic health supplies, business travel cancellations, and market drops, all while the confirmed disease number hiked yesterday [3/10/2020] to around 0.000002 percent of the U.S. population.  So far, U.S. cases of the basic seasonal flu outnumber coronavirus cases by a factor of 45,000 (using federal stats for this year's flu and real-time tracking of coronavirus confirmations).  The flu season has even been especially bad this year, with between 20,000 and 52,000 deaths, compared to 29 so far from coronavirus.  According to infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Carson, who works for the North Dakota public health department, the flu appears to be about five times more contagious than coronavirus, which means containment is possible, although especially for the elderly coronavirus appears to have higher death rates.

Dr. Drew Pinsky slams media for inciting coronavirus 'panic'.  Celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky said the media is stoking the flames of coronavirus "panic" in the United States, and the industry should "be held accountable."  "What I have a problem with is the panic and the fact that businesses are getting destroyed, that people's lives are being upended, not by the virus, but by the panic," Pinsky said in an interview with CBS last week.  "The panic must stop.  And the press, they really somehow need to be held accountable because they are hurting people."

Coronavirus By The Numbers.  Big media is all about ratings, view, and clicks, hence their axiom, "If it bleeds, it leads." A viral outbreak is the perfect story, on par with a missing Malaysian airliner or a celebrity football player named OJ on trial for murder.  The added bonus is that any negative news can be laid at the feet of a president loathed by the media, who just so happens to be running for reelection.  The media is in full campaign mode, trying desperately to drag the carcass of one of their corpselike candidates across the presidential finish line.  Stoking fear over quarantines and supply chain disruptions have sent the stock market on a downward roller coaster ride.  One of President Trump's major achievements is the roaring economy.  Taking the stock market down 25% or more may help the Democrats. [...] Look also at past viral illnesses, far more lethal than coronavirus.  The fatality rate for MERS and SARS was 34.4 and 9.5% respectively.  Neither illness generated as much media hysteria as coronavirus.

Can the Coronavirus-Panic-Creating Media be Sued for Closed Businesses and Lost Jobs?  The deliberate panic created over the coronavirus is not victimless.  Far from it.  When the radioactive dust settles from this orchestrated panic-strategy, potentially hundreds of billions will have been lost, thousands of businesses closed, and millions of employees fired.  When the coronavirus first reared its ugly head, many in the media instantly saw it as a cheap and easy way to increase clicks, newspaper sales, viewers, listeners, and most especially Ad revenue.  In the guise of "informing the public," they intended to run scare headlines and stories to spike attention to their sites.

Latest Climate Report Feeds into Alarmist Fearmongering.  The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public.  Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media.  After all, disaster sells.  But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren't just highly unlikely; they're close to impossible.

The Coronavirus Numbers Are Not Quite What They Seem.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the articulate, veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described at the presser how the efforts to prevent the spread — or "contain" the virus — would continue, but warned that we should expect the number of coronavirus cases in the United States to increase.  Fauci emphasized that the chance of becoming infected remains low and that the majority of those who contract the virus — 75 to 80 percent — will experience it like a "bad flu or a cold."  The other 15 to 20 percent, he said, may need "advanced medical care."  "For the most part, the people who get in trouble and ultimately tragically would die from this are people who are elderly and or have underlying conditions ... heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity," Fauci said.  Some of the "if it bleeds, it leads" media immediately jumped on the 15 to 20 percent figure, multiplied it by the entire U.S. population of about 330 million, and concluded that we might need 50-60 million hospital beds, for which we are unprepared.

Think Trump is 'outrageous?' He's nothing compared to these past presidents.  Unprecedented, unprecedented.  Everything is unprecedented.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  Except it pretty much has.  Whenever you see the word "unprecedented" in the media, you should ask yourself:  Has this reporter ever read a history book?  Make the case against Trump if you want to, but if you pretend the sorts of things he does are without precedent, you simply make yourself look ignorant.

How Dumb Are America's College Students?  It is an article of faith on the Left that college girls are raped at a rate orders of magnitude above the national average.  If that were true, not only would law enforcement be devoting much of its resources to the college rape epidemic, but 18 year old girls and their parents would avoid our universities and colleges like the plague.  But, of course, that isn't happening.  The whole thing is nonsense.

Media Spread Gossipy Barr Resignation Rumor.  "Sources" tell ABC News that "Attorney General Bill Barr told people close to Trump Tuesday that he is considering resigning over the tweets."  Right.  Do any of these corporate media outlets have any credibility?  No, but it keeps the news cycle saturated with hysteria and occasions them a freak out on their political snuff shows and Twitter.  "News" of the Barr resignation was first reported by one the largest purveyors of fake news and gossip:  The Washington Post.  Shortly after the resignation rumor was reported the DoJ shot it down.  "Addressing Beltway rumors:  The Attorney General has no plans to resign," DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted.  It would be absolutely tragic if Barr were to leave because Trump would never, ever be able to get a good replacement.

Really Bad Things the Media Is Ignoring Because of Impeachment.  Have you heard that the president has been impeached?  Seriously, the trial is happening right now in the U.S. Senate.  I'm kidding.  Of course, you can't escape the news because it's the only thing the "news" is talking about.  We're in the middle of the most choreographed foregone conclusion in history and the media is treating it like a whodunit.

Nets Hype Alleged Trump Audio Only ABC Has Heard, Refuses to Air.  Without providing any evidence, ABC News made headlines on Friday when they claimed they had heard an audio recording of President Trump ordering the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to be fired, something that would supposedly aid Democrats with impeachment.  Both CBS News and NBC News pounced on the reporting during their evening newscasts despite the fact ABC had not released the audio or commented on its authenticity.  For something that was supposedly a bombshell uncovered by his own network, World News Tonight anchor David Muir sure kept his distance when he kicked off the program with the report.

Don't buy the media hype over the new China virus.  A CNN reporter broadcasts from Wuhan, China, on the recent viral outbreak.  There is nobody near who could possibly infect him — unless the cameraman has Guinness Book of Records coughs and sneezes.  So why does he insist on wearing a blue surgical mask while talking?  It's called "drama," which is badly needed, because there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus.  It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before.  Over and over.  Heterosexual AIDS, Ebola repeatedly, the H1N1 swine flu that was actually vastly milder than the regular flu and, especially, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003.  Once you start debunking mass hysteria over outbreaks, it gets easy, because the same patterns repeat themselves.

Another dud in the string of bombshells.  [Scroll down]  If it takes exhaustive and complicated explanations to pinpoint precisely why something is a "bombshell," then it is not a "bombshell."  That is the point of a "bombshell."  It is so powerful that it does not need to come wrapped in complicated explanations.  But there is no rabbit hole these people will not venture down in pursuit of President Trump.  There is no zany conspiracy theory they will not gulp down to keep the party going.  And there is no arcane strip of federal code from centuries gone by that they won't dust off to construct their rickety case for impeachment.

Greg Gutfeld Loses It Over the Pomp and Circumstance of Impeachment.  [Scroll down]  ["]We know this was an emotional tantrum directed at daddy who won the election, and they're mad at daddy.  So we have to go through this phony procession.  Ooh, let's show pictures of the cloak room!  Ooh, let's watch them walk down the halls!  Ooh, this is breaking news!["]

The Fantasy War That Never Was.  Over the past few weeks, the media have been singing in 100-part harmony that America is headed to war.  From Fox News and CNN, to MSNBC and the New York Times, media magpies have been proclaiming that America is going to war with Iran, thanks to the rube-in-chief who has no idea what he is doing.  The New York Times declares the U.S. and Iran are, "At the edge of war."  The Wall Street Journal at least asks, "Will the U.S. and Iran blunder into war?" [...] We have been at war with Iran for 40 years, since the Georgia peanut farmer thought the semi-thuggish Shah of Iran was a bad guy, and a religious fanatic would be a better choice to lead the country.

CNN focuses on Trump's twitter typos
CNN's Brian Stelter Does Deep-Dive Data Analysis on Trump's Twitter Typos.  CNN's Brian Stelter used up three-and-a-half minutes of his basement-rated Sunday show to blow the lid off of President Trump's Twitter typos.  Well, two things we can all spell is "3.6 percent unemployment" and "a 40 percent decline in viewers."


When did routine bad weather become such big news?  Bad weather on Thanksgiving week can be stressful in the best of circumstances.  But this week's outbreak of TV weather hysteria was a sight to behold.  For days on end, even Trump news was booted from the top of the network evening newscasts by dire warnings of the "triple storm danger" heading across the country and the "holiday travel nightmare" likely to result.  The reports hit all the usual TV-weather bases: shots of skidding cars and chugging snowplows; airport scenes of passengers stranded by flight delays; Al Roker bounding among the weather maps as though he were plotting a military operation.  And, as always, the alarming statistics: 21 million people under winter-weather alerts; 97 million vulnerable to high winds; "2,000 miles' worth of winter-storm watches, advisories and warnings," stretching from California to the upper Midwest.

The Editor says...
On the other hand, very cold weather at Thanksgiving, including snow in southern California, is newsworthy because it's a little early in the year for all this snow.  What happened to "global warming?"

Everything You Hear About Billion-Dollar Disasters Is Wrong.  The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) counts the number of disasters in the United States that result in losses of greater than $1 billion, starting in 1980.  Over the past three decades that count has shown a sharp increase, from five or less such disasters each year in the decade of the 1980s to ten or more in each of the past 4 years.  That increase must be due to climate change, right?  Actually, no.  The billion-dollar disaster tally is easy to understand, simple to communicate, but — regrettably — incredibly misleading and just plain bad economics.

CBS Anchor Advertises Televised Impeachment Hearings Like Fight Entertainment.  By her excitement and choice of words, one could easily think failing CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell was promoting a pay-per-view boxing or pro-wrestling match during Wednesday's [11/6/2019] newscast.  But no, she was hyping the televised impeachment hearings that would start next week.  In addition to that, NBC Nightly News chided Republicans were wanted the public to know the identity of the infamous anti-Trump whistleblower who helped to start the investigation.  "Tonight, lights, cameras, testimony.  The stage is set for the first televised hearings of the impeachment inquiry," O'Donnell excitedly proclaimed during the program's opening tease.  "We now know when they will happen and who may be the Democrats' star witness."  Once they were finished with the teases, O'Donnell could barely contain her glee as she sprinted to call them "historic," adding, "televised impeachment hearings begin a week from today, and it promises to be must-see TV." [...] She was acting more like a fight promoter for a UFC match than a journalist.  S

Democrats may come to regret choosing impeachment over independents.  Ukraine.  Doral.  Impeachment.  Syria.  Schiff and Pelosi.  Hunter and Joe.  Trump and Trump.  Impeachment.  Secret hearings and secret Russian "assets."  Impeachment.  The media can't get enough of it.  Most people have had enough already.

Local California CBS reporter fired after jumping on, damaging cars during live news segment.  A local CBS reporter in California was apparently fired after he — during a live news segment — climbed atop classic, privately-owned cars, even seemingly damaging one of them in the process.  Angel Cardenas, a correspondent with KMAX-TV's "Good Morning Sacramento," was on air Sunday at the Sacramento International Auto Show, a weekend-long event at Cal Expo that was about to begin its final day.  Someone who caught the segment on air, Adam Copeland, posted a clip of it to Facebook, as he has "never seen such a disregard to someone else's vehicle."

The Editor says...
I've seen several so-called reporters over the years who played the role of out-of-control daredevil/buffoon on the Big Morning Show.  This is the reporter who is the first to ride a new roller coaster at Six Flags, or the one who goes bungee jumping on live TV, or goes rappelling down the side of a building.  (In larger TV markets, the Happy Team of Steve Serious and Suzie Plastique "anchor" the Big Morning Show, but after the first ten minutes, they've run out of news.  At that point they may have to resort to pie-in-the-face slapstick to retain viewers.)  At times, you may hear Steve and Suzie, back in the studio, gasp in phony astonishment at the risks being taken out in the field.  And then, after no more than three minutes, the buffoon in the field will wrap it up.  This is all done for the purpose of grabbing the audience's attention through whatever means necessary, much like a two-year-old screaming in a restaurant.  In this case, the buffoon/jackass thought he could get away with anything, and found out otherwise.

How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings.  The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings.  However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered.  Whereas suicides are treated as sombre tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11.  There's a detailed discussion of the shooter's life story, motives and methods.  Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.  Statistically speaking, mass shootings represent a tiny portion of all deaths in the United States. [...] Despite the low frequency of these tragedies, the media pays outsized attention to them for self-serving reasons, which are both political and economic:  There's a demonstrated anti-gun agenda amongst America's media.  And there's the ongoing shift in the media's business model to attention-based revenue that results in ever-more sensational news coverage and "clickbait" headlines.

Another Newsweek Conspiracy: 'Greta Thunberg Snubbed for Nobel Peace Prize' By Big OilNewsweek reporter Rosie McCall offered a conspiracy theory as to how a 16-year-old environmental activist somehow failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year: [...] This new theory comes courtesy of a magazine fresh off breaking the news that opening tanning salons in urban neighborhoods were a plot to give gay men skin cancer, or something. [...] Such speculation amounts to an insult of the actual Nobel Prize winner, Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, who restarted peace talks with neighboring Eritrea and beginning restoring freedoms in Ethiopia.  He helped stop a war, but was barely mentioned by McCall.  A European teenager who performed some angry End Times-style rants was more deserving, in the eyes of the journalists at Newsweek.

Anti-Trump Psychodrama 10.0?  What do the Kavanaugh hearings, Jussie Smollett, the Covington kids, the Mueller investigation, and now the Trump phone call all have in common?  Staged melodrama, media collusion hysteria, progressive demands that justice be served immediately, promises of walls-are-closing-in blockbuster revelations from new witnesses, supposed surprise revelatory documents, fusions between Democratic politicians and Washington bureaucrats — and then bust, nada, and teeth-gnashing as the truth catches up to various rumor-mongers.

Disappointing State Department IG Meeting Deflates U.S. Media.  For two days the mainstream media were breathlessly reporting on an "urgent request" from the State Department Inspector General for a closed-door meeting.  Media sources whipped their left-wing audiences into an anticipatory frenzy with predictions of devastating information soon to come from an "explosive" and "highly unusual" request.  It must must be connected to President Trump and Secretary Mike Pompeo hiding devastating information, they said...  Well, the super-anticipated 'closed door' briefing was held today, and the IG handed out packets of information related to revelations of Democrats colluding with the Ukraine government.  The exact opposite of what the media and the professional left anticipated.

They Demand Our Respect, Yet Treat Us Like Fools.  Six months ago I wrote about the liberal media masquerading as journalists to scam the American people down a rabbit hole with their contrived high noon drama-filled fake news scandals. [...] Unfortunately, we are still bored with these manufactured scandals.  These snake-oil salesmen Washington "insiders" have not figured us out yet.  But we've figured them out.  They are desperados who cannot survive without their 'sky is falling' narratives.  As pathetic as these high-brow so-called intellectuals are, they are simply people who stayed in Washington long enough to drink the Potomac Kool-Aid, catch the fever, and delusively believe the universe centers on them — that all of America is riveted to their televisions and newspapers yearning to hear what these chatterboxes have to say.

CNN Counts Down The Number Of House Democrats Who Support Impeaching Trump With 'Impeachment Clock'.  CNN is anticipating impeachment proceedings to begin against President Donald Trump with an "impeachment countdown clock."  The network has a graphic behind the anchors that is adding up the number of House Democrats who support impeachment.

California ramps up efforts to combat invasive swamp rodents.  The swamp rodents, called nutria, are setting off alarms in California.  They weigh about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) each and eat the equivalent of about a fourth of their weight each day by burrowing into riverbanks and chomping into plants that emerge from the water.

The Editor says...
Nothing new here.  They've been around Houston for decades.

Network Morning Shows Hype Trump Impeachment 17 Times [in One Day].  On Monday [9/23/2019], the network morning shows managed to feature some variant of the word "impeachment" a total of 17 times while reporting on President Trump's phone call with the President of Ukraine about corruption allegations against Joe Biden's son Hunter.  In addition, ABC, NBC and CBS eagerly touted a letter from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accusing Trump of "lawlessness."

White House Press Secretary Says Daily Briefings On Hold Because Grandstanding Reporters Trying To 'Get Famous'.  During [George W. Bush]'s time in office, the White House press secretary held a briefing nearly every day.  Reporters crammed into the smaller-than-it-looks Brady Briefing Room and badgered the secretary with questions, usually for about an hour.  Some in the first row, usually employed by a TV network, would drone on and on, holding court, asking questions that sometime ran for two minutes (air time, don't you know).  And some, like NBC's David Gregory, would ask five, six, seven questions, often as his colleagues behind him moaned.  Barack Obama held fewer daily briefings, and under President Trump, they barely ever happen.

Yellow Journalism to Fake News:  Media lies against Justice Kavanaugh.  [Scroll down]  The stories were frequently alarming, nudging readers toward hysteria and, as the case usually was, largely fiction.  Today its lineage has continued to other gold medal aspirants:  The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and others. [...] But the gold medal remains in the hands of the so-called Gray Lady:  The New York Times.  Frank Luther Mott identifies yellow journalism based on five characteristics:
  •   Scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
  •   Lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
  •   Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
  •   Emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips
  •   Dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.
Yellow journalism has had its day reaching its pinnacle during the early 20th century.

Good News.  I rarely watch cable news anymore.  It's all hysteria, all the time.  CNN: "We are destroying the planet."  MSNBC: "The middle class is disappearing!"  President Donald Trump says drug trafficking "is worse than ever!"  I'm glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth:  There is less war and more food.  We live healthier and longer lives. [...] It's a surprising message, since most journalists tell us everything's terrible.

There's A Good Reason People Hate The Media.  On Tuesday morning [9/10/2019], the liberal media was in a tizzy — National Security Advisor John Bolton had been fired or resigned.  It didn't matter which, there was a "shake up" in the Trump administration and these Democrats with press passes were ready to pounce. [...] The American people aren't watching, they aren't interested.  Who cares if Bolton was fired or resigned?  That he's gone now is all that matters, and that only matters to a very few.  The opening left by Bolton will be filled by someone else, and life will continue.  By next week, fewer people will remember this than care about it now.  The Bolton exit is the latest "STOP THE PRESSES" moment from an opposition media desperate to find something, anything with which to damage President Trump.

CNBC's Jim Cramer: 'The Only People Talking About a Recession Are Us'.  Have you noticed all the talk recently by the mainstream media about a recession?  Of course, many members of the MSM can barely contain their glee at the prospect of an economic downturn hurting President Trump's prospects in the election next year.  Well, Jim Cramer on Thursday's [9/5/2019] Squawk Box told host Joe Kernen that the only people talking about such a recession are "us," meaning members of the media.

Media Meltdown over Trump's Hurricane Predictions.  The Trump-hating media has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since November 2016, relapsing into insanity after each Trump tweet.  The latest trigger is Trump's tweet about the potential course of Hurricane Dorian. [...] It's a typical Trump tweet with presidential well wishes ahead of a massive potential hurricane.  It took only one word to send the media into a psychotic state.  That word was Alabama, one of several states that could have been affected by the hurricane.  CNN, blissfully unconcerned that Joe Biden often doesn't know where he is or who he was vice-president for, was outraged that Trump is "spreading false information during an emergency situation".  This is even more of a national crisis to CNN than when they learned that the President gets two scoops of ice cream.

Is It True That 'Getting Killed by Police Is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men,' as the LA Times Claims?  As is the intent, the headline is an attention-grabber. [...] Most readers of course will not delve beyond the headline, but even those who do will not encounter anything resembling journalism as it was once practiced.  Rather, they'll find more than 1,400 words devoted to the racial-grievance agenda that drives so much of what appears in the Los Angeles Times.  And worse, not only is journalism itself perverted with the story, but so is science, for the story is presented as such on the page and was written by Amina Khan, who is billed on the paper's website as a "science writer."  So, if you dare to quibble with any of the story's details, or heaven forbid question its very premise, it makes you a "denier," one to be cast out into the darkness with climate-change skeptics, believers in sex differences, and all the other benighted deplorables who are so sneered upon among our sophisticated betters in the media.

How The Media Enables Destructive Climate Change Hysteria.  At a 2005 London conference of "concerned climate scientists and politicians" that helped launch contemporary climate rhetoric, attendees warned that the world had as little as 10 years before the Earth reached "the point of no return on global warming." Humans, they claimed, would soon be grappling with "widespread agricultural failure," "major droughts," "increased disease," "the death of forests," and the "switching-off of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream," among many other calamities.  Since then, the Earth has gotten greener.  This year, for the first time since we began logging data in 2000, there were no "extreme" or "exceptional" droughts across the contiguous United States — although we've come close to zero on numerous occasions over the past decade.  Every time there's a drought anywhere in the world, climate change will be blamed.  But world crop yields continue to ensure that fewer people are hungry than ever.

NASA map shows Africa has more fires burning than Brazil.  The dust up with France's Macron and the President of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro regarding the fires burning in the Amazon left out one small detail.  Africa is on fire as well.  NASA maps show that there are more fires in the African region than in the Amazon.  The on again off again acceptance of money to fight the Amazon fire lost sight that we have fires everywhere.  The G-7 Summit raised $20 Million to assist in putting out the fires in Brazil.  No doubt more proof that humans are just too destructive to the "lungs" of earth.  Another detail never mentioned is that long before planes and humans, fires raged across the planet.  It was nature's way of regeneration.  Old growth was removed and new growth lead to food sources for animals and birds.

Don't Panic:  Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests.  "Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate," declares CNN.  The Daily Beast gives us "Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest."  Here's NBC News:  "Amazon wildfires could be 'game over' for climate change fight."  Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that "it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity.  Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits."  So why are there so many fires?  "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times.  "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."  It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

Yes, Immigrants Should Be Less Dependent On U.S. Welfare, And So Should Everyone Else.  The Trump administration announced long-awaited "public charge" immigration regulations this week, and the furor immediately kicked up to derangement level.  Reason's Shikha Dalmia called the policy a "complete abuse of the original understanding" of the law.  In the Washington Post, opinion writer Paul Waldman said the policy sends a message:  "We hate you and we don't want you here, and if you come we will treat you with all the cruelty we can muster."  CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin went so far as to call the proposed regulation "un-American."  There is very little nuance left in political discourse.  Every administration policy is said to be the key to saving America or the final step in dooming it, depending on your point of view.

(Anti-)Social Media Inciting Hatred.  Twitter artificially increases circulation of the most divisive and polarizing topics by making them Trending.  It directly benefits from inflaming conflicts through increased user engagement, translating into higher ad revenues.  It indirectly benefits from such conduct because lib jornos, MSM, and other agitators enjoy such conflicts and promote Twitter to further the contention.  Twitter was praised for fueling the Ferguson riots in 2014.  Facebook apparently so envied Twitter that it hired left leaning reporters to manipulate its own Trending section.

Press exploits the kids of illegals hauled off in immigration raid.  The press is having a field day exploiting children to attack President Trump and his effort to re-establish rule of law in immigration.  Tossing all previous compunction about showing a child's face on national television out the window, they put the cameras right in a little girl's face to get her to talk and cry about a recent immigration raid in Mississippi.  No blue dot for her over this little girl's face, they went full frontal instead, as if a child that young were capable of giving consent.  Now the video will follow the girl all her life, and will likely end up a topic for mocking memes, something no 11 year-old deserves.  Not a problem for the big-buck press, though, such as CBS, which in fact, does this a lot.

Red Flags and White Supremacists.  For the past two years, the left's 'go to' words were "Russia," "Mueller," and "collusion."  Mueller's investigation and report were a big swing and a miss and not surprisingly these words have quickly been erased from the vocabularies of cable news anchors and their panels.  On a dime, coincident with a handful of mass shootings, the left's new favorite words are "racist" and "white supremacist."

The Media's Disgusting Bloodlust.  If you pay serious attention to network and cable commentators after a mass shooting, you will see something nearly as alarming as the atrocities themselves.  Set aside, for a moment, the horror of the event about which they are holding forth and it will become obvious that their solemn expressions are well-rehearsed affectations that mask a morbid glee.  As you lament truncated lives and traumatized survivors, these creatures count eyeballs and clicks.  While you worry about the health of our society, they search for a connection to some conservative cause or politician.  And the print media are just as ghoulish.

The Media Crossed a Line This Week and There's No Going Back.  [Scroll down]  It really does feel like we are coming apart at the seams, with near majorities of the country being accused of "white supremacy" by some major figures simply for supporting a politician.  Driving the division, broad brushing, and hatred this week had been the liberal media.  Whether it's newspapers amplifying the disgusting rhetoric of people like Beto O'Rourke and Elizabeth Warren or the constant stream of divisive, racially tinged editorials that are being pushed out, there's no question of their role.  The cable news beat has been even worse, with one MSNBC host actually saying that Donald Trump wants there to be mass shootings while another threatened business owners as complicit in white supremacy who donate to the GOP.

CNN roasted over debate production, format: 'A disservice to serious people'.  CNN faced backlash for its first primary debate of the 2020 campaign season, with members of the media comparing its production to a sporting event or movie trailer and others lamenting the time spent to kick off the event.  Journalists noted that the event started on Tuesday night [7/30/2019] at 8 p.m. with an introduction video, a commercial break and opening statements.  The first question to one of the ten candidates was not asked until 8:23 p.m., however.

The latest pathetic chapter in CNN's quest to 'prove' Trump is a racist.  As LU's Howard Portnoy noted yesterday [7/21/2019], the first of what are likely to be a rash of stories in which "a person of color claims that he was told by a person of pallor to go back where he came from" occurred over the weekend.  The alleged victim, who has since walked back her accusation, is a black Georgia state lawmaker named Erica Thomas, whose title instantly catapulted the story to national news status.  The alleged perpetrator is a white man who was standing behind her in a grocery checkout line.  Enter CNN, which is never slow to jump on liberal bandwagons.  The network posted an "open casting call" to its Facebook page asking "immigrants" who have been victimized by Donald Trump or his policies to come forward and share their stories.

The Editor says...
The story turned out to be a fake hate crime.

Media cried wolf:  Calling every Republican a racist lost its bite.  Once upon a time in the world of cable news, a guest or host or anchor calling anyone a racist would have considerable impact.  From what we've seen this week, when it comes to that word, those days are long gone.  A person simply can't turn on the news or scroll Twitterfor even more than a minute before hearing the word "racist" or "racism."  For example, CNN and MSNBC said the word "racist" more than 1,100 times from Sunday to Tuesday, according to a tally conducted by Grabien Media, an online media production and news prep service.  The count, which doesn't include on-screen graphics commonly known as chyrons, [...]

The excerpt below appears to have been extracted from Closed Captioning.
Joe Concha:  According to Grabien Media, Since Sunday, Word 'Racist' [has been] Said on CNN, MSNBC More than 2,200 Times.  There is an actual number around this that since Sunday [7/14/2019] according to gradient [sic] media, the word racist has been said on CNN and MSNBC alone, more than 2200 times.  I don't even know if that is physically or magnetically possible, but that is what has been happening this weekend the myopic focus completely.  [Video clip]

Greg Gutfeld Mocks CNN, MSNBC for 1,100 Uses of 'Racist' in Two Days on Trump.  On Tuesday night's episode of The Five, Fox News pundit Greg Gutfeld mocking the collective mass hysteria of CNN and MSNBC over President Trump's latest tweets against radical first-term Congresswomen.  Gutfeld summarized the hysterics to a T with a simple word count:  "We are reaching peak racism right now.  CNN and MSNBC, according to The Hill this morning, had said the word racist 1,100 times.  That was this morning [7/16/2019] since Sunday [7/14/2019].  Ok, so today's Tuesday... I think when it's 1,100 times by Tuesday afternoon, I'd call that maybe an overreaction.  It's hysterical and it's hysteria."

Media coverage of Hurricane Barry was the real disaster.  There will be no media awards for Al Roker or the Washington Post in recognition of their coverage of Hurricane Barry.  At least if the people living in New Orleans have a say in the matter.  The weekend weather event, fortunately, was nowhere nearly as bad as was predicted in some media accounts.  That's a good thing.  The bad thing, though, is the over-hyped media coverage of Tropical Storm Barry that briefly became Hurricane Barry (a Category 1 storm) before it returned to being a tropical storm.  Barry made landfall Saturday at Intracoastal City, about 160 miles west of New Orleans.  Unfortunately, to read or listen to media coverage, you would have heard calls for mass evacuation in New Orleans, well outside of where the storm hit.  The word "evacuation" has its own connotations for residents on the Gulf Coast and it is not a word to be used lightly.  For a television weather forecaster to suggest such an action when the local authorities are not calling for it, the situation can turn unnecessarily dangerous.

Power Outage in New York — Dramatic Media — Rest of Country 'Meh'.  Fox News talking hair Leland Vitter uses his best dramatic voice, channels his inner Shep, and proclaims the end of the known universe is nigh, because the power went out in a part of Manhattan, New York City.

Could I have some news with my emotions, please?  Emotion now blankets the media landscape like an infant's crib at bedtime.  Google "Shepard Smith emotional," and up come nearly 3 million results, many of them focused on the Fox anchor's recent visceral response to immigrant suffering.  A search of "Rachel Maddow crying" delivers more than 1 million offerings, many for the MSNBC host's reaction to border detentions and the Mueller report.  "Brooke Baldwin tears" uncovers nearly 2 million entries for the CNN reporter's reaction to a variety of news events.  They are not alone.  Contemporary culture trusts feelings over facts, rewards heated emotion — tears or anger — and rejects medium cool.  The effect on journalism is unmistakable.  And a lot of the blame can be placed on those all-too-common twin devils:  television and the internet.

Debunked: The absurd story about smartphones causing kids to sprout horns.  The Washington Post on Thursday [6/20/2019] published a story suggesting that the use of mobile devices is causing young people to sprout horns from their skulls.  But a look at the scientific data behind the story finds that such a splashy takeaway is tenuous at best — and atrocious reporting at worst.  The Post's story was primarily based on a study published back in February 2018 by two Australian researchers.  It earned fresh attention last week after being mentioned in a BBC feature on how modern life is supposedly transforming the human skeleton.  The study was published in Nature's open source journal Scientific Reports, which is supposedly peer-reviewed.  But the study has significant limitations and flaws, and the Post breezed over them for a sensationalized story.

No, Teen Vogue, you should not promote prostitution as a career choice.  The Internet is a crazy place, made crazier with a desire from many platforms to be shocking just to get readership.  Clickbait headlines and outrageous, negative stories complete with aggressive phrases like "owned" and "called out" litter websites and their corresponding social media accounts, which all do their best to out-shock each other to capture readers' limited attention.  While this insanity is definitely detrimental to our health as a society, it deserves even more scrutiny when directed at children.

Arsenic found in bottled water sold at Whole Foods, Walmart, Target.  When you pay premium prices, you expect a premium product — but that's not necessarily the case with bottled water.  California nonprofit Center for Environmental Health has revealed that water bottle brands Peñafiel, owned by Keurig Dr. Pepper, and Starkey, owned by Whole Foods, contain levels of highly toxic arsenic that are above the legal limit. [...] Other symptoms of arsenic poisoning include stomach pain and nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, numbness, even paralysis or blindness.

The Editor says...
This is nothing but alarmism, brought to you by an environmental activist group and gladly passed along by the New York Post.  There's not enough arsenic in bottled water to give anyone arsenic poisoning.  The "legal limit" for arsenic content in bottled water is probably so low that it's easy to exceed that limit.

No, Your Kid Isn't Growing Horns Because Of Cellphone Use.  This week, the Washington Post grabbed plenty of attention for a story that claimed that kids are actually growing "horns" because of cell phone use.  The story, which leans on 2016 and 2018 research out of Australia, was cribbing off of [a] more nuanced piece by the BBC on how skeletal adaptation to modern living changes are kind of a thing.  The Post's more inflammatory take was accompanied by a wide variety of other stories proclaiming that today's children are growing horns and bone spurs because they use their [...] cellphones too much!

ABC's '08 Prediction:  NYC Under Water from Climate Change By June 2015.  New York City underwater?  Gas over $9 a gallon?  A carton of milk costs almost $13?  Remember when that happened on June 12, 2015?  No?  This was the wildly-inaccurate world of 2015 predicted by ABC News 11 years ago this week.  Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.  The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, "It's June 8th, 2015.  One carton of milk is $12.99."  (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.)  Another clip featured this prediction for 2015 "Gas reached over $9 a gallon."  (In reality, gas cost an average of $2.75 four years ago.)

Paper to staff:  Use 'climate crisis' ... 'change' is 'too gentle'.  Staff at the Guardian newspaper of London, England, has been directed to address "global warming" more aggressively and use "climate crisis" or "climate emergency" instead of "climate change," which it considers "too passive and gentle."

The Media Press Dems for Impeachment Porn.  [This article examines] the motivation of the media as they continue to peddle impeachment.  They know it would be political suicide for the Democrats because only a minority of voters supports removing the President, yet they crave the countless clicks and eyeballs the circus would inevitably produce.  But the Democratic leadership, their antipathy for the President notwithstanding, is loath to take the leap just to provide impeachment porn for the media.

Climate change scare stories reach the point of psychological terrorism.  The corporate media cartels have become hubs of hatred and "journo-terrorism" that targets the psyche of the masses.  The quack science hoax of so-called "climate change" is used to terrorize the public into believing that their planet will somehow be destroyed by carbon dioxide — the very molecule that has been rapidly re-greening the Earth over the past four decades, according to NASA.  Now, a new round of "science" has been studying the mental stress of the victims of this psychological terrorism pushed by the dishonest media, and they've reached an even more bizarre conclusion.  Scientists now claim that climate change is causing "mental anguish" among humans.  Seriously.  Of course, the real source of the mental anguish is the lies and panic propaganda of the corporate media and the pathetic scientific establishment which has figured out that if you want more government grant money, you have to conduct "research" that identifies some new crisis to be blamed on climate change.  In fact, the very phrase "climate change" isn't scary enough yet to achieve the desired goal of mass mental terrorism, so media outlets around the world are now ordering their obedient writers to start using the phrase "climate crisis."

The hoax and due diligence.  Nothing illustrates the decline of serious journalism more than the fact that many of the major media, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have participated (and to some extent continue to participate) in massive hoaxes which would have been easily disproved with basic due diligence.  The first and least important hoax was that of Michael Avenatti.  He appeared on CNN and MSNBC more than 100 times where he was touted as an expert on many things, particularly the alleged misdeeds of President Trump.  Fawning hosts on these networks even referred to him as presidential material — yet he was nothing more than a conman.  He now faces about 400 years in prison if he is convicted on the many charges in several different courts.

Jussie Smollett [is] just a symptom of the fake outrage disease.  Remember folk expressions about the wisdom of being careful?  "Look before you leap."  "Measure twice, cut once."  "Don't go off half-cocked."  All of this should go double for online culture.  Instead lives are being destroyed over misleading, unfair or just plain false accusations.  People are being turned into public enemies or even fired after being framed for racism, homophobia or other perceived social crimes.  Others are casting themselves as victims of hate in order to line their pockets.  These days anyone with a phone in his hand can be P.T. Barnum.  And people who congratulate themselves for being unusually tolerant, kind-hearted and impervious to misinformation are the leaders of frenzied online mobs who are pitchforking innocent people.  Fake news is bad enough.  Fake outrage is even worse.

Climate hysteria.  The UK Guardian Newspaper decided that you're not sufficiently alarmed about climate doom.  Climate change is no longer the term of choice with the Guardian and other news outlets.  Get ready to hear the newly invented terms, "climate emergency," "climate crisis," "climate breakdown," and "global heating."  By the way, when did it become the job of a news organization to hype public concern over an issue instead of just reporting the facts?

Will the Media Ever Pay a Price For Its Irresponsibility?  [Michael] Avenatti was entirely the creation of the media, right down to the idea, which CNN and MSNBC took seriously, that he could be a presidential candidate in 2020.  It is emerging now that the media knew first hand that Avenatti is a first class jerk, from the outrageous and rude way he treated the low- and mid-level media people (producers, etc) he dealt with in his nonstop media campaign.  But because he was saying what the media wanted to hear (Trump is a horrible human being), the media were willing overlook all of the slime this reptile was leaving in media green rooms and on TV sets.

Democrats Claim 'Constitutional Crisis,' Media Repeat It 386 Times.  Evidently Democrats need only utter the words "constitutional crisis" for the media to report it as fact.  Watch cable "news" these days, and you'll surely see talking heads parroting the Democratic line that the Trump administration's noncompliance with House Committee subpoenas amounts to a constitutional crisis.  While a small handful of analysts and guest legal scholars disagree, TV hosts continue to push the idea uncritically, with some even urging the alleged crisis be used as grounds for impeachment.  MRC analysts looked at all coverage on broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC) and liberal cable (CNN, MSNBC) networks from May 8 to 12, finding 386 utterances of the term "constitutional crisis" by hosts, analysts, or guest journalists.  This count did not include cases in which the term was used by political partisans, such as members of Congress, former administration officials, or Democratic and Republican strategists.

Children Have to Listen to Fake News, Too, and It's Not Good for Them.  [Scroll down]  Kids are being propagandized about the ticking climate clock in school, on TV, and everywhere on social media.  It just doesn't help when the parents are scared, too.  A 40-year-old Salt Lake City mother said the release of the U.N.'s latest climate report caused her three teenage daughters a severe emotional crisis.  "There was a lot of crying.  They told me, 'We know what's coming, and it's going to be really rough.'"  Because mom believes it, too, there's not much help she can offer.  "I want to have hope," she said, "but the reports are showing that this isn't going to stop, so all we can do is cope."  I don't believe that these children are really studying climate reports; it's the media's hysterical coverage that's upsetting them.

CNN's Jim Acosta Makes A Fool Of Himself At The WH Medal Of Freedom Ceremony.  CNN's Jim Acosta is in a running gun battle with April Ryan for the worst White House reporter currently on the beat.  Acosta's self-aggrandizement and constant editorializing in briefings have become the butt of jokes everywhere.  His false sense of grandeur has led him to write a book proclaiming how dangerous it is to "tell the truth" in America.  Because Acosta's life is so harrowing.

Scarborough: 'History Has Chosen' the Dem Party to 'Stand Up and Defend the Rule of Law'.  As President Donald Trump continues to spar with House Democrats over subpoenas, MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough applauded Democrats, saying that "history has chosen" their party to "stand up and defend the rule of law" in America.  Scarborough said that as a former Republican, it makes him "sad" to see the GOP "breaking the law."  "You can look at all of the document requests that they've ignored," Scarborough outlined.  "They're in contempt of Congress."

What did she say that isn't absolutely true?
What strange personification:  Does History take a vote, or what does it take to make up History's mind?

Parts of the American Media Are Willfully Twisting News to Stoke Racial Tension.  President Trump is cheering on someone who has not only supported the President, but withstood an online campaign of harassment for doing so.  The media would prefer to make this a race issue and fan the flames of racial tension.  It is unfortunate.

MSNBC Reporter Sticks A Mic In Robert Mueller's Face After Easter Services.  MSNBC reporter Mike Viqueira confronted Robert Mueller with a microphone and camera crew after the former special counsel exited Easter Sunday [4/21/2019] church services with his wife.

CBS Incites Violence Against Political Opponents.  "It's time to punch a few Nazis."  It's hard to shock me, but I was shocked by the trailer for CBS's "The Good Fight." [...] Promoting violence in the abstract is not illegal.  According to the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech is legal unless it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."  The trailer showed an unprovoked assault against a real person.  It told viewers it is time to punch Nazis.  If this isn't a call to violence — at least against Richard Spencer — what is?  If the show had named almost anyone else, there would surely be criminal charges.  While we are to attack "neo-Nazis," communists or non-white extremists are apparently off limits.

Mainstream Media's Worshipping of Michael Avenatti.  Remember celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, the man who represented porn star Stormy Daniels?  Well, the media's favorite guest is back in the news after being indicted on 36 charges Thursday [4/11/2019].  Two hundred fifty-four — that's how many times Avenatti was featured on major TV networks in one year, according to NewsBusters.  CNN alone featured Avenatti a staggering 121 times.  Now he has been charged with numerous crimes, including tax evasion, fraud, and stealing money from clients — including scamming a paraplegic man out of a $4 million settlement.

Media exaggerate impact of US-Mexico border closure.  Let's hope that President Trump's "one-year warning" issued to Mexico Thursday to halt the flood of illegal drugs and migrants entering the U.S. — or face a border closure and new tariffs — will influence Mexico to make some real changes.  Unfortunately, the media's continual exaggerations of the dangers of closing the border may give Mexico the idea that the U.S. lacks the willpower to carry through on the president's threat.  If Mexican leaders conclude Trump is bluffing, there will be little reason for them to change their behavior.

Media ignore border debacle to feed us avocado stories.  Here at the Mexican border in San Diego, the local television press is always looking for ways to Get Trump.  The illegal immigrant sob stories aren't working all that much anymore.  So now they're reporting on President Trump's threatened border shutdown over it as a matter of the price of avocados in San Diego. [...] Obviously, the intent is to create a unified voice to whip up opposition to Trump's vow to shut the U.S.-Mexican border on public hysteria grounds, supposedly because we San Diegans just can't possibly live without our guac and margaritas, we're too la-la over here, and someone messing with our avocado supply should be enough to trigger the fury of Surfer Dude Nation.

Press goes Code Avocado against Trump.  How can you take seriously an occupation that repeatedly dives off the deep end over the tiniest of items?  Avocado sales in the United States are a little more than $2 billion a year.  In a $20 trillion dollar economy, that is 1% of 1% of all activity.  Mexico's $1.2 trillion economy will not suffer much either.  While shutting the border would be a hardship for avocado growers, open borders cost hundreds of Americans their lives every year.  But thanks to the media savvy of Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, the largest distributor and grower of avocados in the world, the press is on a mission to save avocados, not American lives.

The Mueller-Industrial Complex Collapses.  So much media is premediated now, it's almost impossible to find something whose payload isn't partly composed of practice for future events.  Most of the time, nobody even notices this phenomenon.  Premediation works because it homes in on natural anxieties or desires amplified by the hyper-mediated ecosystem in which television, smartphones, social media, and all the rest rot and reanimate.  Whom should I consider voting for in the next election?  Am I going to die if I board a plane?  Those are questions whose future answers seem to demand consideration today.

CBS & NBC Cheer Student Climate Strike, Warn 'Future Might Not Exist'.  On Thursday [3/14/2019] and Friday, CBS This Morning and NBC's Today show celebrated left-wing student activists around the world preparing to walk out of their classrooms to "demand action on climate change."  The CBS report took a particularly dark turn as correspondent Tony Dokoupil warned of "a future that might not even exist" for the young protesters.  "Groups of students across America say they will skip class tomorrow for the first national school strike over climate change," co-host Gayle King proudly announced on Thursday's CBS This Morning.  "Tomorrow's protests are planned in more than 130 U.S. cities and about 90 countries worldwide," she added.

Study: White People Responsible for Blacks' and Latinos' Higher Exposure to Pollution.  A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that white people contribute more to pollution than black and Latino people, but the latter suffer from it more than the white polluters.  "The air that Americans breathe isn't equal," USA Today says in its report on the study.  "Blacks and Hispanics disproportionately breathe air that's been polluted by non-Hispanic whites, according to a study," USA Today says.  "This new research quantifies for the first time the racial gap between who causes air pollution — and who breathes it."

Rebuttal:
Who Declared this to Be Crazy Week?  There are so many things stupidly wrong with this whole story that I don't even know where to begin.  First, this study, and many others like it, anchor their alarm on the supposed fact that particulate pollution causes about 42,000 premature deaths in the U.S. every year.  Though the EPA relies on this figure, the epidemiology behind it is very weak.  But without this scary statistic, a lot of regulations would fail even the most generous cost-benefit test.  Second, particulate levels have been falling fast for the last 25 years, and will continue to fall in the future.  Most studies such as this one are relying on obsolete data.  What this means is that most black and Hispanic Americans, even in the places that still have the highest air pollution levels like the Los Angeles basin, are breathing air today that is lower in ambient pollution than white people inhaled 20 years ago.  Don't expect NPR or anyone else to put it in perspective this way.  They've got an agenda and a narrative that needs to be kept up.

Alabama Tornado Victims Ask Trump To Sign Bibles; Meltdown Ensues.  Another day, another obtuse, ridiculous meltdown in the media over something Donald Trump did.  This time we head to Alabama, in the wake of dozens of deaths and hundreds who lost everything due to a vicious string of tornadoes. [...] This kind of petty craziness, played on a loop daily by our media, is why Trump has a much better shot of winning in 2020 than he otherwise would have.

American Air Is Clean And Getting Cleaner.  [A]ir quality is very good pretty much everywhere in the United States.  This fact stands in stark contrast to utterly absurd claims in the media, such as blaming air pollution for killing 155,000 Americans.  Why is there such a disconnect between reality and what the media say?  Because bad news is intrinsically more interesting than good news.  It's the same reason that murder and violence grab top headlines, even though both are near historic lows. [...] Air pollution is not a problem in the United States.  It is a problem in Europe, and it is a monumental problem in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Media Hypes Roger Stone 'Revelation' That Has Been Public For A Year.  News outlets and media pundits on Friday [2/15/2019] seized on a court filing in the special counsel's case against Roger Stone that referred to communication the longtime Trump confidant had with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, the group of alleged Russian operatives suspected of stealing Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign.  The court filing, which was touted as new, bombshell evidence by numerous news sources, including CNN and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, may be less than meets the anti-Trump eye.

Let's Chill about Hate Crimes.  "Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the television show 'Empire,' was attacked in Chicago by 2 assailants who yelled racial and homophobic slurs," tweeted the New York Times on January 29.  Mark the tone of absolute certainty about an unconfirmed claim.  Many other news outlets took the same tack.  "Celebrities, lawmakers rally behind Jussie Smollett in wake of brutal attack," reported ABC News.  "Jussie Smollett Performs at Troubadour Just Days After Chicago Attack: 'I Had to Be Here Tonight'" read a Los Angeles Times headline.  Many commenters linked the alleged attack to larger alleged sicknesses:  "The racist, homophobic attack on Jussie Smollett is far-right America's endgame," tweeted GQ, in a sentiment echoed by many others.

Bezos vs. the Enquirer Could Be a Watershed.  What to make of the battle between Jeff Bezos and the National Enquirer, which we will delight in calling the affair of Bezos, Pecker and de Becker?  Under any circumstance, the world's richest man cheating on his wife with a sexy helicopter pilot, supported by racy texts and photos, would be a story for the National Enquirer.  Tasteful Americans may wish it weren't so, but Mr. Bezos is a public figure in the Supreme Court's definition.

WaPo Spends $5.2M on Vanity Ad in [the] Wake of 1,200 Media Layoffs.  After some 1,200 people lost their media jobs last week, the far-left Washington Post spent $5.2 million to run a vanity ad during the Super Bowl.  You have to watch the Post ad to understand just how vacuous it is.  What we have here is the highest form of propaganda narrated by a Big Movie Star (Tom Hanks), produced only to give you a chronic case of the FeelSoGoodz.

The MAGA-phobic manure-spreaders of media sensationalism.  [Scroll down]  Question:  How many racist, homophobic menaces wander around the upscale Streeterville neighborhood of liberal Chicago at 2 a.m. carrying rope and bleach, yelling about "MAGA country?"  Question:  How many racist, homophobic menaces have ever heard of "Empire," could recognize Jussie Smollett, or know or care anything about his sexuality?  Despite TMZ's claim that Smollett had the "hell beat outta him" and attackers "broke his ribs" plus subjected him to a chemical attack, an ambulance was not called and he instead "self-transported" to the hospital.  CWB Chicago, a local public safety watchdog site, reported on police dispatch records documenting that Smollett's friend "Frank" refused EMS services for Smollett; no mention of bleach was made; "no or minor injury" was observed; and "officers never sent a 'flash; message with offender descriptions to field units."

An example of news media sensationalism:
It Could Take Joshua Tree 300 Years to Recover From the Government Shutdown.  Though the government shutdown may have ended last Friday [1/25/2019], Joshua Tree National Park will be feeling the ruinous effects of it for hundreds of years.  Throughout the duration of the shutdown, which lasted a record-long 35 days, national parks greatly suffered: human waste piled up, lands were littered with trash, and some campgrounds and other public areas even closed to visitors, as the parks weren't adequately staffed to stay open.  It wasn't until after Joshua Tree closed on January 2, though, that humans became excessively reckless, during which they off-roaded, graffittied rocks, started campfires in illegal areas, and cut down protected trees.

The Editor says...
Sounds like a wee bit of an exaggeration.  Human waste does not stick around for 300 years.  Neither does litter.  Neither do tire tracks.  But aside from that, the obvious solution is to privatize the park.  (By the way, graffiti is not a verb.  Neither is off-road.)  But this whole story seems very far-fetched.  Were a bunch of anarchist maniacs taking advantage the government shutdown, during which they could enter the unattended national parks and spread garbage and feces everywhere?  Sounds like a false flag to me:  Somebody went into the park and trashed it, in order to make the "government shutdown" as ghastly as possible — something that must be avoided at all cost — when in reality very few people outside of a 200-mile radius from Washington DC even noticed the five-week shutdown.

The Famed 'Doomsday Clock' Is Little More Than A Liberal Angst Meter.  When the Doomsday Clock launched in 1947, the initial setting was seven minutes to midnight.  Since then, it's gone up and down.  The furthest it got from doomsday was 17 minutes in 1991.  But it's clear from its movements over the past seven decades that the Doomsday Clock is more about politics than any sort of scientific measure of the risk of nuclear annihilation.  After all, the Clock routinely counted down after a Republican wins the White House, and ticked up when Democrats reclaim the presidency.

Apocalypse Creep.  Nothing says "end of the world" like a big fake clock.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave its annual Doomsday Clock presentation on Thursday [1/24/2019] and announced that it's still two minutes to midnight.  Last year, the group of 15 scholars and scientists moved the phony minute hand of fate 30 seconds closer to Armageddon, from two-and-a-half minutes to midnight to its present setting, 11:58 pm sharp.  By the Bulletin's logic, we're as close to the end as we've ever been.  The whole thing is adorably retro.

How the media convinces us we're all outraged — even when no one cares.  Lazy media reporters who are too lazy to even actually speak to people anymore are instead constructing Potemkin Villages of fake hate, fake disgust and fake outrage.  They're Contemptkin Villages.  No one really lives there.  The laziest hacks can build them using tweets, even tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts.  Somehow these hacks are employed at places like the BBC and the [New York] Times. [...] Shameless online editors today figure that readers will click through to anything that is supposedly making anyone mad.  And if the underlying story doesn't actually contain any evidence that anyone has blown his lid, too late!  Made ya click.

Government shutdown lessons — We could take a chainsaw to so much of government.  This government shutdown is now longer than any in history.  The media keep using the word "crisis."  "Shutdown sows chaos, confusion and anxiety!" says The Washington Post.  "Pain spreads widely."  The New York Times headlined, it's all "just too much!"  But wait.  Looking around America, I see people going about their business — families eating in restaurants, employees going to work, children playing in playgrounds, etc.  I have to ask:  Where's the crisis?

Media's anti-Trump addiction amps up the outrage and fuels the public's suspicion.  Alas, much of today's political journalism has fallen into advocacy, intentionally inflammatory, using or omitting selective details, quotes and background to make a case against President Donald Trump.  The criticism generally centers on something he did or said he would do — or something someone, usually unidentified, said he might do or is considering possibly doing.  And then in a kind of staged Kabuki dance, journalists run to gather reaction from waiting opponents who provide a predictably outraged quote calling for counteraction.  Yes, this president's name boosts ratings and clicks from both sides.  But the media's addiction to anything Trump lets this president manipulate them, which he does skillfully.  It squeezes out other important news.  And it denies Americans a set of generally-accepted facts to debate, merely providing fodder for an anti-Trump agenda and more argumentative ammo for both sides.

How many times have the media predicted doom because of Trump, and how many times have they been dead wrong?  On Thursday [1/10/2019], there was a screaming headline on Drudge saying, "Doomsday."  The article was from NBC News, and the source of the doomsday report was the ever reliable Mark Zandi of Moody's.  The purpose of the report was not to be objective news, because anyone with a brain knows that the shutdown will end soon.  The purpose was to scare the public, tamp down economic growth, and destroy Trump.

Sorry, I Don't Feel Sorry For Furloughed Feds.  Now that the nation has heard the President explain how he wants to address our immigration crisis, and we have all enjoyed the comic relief offered by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in lieu of a serious response, the media have launched a propaganda campaign they hope will pull the Democrats from the ditch they have driven into regarding "the wall."  But our friends in the Fourth Estate are approaching the project in a manner that merely highlights how divorced they are from the world beyond the Beltway.  Their primary focus involves the heartrending human tragedy of... idle bureaucrats.

The Media Was Still Unglued in 2018.  The comparisons to dictators (especially Hitler) were once shocking, but no longer.  These smears arrive almost daily.  Take perpetually malcontent Steve Schmidt lecturing on MSNBC. Trump "creates a mass sense of victimization amongst his base," he said.  "And then he asserts extraordinary claims of power to protect the victims from the scapegoated populations and the nefarious conspiracy.  That is fundamentally illiberal, deeply un-American, and, frankly, could be straight out of Munich circa 1928."  Then there's the racial panic.  "Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era," wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.  Trump & Co. is responsible for encouraging the murder of blacks?  O-o-K.  Krugman wrote this junk after a lone gunman killed two African-Americans at a supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky.  Any terrible event can be quickly blamed on Trump.

Chuck Todd's Perpetual Hype Machine: 'What If the President IS the Crisis?'Meet the Press host Chuck Todd has proclaimed he thinks NBC and MSNBC are a very "fact-based environment," unlike Fox News.  But his opening to his show on Sunday sounded like a dramatic editorial, underlining all of Trump's problems with Republican leaders and conservative radio and TV hosts, throwing together the shutdown, the resignation of the defense secretary, and the stock market decline into one grand opinionated summary:  [Video clip]

Flashback: Media Silence After Obama Fires General Mattis Without Even a Call.  The liberal media and DC establishment suffered a complete meltdown on Thursday [12/20/2018] after the sudden resignation by Secretary of Defense James Mattis.  Talk of impeachment, coups, and suicide abound over fears that Mattis was the last 'adult' keeping President Trump in check.  Mattis resigned as Trump moved to assert mastery over his presidency this week in key areas after nearly two years on the job.

Recap and overview of the Jim Acosta tantrum:
Profiles in Absurdity:  Jim Acosta as First Amendment 'Hero'.  The underlying facts are by now well-known:  The insufferable Acosta, surely the most obnoxious "correspondent" ever to hold a White House press pass — a dubious distinction in a competition that includes Sam Donaldson (ABC) and the late Helen Thomas (UPI), among others — had his credentials suspended after a particularly abrasive encounter with President Trump at a November 7 presser.  In a widely publicized incident, Acosta harangued at length, refused to relinquish the microphone when directed to do so, and pushed away a young female intern who was trying to pass the mic to another reporter.  White House press passes have always been viewed as discretionary and subject to regulation, in order reasonably to limit the size of the press pool and ensure proper decorum.  Reporters are expected to be courteous and to exhibit professional behavior.  The attention-seeking Acosta, as is his custom, was grandstanding at the press conference, and breached longstanding protocols by insisting on arguing disrespectfully with the president.  For this, his "hard pass" — necessary to gain entrance to the White House — was temporarily suspended.  CNN was not barred from the White House; only Acosta was.

Like Drug Addicts, Reporters Demean Themselves For Just One More Trump Story.  But, it's not enough.  It's not getting them the high they want.  The high they crave.  The traffic, the clicks, the views, the response... none of it is the same.  There's gotta be a stronger dose somewhere.  So, when it comes time to cover the funeral of the former president, they seek out something stronger.  Trump is sitting by the Obamas and the Clintons!  He's not reciting the Creed!  He is doing this or not doing that!  And in the process, the funeral is no longer about George H.W. Bush.  It is about Trump.  It's wrong.  They know it's wrong.  They can't help themselves, though.  They are addicts.

A little hysteria can make the news go down.  The mainstream/legacy/hothouse media has been rubbing sticks together for months, trying to start a fire under the White House to frighten the administration into abolishing fossil fuels before Christmas.  Hysteria used to be the sworn enemy of newspapers.  (Television, not so much.)  Now everyone manufactures it.  Helene Cooper of The New York Times thinks it's OK to spread a little hysteria because becoming "hysterical" is the right and proper response.

Trump hatred fueled media's yearlong obsession with Avenatti and Stormy.  2018 was the year the mainstream media willingly handed whatever was left of their credibility and dignity over to an aging porn star/stripper and her odious, ethically challenged attorney. [...] At one point, Mr. Avenatti had become such a fixture on certain cable networks that it almost appeared he had joined the prime-time lineup.  Analysts at the Media Research Center categorized his appearances on CNN over a two-month period.  The results are as startling as they are embarrassing.

Another nothing-burger?  Catherine Herridge breaks down Michael Cohen's guilty plea 'bombshell'.  Early Thursday morning word broke that President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress during its investigation into possible Russian collusion.  Following the announcement, the perpetually hysterical left broke into cheers of gleeful applause over the belief that the president would soon be the next one to be indicted.

Trump has the goods on Democrats.  CNN was so excited on June 6, 2017.  Jim Comey was going to testify in Congress in two days.  The fired FBI director would start the ball rolling on the impeachment of the Orange Man.  The cable outlet posted a story, "Comey expected to refute Trump."  Wolf Blitzer cranked up his self-righteousness to Pope Level.  CNN attached a countdown-to-Comey clock to its chyron.  Then Comey released his opening statement to the public a day early.  Blitzer dialed down his attitude to DMV clerk.  The countdown clock disappeared.  The story was downgraded to "Comey unlikely to judge on obstruction."

Jim Acosta Will Only Behave When There's A Democrat In The White House.  President Donald Trump says he's drafting rules of decorum for White House reporters in the wake of the lawsuit involving CNN's aggressively misbehaving reporter Jim Acosta.  Funny how unruly press behavior never comes up when a Democrat is president.

White House has to tell reporters how to act like adults.  Sarah Sanders today issued rules of conduct for White House reporters.  Everyone in the press room should be embarrassed because like kindergartners, they have to be told to share the microphone and take turns asking questions.  These geniuses brought this nonsense on because they were too pathetically lame to tell Jim Acosta to sit down and shut up.  Instead, their self-important White House Correspondents Association issued a statement of support, "Journalists may use a range of approaches to carry out their jobs and the WHCA does not police the tone or frequency of the questions its members ask of powerful senior government officials, including the President.  "Such interactions, however uncomfortable they may appear to be, help define the strength of our national institutions.  We urge the White House to immediately reverse this weak and misguided action."

CNN Requests Emergency Hearing After Trump Warns Acosta's Press Pass in Jeopardy Again.  CNN host Brian Stelter reports that the White House may once again revoke White House correspondent Jim Acosta's press credential after a judge ruled to reinstate the "hard pass" last week.  The network has asked for an emergency hearing in response to the threat.  "Friday's court ruling means that a temporary restraining order is in effect for 14 days.  But W.H. officials sent Acosta a letter stating that his press pass is set to be suspended again once the restraining order expires," Stelter tweeted late Sunday [11/18/2018].

The Editor says...
The suspension of a press pass for a single ill-behaved reporter is not an emergency.

White House Notifies CNN Journalist Jim Acosta of Rules to Permanently Revoke "Hard Pass".  The White House sent a letter to CNN narrative engineer Jim Acosta notifying him his pass granting him temporary access to the White House grounds could be suspended after a temporary restraining order runs its course.

Acosta decision could make it easier for White House to kick reporters out.  In short, the judge said to the White House:  You can't throw out a reporter without going through a process.  But if you go through a process — which you, the White House, can design — then you can throw the reporter out.  In the end, it could be that Kelly's ruling will make it easier for the White House to oust reporters in the future — and to make the decision stick.

Jim Acosta is smug, and no court ruling changes that.  CNN's Jim Acosta scored some court points with a ruling that orders the White House to give back his press pass, at least for the time being.  But he still presents as a smug elitist.  He presented as an out-of-touch elitist the day he jerked away from the arm of the reaching White House intern — the day he refused to cede the microphone and cede the floor and cede his time to the many other journalists who were patiently waiting to pose questions to the president.

Jim Acosta and the Hubris of Celebrity Journalism.  When do Jim Acosta's 15 minutes of fame expire?  Has there ever been anyone less deserving of the spotlight who has managed to hog it quite so thoroughly as CNN's White House show horse?  Most recently, on Nov. 7, Acosta gave President Trump a moral lecture in the form of a loaded "question" about why Trump called the migrant "caravan" an "invasion."  According to Acosta, it is not an invasion because the migrants were hundreds of miles away, and besides, the migrants aren't going to be "climbing over walls and so on."  One week later, as we all know, members of the caravan (and of course it's not really a "caravan") were sitting astride the border wall and invading U.S. territory.  So much for Acosta's credibility.  Mind you, the president answered Acosta's "When are you going to stop beating your wife?" question, and acknowledged that he and the reporter have a difference of opinion about what an invasion is, but Acosta was pressing his left-wing agenda and not actually trying to elicit information with his "fake question."

Acosta Gets His Press Pass Back, But Trump Is the Real Winner.  It would be the easiest thing in the world for the White House to turn Acosta into a non-entity, just another cable-news squawker tut-tutting the president's decisions into a camera from the White House lawn.  Call on him, give him bland answers to his silly questions, and move on.  Or don't call on him at all!  Instead, time after time, Trump and press secretary Sarah Sanders have allowed Acosta to harrumph them into tiffs that become news stories in themselves.  Last Friday's foolishness, with Acosta white-knuckling the mic and Trump shouting and that poor intern visibly wishing she'd taken some other gig, was just the latest, greatest example.  Why?  Because the White House loves it when Acosta is in the spotlight.  He's the perfect foil to Trump, the perfect face for the administration's constant campaign against the "fake news media."

Trump everyone's hard passes then.  A federal judge today [11/16/2018] ordered President Trump to restore Jim Acosta's hard pass access to the White House despite Acosta's belligerence at a press conference.  Just about every media outlet who gets hard passes sided with Acosta. [...] Revoke all the hard passes.  Make them stand in line each day with every other reporter from outlets not so privileged seeking access.  The press wants to play hardball, so play hardball.  Why give them this privilege when they hate him?

Everyone Is Wrong About The Jim Acosta, White House Battle.  Jim Acosta is a pundit who works for CNN.  He was credentialed to attend White House press briefings, which he routinely used as opportunities to share his personal political views and animosity toward President Donald Trump.  The situation with Acosta, who is known as a shameless grandstander who seeks personal attention rather than a journalist who seeks to cover the news, came to a head last week when he repeatedly violated decorum at the White House by offering personal opinions in the place of actual questions, fighting with the president, interrupting the president, and belligerently refusing to return the White House microphone to a staff member.

Levin: 'No reporter has a constitutional right' to be in the White House.  Tuesday [11/13/2018] on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin called out the ridiculous stunt of CNN's lawsuit against the Trump administration over the antics of reporter Jim Acosta.  "The purpose of a presidential press conference is to allow as many reporters as possible to ask pertinent questions, and for the president to answer them.  In other words, a press conference is for the American people.  One of the difficulties the other members of the press and the president are having communicating with each other ... is Jim Acosta.  When Jim Acosta disrupts the press conference, monopolized the time, and basically gives his political opinions about a president who he constantly calls a liar, we learn nothing," Levin said.

Trump White House Responds to Judge's Ruling that CNN's Jim Acosta Has Right to Disrupt White House Pressers.  On Friday morning [11/16/2018] a federal judge ruled that the Trump White House must restore jackass Jim Acosta's hard press pass.  This is unbelievable.  In any other business this jackass would be fired — at CNN he is defended in court.

CNN's Acosta stopped being a journalist long ago.  Invariably, [Jim] Acosta makes his interactions with Trump all about himself.  The fact that the CNN reporter had his press credentials pulled — even if only temporarily — will surely feed the legend and perhaps add a couple of zeros to his speaking fee or a future book deal.  Still, Acosta deserved the rebuke.  He was arrogant, rude and sanctimonious.  He was sent to cover the story, and he made himself the story.  He was supposed to ask questions, but instead he tried to "challenge" the president about the refugee caravan.  He asked several questions, instead of one.  And when he got answers, he rejected them.

When reporters stick together — as a mob.  [Scroll down]  Acosta wasn't there to ask questions.  He was there to lecture and make accusations, as were they all.  But Acosta's disrespect and contemptuousness is special... especially obnoxious.  He is a hothead and, knowing his act, why he gets a front row seat at these briefings would be my first question.  He is no reporter, but rather a Resist Trump community organizer.

Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive.  When CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stages his periodic psychodramatic shout-downs of Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Donald Trump, he is no Edward R. Murrow bucking Joe McCarthy, but rather he is one-upping his progressive like-minded journalists, virtue-signaling to his CNN liberal audience, and scoring career chits with his left-wing bosses and employers.

Jim Acosta isn't disliked because of his 'hard questions' but because he doesn't ask any real ones.  There are a lot of ways to describe what CNN's Jim Acosta does when he shows up for a White House press briefing or a press conference with President Trump: stunt, showboat, grandstand.  But you cannot say he's there to ask "hard questions," as the New York Times characterized his routine in an editorial Thursday [11/8/2018].

Fearmongering on the Left Has Been Ignored in 2018 Coverage.  A CNN screen graphic bluntly asked on the morning of Tuesday's midterms elections, "Will fear win?" I think the answer is "yes," but not necessarily for the same reasons as the Chyron With Attitude.  CNN was referring to President Donald Trump's aggressive rhetoric against illegal immigration, sending troops to the border, and warning of the consequences of Democratic victories in the 2018 elections.  It wasn't alone in portraying the race as Democrats Vs.  The Fearmongerers.  The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump is "painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign's final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty."

Senate report paints devastating profile of Justice Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick.  A new Senate committee report questions the credibility of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's three main accusers, dishing out the worst criticism at gang-rape accuser Julie Swetnick.  The 400-page report by the Judiciary Committee's Republican staff paints a devastating portrait of Ms. Swetnick.  She made the most sensational charges of the women accusers and won airtime on national TV.  The report depicts her as dangerous, a serial complainer, a liar, mentally unstable and cruel toward her parents.  It turns out that in one of Ms. Swetnick's previous sexual harassment complaints she was represented by Debra Katz, the Democratic-connected attorney who took the case of Christine Blasey Ford.  The Palo Alto, California, psychologist emerged as the first accuser of Justice Kavanaugh, who ultimately won Senate confirmation on Oct. 5 to the Supreme Court.

Democrats have intentionally divided the country and stoked fear among the public for a very long time.  Democrats have always tried to scare the people on food stamps, Medicare, social security and Medicaid.  Republicans want to starve children.  Democrats support Iran that spreads terrorism and pledges death to Israel and death to America.  Democrats are the ones who support Louis Farrakhan, not Republicans.  Democrats are the ones that had the KKK leader as an honorable leader in the Senate for years, not Republicans.  Democrats are the ones that pushed the fictional "hands up don't shoot" narrative to gin up racial hate and hate towards cops, not Republicans.  Who knows how many deaths and how much violence that caused.  Democrats are the ones who created a fictional dossier to destroy a political opponent and used the Justice Department to spy on them.  The person that shot up the Jews in Pittsburgh hates Trump yet somehow the media blames Trump.  The media has supported Democrats no matter what they say or do and now they are willing enablers and participants in seeking to destroy Trump and other Republicans no matter how much propaganda they have to spread.

'Nothing to Gain,' Kavanaugh Accuser Raises Nearly $1 Million.  During the crucible of Brett Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation hearings, Democrats repeatedly asserted that Christine Blasey Ford had "nothing to gain" by coming forward with her explosive accusation of attempted rape against the Supreme Court nominee.  "You had absolutely nothing to gain by bringing these facts to the Senate Judiciary Committee," Sen. Dick Durbin said during her testimony last month.  This sentiment was echoed by other Democrats, who presented it as evidence that Ford was telling the truth.  "I want to thank you," added California Sen. Kamala Harris, "because you clearly have nothing to gain for what you have done."  In fact, Ford stands to gain some $1 million and counting from national crowdfunding campaigns launched by friends and other supporters, while she is said to be fielding book offers.

Avenatti's media honeymoon is over following Kavanaugh accuser backlash.  No private citizen has enjoyed more free airtime on two-thirds of the major cable news networks than Michael Avenatti has in 2018.  Tune in to CNN and there's a decent chance you'll find him there.  If he isn't on CNN, there's an equally good chance he'll be on MSNBC.

Are We on the Verge of Civil War?  The internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob.  In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral.  Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.  Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions.  Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism — on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.  Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint.  Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a "fake news" moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.

CNN's Jake Tapper Dedicates Segment to Trump's Penis.  CNN aired a segment about Stormy Daniels' new book that described what Donald Trump's genitals looks like on The Lead with Jake Tapper Tuesday [9/18/2018].

Weather Channel Defends Reporter Mocked for 'So Dramatic' Hurricane Florence Coverage.  The Weather Channel is defending one of their own after a video of Hurricane Florence coverage went viral.  The video, uploaded to Twitter, shows Weather Channel meteorologist and reporter Mike Seidel bracing in the wind during a live shot in Wilmington, NC.  As he is struggling to keep his footing, two people walk behind him showing no signs of struggle.  Twitter was not impressed.

Hilarious video shows journalist 'bravely' reporting on Hurricane Florence — until two men in shorts casually stroll past.  A Weather Channel reporter looked to have played up the drama and severity of Hurricane Florence in a hilarious video that has been circulating on Twitter.  Weather Channel reporter Mike Seidel was shooting a live segment in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Friday [9/14/2018] as winds barreled around him.  In the clip, Seidel appears to brace his feet deeper into the grass so that he won't go with the wind.

Teens Stroll Past Reporter Who Can Barely Stand in Raging Winds.  Weather Channel correspondent Mike Seidel in Wilmington, North Carolina, looks like he's gallantly fighting the raging winds as he courageously reported live from Hurricane Florence on Friday [9/14/2018].  "This is about as nasty as it's been," Seidel said dramatically.  Shortly after he made the comment, two teens in shorts are seen in the background strolling along, taking cell phone photos, having no problem at all. [...] As an aside, did you notice how the media now counts homes without power?  They don't count homes, they estimate the number of people who might be in a home and multiple [sic] it by the actual homes.

Media Hype:  Mueller Probe 'Bombshell' Turns Out To Be Major Dud.  According to various mainstream media figures this week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was all but certain to drop a bombshell Friday [8/31/2018] that would shake Washington, D.C., to its core.  It didn't happen.  NBC's Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on Thursday kicked off the Mueller "bombshell" frenzy, warning viewers that Friday could go down in history as a turning point in the Russia investigation.

The 'Echo Chamber' Isn't A Conspiracy Theory, It's A Fact.  When I finally got to the end of a supposed blockbuster piece by the New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow regarding a dark conspiracy theory that had been spreading within the Trump White House, I was struck by two things:  1) the innocuousness of the memo in question, and 2) how the basis of the memo was plainly true.  The piece, in fact, goes a long way in substantiating the memo's contention about the media, allowing former Obama administration officials and their allies to offer ludicrous claims without even a scintilla of journalistic skepticism.

Lawrence O'Donnell
After Trump's "Worst Week" his approval plummets — I mean, barely changes.  The convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen had #TheResistance giddy with excitement.  This was the end.  He's a gonner.  WORST WEEK EVER. [...] The NBC/WSJ polls is almost exactly what Rasmussen finds as of August 24, 2018, 46% approval.  On August 24, 2010, Obama had a 45% approval rating according to Rasmussen.  So despite a massively negative media environment for Trump and a massively positive media environment for Obama, Trump's approval rating is the same as Obama at a similar time in his presidency.


Liberal media's desperate push for Trump impeachment may actually hurt Democrats.  The liberal news media have a new favorite word to use when discussing President Trump:  impeachment.  For example, MSNBC and CNN reporters, anchors and guests said "impeach," "impeachment" or some other form of the word on the cable news channels an incredible 222 times between 6 a.m. and 11:59 p.m.  Wednesday [8/22/2018].  And of course, they talked about possible impeachment other days as well, and newspapers and websites were also filled with impeachment speculation.  Most Democrats in Congress and their leaders are shying away from talking about impeachment before the November midterm elections — but that's not stopping the anti-Trump media.

All the Talk About Impeaching the President Is Nonsense.  The television-news media desperately need to fill twenty-four hours every day in order to sell advertising to support their stations, their management, their employees, and their negotiated settlements and non-disclosure-agreement pay-outs to women whom they must silence after one or another of their male employees has violated them. [...] So the television-news media have to keep the money pouring in.  Same with the print media.  They need to grab your attention and hold it all day and night, every day. [...] So they have to figure out how to keep the ratings up.  They love a murder — oh, how they love a murder!  Especially of a young pretty White girl.  That grabs the attention of everyone:  men, women, liberals, conservatives, young, and old. [...] Even an isolated unsolved murder of a single young White woman gets the media exercised into a frenzy:  Jonbenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Short, Chandra Levy, Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbets.  The Seedier Media obsess over these individual murders round-the-clock until it emerges that the murderer was an illegal alien.

Summertime and the media are embarrassing — from hating America to loving Antifa.  In the space of one week, the press downplayed a Democrat governor saying America "was never that great" and watched as the governor's brother/CNN anchor defended Antifa.  Another CNN commentator bashed America and mocked a conservative while she told of the discrimination her disabled son faced.  And former CIA director John Brennan, now an NBC national security analyst, recanted his claim that President Donald Trump committed treason and spent the week whining about losing his security clearance.

CNN's Philip Mudd Tells Paris Dennard to 'Get Out' for Telling the Truth.  CNN counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd exploded at conservative CNN contributor Paris Dennard on Friday evening when Dennard made the completely factual claim that former government officials with security clearance can land top D.C. jobs.  Mudd and Dennard were debating on Anderson Cooper 360°, guest-hosted by Jim Sciutto, over the question of whether President Donald Trump had been right to revoke the security clearance of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan.

Newsroom commando Ralph Peters cashiers [him]self.  This weekend, retired lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters went on CNN's dubiously titled Reliable Sources and, in the presence of the show's serially unreliable host, Brian Stelter, and all those unfortunate souls in airport waiting areas across the nation being force-fed this liberal Sunday-morning drivel, cashiered himself.  It appears that fulminating Trump Derangement Syndrome brought this former Fox News military analyst to perform this sad ceremony. [...] As a combat veteran, which Peters is not, I have to wonder if this sneering, whiny-voiced news show commando has a clue as to how many millions of his military family he has just branded as destructive, vengeful, racist couch-potato anarchists, followers of a false messiah and derelict in our oaths to the Constitution.  It is a fact that a substantial majority of military personnel, whether active-duty, retirees, or veterans, are conservative in their politics, so Peters had to know he was spitting in the faces of millions of his former comrades.

Enemies of the People.  [T]here is a certain equanimity that comes with realizing that so many of the daily crises are not crises at all, and that so much of the media screaming is like visiting an ice cream store — each day a different flavor, but all the same basic product ready to kill you if you don't control the portions, the frequency...

How Far Will the Left Go?  All the Way.  [Scroll down]  Each day brings a new outrage, a development enthusiastically promulgated by a brain-dead media that thinks a headline must contain the words "sparks outrage" or "comes under fire," to be newsworthy.  The foxes of anger and resentment have been set among the hens of political cohesion, and every day the squawking grows louder — as it will until that day comes when there are no more hens left to lay the eggs.

As the Swamp Turns.  It never ends, does it?  The daily cable-news soap opera installment.  A new crisis every day.  Sex.  Money.  Secret tapes.  A stripper whose upper torso gives new meaning to the term Silicon Valley.  And then her media-frenzied lawyer steeped in his own fun-to-watch divorce.  Bring out the popcorn.  Pull out some Raisinets.  Refill the Coke and Pepsi.  Sneak in a few plastic straws.  Another day's episode of "As the Swamp Turns."  Children separated from their parents.  Parents sent back with their children — and then telling the authorities:  "Naah, we'll go back, but leave the kids separated here."  Kids who do not even belong to the parents.  Russians — even red-headed Reds.  Secret courts.  Spies.  Married paramours exchanging mysterious messages:  "Andy."  "Secret plans."  An "Insurance Policy."  Smells at a Virginia Walmart.  Secret tape recordings.  The only thing missing is the "other woman" with the unwanted and hidden pregnancy, suddenly revealed — and the drama of whose baby it is.  Enter Bill Clinton!

The Conspiracy Theory That Ate New York.  This is the helpful illustration that New York Magazine published to help readers understand its convoluted — and, needless to say, #FakeNews — cover story alleging a Trump-Putin plot that began in... 1987.  Before the Soviet Union fell.  Before Putin had assumed any sort of true power.

What Critics Missed About the Trump-Putin Summit.  When Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin ended their joint press conference in Helsinki, the punditocracy predictably swarmed all over it like ants around a pile of crumbs.  Was Trump winking at Putin?  Did he really say he believes Putin more than he believes Robert Mueller about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election?  Former Gus Hall enthusiast John Brennan, off his meds again, tweeted that the presser was "treasonous."  Professional chatterer Anderson Cooper said it was "perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit."  Every phrase, every gesture of the event will be picked apart and second-guessed to death in the next few days.

The Jim Jordan Hit Job Implodes:  Ohio State Held Hearing on Reputed Sex Abuser in... 1997.  I did some research on the story alleging that our warrior patriot, Rep. Jim Jordan was aware that his wrestling team members were being molested and did nothing about it. [...] We all have the facts and know that Rep. Jordan is not guilty of this allegation.

How to Read the News:  A Guide for Truth-Seekers.  The recent MSM and celebrity hysteria about the illegal immigrant children being separated from their alleged parents would have had some impact with voters had not the truth been exposed in the Internet on unbiased websites and twitter posts.  Those pictures of immigrant children sleeping in cages brought tears (crocodile?) to MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, who apparently failed to note that these heartbreaking photos were taken in 2014 during the Obama administration.  The detention center used by the Trump administration was a far cry from Obama's if one viewed them on one of the more credible news sites like Breitbart.com.

The Zombie Media.  Journalism schools do not teach journalism anymore.  They teach persuasive storytelling.  They teach the Machiavellian black art of propaganda.  Like most black arts, left-wing "journalism" relies heavily on its own peculiar dogma of magical rites and incantations.  To shut down Herman Cain in 2012, our leftist adversaries invented (or at least exaggerated) the ever popular sex scandal — the trusted and true kill shot they have used to assassinate troublesome public figures for decades.  Republicans nailed by a weeping and well paid accuser have typically curled into the fetal position and faded away.

Chris Matthews Urges Communist Revolution to Stop Supreme Court.  So the Chris Matthews [plan] is for the Democrats to declare a Communist revolution, call in the Russians for help, start executing their own people for being insufficiently left-wing, go down to defeat, flee the country while kidnapping a bunch of children and stealing all the gold?  Actually I think that is their plan.

Journalists circulate conspiratorial claims against DHS Doc claiming it has Nazi code.  Multiple journalists circulated a conspiracy theory on Twitter that a document from the Department of Homeland Security contained a Nazi code Thursday [6/28/2018]. [...] The tweets reference a press release from DHS titled "We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again" and was released in February, garnering little attention until recently.

Ex-CNN producer blasts Jim Acosta for 'self-serving antics'.  A former CNN producer took to Twitter on Friday [6/29/2018] to blast Jim Acosta, the network's White House correspondent, for what he called Acosta's "self-serving antics," saying they "give all good journalists a bad name."  The posts by Steve Krakauer, a former senior digital producer for the network who is now is a top executive at Commerce House, a Dallas-based advertising firm, were prompted by a question that Acosta shouted to President Donald Trump on Friday [6/29/2018] during a White House event on the economy and tax cuts.

Immigration 'crisis' brought to you by the Media Matrix.  Starting a week ago Friday, the media discovered (surprise!) that the Trump White House is taking a hard line on illegal immigration — and the pharisees of CNN and MSNBC began dressing themselves in sackcloth and ashes to impress us with the sincerity of their shock and dismay at finding out that children coming across the border illegally are separated from the adults who accompanied them (not necessarily their parents).  Honestly, if you need a give-away (a "tell" as they say in poker) that the left-wing media is conspiring to damage this president, all you need to do is click back and forth between CNN and MSNBC for about three hours.  If every time you turn on one of these channels they are parroting the same story back at you with different talking heads pouring ashes on each other and cursing Trump, then you know you are in the middle of a feeding frenzy.

Delusion About Detentions:  On Family Separation at the Border.  Upstanding journalists, their fellow right-minded pundits, and progressive elected official friends are outraged!  According to them, the Trump Administration's approach to immigration enforcement is cruel, un-American, inhumane, barbaric, and even medically dangerous. [...] The problem is the facts are at odds with the conventional media interpretation of existing legal precedent, prior administrations' practices, and even relevant federal statutes.  You know, the law.  But being wrong on the facts has never stopped the media and their useful idiots in the commentariat from maligning the Trump Administration unfairly to suit their agenda.  Now they're shrieking about "baby jails."  It's insane.

News Fatigue?  Join the Club.  A Pew Research study recently found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans suffer from "news fatigue" — a phenomenon even more pervasive among Republicans.  The survey focused on the volume as much as the quality of the offerings.  But why wouldn't the public be emotionally expended from the anger and accusations, bullying and backbiting, "fake news" and "fact checks," insults and innuendo, posturing and protests, threats and trolling, and virtue-signaling and violent rhetoric and imagery spewed from every direction today?

The Editor says...
Whenever a big furor suddenly and simultaneously appears on every television "news" channel, there's a reason for it.  It is almost always a manufactured crisis designed to displace some other story.  The "anchor baby prison" and "kids in cages" hype is a false description of conditions that are nothing new.  The same laws and policies have been in place for months and years.  The reason all this is now front and center is that Donald Trump's popularity is steadily increasing — now surpassing that of Barack H. Obama — and it appears that he is about to single-handedly end the Korean War.  That is an accomplishment that must not be allowed to stay in the hourly news cycle if the news media's preferred party is to have any power.

Desperately Seeking Supremacists.  Talia Lavin is (or was, at last word) a fact-checker for the New Yorker.  She achieved overnight Twitter-fame by accusing an ICE agent of being a white supremacist. [...] Part of the story, I think, is that the Left is hard up for white supremacists.  Liberals talk about them all the time, but to the best of my knowledge, I have never met one.  Have you?  Liberals need to come up with someone other than Richard Spencer; hence the eagerness to libel a heroic ICE employee.

Update:
New Yorker staffer resigns after falsely accusing ICE agent of having Nazi tattoo.  The fact-checker for the New Yorker who mistook a Marine veteran's tattoo for a Nazi symbol has resigned, saying the "small mistake" has ruined her life.  Talia Lavin is out of a job following her June 18 tweet that caused mass outrage.  "I feel like I made a small mistake and it's destroyed my life," she told New York Magazine's The Cut.  Lavin's since-deleted tweet was about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Justin Gaertner, whom she falsely accused of having a tattoo of the Nazis' Iron Cross.

Drive-By Media Bombarding Americans With 'Manufactured Crises' to Distract from IG Report, Robust Economy.  The liberal media has been manufacturing crises ad-infinitum to divert the public's attention away from the Trump administration's tremendous achievements and the Democratic establishment's corruption, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh warns.

The Astonishing Silliness of CNN.  The good people at CNN can do what they want, but this blatant chyron-splaining sends a rather clear and unfortunate message:  that they think their audience is daft and incapable of figuring things out for themselves.  CNN is frequently breathless when no one should be breathless, which would be kind of exhausting, if anyone cared.  Take this headline from the network's website this week:  "The 45 Most Astonishing Lines from Donald Trump's Nashville Speech."

Lost Children?  Detention Cages?  Baby Prison Bus?  Trump's Critics Will Believe Anything.  Over the long weekend, President Trump's critics were in a sputtering rage over his supposedly losing 1,500 illegal immigrant children, sticking them in cages, and putting others on specially equipped prison buses.  Turns out, it was all 100% bogus.

Mainstream Media's Credibility Problem Is Of Their Own Making.  So, not only are the mainstream media biased, they're also incompetent.  Headlines and scandalous snippets that the news shows can flash on chyrons trump facts, and they are what is important to the mainstream media.  They eschew fact checking in favor of sensational headlines.  They create salacious news narratives, meant not to inform but to sell advertising.

The Firesign Theater Media.  The "mainstream media" (CNN, MSNBC, the three networks, the major newspapers, et al.) are so consumed by Trump hysteria that it places them squarely in this Firesign Theater zone.  Nicholas Kristof and his wife talk about the president in bed.  Brian Stelter describes himself as "Trump addicted."  Any psychiatrist can tell you that monomaniacal, pathological hatred has its surreal aspects.  Trump as the great white (orange?) whale and the media as Captain Ahab.  MSNBC's exegesis of the importance of the Mueller investigation in its various guises is a good example of this "Credo quia absurdum" (I believe because it is absurd) approach.  Rachel Maddow, Stephanie Ruhle, and Chris Hayes constantly strain to outdo themselves with conspiracy theories.  One would think there were more Russians involved with the Trump campaign than populate the pages of War and Peace.  More entertaining are the nightly shouting matches on Don Lemon's CNN show.

Mueller Year One:  The Real Heroes in Journalism.  CNN won an award for its January 2017 report about President-elect Trump being briefed on the bogus Steele dossier.  While we now know the story was improperly leaked by former Director of National Intelligence (and virulent Trump foe) James Clapper to shotgun the Trump-Russia collusion plotline days before the inauguration — and the celebrated CNN reporters did little more than regurgitate talking points spoon-fed to them by political operatives (one is known to have close ties to Fusion GPS) — the network was applauded for its "depth of reporting."

Estimate:  Cable News Nets Have Given Michael Avenatti $175 Million Worth Of Airtime.  [Scroll down]  Another thing:  He's doing it with no help from Fox.  If I'm not mistaken, the only FNC show he's been on is Shannon Bream's in March.  He was, allegedly, scheduled on Martha MacCallum's show recently but canceled at the last minute.  Tucker Carlson invited him on but Avenatti told his producer that he only wants to do Hannity's show, an obviously deliberate slight to Carlson.  (Or is it a compliment, with Avenatti suspecting he'd have a harder time outmaneuvering Tucker in an interview?)  Whether he's avoiding Fox because he's wary of the hostile reception he'd get there or because he's building a brand as a #Resistance hero and wants viewers to identify him with anti-Trump CNN and MSNBC, the fact remains that he's somehow achieved cable ubiquity without any exposure on the most highly rated cable news network in the country.

Court Documents Show Porn Star Lawyer Reported $8 Million Windfall in Feb.  When he Took on Stormy.  The Michael Avenatti Files — How did a bankrupt attorney come across $8 million after picking up porn star client Stormy Daniels?  Porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti is a huge hit with the Democrat-media complex.  The attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels has held 108 interviews on cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN since March 7th.

2018: When Orwell's 1984 Stopped Being Fiction.  When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a "Revealed" or an "Exposed" for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known.  These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.  But today's Guardian's "exclusive" story "Revealed:  UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance" is doing none of this.  Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being "revealed". No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this "revelation".  Everyone in this story — the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous "Whitehall official", and the named politicians and think-tank wonks — is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

CNN Hosts Porn Star's Lawyer Michael Avenatti 59 Times in Less Than Two Months.  CNN has exhibited a fetish for the Stormy Daniels story, particularly for her Trump-smacking lawyer, Michael Avenatti.  In less than two months (from March 7 to April 30), Avenatti has been a guest on CNN a total of 59 times — an average of more than once per day.  MRC analysts combed through transcripts of all of CNN's 2018 coverage looking for references to interviews with Avenatti, and then double-checked using our video archive.  Since Avenatti's first appearance on March 7, he has been interviewed on CNN a whopping 59 times, more than one-third of which (19) were with Anderson Cooper — who, of course, interviewed Stormy Daniels on CBS's 60 Minutes back in March.

Black Coffee:  The Starbucks Story Is Trash.  This is a country of 325-million people.  If two guys getting tossed out of a coffee shop is news, then things in Donald Trump's America must be going [very] well.  But if the story were only meaningless trash, it would just be typical of American journalism.  But it's pernicious trash meant to advance a false left-wing narrative, which is — oh yeah! — typical of American journalism.

CNN's dicey interview with student on lockdown after Maryland school shooting.  CNN engaged a student to pass along casualty stats from a school shooting, even though the student himself made clear that his own familiarity with the details was limited.  And then, when police showed up to escort him and his classmates from the school, CNN asked him to stay on the line, presumably to get a guided audio tour of the aftermath.

A User's Guide To Media Coverage Of Political Protests.  Liberal protests are newsworthy because they're disruptive; conservative protests are too orderly to be worth discussing.  The news angle with the gun protests was the disobedience involved in walking out, something to be celebrated.  Leftist protests demand police activity because leftists break stuff, and they demand to be arrested because it somehow makes them heroic.  One hundred thousand conservatives could show up on the National Mall in our nation's capital and not leave behind so much as a candy wrapper on the ground.  Bo-ring.

The 'scandal' of Perla Morales-Luna's arrest is fake news.  The arrest of Perla Morales-Luna on March 3 in San Diego is an absolute nonscandal.  Yes, at first glance the video looks a little concerning.  It shows a mother being separated from her screaming family as Customs and Border Patrol officers struggle to put her in the back of a vehicle.  But only at first glance.  Because if you watch again you'll see that the CBP officers use proportionate force and good efficiency in getting Morales-Luna off the street and into custody.  That's the best way to ensure no one is harmed and the situation isn't escalated unnecessarily.  Moreover, the CBP wasn't simply detaining Morales-Luna because she was just a random illegal immigrant.

Nikolas Cruz Is the Result of 'It Takes a Village'.  Does everyone see what the Democrats have done?  They've pitted children against us, thereby mainstreaming and normalizing child exploitation.  What the Democrats did to Parkland student Emma Gonzalez was as sickening a display as any I've ever witnessed.  They coaxed an understandably distraught child to spew one debunked Democrat lie after another — and, of course, plenty of invective toward President Trump.  David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland student, asked on CNN:  "If you can't get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?"  Normal question from a 17-year-old, right?  Wondering aloud if he came up with that question all on his own, with such emotionally vivid lingual sophistication and political acumen, must make me a grumpy old gun nut who thinks our youth are stupid.

The Portraits and the Obama Reality Distortion Field.  [T]he Obamas are the center of the most delusional cult of personality that the media has yet spawned. [...] This isn't journalism.  It's not a free press.  It's a bunch of cult members rushing out to explain that the flawed thing is flawless.  You're the flawed one for not seeing its gloriousness.  All hail the beloved leader.

Joe Concha:  Media's Trump Anger Mostly 'Performance Art at This Point'.  After it was made public that President Trump had requested the Pentagon to plan a military parade through Washington, DC, there was a steady stream of forceful condemnation of the President in which they claimed he was imitating foreign dictators.  And in an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight Thursday [2/8/2018], Hill media reporter Joe Concha knocked them for playing up their outrage and playing to an audience.

CNN: Undetected Asteroids Could Threaten Earth During Government Shutdown.  Two CNN correspondents claimed during an episode of The Lead with Jake Tapper that an asteroid could potentially threaten the Earth if the government shutdown continues.  CNN correspondent Tom Foreman recalled the time NASA could not monitor "potentially dangerous asteroids" for over two weeks, implying that NASA would not be able to prevent an asteroid attack if it hit Earth while the government shut down.

TV crew busted trying to sneak fake bomb into airport.  Seven members of a cable TV crew were arrested at Newark Airport on Thursday [1/18/2018] after trying to film themselves passing a fake explosive device through a security checkpoint and onto a plane, according to reports.  The crew was working for the cable network CNBC, according to nj.com.  The fake explosive device was in a carry-on bag and never made it past security, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Michael McCarthy said.  "They failed, were caught and were arrested on multiple charges," he said, without elaborating on the charges.

CNN's Sanjay Gupta Diagnoses Donald Trump With Heart Disease.  Wednesday [1/17/2018] on CNN's "New Day," Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the network's chief medical correspondent, proclaimed that based on President Donald Trump's coronary calcium scores going back to the previous decade, Trump has heart disease.  Gupta's diagnosis came a day after Trump's doctor, Navy Rear Adm. Dr. Ronny Jackson, offered his assessment of Trump's health at a White House press briefing.

Armchair diagnosis of a patient he has never examined:
Sanjay Gupta:  By all standards, Trump has heart disease.  CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, said Wednesday that he believes tests reveal that President Trump has heart disease.  Gupta said dating back to 2009, Trump started to have "these tests that are actually looking for the presence of calcium in the blood vessels that lead to the heart."  "Steadily, up until just this past week when he had it performed again, those numbers have gone up," he said.  "When they get to a certain range ... that means he has heart disease."

Leftist Toilet Mouths Condemn Trump as They Corrupt Nation.  President Trump denies having used a vulgar term last Thursday [1/11/2018] to describe dysfunctional Third World countries.  Yet there's no denying that the leftist media, believing he did, responded by repeatedly disgorging the term in a childish orgy of decadence.  Of course, the media no doubt think they're damaging Trump — but they're actually damaging society.  Let's be clear:  Leftists certainly object to the substance of Trump's comments, that we shouldn't continually absorb poor, unskilled, often functionally illiterate and unassimilable people from Third World nations.  But they also object to his alleged style, labeling as obscene the use of s-hole (toilet) to describe such places.  So to show us how bad such language is, the Crude News Network (CNN), for example, used it at least 36 times on Thursday.  It's sort of like inveighing against animal abuse and then bludgeoning dozens of dogs to death on air to prove your point.

CNN Leaps Into The Toilet:  Network Aired 195 Uses of 'S***hole' on Friday.  In the contest for Most Offended News Network after President Trump reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole" countries, CNN wins hands down.  NewsBusters staff combed through CNN transcripts on Nexis for the S-hole word in the 24 hours of January 12 — the first full day after The Washington Post reported the controversy — and found CNN staffers and CNN guests uncorked the profanity 195 times in one day.  That doesn't count Saturday, Sunday or Monday.  They could be headed for 1,000 by now.  It also doesn't count the amount of time they put the S-word on screen (sometimes twice, as you can see on Cuomo's temporary prime time show.)  Compare that to Fox News Channel.  Their curse count was zero.  FNC told staff and guests not to say it.

Revealed:  Trump guzzles Diet Coke.  [Scroll down]  If not for Fox News we'd be totally in the dark, about everything, and it was from there that I first heard about CNN's alarming report:  [Something important?]  No, not exactly.  Rather, it's been reported, first from The New York Times, that Trump likes Diet Coke.  Wait — it gets worse.  He guzzles down a dozen a day.  So given such a scoop, CNN could not resist breaking it at around the same time that [a terrorist attack] was going on at Port Authority.  New Yorkers were running for their lives... but first things first; Trump is a glutton for Diet Coke

What Were the Motives of the Port Authority Bomber?  What were the motives of Ayaked Ullah, the Port Authority bomber in yesterday's attack?  There are many news headlines that address the issue, and they advance differing theories, each of them presented as fact.

CNN Promotes 'White Nonsense Roundup:' White Liberals Who Save Victimized People Of Color On Social Media.  In a piece titled "These are your white allies on Facebook," CNN enthusiastically introduces us to a group called "White Nonsense Roundup" (WNR).  Essentially, the group of roughly 100 "white ally" volunteers take turns swooping in to save African American people (already suffering from the "emotional labor" of systemic racism) from social media arguments when issues of race arise.  You know, because these white liberals are "woke" enough to recognize their inherent sin of whiteness and, apparently along with CNN, think people of color need white people to fight their social media battles for them.

New York Times forced to heavily amend another supposed K.T. McFarland 'scoop'.  The New York Times got ahead of itself again with yet another supposedly hot scoop involving former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, the Russians and the 2016 presidential election.  The story, now titled "McFarland's Testimony About Russia Contacts Is Questioned," reported originally that an email sent by the former Trump transition official indicated she lied to Congress this summer when she was questioned about disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn's communications with the Russians.  The article has been heavily amended since publication so that it is now mostly innuendo.  The initial references to the emails have been removed, and the story now leans mostly on Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who only questions whether McFarland was forthright in her testimony.

How D.C. political assassins use media to oust Rex Tillerson.  If several major media outlets are to be believed, at least two senior administration officials say Chief of Staff John Kelly has drawn up a plan to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who would be replaced by Sen. Tom Cotton by year's end or soon after.  The Washington media lap up these anonymous leaks like starving kittens.  Personnel contests, like shallow election horse race stories, are easy to do, appear to contain drama and inside info and elevate the reporter to someone-in-the-know.  The fundamental problem with these self-serving reports is the sources are unknown, so news consumers cannot judge their trustworthiness and motivations.  Which, of course, is the point of hiding their identities.  Consumers must trust the reporters and media outlets, a dubious act in this era of rampant Trump antipathy.  The New York Times started this latest Tillerson-is-a-goner meme.

Unhinged coverage of Trump is hurting the media.  Not only is everything (still) hyper-politicized, but the lines between news media, lifestyle media and flat-out activism have faded into irrelevance.  On Wednesday [11/22/2017], the lead story in Teen Vogue, next to stories about how "I Will Never Use Regular Soap Again After THIS $6 Foam Body Wash" and "Everyone Basically Wore Lingerie to the VS Fashion Show After Party," was this screaming headline:  "The United States Voted 'No' on an Anti-Nazi UN Resolution."  It ran over a terrifying picture of crowds carrying banners, some featuring swastikas, with smoke in the background suggesting a terror attack.  Only when you click through do you discover that there is no news here whatsoever:  The US votes against this meaningless, nonbinding UN gambit every year because the US has this thing called the First Amendment.  President Obama's appointees also opposed the resolution.

A Year to be Thankful For.  I'm thankful my fears about Donald Trump seem to have been unfounded.  Not a fascist.  Not a secret liberal.  Not an incompetent.  ISIS is defeated.  GDP at 3% plus.  Some 60 great originalist judges nominated.  Regulations cut back at an amazing rate.  Our lying leftist press humiliated and discredited.  I'm thankful because, whenever I get tired of watching an America in crisis, all I have to do is turn off the mainstream news and America is not in crisis anymore.  In fact, America is doing quite well.

Whittle: The News Media Knows How To Stop These Massacres, But Refuses To Do It.  In his latest video, conservative commentator Bill Whittle discusses the most effective way to end the surge of mass murders that America has suffered in the last twenty years — and it's one that falls squarely at the feet of the national news media.  Citing forensic psychologist Park Dietz, who has studied mass murderers extensively, Whittle contends that we've seen a wave of mass shootings like Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs because the media insists on providing 24/7 coverage of the tragedies, turning suicide massacres into a chance for glory for the sociopaths carrying out the heinous acts.

The Puerto Rican Genocide That Wasn't.  The death toll in Puerto Rico currently stands at 48.  Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20.  As we approach October 20, the death toll from the hurricane is a lot less than the death toll from the deadliest month in Chicago.  Despite media arm waving, with only 117 people not accounted for, the actual death toll in Puerto Rico isn't likely to rise very much.  And even a death toll of 48 was only achieved by listing people who died of heart attacks and other medical problems that could not be treated because of hurricane damage.  It's unknown whether some of them might have lived without the hurricane.  It's guesswork.  The previous, incomplete death toll showed that the actual hurricane seemed to have only killed 19 people.  2 suicides were also attributed to the hurricane.  As were respiratory failures "indirectly linked" to the hurricane.  But the media has been working hard to inflate the death toll.  "We'll probably never know exactly how many people died," the Washington Post speculates.  "Hurricane Maria likely killed more people than Puerto Rico says," the Daily News ghoulishly insists.

No, Mr. Krugman, There is Not a Cholera Outbreak in Puerto Rico.  Yesterday [9/30/2-17], liberal pundit and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman incorrectly tweeted that cholera, a deadly bacterial disease caused by unsanitary water, had resurfaced in Puerto Rico. [...] Then moments later, he corrected himself with a follow up tweet. [...] You will notice his fake news has amassed thousands of retweets and favorites, while his correction has not.

Hurricane Irma And How The Left Has Politicized Even The Weather.  A number of years ago, I sat down with the general manager of a major television news station.  He told me that in their own survey, viewers tuned in for "weather first, sports second, and news last."  Therefore he stressed, weather forecasters were the "cash cow" of the station.  He further explained that much of television weather forecasting was a "sham."  He said that decades ago, they would give a "one-day" forecast.  But then Station B across town went to a "two-day" forecast.  So then they countered with a "three-day" forecast," until everyone went to the "useless seven-day" forecasts.  He emphasized that it was all done for reasons of competition and ratings and that with a "seven-day" forecast, the station and the networks were playing viewers for "fools," because they normally "couldn't even get the forecast for tomorrow correct."

While People Die, Washington Post Obsesses Over Melania Trump's Shoes.  Searching for a scandal the way a crackhead hunts for crack, the media decided that the real story of the natural disaster ought to be Melania Trump's shoes.  Because that is what the media is now.  Melania Trump wore high heels while getting on Air Force One.  The media howled that she was heading to a flood zone while wearing high heels.  Never mind that she was still far from the zone and was just boarding a plane.  Then she landed in Texas, wearing sneakers.  And that was also bad.

Between alt-right and 'antifa,' media still manages to be worse.  The only people dumber than the Neanderthals and Brass Knuckle Draggers are the insufferably tedious referees known as the Stupid Media who shape the country as a barking mad carnival, whipping up hysteria for every armed showdown.

CBS News joins O.J. Simpson on the hunt for the real killers.  In the wake of O.J. Simpson's parole last week, CBS News has a story today titled "Who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman?" Curiously, the story doesn't attempt to answer that question.  Instead, the entire premise of the story is that the investigation into the murders is officially still open in Los Angeles.

Worst media moments of the week:  NY Mag climate screed wins!  [Scroll down]  "There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years," goes one of the milder passages.  It was so bad that climate alarmist and hockey stick creator Michael Mann teamed up with two others to write a response, arguing, "Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial."  Mann and his compatriots criticized the New York Mag piece as painting, "an overly bleak picture, arguing that climate change could render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century."  They also called it out for errors.  Mann made an interesting comment that seems to go right over the head of eco-journalists, explaining, "fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive."  Yet fear is about 99.99 percent of all media climate catastrophe coverage.

"The more it sensationalizes the commonplace, the more boring its coverage becomes."
The Media's Endless Anti-Trump Show Trial.  It is a measure of the anti-Trump media's stupidity and malpractice that the phrase "breaking news" now elicits eye rolls.  The media's "breaking news" about Trump is rarely breaking or news.  It is usually recycled and old — some stale piece of information, relating to a practice both parties long ago adopted, that is sensationalized and dished up as novel.  Into this category falls much of its breathless "Trump-Russia" coverage, including its all-hands-on-deck stories about Donald Trump Jr.

The media's mass hysteria over 'collusion' is out of control.  Hysteria among the media and Trump opponents over the prospect of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin may have hit its crescendo this week.  That's right:  The wailing from the media and their allies about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with some "Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer" (whatever that means) may be the last gasp of this faux scandal.  Good riddance.  Predictably, the New York Times started the ball rolling with front-page coverage, going so far as to argue, "The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help."  As if this were some breakthrough moment.  The Times followed up with a headline yesterday [7/10/2017] that the meeting request and subject matter discussed in the prior story were transmitted to Trump Jr. via an email. [...] The Times is so desperate to move the story that the meeting's arrangement over email is being made into Page 1 news.

What counts as treason differs depending on the letter after your name.  In 2012, Obama met with Russia and said he would be more flexible if he was re-elected.  The media and Democrats had no problem.  There were no investigations and no spying on Obama looking for collusion.  The Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, and their close associates got huge amounts of money from foreign governments including Russia.  In return, Russia got uranium, some of which it transferred to Iran.  There were no investigations by the FBI; Democrats and the media didn't care.  Kickbacks for uranium to the enemy looks like actual treason. [...] But Donald Jr. had a ten-minute meeting where he thought he might get dirt on Hillary in which he got nothing and gave nothing in return, and he and his father are essentially accused of treason.

Byron York:  Trump-Russia investigation takes sharp turn toward the dumb.  What a mess for the White House.  And all for nothing.  When the meeting actually happened, at Trump Tower on June 9, there was a reason Jared Kushner left after a few minutes and Paul Manafort spent the whole time staring at his phone.  The "Crown prosecutor" of Russia — there is no such position — was actually a shady lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had no "official documents" to offer but wanted to harangue Trump Jr. about U.S. sanctions on Russia.  Trump Jr. quite reasonably saw there was nothing there and cut the meeting off after about 20 minutes.  But in a capital consumed with Trump and Russia, the revelations, first reported in the New York Times and then substantiated by Trump Jr. himself, blew up into the Scandal That Ate Cable TV.

Some subways are literally held together with zip ties.  At more than $1 million per subway car, you'd think they'd be held together with something more than zip ties. [...] An MTA spokeswoman said Wednesday that the zip tie was being used as a temporary fastener to attach a cable to the new R186 cars while a special part is being made.  She added that the cable is attached another way, and the zip tie is just a back-up.

The Editor says...
The article immediately above, as you can see from the two sentences excerpted above, is an example of self-contradictory sensationalism.

NYT's Latest Trump Story Follows A Familiar Pattern Of Breathlessly Reporting Routine Procedures.  The establishment media's hysteria is once again in high gear after news that members of the Trump transition team were ordered to preserve documents and other materials pertinent to the investigation into Russian interference of the election.  Trump's transition team's counsel, issuing a memo to satisfy routine requirements in any investigation, hardly called for the tone and seriousness with which it was reported.  The New York Times asserts that the request "illustrated the seriousness of the inquiry" conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, and how "deeply they are delving" into President Donald Trump's activities.  Such rhetoric follows a longstanding pattern of the establishment media's propensity to overreact to even the most routine circumstances with anything related to the president.  The Washington Post's Tom Nichols says that media personnel "seem determined to overreact on even ordinary matters."

Winners and Losers from Comey Hearing.  Mainstream media cable networks like CNN had countdown clocks.  Broadcast networks covered the hearing as if it would go down as one of the most seminal events in the history of the country.  "Never Trump" Republicans were getting ready to be used as the mainstream media's useful idiots and get their predictable television hits and quotes in mainstream media publications.  Left-wing Democrats were dreaming of drafting articles of impeachment.  They lionized Comey as their hero who would help them destroy Trump once and for all.  Not so fast.

I think they do this intentionally.
Grrr 59% say news media make them angry, dissatisfied.  Nearly six in 10 Americans are upset with the news media, claiming in a new poll that it makes them angry and dissatisfied.

CNN Goes Bonkers:  Spends 10 Hours on Comey Before a Single Word of Testimony.  Former FBI Director James Comey has not said a single word in public, but the liberal media have been salivating for days over his upcoming testimony on Thursday.  Case in point:  from noon on Thursday (June 1) when the date for the testimony was set, until noon today (June 7), CNN has already devoted more than 10 hours of coverage to testimony that has yet to even occur.

The Media Is Now Leaking Classified Info Just Because They Feel Like It.  This morning, The New York Times brought us another breathtaking exposé of classified national security information that is really important for the public to know because... um, well, because they just kind of felt like it.  The story is about a contractor for an international shipping company who was captured and held hostage by rebels in Yemen before being released last year.  Without the man's permission or cooperation, The New York Times gives details of his capture and imprisonment, his name, his age, his exact job description with the shipping company, and the location where his wife and children lived at the time (none of which I will repeat here). [...] The whole report is inexplicable, and you get the sense that the reporters just wanted to tell a splashy, thriller-like story.  Except that there's a larger pattern:  it has become acceptable to open the floodgates of classified information because Trump.

The News Is Propaganda.  Non-stop distractions are deliberately used by those in power as instruments of policy for the purpose of preventing people from paying attention to reality.  Propaganda is used by those in power to manipulate language, thought, and opinion in a way that causes the progression from thought to action artificially.  When the public is reduced to a state where people no longer care about the truth and are unaware of what that truth even is, propaganda takes hold and shows them what to do. [...] Under the conditions in which we find ourselves living crisis to crisis, there can be no thought as the steady stream of propaganda is fed to us in the form of "news" that never strays from a certain narrative.

The Anonymous Sources Of Washington Post And CNN Fake News.  Media fake news is everywhere.  No, the new health care bill does not treat rape as a pre-existing condition and Republicans did not celebrate its passage with beer.  The latest media outrage is driven by a Washington Post story about intelligence disclosures based on claims by anonymous sources.  The Post's big hit pieces are mainly based on anonymous sources.  Its latest hit piece runs a quote from, "a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials."  That's an anonymous source quoting hearsay from other anonymous sources.  This isn't journalism.  It's a joke.

Anonymous Nation:  America's Papers of Record Have Turned into Tabloids.  Donald Trump made a name for himself in part by regularly appearing on the cover of New York City tabloids in the 1980s and 1990s.  Fast forward to 2017, and the guy is now president, still appearing on the cover of various grocery store check-out scandal sheets — like the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Journalists from these institutions conduct their reporting like they're covering Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's divorce.

Hysteria, overblown hooey part of the fake news cycle.  Turns out Mr. Trump is a germaphobe and wasn't in that Russian hotel room.  The bust of Martin Luther King is still in the Oval Office.  He didn't abandon conservatives by naming his sister to the Supreme Court.  Mr. Trump's Tower — and people involved in his campaign — were, in fact, surveilled.  Slowly, agonizingly, Truth becomes very inconvenient for all these people predicting Mr. Trump's certain demise.  In the end, they are all left clinging to the smallest Styrofoam shard of their original story, bobbing in the harsh sea of Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome.

How many buzzwords can the liberal media write in one sentence?  I was reading a very poorly written Los Angeles Times article about North Carolina legislators introducing a bill to define marriage as between a man and a woman, and I was surprised to read the following sentence:  ["]Opponents of the legislation castigated it as an unnecessary step that will stoke division in a state still reeling from the fallout of a controversial bill regulating which bathrooms transgender people can use.["]  I have rarely seen a sentence so sensationalistically, so chock-full of so many liberal buzzwords.  The over-dramatization of facts makes this news article read like an action thriller.

Trump's Budget is an Attack On the Bureaucratic State.  So according to journalists, Donald Trump's proposed budget cuts are "big," "deep," "dramatic," "massive," and so on.  With each breathless adjective — often coupled with excellent verbs like "gut" and "slash" — they add to the apocalypticism that's engulfed the Left.  "Reading through the Trump budget," tweeted The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "I feel as the Romans must have felt in 456 AD as the barbarians conquered and ushered in the dark ages."  Vox claimed that the budget plan is a proposal to "dramatically remake the federal government."  If only.  In perspective, all of this melodrama is over probably less than 1 percent of the national budget.

Fake News Frenzy — Remember the Great Black Church Burning Hoax?  The recent "fake news" about bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers and desecration of Jewish cemeteries recalls a much earlier chapter in the history of Fake News — the Black Church Burnings of the 1990s.  Bomb threats phoned in to Jewish Community Centers across the country caused a spasm of "Trump is not denouncing these fast enough" tweets.  At around the same time, there were multiple cases of reported desecration of Jewish cemeteries, including the toppling of tombstones.  All this was presumed to be part of an imagined Trump Effect: [...] When Trump suggested that some of these might be typical Hate Hoaxes, he was denounced for that, too.  Well, it turned out that many bomb threats could be traced to one black disgruntled reporter (Juan Thompson) who was attempting to lay the blame on his white girlfriend.

ICE Calls Out CNN, NBC, Etc., For "False, Dangerous & Irresponsible" Fake News Reporting.  President Trump told a gathering of news media yesterday, namely the Mainstream Media that is not accustomed to having its status questioned, that they were constantly perpetrating fakes news to create an intended reaction from the American people.  ICE, the nation's largest immigration enforcement agency, just did the very same thing, calling out the media for its fabricated/highly slanted coverage of recent immigration raids and reminding everyone that under previous administration these raids were far more numerous — and the media then said NOTHING.

ICE: Raid reports fake news, Obama grabbed 350% more.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pushing back hard on media reports that President Trump has unleashed a mean-spirited national raid on immigrants, noting that it rounded up over 350 percent more during one sweep under former President Obama.  In a series of tweets, ICE called the reports, in the Washington Post and elsewhere, "dangerous and irresponsible."  The agency this week said that had made 683 arrests of mostly criminal illegal immigrants, or those with multiple cases against them beyond illegally crossing the border.

NBC News Spreads Fear, Lies With "Ghost Gun" Fake News.  Here's the thing: former ATF agent Rick Vasquez and Jeff Rossen are boldly and directly lying to the viewers/readers of NBC News.  I know this from firsthand experience, as I've built semi-automatic firearms from the ground up, including AR-15s and an AKM.  You cannot buy "all the parts" for any firearm online and simply slap the pieces together to build a functioning firearm as they mislead viewers, and this is a very easy claim to debunk.  Every firearm made or imported into the United States has a part of the frame or receiver that the ATF recognizes as the actual firearm that carries the serial number.  All the other pieces are just parts.

Iceberg Story, Slim.  In the post-November 8 universe, one man's fake news is another man's vitally important scoop.  The third-most emailed article in today's [2/7/2017] New York Times is surely both things depending on who's reading it. [...] Here's the gist of it:  A crack is growing in the Larson C Ice Shelf, "in an area already vulnerable to warming temperatures" and may soon create a very large iceberg. [...] This is literally a story about an iceberg that could form — and then do no appreciable damage.  And lest you think there's any new information here, the Times reports that scientists have been monitoring the thing since 2014.

NBC's Holt Lectures Viewers on the Meaning of the Statue of Liberty.  With the debate over the legality of President Donald Trump's immigration and travel ban still raging Monday evening [1/30/2017], NBC broadcasted their Nightly News program "from the shadow of the Statue of Liberty" accompanied by a lecture from anchor Lester Holt. [...] But neither ABC nor CBS treated it as a time to seemingly pontificate about the morality of the issue, let alone march out to the Statue of Liberty and use it as a prop.

Trump's Reassertion of Common Sense is a shattering experience for death-wish liberals, bishops, and RINOs.  The grandstanding hysteria over Trump's travel ban on people coming from seven terrorist countries falls into the category of sound and fury signifying nothing, save the persistence of death-wish liberalism in our politics.  It happened so "abruptly," harrumphed the chattering class.  Really?  Trump has only been talking about the ban for over a year.  People in those countries had since his victory in November time to "prepare" for it.  Besides, since when has it been a constitutional right for peoples residing in terrorist hotbeds to travel inconvenience-free to America?

The Famed 'Doomsday Clock' Is More Like A Liberal Angst Meter.  When the Doomsday Clock launched in 1947, the initial setting was seven minutes to midnight.  Since then, it's gone up and down.  The furthest it got from doomsday was 17 minutes in 1991.  The closest was 2 minutes to midnight in 1953.  But it's clear from its movements over the past seven decades that the Doomsday Clock is more about politics than any sort of scientific measure of the risk of global nuclear war.  After all, it has routinely counted down after a Republican wins the White House, and ticked up when Democrats reclaim the presidency.

Grasping for Metaphor, Reporters Flock to Burning DC Garbage Can.  As chance would happen, many of the people upset by the presidency of Donald Trump took to the streets of Washington today [1/20/2017] to express their displeasure with the new administration.  Shortly after Trump was sworn in, a large march organized by the DisruptJ20 protest group set out from Union Station to McPherson Square, where it is holding a large rally.  When the march passed by 13th and K streets, Northwest, some in in the demonstration broke away and started throwing newspaper boxes, garbage cans, and other objects in middle of K Street and set them on fire, using Trump T-shirts as kindling.  And as any event involving the combination of garbage, fire, and a large crowd — coupled with its convenient location right outside the office of a major news organization — does, the small blaze caught the attention of seemingly every reporter within sprinting distance.

No, Trump's Dismissal of Obama's Ambassadors Is Not an Unprecedented Crisis.  President-elect Donald Trump's order for all politically-appointed ambassadors to leave their overseas posts by Inauguration Day is "breaking with decades of precedent by declining to provide even the briefest of grace periods," according to the New York Times.

The Election Was Not Hacked.  Despite the histrionic claims of the press, the election was not hacked.  The Democratic National Committee's lousy IT security allowed someone to access their emails which were then leaked.  Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta fell for an age-old phishing scam that was as believable as getting millions of dollars from a Nigerian prince.  Using the spotty media understanding of cybersecurity, they can claim that the DNC and Hillary's campaign were "hacked," but the election decisively was not.  And the press knows it.  In order to "hack" an election, a nefarious group would have to inltrate the voting systems of 50 states, plus DC and territories.  All of these systems are unique, with completely different architecture, ballot formats, tabulation processes, etc., etc.  This did not happen.  In fact, some hackers tried breaking into a few different states' systems weeks before the election, were quickly identied, and prevented from doing so.

'Russian hackers' penetrate US power grid with 'outdated Ukrainian malware'.  A Vermont utility sounded the alarm after finding malware code on a laptop that the FBI and DHS had touted as associated with Russian hackers.  However, cybersecurity specialists say the code came from an outdated Ukrainian hacking tool.

The Editor says...
This is one of the biggest mountains ever made out of a newsroom molehill.  Utility companies don't transact their business or control the power grid with laptop computers.  In any event, the presence of malware on one computer doesn't mean that any other computer was affected — or even the one with malware.  This story is a whole lot of nothing, probably intended to make Russia look like a villain, at a time when president-elect Trump is showing he's far more capable of dealing with Russia than Barack H. Obama ever was.

Russian Hacking Malware Found on Vermont Utility Computer.  Malware associated with Russian hackers was found on a computer belonging to a utility company in Vermont, according to the company.  After being alerted last night by the Department of Homeland Security about malware code used in Grizzly Steppe, Russia's hacking campaign against U.S. political institutions, Burlington Electric Department performed a scan, the utility said in a statement.  "We acted quickly to scan all computers in our system for the malware signature.  We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization's grid systems," the statement said.  "We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding."

Washington Post Publishes False News Story About Russians Hacking Electrical Grid.  The [Washington] Post [12/30/2016] story was titled, "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say."  The story said, "A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials."  The Post published the story before being able to get comment from the two utility companies in Vermont.  The Burlington Electric Department would end up putting out a statement showing the premise of The Washington Post story as being untrue.

Update:
Wait, Never Mind, Russia's Not Trying to Destroy Vermont After All.  Hey, remember that ominous Washington Post story about Russia hacking a Vermont electrical company, and the scary warnings from Vermont Democrats that Vladimir Putin was attempting to shut down the grid in the middle of winter?  This morning [1/3/2017] the Post reports, "Whoops!"

Vt. utility not specifically targeted for hack, official says.  Federal investigators have found no information suggesting this city's electric utility was specifically targeted after Burlington officials found malicious software linked to Russian hackers on a department laptop, the utility's general manager said Saturday [12/31/2016].  Evidence of Internet traffic associated with Grizzly Steppe, a notorious Russian distributor of malware, was disturbing but did not pose a threat to Burlington Electric Department's highly computerized grid or its customers, said Neale Lunderville, general manager of the city-owned utility.  The stealth software, isolated on the one laptop, was discovered Friday [12/30/2016] as part of ongoing routine vigilance.

The Great Hacking of Vermont's Electrical Grid That Never Happened.  For starters, the computer that had the malware was an employee's laptop, and it was never connected to the Vermont electrical grid itself.  Vermont had not been specifically targeted, and the Post's original headline — "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say" — was false.  The statement from Burlington Electric Department General Manager Neale F. Lunderville not-so-subtly urges the media covering this news to get their facts straight: [...]

Washington Post corrects story on Vermont utility breach.  The Washington Post has corrected a story that originally said Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electric grid by breaching a utility company in Vermont.  "An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid.  Authorities say there is no indication of that so far.  The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid," an editor's note attached to the original article said.  The original story was published Friday, one day after the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia for its cyber activities.

Washington Post retracts story about Russian hack at Vermont utility.  The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation's electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop.  "Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid]," according to an editor's note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper's website.  "The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid," the editor's note read.

These Are the Media's Top Ten Embarrassments of the Year.  According to the major networks, Fidel was awesome, Hillary rallies are the best, and white people ruined America.

The Scourge of Dumb News.  Media is a product.  Firms that provide this product are servicing a need, and we'd only be kidding ourselves to claim news consumers desire only to be informed.  This isn't a matter of simple bias confirmation.  News outlets have begun to cater not just to partisans but the minimally informed for whom fleeting and shareable controversies provide a sense of feeling informed. [...] "Fake news" is a real problem, but it attracts a credulous audience because news consumers have been primed to expect emotional satisfaction from the news.

12 Fake News Stories from the Mainstream Media.  [For example,] Dateline NBC rigs a truck to explode:  In 1993, NBC News delivered a historic public apology for staging the test crash of a General Motors pickup truck for the Dateline NBC program.  The reporters wanted to demonstrate that gas could leak from the truck's fuel tank and cause a dangerous fire after a crash, so they rigged it with explosives. [...] Dateline NBC was far from the only example of dubious product-safety reporting.  It wasn't even the first time a vehicle was rigged to explode for a major network consumer report.

Amanpour: Media Should Fight Trump Because He Might Start Putting Us In Cages.  CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour urged journalists Tuesday night to protect their profession from the "existential threat" of President-elect Donald Trump, who she implied might try to put the media in "cages."  Citing Trump's tweet about the media "inciting" some of the protests against him following the election, Amanpour warned gravely of authoritarian leaders who dismantle the free press and imprison journalists.

Corporate Media Berating Fake News Should Look In Mirror.  The corporate media has been abuzz recently about the surge of fake news stories tainting our digital ether, cautioning consumers against being conned by those pushing fantastical falsehoods online.  The glaring problem with this:  the messenger.  As reflective as the Democratic (and Republican) establishment should be in the aftermath of the Trump-nado that swept itself into the White House, the elites in our media should be looking themselves in the mirror morning, noon, and night, perhaps more than any other institution in the U.S.  Complacent for decades in a system of its own tone-deaf creation, political media elites have long operated by chasing the "horse race" of he-said, she-said politics — or in Trump's case, he-tweeted, she-tweeted.

Trump Sticks with People Who Stuck by Him, Media Bewildered.  As soon as the news broke that President-elect Trump had named Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist, the media began acting as if he'd just freed Charles Manson and given him the launch codes.  After helping Trump win in states where Republicans have sought nothing but moral victories for decades, Bannon seemed like a perfectly logical choice to keep close in an advisory capacity.

The Misinformation Age.  Consumers of mass media are not seeking to be informed, because they assume it is all nonsense.  They just want to be entertained.  It's probably why Trump is one nominee and Clinton is the other.  Everyone is looking forward to the brash bully tearing into the corrupt old cow.  It may be awful for the country, but it will make good TV.

Obama's legacy:  Dead cops.  [Scroll down]  For one thing, if Obama did his homework at all, he would know that what appears to be an explosion of killings-by-police is actually just an explosion of media hype on the rare occasions when it happens, often without any of the context that would help people explain why a certain thing happened.  A responsible president would urge people to wait for the facts and recognize that even though they can make mistakes, police officers have dangerous, difficult and crucially important job such that they do not deserve to be painted with a broad brush as a bunch of racists.

CNN's Liberal Meltdown:  Brexit Means 'Xenophobia,' 'White Identity' Win.  Liberal CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour suffered an epic meltdown on Thursday night [6/23/2016] as it became clear that Britain was asserting its national sovereignty and voting to leave the European Union.  The sneering Amanpour repeatedly derided it as an example of "xenophobia" and "white identity" politics.  Early in the evening, with the result still in doubt, Amanpour told Anderson Cooper:  "A lot of the Leave movements are led by the hard-right, very, very xenophobic, anti-immigrant, very populist, nationalist, white identity politics."  Later, as reality set in, the journalist referenced the current issue of The Economist and raged, "This marks a victory for the kind of economic nationalism, to quote this article here, for the kind of xenophobia, that will imperil the liberal world order that has guaranteed western prosperity and stability since World War II."

'This is the end': Media hysterical over Brexit.  Reporters around the world were left terrified, heartbroken and angry over the vote in the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union.  "No words.  The dream is over.  Britain has voted to fall into the sea.  This is the end," Fusion's Felix Salmon opined on social media.  "I despair.  This is not my England."  "I feel like there's been a death in the family.  There needs to be some kind of funeral," he added.

My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump.  Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump's rise on the Republican Party's toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years.  But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump:  Us.  I polled a number of journalists and scholars, and there was a broad (though not universal) view that we in the media screwed up.  Our first big failing was that television in particular handed Trump the microphone without adequately fact-checking him or rigorously examining his background, in a craven symbiosis that boosted audiences for both.

Hillary's Really Bad Week No One Heard About because Guess Who.  Hillary Clinton had a gaffe-filled, staggeringly bad week last week.  It started with her politicizing Nancy Reagan's funeral and ending with more explosive allegations that her informal adviser Sidney Blumenthal had directly cut and pasted classified intelligence into an unsecured personal e-mail account.  But you wouldn't know it from media campaign coverage, which has been far more occupied with the GOP primary and the escalation of violent incidents at rallies.

Of Course Whites Commit Most Of The Crime In Fargo You Idiots.  It's time for another fantastically stupid "exclusive" news story from the folks at Fargo-based television news station Valley News Live.  Their big revelation?  White people commit most of the crime in Fargo.  A city where, according to the U.S. Census, is 90.2 percent white.

The myth of the cop killing 'epidemic'.  To hear the media tell it, America is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave, an orgy of wanton murder in which heavily armed thugs randomly gun down innocent unarmed people, some of them teens, just for sport.  Except that these homicidal goons are wearing the blues and badges of American police departments.  It's the narrative that's given rise to the protest movement Black Lives Matter and to a growing public mistrust of the police in general.  From Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to the recent shooting of a middle-aged woman and a teen in Chicago, the body count seemingly keeps rising, exacerbating racial tensions and keeping the nation on edge.  And each incident is breathlessly reported by a media determined to show that America remains deeply, irredeemably racist.  Problem is, it's simply not true.

5 Devastating Facts About Black-on-Black Crime.  The mainstream American media is, again, happily hitting the Black Lives Matter crack pipe in its pernicious pursuit of high ratings. [...] [T]he ugly truth behind #BlackLivesMatter is that black people killing other black people does nothing to advance its political power in the same way that one white cop killing a black criminal can.  Despite the media's overindulgence on white cops killing blacks, there is still a far-larger amount of black bodies being sent to morgues by black killers.  Here's five devastating facts, liberals can't deny, that prove it.

The System Worked, So Why The Protests In Chicago?  The truth is the awful death is demeaned by another outbreak of the nation's protest industry, one that unfortunately doesn't move itself overseas.  The telling tip-off is the presence of Jesse Jackson.  Or Al Sharpton.  And protest leaders' choice of target, in this case a nationally familiar tourist area that — Oh, look! — is handy to all the local TV newsrooms.  And it piggybacks on a traditionally slow news day's fascination with holiday shoppers.  A perfect public-relations storm for protesters.

Don't Believe the Media!  You must keep in mind that the media industry is exactly that; an industry.  They must make greater and greater profits to satisfy their stockholders.  Dramatic reports of a child that is shot by another child increase ratings much more than reporting that 28 women used a gun to fight off rape today and every day, for that matter (the national average).  A heart rending image of a mother who just lost a child to a drive-by shooting drives ratings much higher than a dry report that violent crime is down in states with the least amount of gun control.  The simple fact is that violence sells! [...] Splashier news makes for more profit.  You can't blame someone for wanting to make more money, even if you disagree with how they do it.  So, it is imperative that you remember that those in control of the media have their own agenda and that agenda does NOT serve YOUR best interest.  Since violence sells and legal unrestricted gun ownership reduces violence, it is in the media's business interest to promote restrictions on legal gun ownership.

Media Coverage Foments Copycat Suicides, Including Mass-Shooter Suicides.  Earlier this year, the deranged 26-year-old gunman who snuffed out the lives of nine innocent human beings before taking his own life on the campus of Umpqua Community College provided some real insight into the minds of the young men involved in what is a disturbing — and growing — trend in America:  mass-shooter suicides.  And that's what these are, these mass shootings.  They are suicides that would not be big national stories without a body count that included innocents killed in movie theaters, churches, schools.  And, to judge from the shooter's words, they are mass shootings that might not have happened at all had there been no prospect of mass-media coverage.

No, You Do Not Have to Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day.  If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this:  You should drink eight glasses of water a day.  It's just not true.  There is no science behind it.  And yet every summer we are inundated with news media reports warning that dehydration is dangerous and also ubiquitous.  These reports work up a fear that otherwise healthy adults and children are walking around dehydrated, even that dehydration has reached epidemic proportions.  Let's put these claims under scrutiny.

The Plight of the Unarmed Perp.  This is the point I really want to make: the constant emphasis on police shootings of unarmed men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy.  If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not.  Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not.  If you attack him, what do you expect him to do?  Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match?  He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself.  Attacking a police officer rarely ends well.  Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop.  If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices.  Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group — 6% of the population, according to the Post — impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop.  If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.

Priceless Liberal reactions to allegedly violent black burglar shot by police.  We don't know all the facts.  Maybe he fought with the cops and they shot him in self defense.  Maybe he didn't fight at all and they still shot him.  What we do know, however, is that he rammed a dealership with his car and started to deface the cars in the lot.  He wasn't shot walking home from the library; he was shot while committing an act of violence and destruction of property.

Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed College Football Player.  Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday [8/7/2015] in Arlington when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police Department.  The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle ensued.  At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.

The Editor says...
Why is the perpetrator identified, every time this story comes up, as a football player?  What difference does it make if he plays football?  He certainly wasn't playing football in the closed showroom of a car dealership well after midnight.  The clear implication is that the liberal press considers football players to be on a plane above all others.

In Zimbabwe, We Don't Cry for Lions.  When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered:  One lion fewer to menace families like mine.  My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain.  I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I'd experienced during my five years studying in the United States.  Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people?  That all the talk about Cecil being "beloved" or a "local favorite" was media hype?

Nets Spend 30 Minutes on Lion; Censor Abortion Videos.  The broadcast news shows covered Cecil the lion more in one day than they spent on the Planned Parenthood videos in two weeks — and that discrepancy only continues to grow.  In two days, ABC, NBC and CBS have spent 30 minutes, 1 second on Cecil, a famed African lion shot by an American dentist.  But anchors couldn't spare nearly as much time for the videos exposing Planned Parenthood's harvesting of aborted baby parts.  Since the release of the Center for Medical Progress' first video two weeks ago, the networks have spent only 11 minutes, 13 seconds on the story.

World Explodes over Dead Lion, Ignores Planned Parenthood.  On Tuesday [7/28/2015], the world lost its collective mind — whatever is left of it, anyway — when media discovered the identity of the killer of a Zimbabwean named Cecil.  Cecil is a lion.  Cecil, a lion, was by most accounts "one of Africa's most famous lions."  Cecil, incredibly, was famous for being a lion, not for curing cancer, although you wouldn't know that by the media coverage.  The man who shot Cecil, a lion, to death is Dr. Walter Palmer, a big game hunter who allegedly paid $55,000 for a big game permit.  He hired a guide, who lured Cecil, a lion, out from a protected area, where Cecil, a lion, then met his end.

The War on Black People in South Carolina: the First Casualty is Truth.  Mass murder was not enough.  Not for the army of reporters who soon after the South Carolina killings surrounded this truth with a bodyguard of lies.  The shooting was part of a pattern of white on black violence wildly out of proportion, journalists told us over and over.  The tragedy also reminded many scribes of the so-called epidemic of arson against black churches in the 1990s.  Neither of which are true.

If You're Going To Fake A Rape, Remember To Take Off Your Fitbit.  Technology can be a useful tool for the rape hoaxer, but inevitably it leads to the hoaxer's downfall.  Social media can catapult a mattress-carrying liar all the way to the State of the Union Address, but then her text-message record can show her for the fraud she is.  (And if she subsequently decides to post amateur porn online, well... )  A once-respected magazine can put a rape hoaxer in the headlines, but then a handful of bloggers questioning the story can bring it all crashing down.

ABC's '08 Prediction: NYC Under Water from Climate Change By June 2015.  New York City underwater?  Gas over $9 a gallon?  A carton of milk costs almost $13?  Welcome to June 12, 2015.  Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago.  Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.  The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, "It's June 8th, 2015.  One carton of milk is $12.99."  (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.)  Another clip featured this prediction for the current year:  "Gas reached over $9 a gallon."  (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)

Media distorts Bibi's statements, then claims he's walking them back.  The distortion of Benjamin Netanyahu's pre-election statements on a two-state solution and Arab voting was a classic Obama and media distortion.  If you take the actual text of Netanyahu said, he never ruled out a two-state solution and never discouraged Arab voting.  But those were the headlines and the foaming-at-the mouth hyperbole, fomented by the Obama administration in numerous anonymous statements to the media.

58,000 children 'abducted' a year: yet another fishy statistic.  [Scroll down]  In other words, these numbers come from an era that predates the wide use of mobile phones, which allow parents to keep much closer track of their children, or the creation of the Amber alerts (which are also on phones, in Facebook news feeds and so forth).  There is an update in the works but the results will not be released until sometime later this year.  So, first off, you see this is an estimate, based on a survey, not based on actual incidents.  NBC News claimed this was FBI data, which makes it sound like actual reports, but instead this was simply derived from a study conducted by academicians for the Justice Department.

NBC Devotes Nearly Four Minutes to Dress Debate, Seconds to Clinton Corruption.  On Friday [2/27/2015], NBC finally noticed the corruption scandal swirling around Hillary Clinton.  However, the coverage on the Today show was relegated to a 49-second mention within a story slamming Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  By contrast, the morning show devoted 3 minutes 56 seconds to a social media debate about the color of a dress.

Another Bogus Academic Study Creates Bogus Headlines.  Thanks to the Washington Post, we have new entry in what is surely the fastest-growing industry in academia: bogus studies that purport to show there is no difference between black and white rates of crime. [...] This latest headline from the Post tells a shocking story:  "Black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens."  Or it would be shocking if it were true.  But it is not.

Reporter is Maced After Storming a Police Station with Protesters.  If you run with radicals, expect to be treated like them.  You storm a police headquarters and you get maced for being part of the mob.  Oh, boo hoo!  This reporter should not have expected anything less.  He's lucky he didn't get shot.

CBS: Voter ID Laws Are Like Violent Attacks on Blacks at Selma.  The journalists at CBS This Morning on Monday [12/15/2014] compared the violent, bloody attacks on African Americans during civil rights marches in 1965 to voter ID laws passed by various states in the last few years.

The great campus rape hoax.  Americans have been living through an enormously sensationalized college rape hoax, but as the evidence accumulates it's becoming clear that the entire thing was just a bunch of media hype and political opportunism.  No, I'm not talking about the Rolling Stone's lurid and now-exploded fraternity gang-rape story.  Whatever the truth behind that story, it's now clear that basically nothing that Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely told us happened, actually happened.  But the hoax is much bigger than one overwrought and perhaps entirely fictional tale of campus goings-on.

Hysterical Media Tell Us to Calm Down.  In the past week, The New York Times has ridiculed Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie for having "fed panic" by ordering quarantines for health workers arriving from Ebola-plagued countries.  [...] I haven't noticed any panic.  If you want panic, review media coverage of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.  That hair-on-fire coverage was based entirely, it turns out, on the media's gullibly swallowing inaccurate accounts of the incident.  For decades liberals have terrified soccer moms about a slew of imaginary terrors:  global warming, Alar on apples, breast implants, heterosexual AIDS, nuclear war, and Republicans taking away their birth control.

Ebola and the Media's Multiple Personality Disorder.  While The Daily Mail suggests that terrorists could transform the virus into a weapon, The Daily Beast declares that the "Ebola Panic Is Worse Than the Disease."  Fox raises the specter of illegal immigrants bringing the virus over the border, and MSNBC assures us that the authorities have things in hand.  One outlet asks an author of medical thrillers to speculate about the ways the threat might mutate into something more frightening; another declares that we're watching an "epic, epidemic overreaction."  Wait, sorry:  Did I say that was "another" outlet?  Actually, those last two both came from CNN.

Media Should Stop Lecturing Americans About Their Ebola Concerns.  The very moment that the news was confirmed about Dr. Ebola, various reporters started telling everyone to calm down.  But nobody was panicking.  I mean, expressing interest in an unbelievably deadly disease that has spread quickly is not panicking.  Panicking is loading up your car like a prepper who just won the Lottery and heading to your cabin in West Virginia.  I mean, maybe there's someone who has done just that.  But there is no evidence that we have any serious problem with people panicking.

Race-Baiting CNN Falls For Another Trayvonesque Hoax.  Desperate to frame the shooting death of Michael Brown in racial terms, CNN has bitten hard on what appears to be faked evidence.  The network did the same thing during the Trayvon Martin case.

Ebola Optics and Questionable MSM Smiley Narratives.  Conservatives can be forgiven if, after having carefully reflected upon a sampling of MSM Ebola narratives, they conclude that something seems a bit askew.  Certain optics and associated stories appear to put a giant smiley face on the Ebola situation.  Nothing to worry about here.  Move along.  However, certain omissions raise troubling questions in regard to what we have been told — especially when the omissions are conjoined with scientific findings on Ebola. [...] The MSM is obviously populated by many people whose mouths are as big as their brains are tiny.  It is therefore no surprise that many such people do not know how to recognize when a question is really statistical in nature and, if it is, how to analyze it.

About That 'World-Ending' Solar Storm...  News of a devastating solar storm 'just missing' Earth in 2012 made the rounds last week.  Turns out that storm was nowhere near us, and similar storms have happened before.

Taliban sets oil tankers on fire in Afghanistan.  Television footage showed black smoke billowing above the site of the attack, with the charred wreckage of dozens of trucks scattered around a vast parking space.  The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the trucks carried fuel intended for U.S.-led NATO forces.

The Editor says...
The sensational headline would lead most readers to believe that somebody had set fire to two or more ocean-going oil tankers.  In reality, only a few thousand gallons of oil — in ordinary trucks — appear to be involved.

U.S. passenger jet nearly collided with drone in March: FAA.  An American Airlines Group Inc aircraft almost collided with a drone above Florida earlier this year, a near-accident that highlights the growing risk from rising use of unmanned aircraft, the U.S. air safety regulator said.

The Editor says...
Don't be deceived by the sensational headline.  It was a small plane, a small drone, no collision, very small story.

Barbara Walters is TV personality, not a journalist.  Walters broke into the media business as a behind-the-scenes writer at NBC, eventually working her way up to be co-host of "Today."  She entered the network news world with no journalistic credentials, a fact that bothered the grizzled news veterans of the day.  She made history in 1976 when ABC hired her to be the first woman to co-anchor a network evening newscast.  The gimmick of hiring a "Today" host to do a serious newscast never worked.  Walters had built her career as a morning gabber, and that didn't translate to the serious news anchor desk.

Dateline producer suing NBC.  Women working at NBC's Dateline show are regularly asked to pose as 'sexual bait' for stories about prostitution, sex trafficking, and sexual deviants according to a female producer who is now suing the network.  New York-based Kimberly Lengle, 33, says she quit the program last April after a senior HR director failed to follow-up on her complaints about the practice.

Logic Gets Sucked into the Polar Vortex.  North America is presently experiencing the kind of abnormally cold temperatures that can wreak havoc on computer climate models.  The mainstream media is overflowing with headlines about coldness raging unexpectedly across Canada in January, Jack Frost nipping at people's noses, and other signs of the Apocalypse.  Naturally, then, it was only a matter of time before these media outlets — aka the global Ministry of Propaganda — let the other shoe drop, and explained how all this routine winter weather is the result of man-made global warming, and therefore can only be halted by international totalitarianism.

Obama portrayed as victim.  Some may think reporters and editors are simply clumsy or indifferent writers, and sometimes they are.  But much of the time they choose their words (and photos) with exquisite and subtle care.  They also realize that most people only look at the headlines and photos of most articles, and that those are therefore the most important elements, and that even people who do read the article often read only the first few paragraphs.

The media war over George W. Bush's stent.  From Benghazi to the health of former President George W. Bush, wild unsubstantiated assertions by the news media take the place of real reporting.  Fox News is left to set the record straight, yet frequently it doesn't get the credit it deserves.  The stent placement in President Bush's coronary artery is the latest example of the world of Fox News versus wild speculation.

Media Coverage of Benghazi Leans Toward Political Theater.  First, we learned from the Obama Administration that it was a YouTube video that sparked the protests — a false narrative gladly perpetuated by the media as long as possible.  Currently, the media and the administration are pushing the story that attempts to investigate Benghazi constitute a Republican vendetta, the perpetuation of a "phony scandal" to incite the populace against the President and former Secretary of State — and presidential hopeful — Hillary Clinton.  To this end, it is not surprising that key details of the recent congressional hearings on Benghazi went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media.

Art Horn Letter to Connecticut State Department of Agriculture.  Hurricane Sandy was not a "Super Storm".  This label was assigned by the news media.  Those who called Sandy a Super Storm did so because they liked the sound of "Super Storm."  Having worked in television news rooms for 25 years I am well acquainted with these exaggerations.  The term "Super Storm Sandy" sounds much more dramatic than "Sandy is a category one Hurricane on a scale of one to five" which is what it was.

Breaking News! Seventh First Climate Refugees Discovered!  BBC, your climate reporting is pathetic.  Doesn't anyone there think to check up on some dewy-eyed reporter gushing on about the tragic fate of the latest batch of pseudo-refugees?  Missing the facts in this story would have been understandable a decade ago, but in 2013, you guys are a running joke.

The Media's Moral Decline: Standards, Story Selection Now Tabloids On Steroids.  For those who don't live in New York and aren't familiar with the Daily News, it should be noted that while it sometimes reads like a tabloid, it is a legitimate news source and is mentioned in the same breath as The News York Times and New York Post one of the city's top newspapers.  In fact, the Daily News has won ten Pulitzers and is the fourth-most circulated newspaper in the United States.  To that end, these headlines aren't too different than what we see dominating national or local cable news today, and by extension (since we cover this stuff), Mediaite as well.

An Abortionist's Unglamorous Victims.  He's allegedly killed more people than Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy combined, but most Americans have never heard of him. [...] We have wall-to-wall coverage of Jodi Arias, a lone nut who admits to killing her boyfriend in Arizona, but a blackout on Kermit Gosnell.  And why wouldn't we?  The Arias trial involves nude pictures, kinky sex, and an attractive woman.

The 10 Absolute Worst Media Reactions To The Boston Marathon Bombings.  In the media business, what's the one thing you can consistently expect from reporters, pundits, "experts," and anchors on the day of a major news event?  Speculation.  Wild, unabashed speculation.  Oftentimes, their conjecture is based on their own political beliefs and agendas.  And this can lead to some particularly ugly comments while the wounds are still fresh during major tragedies like the Newtown and Aurora massacres... and Monday's Boston marathon bombings.

The Media's Privacy War.  Sensationalizing the news and publicizing the story non-stop allows advertisers to count on human nature.  The public tunes in and/or buys the newspaper.  Media networks bet that if you get hooked on the drama, the personalities of the reporters, you will keep watching or buying the particular outlet for your news.  High viewership and readership increases the likelihood of advertising sales.  The media wages a privacy war for money.

Woodward-Sperling Flap May Turn Tide.  The more superficial the brouhaha the bigger its impact.  What public figures say is more important than what they do, because cable TV and political blogs can cover a mud fight more cheaply and more easily than they can a real story.

Geraldo Rivera and Common Decency.  There are those who will dismiss Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera's announcement that he is considering running for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 2014 as a Republican as just one more publicity stunt in a career replete with them.  Rivera's public record is mixed, as it has combined serious advocacy on a number of issues with the sort of foolish excess that has given a bad name to tabloid journalism.  If people think of him more as a celebrity than a journalist, it is his own fault and not something that he has seemed to mind very much.

The media love maniacs.  The same media that pointedly ignore frequent life-saving defensive uses of firearms consistently pours hours and days and weeks of attention upon the latest maniac who chooses a firearm as his tool of mass murder, so that the next potential insane villain cannot fail to notice the easy path to fame and immortality that the misuse of a gun can bring.  But the greatest fame will only attach if they can beat the previous body-count record, a number constantly and loudly broadcast, so that no one can fail to hear it.  The message to the unstable is clear:  Come on, you crazy guys, can't you at least murder your way to thirty?

Newtown is the Latest Example of Media Overkill.  On behalf of all us, I beg the media:  Please go away.  Please stop cold calling my friends who live in Sandy Hook for potential news nuggets.  Please stop harassing people like my mother as they leave funerals.  Please stop parking on people's lawns without permission.

CBS presents hype as news.  Does anyone remember when CBS used to be a respected news organization that did its own research — or at least quoted independent experts?  Or even conducted interviews?  When it comes to health and science news, alas, it seems like they've been reduced to rewriting alarmist or sensationalist press releases.

The 'Screw Science' Media and Super Storm Sandy.  When science departs from the scary-story script, journalists are the first to dismiss its importance.

Newsweek's 'Muslim Rage': A sickening piece of shock journalism that cheapens a once great magazine.  Sensational covers now seem to be the only way to keep selling the magazine, whether it's declaring Obama to be the first gay president or a recycled picture of asparagus spears and a juicy pair of lips to tease customers into parting with their change.

A Tsunami of Exaggeration.  One of the current obsessions is how much debris from the tsunami in Japan last year — some of it possibly radioactive!!! — will be washing ashore in North America.  Usha Lee McFarling writes in the Los Angeles Times that we should all calm down.

When 'Minority' is a Trick of Definition.  When the Census Bureau this month issued a press release headlined "Most Children Younger Than Age 1 are Minorities," the media snapped to attention.  News outlets nationwide covered the announcement, hailing it as a "historic demographic milestone" (CNN), as the "dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority" (Washington Post), and as an "important turning point for the nation" (McClatchy) that would "starkly ... change the face of America's next generations" (Time).  None of that was true.  None of that was new, either.

Mike Wallace, Entertainment, and Journalism.  On the back nine, Mike liked to think of himself exclusively as a journalist.  The network might have plucked him from daytime television — but taking the shill out of the entertainer was another matter.  Wallace was the quintessential barker, an ambulance-chaser with press credentials.  He perfected the art of "ambush" journalism at CBS.  With such tactics, copy led only when it bled.  Indeed, Mike Wallace's career echoes some of the more predatory traditions of broadcast journalism.

Journalism's Eroding Integrity.  The ABC News product increasingly ceases to be journalism.  It is sensationalism.  It is reprehensible.  It's time to let ABC News feel the sting of public disapproval.

Journalists don't have good grasp of religion.  Evidence of big media's bias against religion that doesn't advance the secular and liberal agenda of the Democratic Party is beyond dispute.  Any faith attached to a conservative agenda is to be ridiculed, stereotyped and misrepresented.  Islam is a notable exception.  The media appear to bend over backward not to offend Muslims.

ABC News' reporting on the Aurora shooting is even worse than we thought.  Apparently this story isn't horrible enough already.  The people we used to count on to tell us the news keep doing [everything they can] to make it even worse.

Police called in because of disruptive MEDIA members harassing employees at Hollywood Chick-Fil-A 'kiss-in'.  Apparently, in Hollywood, CA police had to be called in because of disruptive people.  The police weren't called in because of the protesters doing anything wrong, but rather for the pink slime media members who were harassing the employees!

Upon Further Review?  How the media does love its monsters.  The media got an early Christmas gift from Jerry Sandusky, who fills the hideous monster vacuum that had developed after Osama Bin Laden was slain.  How the media does love its monsters.  After Bin Laden, the monster niche was neatly filled by Dominique Strauss-Kahn (almost forgotten now, relegated to media monster purgatory.)  Prior to DSK we had folk villain Bernie Madoff, after which Michael Vick's head was served to us on a platter.  Prior to Vick came loony monster Mel Gibson, preceded by Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and, to be sure, O.J. Simpson, a sort of monster emeritus.  Qadaffi was October monster of the month, giving way to Sandusky.

What is Poverty in the United States Today?  [Scroll down]  Mainstream news media also present poverty in America as severe material hardship. ... The ongoing use of examples of severe hardship in TV news should not be surprising.  TV news thrives on drama, and reporters naturally seek out the starkest and most sympathetic examples of poverty to build the most compelling stories.  By contrast, a realistic portrayal of the living conditions of the typical poor family in America would not make compelling viewing.  In fact, the audience would be unlikely to regard such a family as seriously deprived.

Payday Loans.  The mindset of the left was recently displayed in a big, front-page story in the October 30th issue of the San Mateo County Times.  It was an investigative reporter's expose of the "payday loan" business and its lobbyists.  According to the reporter:  "In California lenders charge up to $45 in fees on a maximum $300 loan.  This amounts to an interest rate of 460 percent, trapping some borrowers into a never-ending cycle of debt." ... Using this kind of reasoning — or lack of reasoning — you could quote the price of salmon as $15,000 a ton or say a hotel room rents for $36,000 a year, when no consumer buys a ton of salmon and few people stay in a hotel room all year.  It is clever propaganda, but do people buy newspapers to be propagandized?

The 'Hunger' Hoax.  Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over "hunger in America." Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, "one in eight American children is going hungry tonight."  Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

Jackie, Oh No.  Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV?  I'm sure there must be — around seven billion of them, probably.  But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer?  Not a chance.  When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of someone who's just seen your lab results and is trying to figure out how to break the bad news.

The Editor says...
Bill Curtis of WBBM-TV has perfected the "phony concerned look".

Understanding Poverty in the U.S.  Poor Americans, on average, live in larger houses or apartments than does the average, non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.  The media cry with alarm that "nearly one in four kids" in the nation are hungry.  Again, government data show otherwise.  Fully 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during 2009, despite the severity of the recession, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A Weather Newsgasm.  [Scroll down]  The incessant "news" coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts.  So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

Here's an example of news media alarmism:
Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain That Runs Nonstop.  Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems. ... One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year...

The Editor's rebuttal:
Do the math.  446 kWh a year, consumed by an appliance that runs 24 hours a day, is an average power consumption of only 50 watts.  Is that more power than your "central air-conditioning system" uses?  Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to get a high-def DVR and a cable box.  If that's how you want to spend your money, that's your business.

Exploiting the Japanese.  For the left, no crisis is too terrible to go unused.  So it is with the horrific suffering that has taken place in Japan. ... In [an] appearance on the NBC Nightly News, Edward Lyman of UCS stressed the ominous situation in Japan while at the same time stressing that "it can happen here."  The "safety bar is set too low," Lyman insisted.  We need more restrictions — presumably the sort that would slow down further nuclear power development or shut it down entirely.  Suddenly, the media was full of the "worse than Three Mile Island" scenario — the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl.  Come to think of it, has there been a nuclear "catastrophe" since Chernobyl?  Is the situation in Japan, however serious it may be, a Chernobyl-scale accident?  Not likely, but the media seems to be licking its lips, hoping it will come close.

Fear the Media Meltdown, Not the Nuclear One.  Relax:  this is not another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and I'll tell you exactly why.  The only thing to fear is the sensationalist reporting that has the world panicked.

The Media's Deadly Sin.  Last year I was listening to the radio and heard that our area had experienced an earthquake during the night.  I took the reporter's word that it happened; it had been so mild that I slept right through it.  In December 1995, if one weren't visiting a national park or applying for a passport, the government shutdown had the same impact as that earthquake.  In other words, if it hadn't been for the media caterwauling, the majority of us wouldn't have even known the shutdown had happened.

Journalists' sob stories block reform.  Now that budget battles have begun in earnest all around the country, those advocating spending cuts, Democratic and Republican, had better not expect any help in furthering their cause from the mainstream news media.  In fact, the news media might be their most formidable foe.  How so?  Well, now that we know the targets of the cuts, the news media, suckers for a sob story, are already throbbing with carefully orchestrated, heart-rending tales about what devastation those cuts will cause:  Children who won't be fed; students unable to afford college; classrooms bursting at the seams; cancers that will not be treated; trains that won't run; roads that won't be built; families becoming homeless or freezing in their unheated homes; single mothers who will lose child care and job training; food that will not be inspected; water and air that will be more polluted; farmers who will be forced from their land; playgrounds, parks, museums, libraries and health clinics that will be closed.  You know the drill.

The Toyota Death Panel.  The Toyota scare was just the latest in a long series of orchestrated crises, in the tradition of the Alar scam of the 1980s, or DDT hysteria before that.  It's very easy to provoke a media stampede against a large corporation.  The narrative plays into the anti-business biases of reporters, whose ears are hungry for the distant cry of trumpets calling them to battle in a populist crusade.

The Anti-Cop Trend That Isn't.  [Scroll down]  Dig into most of these articles, however, and you will find there is no real evidence of an increase in anti-police violence, let alone one that can be traced to anti-police rhetoric, gun sales, disrespect for authority, or "don't tread on me" sentiment.  (CNN is one of the few media outlets that have covered the purported anti-police trend with appropriate skepticism.)  Amid all the quotes from concerned law enforcement officials in MSNBC's "War on Cops" article, for example, is a casual mention that police fatality statistics for this month are about the same as they were in January 2010.

The Media's Debacles.  Without an analysis of the significance of an event, the news becomes an arena in which to compete for attention and the most outlandish, shocking, offensive or bizarre becomes "newsworthy".  Competition for sensational news is no less intense today than it was when the so-called "yellow press" in the United States, largely under the control of editor William Randolph Hearst, found Spain guilty for the disaster of the sinking of the U.S. battleship "Maine" in Havana harbor and provoked the Spanish-American War in 1898. ... A viewing audience unequipped with basic background information is likely to take at face value the absurd, shocking and grotesque if portrayed often enough and presented as "news".

IPCC Distortion Of Weather And Climate Is Reinforced By Media Hyperbole.  It's pathetic to watch the US mainstream media yearn for a hurricane, especially one that will threaten people.  They anxiously scan the weather maps off the coast of West Africa for any low-pressure system that might develop into a news making, life threatening, normal event.  It is another measure of how the media is not about news but editorializing, speculation and sensationalism.  Sadly, they are joined in this or at least not dissuaded or counteracted by government agencies.

Jacksonian America.  On September 11th 2001, about an hour after the planes hit the twin towers, Jo Moore, a senior advisor to Britain's Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, turned away from the TV and fired off a departmental e-mail:  It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.  I'm not sure where Ms Moore is these days, but June 25th and all the following week were even better days to get out anything you want to bury.  The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey "cap-and-trade" bill ... And nobody cared.  Because Michael Jackson had died.

The Price Of A Porcine Panic.  There's panic in the streets over a flu outbreak.  "Projections are that this virus will kill 1 million Americans," the nation's top health official has warned.  The virus is swine flu.  But the date is 1976.  And the projection, it turns out, is off by 999,999 deaths.  Direct ones, that is.  The hastily developed vaccine killed or crippled hundreds.

Figuring How to Terrify Us Over Swine Flu.  "U.S. health officials say swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die."  So declares an Associated Press article, the writer of which you can picture trying to catch his breath as he pounds away at the keyboard.

A pandemic of panic — are we dead yet?  We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu.  But here we are, proof that there really is life after death.

The Great Liberal Pandemonium Machine.  The Mexican swine flu pandemic?  Oh, that's soooo yesterday.  Global Warming?  All those confident "scientific" predictions are falling apart around the world, even as greedy politicians still try to squeeze the last little drops of power and money out of them.  Human flesh-eating bacteria?  SARS?  Ozone holes?  Mad Cow?  The Curse of the Killer Tomatoes?  Water torture?  CO2?  Bee Colony Collapse?  It never ends.  As long as scare stories sell, as long as millions of indoctrinated suckers fall for them they will never end.

After salmonella, bird flu, the Millennium Bug... should we actually be scared this time?  Don't we have the sense that we have seen this kind of panic before, which eventually turned out to have gone way over the top?  The moment which more than any might have set off a severe attack of deja vu came when the BBC Today programme wheeled on an expert from the World Health Organisation to tell us that '40 percent' of us in Britain may catch swine flu — while another unnamed expert was quoted predicting that '1.2 million' Britons could die.

Yellowcake and Yellow Journalism:  On MSNBC they're covering the [Scooter Libby] trial like it's the Normandy Invasion, starring Elvis Presley, as told by Joseph Goebbels.  MSNBC's "reportage" consists of endless repetition of arbitrary assertions, half-truths and thoroughly debunked canards.  No one else cares about the trial — except presumably Scooter Libby — so the passionate left is allowed to invent a liberal fable without correction.

Yellow Science:  Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism.  Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge, particularly knowledge of something sensational.  It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science.

The Fog of Breaking News:  Why you should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt.

Paris, Lindsay and A-Rod?  We Don't Care!  Apparently, the causal relationship between the media's supply of celebrity gossip and the public's demand for it is a two-way street.  America's seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrity scandal is a troubling sign, but here's an even more alarming truth:  Our enemy — facing the most powerful military force in history — has never concealed its belief that its ultimate triumph, as well as our ultimate demise, will come about because Americans are too fat, lazy and decadent to care enough to fight for their civilization and their values.

Movie shows photo fraud involved in wartime journalism.  Numerous examples of Photoshop embellishment and throw-down toys carefully arranged by news photographers to evoke emotion.

Amped-up storm coverage may become the norm.  Nearly a year later, hurricanes Katrina and Rita are still fresh on Gulf Coast minds, and Houston's television stations are trending toward more aggressive storm coverage.

The Editor continues to rant...
How can someone report current events aggressively without dishonest hype?  What does "aggressive coverage" really mean anyway?  It means the poorly educated masses in Houston will be drenched, if you will, with sensational, pessimistically speculative, tabloid television.  This style of "journalism" benefits only the TV stations and their advertisers, not the viewers.

How a New York Times reporter's passion for Castro led him astray:  Aha!  Finally we've discovered the missing ingredient in American journalism, the vitamin deficiency that's been shrinking newspaper circulation and TV newscast audiences all these years.  What Americans clamor for is not information but passion.  The heroes of the coverage of Katrina were not the reporters who got the most accurate stories but the ones who shouted the loudest or cried the hardest.

TV News Meets the Vast Wasteland:  Those amusing, though sadly depressing man-in-the-street interviews are an indication that the American hoi-polloi get whatever knowledge they may have only from TV newscasts, not printed material.  For this reason, national TV news has become increasingly more dependent on the sensationalism that their entertainment brethren can provide to attract viewers.  It's sometimes hard to determine where news coverage leaves off and entertainment begins, but the signs have been around for a long time.  The O.J. Simpson day-by-day trial was the most egregious example, but John Kennedy Jr.'s fatal flight coverage was a close second in televised excess.  Aging stalwarts like Barbara Walters think they can alternate between slobbering celebrity interviews and interrogating prominent political figures without suffering a lack of credibility.

Barbara Walters is not a role model.  She's written a tell-all autobiography.  And she's promoting it on ABC, which continues to employ her.  Once upon a time, legitimate news organizations would not have allowed a conflict of interest like this.

ABC Even Complains About Charity.  No good deed goes unpunished — that was the theme of an ABC Christmas day segment about donating clothing to charity.  "World News Tonight with Charles Gibson," took "A Closer Look" at charities and gave the appearance of dishonesty.

RIP:  protest films, e-porn and bimbos.  Year's end is a time of many media traditions.  For example, the tearing away of the last page of the calendar is all the excuse TV producers need to recycle hours of sensational video footage of dubious news value on the pretense that viewers need to relive the last 365 days. ... And then there's the practice of "spotting trends" from the year.  Trend-spotting has become something of an obsession with today's journalists, particularly at newspapers coping with the fact that they don't "break" news the way they did in the past.

Long Winter for the Media.  It is an unsettling time to be a journalist.  You are either on the edge of extinction or in charge of the universe.  The newspaper industry is condemned to write piecemeal its own obituary without knowing when or how — or, truth be told, if — the end will come.  Broadcast media now possess a self-inflated importance that they rarely bother to deny.

The L.A. Times's Human Wrecking Ball.  Great newspapers take decades to build.  We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order.

Fence fiasco:  Or Feliz ano nuevo.  The decline of American sovereignty would typically be a big story in any year, but with all the news coming out of Hollywood this year, maybe it was a bit overshadowed by more significant events.  I mean, how can the virtual surrender of a 231-year-old nation to the Pollyanna-ish forces of political correctness possibly compete with the dramatic real-life struggles of Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, and the nation's hot new nymphet, Britney's baby sister, Jamie Lynn Spears?

Summertime, and the news is so cheesy.  Last year's Great August Story was left-wing activist Cindy Sheehan's absurd campout near the president's Texas ranch, which, much to the dismay of Mrs. Sheehan, was interrupted only after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.  Remember the Summer of the Shark?  That was 2001, when the media hyped shark attacks, despite the widely acknowledged fact that the season's attacks were no higher than previous seasons'.

Bigotry and Sports:  Although not too many years ago, sports-writing was considered the "toy department" of journalism, the boys and girls in the press box have been eager to catch up to their counterparts in the "real" world.  And so, they are also no longer content with merely reporting the scores, trades and what have you; they must now generate the news.  And, similar to the mainstream media, they need divisive issues in order to push the agenda of all J-school graduates:  to change the world.

Hurricane Hype Clouds Warming Debate.  ABC's Jeffrey Kofman sounded the alarm about storms so bad scientists "are now considering adding a fearsome category 6.  That's hurricanes of more than 175 miles an hour.  Something no one would want to meet head-on."  No one did.  Category 6 wasn't even added, and the chorus of media hype about another deadly season of storms turned into so much hot air.  That's right — forecasts for the 2006 hurricane season, which ends November 30, have proven entirely wrong.  Instead of 17 tropical storms and hurricanes, we got only nine.

Frivolous politics:  In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a C.I.A. "agent" — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.  This is the frivolous media — and the biased media.

9/11 Myths, Debunked.  Trust that conspiracy theorists will attempt to exploit the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to spread sensational claims and sensational lies.  Moreover, it's a fair bet sensationalist media will collaborate, not because the squawk show host or headline scribbler believes the poisoned foolishness, but because anger, fear and trembling sell.

Shepard Smith Smears Swift Boat Vets.  While some press attention has been focused on the seeming odd-couple of Rupert Murdoch raising money for Hillary Clinton, another fascinating relationship has apparently been developed between Fox News and Hugh Hefner's Playboy.  Fox News' Neil Cavuto aired an interview with Hugh Hefner on May 4, on the grounds that the announcement of his "Playmate of the Year" was "business news," and Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is interviewed in the June issue of Playboy magazine.

Al Gore and the Global Warming Scare.  People are naturally prone to worry about dangers that are invisible: radioactivity, for one spectacular example.  The media know this, and are forever trumpeting the discovery of new perils to scare us with.  Hardly a week passes without someone announcing that some familiar food or other useful substance has just been discovered to cause cancer (though usually only when administered in huge doses to mice).  Dangers associated with weather are special favorites because they are usually so difficult to cope with.  In recent decades, we have been treated to alarmist reports about impending disasters to be caused by nuclear winter, acid rain and the ozone hole.  But the Big Daddy of all such scare stories is "global warming."

Did someone mention Global Warming?

TV Jumps on Stale NSA Database Story.  Like the TV coverage, USA Today's story insinuated that the existence of the database was a major violation of Americans' privacy rights and evidence that the President was lying last December when he described the NSA's eavesdropping on suspected terrorist communications as limited and targeted.

Simply Put, the US Mainstream Media Provides an Inferior Product.  They may have the most advanced technology for delivering the news and the flashiest sets, graphics and promotional tactics; they may have scoured the earth for the "prettiest" people who can read Teleprompters and those with the most important sounding voices, but they have sacrificed their credibility at the altar of the almighty advertising dollar and because of that the public's trust in the mainstream media is shattered.

Drivin' and Not Cryin'?  When it comes to gas prices, the media too often know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Flip open a paper and turn on the TV and you'll learn that gas prices are rising again.  "Stormy 6 Weeks Ahead" says CBSNews and warns consumers to expect "pain at the pump."

Digging for the truth:  Too many journalists fail to dig deeply enough to get to the real story.  They breathless hype the latest scare about everything from pesticides and "road rage" to cell phones and irradiated food.  Deadly dangers lurk everywhere, and your Intrepid Reporter is all that stands between you and certain disaster.

Media eat up absurd rape story.  I called it back in April.  When a black stripper claimed three white Duke University lacrosse players gang-raped her at a party, I knew instinctively it was a lie.  The tale reeked of Tawana Brawley-like fabrications.

Movie shows photo fraud involved in wartime journalism.  Numerous examples of Photoshop embellishment and throw-down toys carefully arranged by news photographers to evoke emotion.

Hold that opinion.  Opinion journalism — the business not of reporting what happened, but of commenting on it — tends to place a premium on speed.  When that story breaks on Tuesday, members of the pundits' guild spring into action as well.  Editorial writers and columnists tell their readers what the news means.  TV talking heads and radio pontificators pass judgment.  Internet bloggers — the commentariat's newest, increasingly influential players — scramble to weigh in.

CBS Whips Up Worry about Hurricane Season:  The first day of spring [2006] proved perfect timing for the CBS's Jim Acosta to resurrect global warming as the villain behind last year's hurricane season, downplaying how hotly debated the matter is in the scientific community.

NASCAR Furious With NBC Over 'Dateline' Segment.  "It is outrageous that a news organization of NBC's stature would stoop to the level of going out to create news instead of reporting news," [NASCAR spokesman Ramsey] Poston said [4/5/2006].  "Any legitimate journalist in America should be embarrassed by this stunt.  The obvious intent by NBC was to evoke reaction, and we are confident our fans won't take the bait," he said.

ABC Hatches Weeklong Series on Bird Flu:  In 2003, ABC questioned government's bioterrorism warnings, but now emphasizes the latest concerns on bird flu.

Are You Satisfied With Your TV News?  Sound bites!  They may be the death of Western civilization!  The triviality of our network and local TV news is well known.  Locally, so much of the local channels give us a steady diet of blood and guts that is debilitating.  All the accidents, the murders, the court appearances of sordid criminals, the crimes of all descriptions seem to be their main focus.

The propaganda broadcasting network:  The definition of propaganda describes ABC News' decision to enlist the services of actor and teenage heartthrob, Leonardo DiCaprio, to interview President Clinton about the environment:  "the spreading of ideas, information or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a person."

Cool Britannia:  Sometimes, during what are called "slow news periods," newspapers and magazines struggle to fill pages.  In America at least, they solve this problem several ways:  by printing what are generously called "puff pieces", by covering tabloid trash stories, or by recycling old items to try to get more mileage out of them.  We seem to be in one of those times nationally, even with the so-called "war on terrorism."  When George W. Bush choking on a pretzel is the big story of the week, you know it is a slow news time.

How CNN Creates The News:  CNN's "Compound" Interest:  Their interest is in ratings and sensationalism, not in accuracy or justice.

What is the media thinking by ignoring the Medal of Honor?  "If it bleeds, it leads" is a canon of today's mass media, so bad news usually trumps good news for editors and producers.  But this week proves there is an even more powerful maxim:  "Trivial celebrity news beats all."  The carefully choreographed royal pronouncement pushed at least two other events — far more important to Americans — well into the background of U.S. print and broadcast media.

Soft News Erodes Audience The rise in "soft news" and "critical journalism" could be turning off traditional news audiences, according to a Harvard University study.  Soft news was defined as being typically more sensational, more personality-centered, more entertainment-oriented and more incident-based than traditional public affairs news.

Christmas with Hef:  They claim that she gets "the big stories."  But MSNBC's Rita Cosby continues to dig in the bottom of the barrel to attract an audience.

Our most destructive kind of racism.  Paula Zahn devoted two of her hour-long CNN shows this week to the topic "Skin Deep: Racism in America."  After taking the time to watch, the question I walked away with was:  "What was the point?"  In my view, the shows told us little that most of us don't already know — strong racist sentiments exist in the country — and really never asked the deeper and more important questions about what this means and why we should care.

O.J., "Kramer" and limits:  This "If I Did It" book and TV interview monstrosity was deliberately planned for the last week of the November sweeps, and Simpson reportedly was to be paid a cool $3.5 million for his efforts.  It was a disaster.  Fox News Channel discussed the story relentlessly, obviously promoting both the book and the upcoming interview, but it backfired and open revolt ensued.

Celebrities At The End.  The surrealism of celebrity pop culture erupts when a major celebrity dies.  The sudden, mysterious death of Michael Jackson caused a near-total eclipse of the real news.  The cable-news channels blurred into 24-7 wailing walls for the so-called "King of Pop."  Television ratings surged with a big ka-ching.  So much for the "news" business.

The Michael Jackson funeral.  In their rush to pander to the lowest common denominator, the major media, especially television, have fallen for their own hype, in a self-reinforcing cycle of Jackson mania.  They believed the importance of their coverage was revealed by the fact that all their peers and competitors regarded Jackson as equally important.  The public has even less reason to place their confidence in the antique media that brought us the sensationalistic coverage of the funeral of a celebrity whose career and life have been falling apart for many years.

The 12 Days of Michael.  There's no doubt about it.  Celebrity is the media's top priority.  Michael Jackson's June 25 death overshadowed all other news for almost two weeks.  Nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC featured at least one story each night about Jackson since his death.  More than half of those broadcasts aired since June 25 lead (sic) with a story about Jackson.

What ever Happened To The Erupting Iceland Volcano?  The Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to erupt in Iceland, but the story has fallen off the very small mainstream media tabletop. ... A brief examination of climate history shows how much it changes naturally and how those changes are a great influence on nature and human history.  The planes may be flying again but the fallout from the eruption is just beginning.  The mainstream media ... quickly lurch on to the next hysteria leaving the outcome and fallout of previous hysterias unreported.

The Lies of Duke:  "She was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air."  That's how a Washington Post columnist described the atmosphere that led to the brutal gang rape of Crystal Mangum by a group of Duke University lacrosse players in 2006.  You remember, right?  That was the violent, racially motivated hate crime that never happened.

Journalists become 'self-reverential' celebrities.  Newsmen have become the news.  And the gossip.  One may run for office.  Many are vying for a single plum job.  Another is suing his old network for millions.  It is a long way from the austere days of Eric Sevareid, when staid anchormen left stardom to Hollywood.

The national news media provide publicity for every crazed gunman who goes out with a bang.
Dial CNN for Murder.  The same dangerous pattern has been repeated again and again.  The disturbed man who took hostages at Sen. Clinton's headquarters in New Hampshire told loved ones to "watch the news tonight."  The shooter who terrorized an Omaha shopping mall by mowing down total strangers has achieved his goal (and I will not add to the problem by publishing his name).  He left a suicide note in which he predicted "at least now I'll be famous."  His picture is featured in every newspaper and is flashed on television hourly.  His miseries are being dissected and analyzed. ... And other disturbed people are watching and taking note.

The Media Has Declared... WAR!  Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common:  the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears.  The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity.  While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news — and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive — the similarities end there.  Hospitals gird for the incoming and the flood of bad news to follow; most newsrooms do not.  In a newsroom, tragic events are met with a different vibe:  an electric jolt that energizes the room with a sense of self-importance.  The shot of adrenaline that surges through a newsroom is fascinating to watch.

Media madness:  The Virginia Tech story.  There seems to be just one template for the media in covering tragedies like that which just occurred at Virginia Tech:  Discussion of further regulation of guns and so much coverage of the perpetrator that copycats are sure to be impressed. … Seeing the glorification of the latest mass murderer, the next Cho may be already getting some ideas about how to take follow in his footsteps.

Reducing the risk of copycat killers:  The way the media cover an event influences whether there will be repetitions.  For example, if a fan runs onto the field during a baseball game, the broadcast cameras usually avoid showing pictures of the fan.  The TV producers know that the fan on the field is seeking attention, and that, presumably, getting his picture on television will reward him.  Moreover, broadcasting the man's antics would encourage copycats.

Five Questions about Shootings at Universities.  The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was:  "6 Dead in NIU Shooting."  "6 dead" included the murderer.  Why wasn't the headline "5 killed at NIU"?  It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.  This is something entirely new.  Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims.

In time of tragedy, media are at their worst.  The press, particularly television news networks … [are] competing with each other like starving dogs for the slightest new morsel of information they can then put on a permanent loop on cable TV, until the next fragmentary detail is pried loose by a reporter desperate to be first, for 15 minutes.  Because there isn't enough new information to fill the infinite void allotted to these stories, the press quickly succumbs to a kind of emotional vampirism, feeding off the grief, fear and anguish of victims clearly incapable of understanding their own feelings….

Murder by media?  Did the non-stop playing of the Virginia Tech killer's twisted thoughts help to push a fragile mind in Houston to walk the same grisly path?  Has the airing of that video set in motion other killers and imitators who may not carry out their copy-cat crimes for months or years?

Autism Fraud Just the Tip of the Iceberg.  The lead author of that anti-vaccine study, which also appeared in one most respected medical journals, The Lancet, was British physician Andrew Wakefield.  And its consequences include millions of terrified and confused parents, large drops in vaccination rates and death.  Yet while this "deliberate fraud" has been exposed, others continue to go unchallenged, or worse, get trumpeted by reporters who should know better.  Regarding Wakefield, many people, including me, have spent years puncturing his claims and those of his acolytes in the anti-vaccine movement.  But a media that thrives on sensationalism instead played up the phony link.

Hooked on trivia.  We try to hear and see no evil, but it's not far-fetched to suggest that future world events could quickly change the lives of millions.  So why then fixate on Anna Nicole, Rosie, Imus and Alec?  Simple — they are the modern equivalents of grotesque carnival freak shows that used to provide a perverse sense of escapism from what people dare not face.  Yet as our dependency on such tabloid distraction grows, so, too, do the real dangers that we ignore.

The Lines Between News and Entertainment are Blurring.  An on-screen NBC News identifier for a fictional debate on "The West Wing" and a "news conference" by a fake Boston Red Sox executive on ESPN show how fuzzy the lines between news and entertainment have become.

Too much TV drama over storms.  We are now celebrating the anniversary of the Katrina hurricane and if one did not know better, one would think it was a fantastic event. … The hurricane season started a couple of months ago, and when watching TV, reading the papers or listening to the radio, it was obvious that the media was waiting with bated breath for the next disaster.  The season is half over and we can report no disasters.  They really are disappointed.

Like the wind, hurricane predictions keep shifting.  Hurricane forecaster William Gray's team downgraded its predictions again for the 2006 Atlantic storm season Friday [9/1/2006], saying 13 named storms are likely to form this year instead of 15. … Before hurricane season began June 1, Gray's team called for 17 named storms.  He trimmed that to 15 early last month.

Weather has become bogeyman, news staple.  It began as a mass e-mail in a certain Seattle office building on December's first day.  A cold front was arriving!  Snow!  Ice!  Untold inches for the city and surrounding area! … The cautious drove home after lunch.  The brave stayed behind.  And the snow never came.  Not even an inch.

Global Warming to Blame for Hot Weather Hyperbole.  A heat index of more than 100 degrees for days on end not only drains the body and spirit, but it also takes its toll on the thesaurus.  There is a limit to the number of ways to describe the heat and still sound relatively intelligent.

Silly Talk:  How many times have you heard a weatherman say that the sun will try to come out later in the day?  Sometimes their prediction turns out to be false and I wonder whether they would explain it by saying the sun didn't try hard enough.  But it's not just weathermen who use teleological explanations, ascribing purposeful behavior to inanimate objects.

The Media Rush to Duke's Defense.  Usually, reporters breathlessly take everything prosecutors and the police say at face value, often to devastating effect upon criminal defendants.  The "perp walk," in which a suspect is paraded publicly in handcuffs from place to place, often after officials have told television producers where to place their cameras, is only the most visible example of this practice.  The reporters get their shot.  The police get to portray the defendant, innocent or not, as dangerous (i.e. guilty) in the eyes of potential jurors.

All the news is a stage.  As they spin the Saddam trial and deride our soldiers in Iraq, the lesson is clear:  These media masters of theater are incapable of delivering real drama and good news unless they control the script.  Fortunately, you control the remote.

What's Right About America!  Last Sunday when I returned from church services I opened my hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and settled in with a cup of coffee to review the day's news.  It was a good thing I had already received my inspiration at church, or I could have easily become downright depressed over the negative headlines in nearly every section of the paper.  The majority of headlines on the front page of each section promised a story that would focus on the negative aspect of an event or issue, rather than the positive contributions people are making to fix the biggest problems we face.

Don't put much stock in the TV experts.  Stocks go up and down, but eventually, most go up.  So if you invest and hold on, odds are you'll do quite well.

Ending a losing streak:  The left is on another losing streak today, and so their intellectual leaders in the liberal media have gone back to the old playbook for an easy win that will get their team out of its slump.  This time, it is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which has been working for them since the days of Karl Marx.

Fred Barnes Calls Sheehan a "Crackpot," Rues Media Focus on Her.  Barnes criticized both her and the media's treatment of her:  "This woman wants to go in and tell the President that the war is about oil because the President wants to pay off his buddies.  She's a crackpot, and yet the press treats her as some important protestor."

The Brawley Case of the South:  [Scroll down] Reluctance to change a popular story line helps account for the strange press coverage of Cindy Sheehan.  That line pitted moral mom versus stone-hearted president.  When Ms. Sheehan's outbursts grew stranger, the press stayed with the soft line about a mother's grief and simply omitted her increasingly bizarre comments that American troops were "being sent to kill innocent people" in Iraq and that President Bush was "a filth spewer" and "an evil maniac" guilty of "blatant genocide."  The insurgents who killed her son Casey, on the other hand, were "freedom fighters."

Did someone mention Cindy Sheehan?

Let's keep arguing.  It's true that we have more semistructured "Crossfire"-style debates than ever before.  But much of this is rigidly preprogrammed sniping (I was once chastised by a TV producer for not interrupting other speakers more.  What a failure!)  Even when the sniping is downplayed, TV demands sharp sound bites, which pushes all talking heads toward more vehemence and simplemindedness.  Instant certainty becomes mandatory, a delivery style many talking heads start to regret before they're even out of the studio.  Where is the real debate?

None Dare Call It Fascism.  After Johnson's War on Poverty, Nixon's War on Drugs, and Carter's Energy Crisis, then came the premier liberal crisis of modern times, the Environmental Crisis.  The media predictably plays an enthusiastic accomplice in these schemes, not just because its members are mostly liberal, but more importantly, crises generate more readers, viewers, and listeners.  This is why the principal product American media sells to its customers is crisis, not information.



"The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."
— David Brinkley *    

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2020 by Andrew K. Dart


News Media Dishonesty
  ... aside from the specific cases cited above and elsewhere.

Bias is one thing, but sometimes newspaper and TV reporters are just overtly dishonest.

Overview and recap articles:

The Media-Democratic Fusion.  If one were to listen during the last few years to NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, or CNN, or read the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, then one would have believed the following:  A) Donald Trump worked with the Russians to throw and win the 2016 election.  As part of that skullduggery, frolicking amid prostitutes he urinated on a Moscow hotel bed to spite Barack Obama.  B) He was mentally incapacitated as president and should have been removed under the 25th Amendment.  C) In 2020, his campaign once more worked with the Russians to create an exact replica of Hunter Biden's laptop, replete with dozens of lurid fake photos and hundreds of cleverly doctored emails to smear the Biden family and aid his own reelection effort.  D) Trump as chief conspirator preplanned a violent and armed insurrection that sought to storm and permanently occupy the government, violently hijacking the balloting and seizing the presidency — resulting in the murder of a Capitol police officer and the subsequent deaths of other traumatized officers.  E) For the last eight years, none of Trump's political opponents have ever destroyed subpoenaed evidence, conspired to hire foreign nationals to compile false and lurid files on him to subvert his political campaigns, or used their political offices to help solicit foreign money for family lobbyists.  F) Trump is the first major candidate and politician who allegedly overvalued his real assets to obtain a loan that he repaid; the first to have concluded non-disclosure agreements with potential embarrassing liaisons; the first ex-president to remove sensitive files to his personal residence; and the first to phone a state official to whine about the integrity of the vote count.  G) He is the first losing presidential candidate or major politician to question an election result or to seek redress through government agencies to rectify the purported corruption of the balloting.

It is no wonder Americans are so confused.  Here are some of the lies the media intentionally spreads as they push the leftist agenda and seek to destroy anyone who gets in their way:
  •   The border agents whipped illegal immigrants.  The media, Justice Department and other Democrats knew this was a lie from day one but didn't care.
  •   Women are going to die because abortion is limited or prevented.  This is a despicable lie meant to scare everyone.  Not one state that restricts abortion prevents the termination of a pregnancy when the mother's life is in danger.
[...]
  •   The "Hands up don't shoot" lie was meant to gin up racial hate and division against white cops.  How many cops have been injured or killed because so many in the media and others spread this lie?
  •   That January 6th was an armed insurrection.  The FBI determined it wasn't planned or organized and no arms were confiscated. [...]
  •   That the 2020 election was pure as the driven snow.  The media and other Democrats know that many states intentionally violated election laws and that Mark Zuckerberg's money violated laws but don't care.
  •   The Antifa and BLM riots were mostly peaceful
  •   That the U.S has always been a racist country, that all whites are racist and privileged, and all other races are oppressed.
  •   That the vaccines will prevent the virus.  The media sought to silence anyone who disagreed with the false narrative.
  •   That the CDC based everything on science.
[...]
  •   That the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.  They made this up to bury the story before the election as they campaigned for Biden.
  •   That the science is settled that humans, fossil fuels, and CO2 cause warming.  There is not one piece of scientific data from the last 150 years that supports this theory, only easily manipulated computer models that have always been wrong.

Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization.  Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media.  But they grudgingly admitted that many liberal journalists of the last century were mostly professionals.  News divisions mostly reported the news rather than simply made it up.  Not so now with Big Tech and 21stt-century [sic] "woke" journalism.  Few reporters have yet offered apologies for helping hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that paralyzed the country for three years.  Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.  Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the "hands-up-don't shoot" Ferguson distortions.  Journalists promulgated misinformation about the "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.  They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant — but now utterly disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo — as well as the "Russian disinformation" yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.  Most recently, reporters spread serial untruths surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

When all the media narratives collapse.  [Scroll down]  Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed.  They viciously defamed the Covington boys.  They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump's denials only made them more certain.  They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. [...] Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty "white supremacy" narrative.  They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). [...] More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. [...] Any concern was "fearmongering politics."  And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. [...] We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. [...] We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. [...] We were — and still are! — being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn't in high schools at all.  Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is — in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states' education policies.  We all get things wrong.  What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party.  And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods.

Radio Free America — Rush's Legacy.  For decades — before the internet and satellite TV — news in America was controlled by a select few entities, all of which were closely aligned with the Democrat party.  ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN controlled television and radio news.  The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times set the tone for printed news.  The media and leftist politicians they supported were creating narratives to shape public opinion.  They crafted their narratives by being selective in what news they presented, or by outright distortion of facts. [...]
  •   Walter Cronkite told us the Vietnam war was lost after the Tet Offensive.  In fact, Tet was a devastating loss for the North Vietnamese.
  •   We were told that socialism was superior to capitalism.  It just needed to be implemented correctly.
  •   We were told that Ronald Reagan was a fool and a dangerous warmonger.  Yet he won the Cold War without firing a shot.
  •   We were told that Cuba was a workingman's paradise with free education and medical care.  Yet people were fleeing the island on anything that would float.
We knew what we observed didn't quite fit the narrative being presented, but we weren't sure why.  We began to question our worldview.  We were being gaslighted.

The Media That Cried Wolf.  "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is one of many of Aesop's fables. [...] The moral is that nobody believes a liar, even when he is telling the truth.  How is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old story relevant today?  Let's rewrite the fable bringing it up to date.  The shepherd boy today is the collection of social justice warriors throughout the media, academia, and entertainment worlds, basically the core of the modern Democrat Party.

The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin.  When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.  The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, Communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned. [...] MSNBC anchor Brian Williams sermonized about the so-called "fake news" epidemic.  Williams failed to remind us that he was removed as NBC's evening news anchor for serving up all sorts of fake details about his supposedly brave trips abroad in search of edgy news stories.  After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the co-hosts of the show CNN Newsroom collectively put up their hands in "hands up, don't shoot" solidarity — echoing a narrative of police murder later proved to be completely false by a lengthy federal investigation.

The Myth of the Good Old Media.  Donald Trump recently noted that the media had become much worse since Walter Cronkite, which is an honest mistake by a man who grew up as a Democrat leaning to the left.  But there was no "Good Old Honorable Media."  The establishment media have been utterly biased and often outright dishonest for many decades.  The 1965 CBS documentary Hunger in America began with outright lies, citing an infant dying in a hospital as the victim of malnutrition, which was pure invention.  The 1971 CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon actually took the answer of an assistant secretary of state to one question and edited it so that he was giving the answer to another question — and the documentary did that over and over again.

Journalistic standards have had nothing to do with the truth for a long time.  The media knows that Trump gave aid to Ukraine with nothing in return and Obama/Biden withheld aid and only gave a loan to Ukraine after they demanded and got a prosecutor fired, but they say Biden/Obama did nothing wrong and Trump should be impeached.  We don't have the right to hear from anyone who disagrees on climate change.  How does so much of the U.S have exceptionally low temperatures if 150 years of fossil fuel use, 150 years of CO2 increase and an exponential increase in the number of people worldwide causes warming?  While the media intentionally hides the truth for things negative to Democrats, they collude with Democrats to perpetrate a known lie that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016.  They perpetrated gossip to take out Kavanaugh in 2018 with no evidence.  They intentionally lie about what Trump said about Charlottesville to gin up racial hate and violence.  They treat congenital liars Schiff, Brennan, Clapper, Rice and others as credible people as they seek to destroy Trump and elect democrats.

If Anyone Should Be Impeached, It's the Liberal Media.  For decades now, in violation of the public trust, liberals in the American mainstream media — including the news, information, and entertainment media — have willfully corrupted the values and institutions that made the United States of America into the greatest nation in the history of humanity.  Their lies and immorality have wrought havoc on families, churches, schools, businesses, corporations, governments, and so on.  Contrary to their sacred duty to provide what is truthful, they have willfully presented false and misleading information to the public at large concerning, but not limited to, the following:  [#1] The election of Democrats over Republicans. [...] [#2] The role of good government — especially in most every fiscal matter. [...] [#3] The nature and details concerning radical Islam and Islam in general. [...] [#4] The nature and details of the burning of fossil fuels as it relates to global climate change — specifically what is often referred to as "global warming."

Trump, Kavanaugh, Lewandowski and our malignant Left.  This new attempt by the NYT and two wholly unethical reporters at that paper again crosses all lines of respectable, legitimate journalism.  The NYT is no longer, and has not been for ages, an honest broker of the news; it is rag that dispenses fake news intended to deceive.  The facts of this campaign to ruin Kavanaugh and his family, because the left wants to protect unimpeded abortion rights, are well-known and obvious.  They are also a stain on all those who participated in the scheme, a scarlet letter of a sort.  Nothing any of them ever writes again can be or will be trusted.  Nothing published by the NYT can be trusted.  Nothing on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS or NBC can be trusted.  They are all agents of corruption and deceit.

The Best Of CNN 2018.  CNN's version of "news" has become outright parody so many times in 2018 it was difficult to keep track of.  Thankfully, Mark Dice has done just that with a "Best of CNN" video that lays out just how idiotic the Establishment Media now is as they get completely lost within their own anti-Trump hysteria.  Anyone who still considers CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc., actual news needs to get their collective heads examined.  It's globalist propoganda — all of it.  [Video clip]

Who Watches the Media Watchdogs?  Who was it that told America Al Gore won the 2000 election?  Who told us the Fort Hood shooter wasn't an Islamist terrorist?  Who told us a meek and mild Michael Brown was shot with his hands up, begging to surrender?  Who told us CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood front in the U.S., is a "civil rights organization"?  Who is still telling us that after 9-11, there was a violent "backlash" against Muslims in America?  Who told us climate change is settled science?  Who ducked the story about abortionist Kermit Gosnell's Philadelphia slaughterhouse?  Who told us all the troubles in the Middle East are caused by Israel?  Who told us that Robert Mueller's list of indictments proves Trump colluded with Russia?  Who told us it was Trump who initiated the "policy" of family separation at the southern border?  Who ran a fake magazine cover to show Trump looming over a crying Honduran toddler?

Hall Monitor Nation.  The media relentlessly lied to the public about Hillary's health, denouncing conservatives as "conspiracy theorists" for mentioning it.  Then an alert citizen with an iPhone captured Hillary having to be carried to her car at the 9/11 memorial service in 2016.  Mainstream media outlets painted a cherubic picture of Michael Brown after he was fatally shot by Missouri.  He was a "gentle giant," gunned down like a dog as he plaintively cried, "Hands up! Don't shoot!"  HEY!  Wait a second!  How did that video get out of Brown manhandling a tiny Indian man while robbing a convenience store?  That should have been suppressed like the Broaddrick interview!  Would we ever have known about Monica Lewinsky, but for the Drudge Report publishing the blockbuster story that Newsweek had killed?  Currently, the establishment media are in a rage that the public has found out about the modern genocide being waged against white South African farmers.

The 2018 Breitbart News Fake News Awards.  Until you actually take the time to research the amount of lies and lies and lies the establishment media deliberately spread, you can't begin to fathom just how bad things are.  By the time I was done going through the entire year, I literally, no joke, had 11 pages of headlines to choose from for these awards.


Timely news and commentary:
This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2023 by Andrew K. Dart

Bring back the chaos then.  Less than a month after President Trump's inauguration, Time magazine rolled out the Democrat-RINO message of a chaotic White House.  Its proof was as thin as the hair atop John Fetterman's head.  Time reported, "Federal judges in four courts froze a hastily issued Executive Order barring certain immigrants from entering the country.  Intelligence officials leaked descriptions of classified intercepts in a winning attempt to force Trump to fire his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who had misled the nation about his ties with a Russian diplomat.  Then more leaks came, from current and former officials to the New York Times, asserting that Trump campaign aides and senior Russian intelligence officials had been in contact during the 2016 presidential campaign. [...]"  That was not chaos.  That was sabotage by the deep state and its seditious resistance.  The leaks were illegal and impossible to fact-check.  But reporters claim they need access and so they go with leaky stories regardless of how true they may be because they need access to even juicier stories that may or may not be true.

Univision Host Amplifies Florida Curriculum Hoax In Fox News GOP Debate.  The Univision co-host of the Fox News Republican presidential debate reinforced false leftist narratives Wednesday night when pressing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on his state's K-12 curriculum.  Univision's Ilia Calderon implied DeSantis promoted educational standards that suggested slavery benefitted the victims.  The question emanates from claims Vice President Kamala Harris fabricated this summer.  "Florida's new Black History curriculum says 'slaves developed skills that in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit,'" Calderon said, ignoring that the left-wing College Board has apparently made nearly identical statements.  "You have said, 'Slaves developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of it.'  But many are still hurt.  For descendants of slaves, this is personal.  What is your message to them?"  The Florida governor attacked the question as a "hoax" engineered by the vice president to smear Republicans as racist.

The Editor says...
Dishonest left-wing talking heads on TV often make little speeches and inject socialist talking points while pretending to ask a question.

Whose idea was it to invite Ilia Calderón?  How many Republicans watch Univision?  How many Univision viewers become Republicans?
Second GOP Debate Marred By Univision Moderator's Anti-American HATE and LIES.  The second GOP presidential primary debate Wednesday night was a case study in why the Republican Party shouldn't award debate moderation privileges to hostile and dishonest members of the liberal media.  While Fox Business Network occupied two of the moderator positions (Stuart Varney and Dana Perino), the third was given to Univision anchor Ilia Calderón.  Her questions were by far the most anti-American and dishonest; ranging from lies about gun violence being "unique" to America to blaming America for the drug trafficking at the southern border, and more.  In a question directed to North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Calderón peddled the liberal media's BIG LIE about gun violence:  "Mental health concerns are not unique to United States.  But gun violence is."  Back here in reality, Central American and South American countries were some of the most dangerous countries in the world.  Their violence was often cited as a primary driver of illegal immigration to the U.S. According to reporting from NPR, those countries have per capita violent gun death rates many times that of the U.S.

The ten commandments of liberalism.  Liberalism has been likened to a religious movement- a secular quest for heaven on earth.  Like legitimate religions, it has its own tenets.  Thou shalt seek social justice.  We're all in this together. [...] Thou shalt embrace diversity.  Diversity is our strength.  Not really.  Diverse forces flying off in their own direction weaken a society's locus.  Strength lies in overcoming diversity. [...] Liberal activism, especially since the advent of woke progressivism, has evolved into an atheistic, fundamentalist "religion."  Fundamentalism involves strict ideologic adherence, conformity, and maintenance of an in group-out group distinction.  At its core are ideological lay preachers who confer eternal damnation onto those heretics and apostates who challenge its self-appointed role of secular clergy.  Its apostles — media, academia, HR departments — are driven by self-righteous, prejudicial, vengeful hypocrisy.  Liberal dogma knows no compromise.  Nonconformists must be silenced, forcibly if necessary.

Tens of thousands march to kick off climate summit, demanding end to warming-causing fossil fuels.  Yelling that the future and their lives depend on ending fossil fuels, tens of thousands of protesters on Sunday kicked off a week where leaders will try once again to curb climate change primarily caused by coal, oil and natural gas.  But protesters say it's not going to be enough.  And they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers.

The Editor says...
Climate change is not "primarily caused by coal, oil and natural gas."  That assertion was thrown in by the Associated Press writer as if it were an undisputed fact.  The climate was constantly changing long before the industrial revolution created a demand for hydrocarbon fuels, among other things.  The output power of the Sun is not constant.  The eruption of one volcano can alter the weather for months.  China and India have no qualms about the emission of carbon dioxide, so any attempt to reduce our own CO2 byproducts will only hurt US.

Newsweek Failed to Disclose [an] Anti-Trump Op-Ed [was] Written by DeSantis Pollsters.  Corporate media outlet Newsweek has been caught failing to disclose that an opinion editorial attacking former President Donald Trump was written by two employees of a polling firm whose founder and CEO is the chief pollster for the pro-DeSantis SuperPAC Never Back Down.  The authors, Byron Allen and Amanda Iovino, are both employees of WPA Intelligence, and used their op-ed column to claim Trump is losing white voters, passing off Never Back Down talking points as thin analysis.  Newsweek makes no mention of WPA Intelligence's affiliation with Never Back Down.

BBC 'Disinformation' Reporter Caught Lying on Her Resume.  The BBC's so-called "Disinformation Correspondent" Marianna Spring has added yet more controversy to the corrupt "fact-checking" industry as she was caught lying on her resume.  Spring is facing claims that she filled her resume with "disinformation" about her experience in order to advance her career.  According to a report from the Daily Mail, about five years ago Spring was trying to get work as a freelancer in Moscow for U.S.-based news site Coda Story.  When Spring applied to the website's Editor-in-Chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, she said she had worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.

Climate scientist:  Yes, I cooked my Nature article on global warming — and here's why.  Consider this lengthy essay an exposé of a kind of Unified Field Theory of Academia-Media Corruption.  It's not so much that Patrick T. Brown reveals any new angles, but at the Free Press, the climate scientist connects many of the dots — and from the inside, at least at the time. [...] Brown still stands behind that paper, although he has since left his job in Academia for a non-profit where he can speak and act more freely.  In the narrow confines of his paper, limited to only climate change, he writes that his paper remains accurate and useful.  But because the media and Academia establishments are now limiting all discussion of practically any natural phenomena to "climate change," much of the causes of wildfires remains undiscussed — and so, therefore, do any practical policies that would mitigate them.  That is no accident, Brown argues, and it is very well known in scientific circles: [...]

The public isn't being told the full truth about the climate threat.  Patrick Brown, the co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California, has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science:  it's biased in favour of alarmism.  He published a paper in Nature magazine on the effect of climate change on wildfires.  In it he told the truth:  there was an effect.  But not the whole truth:  other factors play a big role in fires too.  On Maui, the failure of the electric utility to manage vegetation along power lines was a probable cause of the devastating recent fires, but climate change proved a convenient excuse.  Editors at journals such as Nature seem to prefer publishing simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change.  "It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility," wrote Brown.  So, after learning this lesson the hard way when his nuanced papers were rejected, he adapted his latest to suit their apparent prejudices — and it was published.

A Preview Of How The Dishonest Media Will Lie And Mislead About Trump's Show Trials.  As we wait for the political show trials of Donald Trump to begin, it's good to remember a hard and fast rule:  Quotes and summaries of events reported by the corporate media are always either half wrong or deliberately misleading.  A perfect example of that truism was provided this week by Axios' Mike Allen, who claimed Monday that Georgia Democrat prosecutor Fani Willis included an "Easter egg" in her I'm-a-very-serious-lawyer indictment.  Allen said that a specific portion of the documents had "a twist" that "could spoil" Trump's legal team's effort to have the entire case moved to federal court, a move that could possibly secure him a more favorable jury (as opposed to the pool of "marginalized, underserved and disadvantaged" voters he would surely get in Fulton County).  That "twist" is an open letter Trump sent to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in September 2021, which was after the former president was out of office, thus supposedly undercutting the Trump team's assertion that the criminal charges are purely federal in nature, rather than addressable at the county court level.  In that letter, the indictment notes, Trump solicited Raffensperger to "unlawfully" undo the 2020 election outcome "and announce the true winner."

Fox News and Martha MacCallum Caught Presenting Koch Brothers Activist as Fake GOP Voter in Wisconsin to Support Ron DeSantis.  By now we are all too familiar with the schemes and plots of the corporate media as they participate in the political illusion of choice game.  However, for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News debate moderator Martha MacCallum, this catch shreds the remaining little credibility they carried.  Fox News is hosting the GOP debate in Wisconsin.  During this build up segment, Martha MacCallum introduces the "random Republican voters" in Wisconsin who will watch the debate.  Except, well... there's a little problem.  MacCallum introduces Chris Lawrence as a "Wisconsin GOP voter" who seemingly supports Ron DeSantis.  However, MacCallum fails to mention that Chris Lawrence actually works for the Koch Network, who have recently pledged to spend $70 million to defeat President Trump.  Not only has Chris Lawrence worked for the Koch Network for the past 9 years, he is also the Senior Field Director for the Koch group Americans for Prosperity.  In essence, Lawrence is a political operative planted in the group by Fox News to support Ron DeSantis and make it appear like he is an innocuous voter.

A Reckoning on COVID Coverage.  [Scroll down]  In both the CDC and FDA examples, you didn't need to be a virologist or epidemiologist to expose the glaring weakness of their argument.  Yet no major conservative media did so at the time.  One Fox newscaster repeated the FDA's "You're not a horse" tweet, but he made no mention that IVM comes in human tablet form which the FDA has made hard to get.  Why not? [...] There occurred no critical analysis of an entire host of COVID issues, including lockdowns, medical establishment sabotage of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, vaccine side effects, issues with remdesivir, etc.  (A notable exception is the Epoch Times, which has offered extensive, scholarly and critical COVID coverage throughout.)  Another problem among conservative news outlets was that they routinely, robotically and uncritically printed Reuters and AP articles, taking their COVID reporting at face value.

Stop Saying That 'It Can't Happen Here' — It IS Happening Here.  But make no mistake, tyranny is here.  It's hidden by state-run news outlets that distract us from the truth with stories about little green men and Lizzo's latest chunky stunt.  They lie to Americans on their 24-hour news propaganda platforms about our own president's skullduggery with China and downplay or ignore the ramifications that chicanery presents, such as spy balloons left unfettered, a border left open, secret Chinese police stations, and more than 13,000 military-aged Chinese people flooding into our nation.  Our leaders lie to us with "The sky is falling" flapdoodle about how climate change and phantom white supremacy, not the tyranny they sponsor, will be our downfall.

The climate scaremongers:  Heatwave hysteria.  The New York Intelligencer magazine called it the 'Worldwide Heatwave', which according to the UN has 'engulfed the Northern Hemisphere'.  It was of course nothing of the sort, simply the usual mix of hot and cold weather we see every year. [...] The Telegraph made several claims which were not borne out by events.  For instance:
  [#1]   They claimed that 41.8C in Rome was a record.  However in 2005 temperatures there hit 42C.
  [#2]   They said temperatures in Sicily might reach 48C.  They got to 45C, well below the record of 48.8C.
  [#3]   They said temperatures in Madrid and Rome could reach 'mid to high 40s' — in the event, Madrid got to 39C and Rome to 41C.

Overheated.  The short version is an underwater Pacific Ocean volcano named Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, 490 feet under the waves, massively erupted, bigger than any other modern eruption, even bigger than Mount Pinatubo.  You never heard about it since it was underwater and nobody died.  But the erupting lava instantly vaporized fantastic, unimaginable amounts of sea water, which billowed into the atmosphere, changing the water composition of Earth's atmosphere and heating it up for years. [...] But I bet you never heard anything about Hunga Tonga, did you?  Thanks, media. [...] For the first time since tracking began, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is pegged out at the maximum, across the board.  Here's why corporate media is ignoring the most dramatic climate even in modern history:  because you can't legislate underwater volcanoes.  You can try, but they won't listen.  So what's the fun in that?  Corporate media only exists to further political ends.  Since volcanoes aren't subject to politics, why bother?

How modern media became the world's second-oldest profession.  The New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post (WaPo), from their perch atop the liberal media pyramid as it evolved in the wake of the JournoList, drove the content of the rest of the mainstream media ecosystem.  CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, HuffPo, Slate, Politico, and myriad other liberal outlets took their lead from NYT and WaPo.  As such, seeding a story in either of these outlets guaranteed media saturation.  It's widely recognized that NYT is the outlet of choice for the FBI and the national law enforcement (DOJ...) blob, while WaPo is the go-to outlet for the CIA and other elements of the national intelligence blob.  Both our law enforcement and intelligence communities worked overtime to seed the Russiagate stories, both knowing how false they were, into these outlets and into the conscience of the American public.  The question that must be asked here is, where were the real reporters?  Why would they risk their credibility reporting "stories" always laden with anonymous sources, from both the intelligence and law enforcement communities, without questioning the motives of those sources or outing them once it was known that the information they provide was false?

CNBC releases list of 'best and worst states to live in'.  CNBC recently released a remarkable ranking of "America's 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023."  Unsurprisingly, considering the source, the list consists exclusively of red states.  The rankings were purportedly based on crime rates, environmental quality, health care, quality and availability of childcare, and inclusiveness in state laws such as reproductive rights, protections against discrimination, and voting rights.  Oh, got it.  Guess we know how they weighted these factors.  Access to unfettered abortion ("reproductive rights"), worship of the LGBTQ community ("Protection against discrimination"), and the "right" to vote sans identification, via mail, and early and often, obviously superseded "crime rates."  [Lists omitted for brevity.]  Notice something oddly amusing, gentle readers?  Most of the states CNBC ranked as the worst in which to live and work are the states everyone is moving to, and several of the states it ranked as the best in which to live and work are the ones everyone is moving from.

The Left's 2020 'Fake Electors' Narrative Is Fake News.  Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump's "fake" electors accepted immunity deals.  Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors' testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct.  Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media's continued peddling of the "fake electors" narrative.  There were no "fake" electors.  There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia's certified vote.  Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers.  On the contrary, Trump's election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided.  And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii's three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.

Press roosters crow about Joe Biden for a fake economic sunrise.  Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell would have you think what Joe Biden thinks — that he is the hero of the American economy just because inflation has stopped ballooning: [...] It's garbage.  Joe Biden is still attempting to force people to buy electric cars and is handing out green goodies to people who claim they can control the climate.  There is also his intentional destruction of companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  The price of crude oil is down from its high but is still over 75% higher than it was before he took office.  (Note to Catherine: Please describe which of Biden's policies brought crude oil down.)  The price of energy affects everything.  Crude oil is used in over 6,000 products.  Statistical inflation increases have been reduced to 3% or 4% but Americans are still suffering.  He is forcing all federal projects to use prevailing wages which inflate costs.  He is taking away the ability for healthy people to buy reasonably priced health insurance policies.

Don't Believe The Leftist Media Narrative About The State of the 2024 Race.  To the surprise of no one, the leftist corporate media's coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been abysmal.  Predictably, their reporting is full of omissions, half truths, and wishful thinking.  Once again, they only report their preferred narratives, in a desperate attempt to persuade stupid people and gullible news outlets into believing them, including Conservative Inc.  As usual the leftist coastal elites are attempting to shape their perceptions into reality.

Climate Fact Check: June 2023 Edition.  Ten more false climate claims from June have already gone bust and are presented below.  [#1] Canadian forest fires caused by climate change?  Smoky American skies caused by Canadian wildfires are not new.  The historical record shows Canadian wildfires have darkened U.S. skies repeatedly since 1706. [...] [#4] Florida strawberries suffering from climate change?  As shown in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) chart [not seen here], Florida's strawberry harvests increased nearly 50 percent between 2001 and 2019.  [#5] Summers getting hotter?  The New York Times reported in "Tracking Dangerous Heat in the U.S." that: "Summer temperatures have become hotter and more extreme in recent decades."  Fact Check.  The New York Times uses the 1951-1980 global cooling period as the baseline temperature and ignores hot summers before 1940.

The Big Gaslight.  The term "gaslighting" was just selected word of the year because of its overuse.  But why would that usage increase have happened?  Maybe because the practice itself has become more common as a political weapon.  In practical parlance, "gaslighting" means trying to persuade others not to believe their "lying eyes," or not to believe what they already had known as established fact.  Recent examples of such disinformation themes include:
  •   The summer 2020 riots were not really riots but "mostly peaceful" demonstrations.
  •   The Hunter Biden laptop emails are not real but instead a Russian disinformation tactic.
  •   The U.S. southern border is closed.
  •   It was Republicans, not Democrats, who favored defunding the police.
  •   Voter ID requirements are actually voter suppression.
  •   Critical Race Theory is not really racist — and is not being taught in schools anyway.
  •   The Afghanistan surrender/retreat was really a great achievement and success.
Curiously, all these familiar ploys are authored by the same political camp.

13 Reasons Joe Biden Isn't The 'Ethical' President Time Magazine Claims.  The corporate media kicked off the week with another outrageous story to spin President Joe Biden, the man guilty of politically persecuting his chief political opponent and potentially selling American policy out to foreign adversaries, as an "ethical" president.  Biden is "reset[ting] the guardrails against ... abuses of power" and "increas[ing] public trust in government," reads a Time magazine article unironically titled, "Biden Is Resetting the Ethical Norms Trump Trampled as President."  "President Biden is proud to have restored respect for the rule of law and will not exploit his office with convention events on the White House lawn," Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates told the magazine.  "He will not exploit his office for political gain in the way that we saw in the last administration," Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added.  Below are 13 reasons Biden is not "ethical," and may in fact go down as one of the most corrupt and immoral presidents in American history.

The press just can't stop propping up Democrats.  I bet no one can recall when the media tried to help George Bush's and Donald Trump's poll numbers.  Nope, they continued their efforts to push them down because they always campaign for Democrats.

The Liberal Media Need Shock Treatment.
  •   The IRS whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden matter are ignored by the liberal media.
  •   Biden steals thousands of classified documents — without the authority to declassify them — when he was a senator and vice-president and the story disappears.
  •   FBI insiders bravely reveal the blatant pro-Democratic bias of the organization and their testimony is sloughed off.
  •   Joe Biden commits one embarrassing verbal gaffe after another, demonstrating an unarguable diminution of mental acuity, and the video clips are nowhere to be seen on the mainstream stations.
  •   James Comer finds one ironclad, tangible example after another of inappropriate, even illegal, financial dealings by the entire Biden family and Comer's investigation is dismissed by the liberal media as unfounded hearsay.
  •   Talk of the 2016 presidential election being stolen by President Trump from Hillary is hailed as heroic, patriotic protest, but presenting the mountains of indisputable evidence of 2020 election fraud committed by the Democrats against President Trump gets you branded as a traitor by the mainstream media.
This list of examples could go on and on, but for the sake of brevity and current relevance, we'll leave it there.

Here's How You Know Conservatives Are Winning.  If you want a good indication that conservatives are, at long last, scoring a few actual victories these days, look at the apoplexy it's causing those on the left.  A prime example is a piece written by Jill Lawrence, a former editor at USA Today, which posted on July 4 on MSNBC and carried the scary title:  "Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July."   It is a remarkable display of fearmongering, incoherence, and illogic.  "The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms," Lawrence writes.  "The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have.  The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing."  Ok.  So, how about some examples?

Has the mainstream press lost all desire to investigate climate alarmist claims?  Being something of a questioning soul, I have found mainstream news sources somewhat unsatisfactory in recent years — banal reporting, simplistic (and error-strewn) reporting and homages to vested interests have turned me off the commonly used channels for consuming the output of the fourth estate.  Having leafed through various fairly anodyne articles that mostly avoided the difficult questions of the day, tucked away on page 36 was a small article by the environment editor of The Times entitled "Antarctic Ice Melts to 'Shocking' Low".  Intrigued — because there are some fascinating observations coming from the world's oceans that are worthy of closer investigation — I read the article in more detail.  I was genuinely astonished.  Not, I should say, by the quality of the article, or the incisiveness of the reporting.  I was astonished by the extent — not of any ice loss — but of the twisting of facts to fit an agenda.  Bereft of nuance, we seem to be spiralling into a polarised world where broadsheet 'journalism' can see fit to distill context-free factoids into an easily-digestible apocalyptic pill to be popped down a reader's gullet: [...]

Under Biden, Fake News Soars to Whole New Level.  "Biden calls China's Xi a dictator; Beijing slams remark as 'provocation,'" headlined the Washington Post on June 20.  "Biden calls Xi a dictator, who was kept in the dark about spy balloon," chimed in the New York Times. [...] That is not exactly the same as saying "China's Xi Jinping is a dictator," or "Xi Jinping is like other dictators." Contrary to what the reports assume, Xi Jinping would have no problem with the label.  The People's Republic of China is a Communist country, and in Marxist-Leninist doctrine the dictatorship of the proletariat rules.  Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu-Wen and Xi Jinping are all totalitarian dictators in the true sense.  Marxist-Leninist doctrine allows no party but the Communist Party, and the Party decides who will run the show.  Xi Jinping is the man of the hour, and the notion he "didn't know" about the balloon is ludicrous.

Living in a Media World.  From National Public Radio (aka state radio), I've gained information that while guns are dangerous in the hands of most of our fellow citizens, they are necessary for transgendered Americans, who must stockpile them because of "hateful rhetoric."  Our brave sexual pioneers are being constantly threatened by Christian bigots and other vicious obscurantists.  NPR has also taught me that whatever riots followed the killing of George Floyd were mostly peaceful and that the slaying of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny was driven by contempt for a minority member struggling with mental illness.  The transgendered youth who murdered six people, including three children, in a Christian school in Nashville did not really cause this "tragedy."  The non-binary shooter was a victim of Christian prejudice and "the gun lobby," and what he did out of emotional desperation led to "an escalation of hate" against the LGBT community.  Yesterday I had the scales fall further from my eyes when I discovered that Hunter Biden had not committed a host of felonies, some of which implicated his dad.  Hunter is a recovering drug addict whom Joe Scarborough on MSNBC is defending against "hyperventilating right-wingers" who have taken their playbook from Joe McCarthy[.]

Did You Breathe Smoke Last Week?  This is Why.  Michael Walsh published the below piece on his the-pipeline.org last week, and in the meantime, the propaganda press has issued one full-throated [objection] after another.  I scan them, not one single writer has ever been to a forest, he is grabbing paras from another, and another grabs another paragraph, all ending in a mess of words that add up to something issued from the WEF's PR Department.  I thought for a split second Jim Geraghty at National Review would be sensible.  He was not.

Media blames 'climate change' for Canadian wildfires despite arrest of multiple arsonists.  Despite the arrest of multiple arsonists, the mainstream media in Canada seems intent on attributing the nation's recent wildfires to "climate change."  As wildfires continue to spread across western, and now central and eastern Canada, burning forestland and homes, the mainstream media continues to imply that climate change is the main culprit, despite a growing number of reports showing that arsonists have been arrested for allegedly setting dozens of fires.

Target Received Bomb Threats From the 'LGBTQ+ Community.' The Media Told a Different Story.  Target stores across America were evacuated over the weekend due to bomb threats that alleged the chain had "betrayed the LGBTQ+ community" and "bowed to the wishes of far-right extremists who want to exterminate us," according to police.  But that's not how some major news outlets presented the story.  The Washington Post, USA Today, and others buried or simply left out the nature of the emailed threats, all of which were false alarms, while prominently mentioning conservative backlash over Target's LGBT Pride merchandise.

The Leftist Green Agenda Is Buying Its Way Into The News.  One recent analysis found AP stories mentioned the phrases "climate change," "global warming," and "Climate disaster" hundreds of times since receiving grants totaling $8 million in early 2022.  The stated purpose of the money is to fund the AP's "Climate Journalism Initiative," which would employ 20 new reporters to "transform how the AP covers the climate story."  Perhaps it also funded the story that gave us Biden's hard-hat environmentalism?  In another example from the story, former top Clinton adviser John Podesta is heavily quoted in his role as overseer of the $369 billion for green energy from Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act.  The story fails to mention Podesta's political operative past, including his unofficial title of "White House clean-up chief" during the Clinton years.  Also quoted are the extreme eco-groups the Natural Resources Defense Council and Center for Biological Diversity.  They are all given a lot of space in a story with a lot of reach.  As a wire service, the hard-hat rebranding from the AP will appear in thousands of newspapers across the world as news.  We don't know if the millions the AP received for climate coverage played a role in helping Biden rebrand his energy policy, and that's precisely the point.

Blame the Media for the National Debt.  Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement to lift the debt ceiling, and nothing is going to change in the disturbing pattern of America's national debt climbing by leaps and bounds.  The best reason for pessimism?  Our Democrat-messaging media.  They can't be bothered to offer the most basic facts in budget coverage.  What is the budget for the current fiscal year?  What was the last budget deficit?  How large is the national debt?  These are questions that are rarely answered by news anchors.  What we get is a lot of horse-race jockeying and finger-pointing instead of facts.  They must think the viewers are too stupid to juggle numbers.

'The Official Truth': The End of Free Speech That Will End America.  According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as "truly the enemy of the people."  This is a majority view, held regardless of race:  "58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities" — all agree that the mainstream media has become their "enemy."  This scorching indictment of the Fourth Estate piggybacks similar polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Big Picture Explanation of What Happened in the Past 15 Years.  In the 50 years that preceded 2008, those same groups had an approach of distrust toward government, and the media apparatus had a very distinct supportive and cynical outlook, favorable to the leftist anti-government perspective.  Now, all of that has reversed — seemingly flipped.  In the 50 years that preceded 2008, media pushed a one-way narrative in defense of those who were "targeted" by the institutions and mechanisms of government.  As the activists railed against the regime, the media framed narratives to excuse the transparently guilty.  Now, that entire dynamic has reversed.  Now we see the media pushing a narrative in support of weaponized government targeting, and — here's the kicker — framing the transparently innocent.  The activists went from accusing government of wrongdoing and defending the transparently guilty — to aligning with government, excusing government wrongdoing, and helping to attack the transparently innocent.

Corporate Media's Coverage Of The Debt-Limit Fight Is Intolerably Dishonest.  [Scroll down]  Biden and Chuck Schumer gambled that Republicans would never unify around a debt-ceiling hike.  Schumer kept snarkily demanding McCarthy show the public his plans.  House Republicans did — one that "slashes" spending all the way back to 2022 levels and then allows one percent increases per year moving forward.  Everyone on the left, which is to say most people in political journalism, keep framing the debate as if this never happened.  So while we can't bore into the souls of the participants and expose their true feeling about a potential default, the fact is that the only people in that entire conversation who have already passed a hike to the debt limit are House Republicans.  Democrats could just sign off on it if they wanted.  No default.  No one, of course, expects Democrats to unilaterally surrender.  But media always covers negotiations over spending as if the organic center, the endpoint, the only reasonable place to be, stands not between the desires of two competing political parties or two competing branches of government but rather wherever Democrats happen to reside.

Harris-Harvard poll: liberal corporate media is radically out of touch with the views of Americans.  It's not just that corporate media rejects Americans' views.  They don't permit those views to be heard.  To start:  Majorities of Americans say it's *false* that Trump colluded with Russia.  The the Steele Dossier is also "false."  In other words, they view the story the US media aggressively centered for 3 years as a hoax and a fraud, yet NBC and CNN won't even air this view.  Americans also believe that the materials on the Hunter Biden laptop are real, and are not and never were "Russian disinformation."  So again, Americans view the claim that the US corporate media and CIA spread for weeks before the 2020 election — to help Biden win — as a fraud.  Majorties of Americans also believe:
  •   Hunter Biden engaged in criminal influence peddling using his father's name.
  •   The FBI is not investigating these crimes.
  •   Joe Biden participated in Hunter's illegal influence peddling and profiteering schemes.

Moscow on the Potomac.  Picture living in the Soviet Union circa 1980.  You wake up and turn on state-run radio.  The great war in Afghanistan is going exceptionally well.  You know that story is a lie, as your neighbors just buried their son, and your cousin tells of the horrors of fighting the Mujahideen in the frozen mountains.  The next story speaks of the great economic success of the most recent Five Year Plan.  You know that it's also a lie, as there has been no meat in the local stores for weeks, and the lines outside of bakeries are only getting longer. [...] Now, let's move to the present-day US. You get up and turn on any of the morning programs with the presenters who do not know how to stop smiling.  They tell us that the war in Ukraine is so successful that the US and its allies will be sending a few billion dollars more in weaponry shortly.  Next, you learn that inflation is actually good for you, as it is proof of a successful economy.  You see that many items that you used to buy are too expensive, but hey, but now you know it's a good thing.  And forget about baby formula.

An Appeal to the Thinkers Left Politically Abandoned.  [Scroll down]  No matter your political beliefs, you likely align yourself with one of these three broad philosophies [Conservatism, Progressivism, Independent].  News stories would make you think the nation is ideologically split down the middle though, between right and left.  However, 25% identify as Liberal or Progressive, while 73% of Americans identify as conservative or moderate.  You wouldn't be aware of this if you relied on Democrat messaging and a breathless press that constantly "informs" you otherwise.  Moderates historically defect from conservative thought when mainstream outlets do not report important news, or slant events unfavorably.

TV portrays Covid vax victims as Coronavirus deaths.  The three screenshots below come from the closing one-minute segment of the nightly news show News Watch 9 on NHK, the Japanese equivalent to the BBC, which aired on Monday.  The segment title in the top-right reads "Various feelings about returning to normality."  The full segment (which can be viewed with English subtitles [elsew]here) is a montage of footage contrasting Tokyo streets deserted during states of emergency and now full of tourists in addition to the three bereaved people below and photos of their dead family members.  You get the idea.  Now, based on what NHK shows them saying, what would you assume their family members died from?  If you assumed they died from Covid, as the millions of NHK viewers who saw the segment doubtlessly did, you'd be completely wrong.  The three people above are actually members of the Bereaved Families of Covid Vaccination Victims that I wrote about in November.  But the segment didn't mention that fact or anything about vaccines.  NHK's creatively deceptive editing generated such a tsunami of criticism on social media that it issued an apology at the end of News Watch 9 the following night.

CNN shows Anderson Cooper 360 and Primetime make NO mention of discredited FBI probe into baseless Trump-Russia claims network previously claimed were 'corroborated'.  Struggling CNN spent all of primetime ignoring John Durham's investigation that tore apart the FBI for launching a baseless probe into claims of Donald Trump's collusion with Russia.  The network's two highest profile nightly shows - Primetime and Anderson Cooper 360 - each failed to mention the probe by the special counsel in two hours of programming.  CNN was among liberal media outlets obsessed with Trump-Russia collusion claims when they first emerged, with since-fired former anchor Don Lemon claiming the infamous Steele Dossier had been partly corroborated.

The Left's 2020 'Fake Electors' Narrative Is Fake News.  Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump's "fake" electors accepted immunity deals.  Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors' testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct.  Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media's continued peddling of the "fake electors" narrative.  There were no "fake" electors.  There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia's certified vote.  Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers.  On the contrary, Trump's election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided.  And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii's three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.  The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.

Weaponizing Death.  Recently, there has been a spate of horrific murders.  The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype. [...] Unfortunately, these tragedies have increasingly become politicized.  Yet our media and politicians do not apply a common standard of reporting about either the victims, the killers, or the apparent motives and circumstances of the violence.  Instead, each horror is quickly analyzed for its political usefulness.  Then its details are selectively downplayed or emphasized, depending upon the political agenda at work.  A sad example was the terrible murder spree at the private Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.  A transgender male shot and killed six people, including three 9-year-old children.  Almost immediately, three media narratives emerged.  One, semi-automatic weapons, not the killer Audrey Hale, were mostly responsible for the massacre.  Two, the shooter's transgender identity profile played no role in the killing whatsoever.  Three, the public had no need to know of the contents of the shooter's "manifesto."

Biden's corrupt?  The MSM shrugs.  The MSM spent 3 years promoting a narrative that they knew was false about Donald Trump colluding with Russia.  Not one of them could possibly believe that it was true because it was so transparently a lie.  Yet they, the intelligence community, and every talking head spoke breathlessly about how the walls were closing in on Trump.  It took the Special Counsel to set them straight, and they still have their Pulitzer Prizes and half the country still believes their lies.  Yet Representative James Comer lays out a straightforward, obvious case that might not stand up in court yet but is clearly true that Joe Biden and his family have engaged in a corrupt influence peddling operation going back over a decade and the press not only shrugs but comes to the president's defense.  Comer didn't pass the "beyond the shadow of a doubt" standard, so it is a big nothing.  Look away.  Those millions of dollars from foreign nationals just MIGHT conceivably be legal or something.  [Tweet]

Most of the media doesn't care about anything unless the story fits their radical leftist agenda.  Every day we hear that there have been hundreds of mass shootings in the U.S this year yet we see the details on only a few.  Why don't we ever see the details of all the mass shootings in Chicago and elsewhere that involve black gang members shooting other blacks?  Why don't we see the names of the victims, the records of the shooters, and the motives?  The answer is it doesn't fit the agenda.  We see little interest in all the subway and street crimes in New York each day, but when a white Marine hero gets involved to protect people from a mentally ill, black, career criminal and accidentally kills him, he is accused of murder and there is endless coverage and violent protests.  A Hispanic commits a mass murder in Texas, and he has magically been converted to a white supremacist and we get huge coverage.  It reminds me of when the media converted the Hispanic shooter George Zimmerman to white in order to gin up racial hate and division.  When a black teen, who had robbed a store in Ferguson, Mo, reached for a white cop's gun, the cop defended himself and killed the teen.  Instead of telling the truth, the media and others regurgitated the fake "hands up don't shoot" narrative to gin up racial hate and violence.  How many cops have been killed and injured because of that false narrative?

How Liars Wreck a Country.  Last year, Forbes concluded that "only 16% of adults in the U.S. say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, and just 11% said the same for television news."  Anyone confronting these stats must conclude that our media are deeply incompetent or crooked or both.  The New York Times announced a few years ago that defeating Trump was the important thing.  They gave themselves a free pass to lie all they want.  How can they now reclaim their honor or their usefulness? [...] Unfortunately, our liberal journalists do not care about true or false.  When they hear an assertion, they try to determine whether it will help their agenda... their narrative.  If it won't help, they know they must attack the assertion, typically by declaring it debunked, fake news, or misinformation.

Andy Ngô sheds light on bizarre reporting about Allen, TX mass shooter Garcia in thread.  Full transparency, this has been the craziest media push after a mass shooting in a long while, and at this time this editor can honestly not say what is and isn't the truth which is a sad reflection of what our mainstream media have become.  As Twitchy readers know, within maybe two hours of the horrific shooting in Allen, Texas, major outlets were running with the story that Garcia 'may have had white supremacist beliefs' based on a patch someone 'close to the story' said they saw on his vest.  Then came the claims about Garcia's social media and tattoos ... which are all over the place.  Not to mention we're not even sure at this point what Garcia actually looked like because there are multiple pictures of different Hispanic men floating around social media.  So all of that is by itself, insane.  Yes?  But then add in the bizarre claims about Garcia having a white supremacist account created on some Russian social media site?

In a World Gone Mad, the Jordan Neelys Rule.  Jordan Neely was a mentally ill homeless man who had terrorized the citizens of New York — especially subway passengers — for many years.  He had been arrested at least 40 times for crimes ranging from assault to disorderly conduct and fare evasion.  And on the day of his death, several eyewitnesses report that Neely had made repeated threats to the well-being of passengers, "stating his willingness to 'hurt anyone' and saying that he was unbothered by the prospect of returning to jail or being killed," according to NRO.  [Tweet]  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Jordan Neely was "murdered" because he "was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself."  So passengers and bystanders are just supposed to allow Mr. Neely to terrorize and assault them with no thought of defending themselves?  You picked the wrong hobby horse to ride, AOC.  [Tweet]  AOC also didn't mention this attack on the gay community.  [Tweet]

Video Of Jordan Neely Defecating In A Subway Station, Then Walking Around Naked (NSFW).  A video of a schizophrenic homeless man, Jordan Neely, [defecating] and then walking around naked in a NYC subway station has surfaced.  The media and BLM have done their best to portray Neely as a friendly Micheal Jackson impersonator when in reality he was a dangerous individual with a long, violent arrest record with little regard for the law.  [Video clip]

Elon Musk Asks Why the Media Misrepresents Interracial Crime Stats "To Such an Extreme Degree".  Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned on Saturday why the establishment media misrepresents interracial crime statistics "to such an extreme degree."  The media's lies and false claims result in more innocent people being killed while inciting more anti-white violence than ever. [...] Now under the control of Musk, many hate hoaxes and disinformation is being countered, including media lies regarding Jordan Neely.

The Auckland Mobbing of Kellie-Jay Keen Was Fuelled by Media-Peddled Misinformation.  Kellie-Jay Keen is a five-foot-one, British middle-aged mother of four children who happens to believe that the word "woman" should be reserved for those who are biologically female.  As many Quillette readers and podcast listeners will already know, she headlined a March 25th women's rights event in Auckland called Let Women Speak, which was shut down by protester violence.  Keen has been under fire for years from trans-rights activists (who believe that men can become women, and vice versa, by acts of self-declaration).  And many such activists in New Zealand were quick to smear Keen as a fascist, on the basis that a small group of apparent Nazis had showed up in the vicinity of one of her recent events in Australia.

Senate Republicans Accuse Democrats, Media Allies of Smear Campaign against Conservative Justices.  Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee tore into their Democratic colleagues during a Tuesday hearing on Supreme Court ethics, accusing the lawmakers of joining with their ideological allies in the media to undermine the conservative Supreme Court majority because it stands in the way of their desired policy outcomes.  The hearing was scheduled by Judiciary Committee Democrats after ProPublica published a series of articles detailing Justice Clarence Thomas's relationship with Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.  Despite the fact that Crow has not had business before the Court during Thomas's tenure — with the exception of one case that was never taken up involving a company which Crow had a minority interest in — many Democrats have seized on the report to argue that the Court should adopt stricter ethics rules to prevent undue interference.

AP redefined 'insurrection' to include J6 protests, then redefined it again to exclude TN and MT protests that disrupted legislatures.  Writing in Human Events, Libby Emmons calls out the AP for redefining the word "insurrection" to apply to the January 6, 2021 demonstrators, and then, when that definition was applied by others to the left wing demonstrations that disrupted the Tennessee and Montana state legislatures, re-redefining the term so as to solely apply to its enemies, the pro-Trump demonstrators.  I's an absolutely clear instance of AP acting as a propaganda organ for the left, not as a news agency.

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.  For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals:  a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.  Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class.  A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election.  Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.  None of it was true.  After reviewing Hamilton 68's secret list, Twitter's safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing "real people" to be "unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse." [...] When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press.

Those scary guns the National Guard leaker possessed?  Airsoft rifles.  This captures so much about the MSM.  It combines total ignorance and open contempt for their audience along with a determined insistence that whatever the intelligence community says must be accepted at face value.  Before I get into the story I want to make clear that am not a fan of dropping classified documents into the public realm, with the exception of whistleblowers revealing the corruption of government.  I haven't followed this story closely, so I really haven't an opinion worth sharing about the whole affair. [...] With that out of the way, I do have a strong opinion about the propaganda we are being fed, and there appears to be proof that we are being lied to.

Teixeira Whistleblower Case Raises Troubling Questions.  Last week, 21-year-old low-level Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act and leaking sensitive defense material.  Among other things, the leaked top-secret documents show that the Biden administration has been misleading the public about the reality of the situation in Ukraine, overstating the country's success in its war with Russia.  The leaked documents, which appear to include briefings prepared for senior Pentagon leadership, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, contained assessments from a multitude of agencies.  The real story, however, is how corporate media organizations, rather than focusing on the content of the revealing documents themselves, chose to focus on finding out who leaked them.  Only after first working to identify Teixeira as the alleged whistleblower, which resulted in his arrest, both The Washington Post and The New York Times began to publish "exclusive" stories about classified information — some of it still unseen by the public — that had been leaked by Teixeira as if the discovery were their own.

'Too Big to Fail' Is Too Big Period.  A recent Gallup poll found that public confidence in our institutions is collapsing.  The only institutions that still garner majority confidence are the military and small businesses.  Nearly three quarters of Americans have lost confidence in government, big business, academia, and the media (among others).  The vast majority of our institutions are failing.  They aren't failing to survive.  They're failing to meet our expectations — which means they're failing to satisfy their reason for being. [...] Media haven't lost our confidence because they're boring.  They have lost it because they are untruthful.  They are pushing a narrative and are unwilling to sell unbiased news or entertainment at any price.

The Most Important Thing To Be Learned From The Teixeira (Ukraine Docs) Leaks.  America no longer has a free press; more specifically, the vast majority of the media are simply mouthpieces for the UniParty and/or the Biden-regime:  [Tweets]  But just keep telling yourselves that 2024 will be different than 2020[,] that all we need to do is nominate Trump or all that we need to do is "move on" past Trump[,] and that magically the media that routinely LIE to us will suddenly become truth-tellers, that the ballot-harvesters will disappear, that the Democrat mega-billionaires who are literally buying votes will go back to buying super-yachts.

Media Hoax: No, the Diary of Anne Frank Has Not Been Banned From Florida Schools.  Not a week goes by that the mainstream media and their allies in the Democratic party don't work hand in hand to misinform the public in an effort to push false narratives about their political opposition.  This week has certainly been no exception to that rule, with the Associated Press among the numerous media outlets that have distorted a Florida high school's decision to remove from their library a book that was very loosely based on the Diary of Anne Frank on the grounds that it minimized the Holocaust and depicted Frank as a young lesbian girl who fantasized about seeing women's breasts.  Katie Couric was among the many so-called "journalists" who shared the story:  [Tweet]  Note that the AP made no attempt to provide even the briefest of contexts in the headline, a dereliction of duty in my opinion since headlines (and the tweets that include them) are oftentimes all people will read about a story before forming an opinion.  At first glance, it makes it look like the grades 9-12 Florida school in question didn't want their students learning about the Holocaust and Frank's experiences, so they pulled the book.  Except that's not the situation at all.

BBC News caught spreading Disinformation which accidentally confirms COVID Vaccination is in fact to blame for Excess Deaths.  Official UK Government data has revealed a startling truth that has left the people in a state of disbelief.  England and Wales suffered the highest number of excess deaths in over half a century in 2022, and a non-stop weekly rally of excess deaths since week 16 of 2022 that equates to 62,543 excess deaths as of March 2023.  And thanks to the BBC lying to the public, we know that the main cause of this huge increase in deaths is COVID-19 vaccination.

Elon Musk Takes Ownership of the BBC After Epic Exchange With Dishonest Reporter.  Elon Musk participated in an interview on Tuesday evening and ended up taking ownership of the BBC by the time it was over.  In an epic exchange, the billionaire worked over James Clayton, a reporter from the British network, after he attempted to push claims about "hate speech" and COVID labeling on Twitter. [...] Musk employs a strategy throughout the interview that I've long been a fan of when interacting with the mainstream press.  Namely, he doesn't accept unproven premises that set up biased questions.  When a reporter says something meant to paint you into a corner, make them prove what they are saying is even true.

Miami Herald isn't fit to be fish wrapper.  When I wrote about Rebekah Jones' son's arrest I relied upon the reporting of the Journal for the facts of the case.  I chose to do so despite there being a Miami Herald story because it was biased and left out the most important point:  he wasn't arrested for sharing memes, as they claimed, but for making threats to shoot up a school.  That's a bit different.  [Tweets]  The Herald is still soft-pedaling the story and pushing the notion that Jones is being persecuted somehow.  And Jones is tweeting up a storm with an ever-changing story.  It is a remarkable example of gaslighting, and the Herald is crying about being criticized for pushing the story of an admitted felon.

Trump Isn't A Special Case, He's A Test Case.  Liberals might be scratching their heads over why potential Donald Trump rivals are rushing to denounce his indictment.  The reason is simple.  Conservative Republicans know that if this assault is allowed to stand, they will be next.  The left, as well as the rabble of never-Trump Republicans, like to tell everybody that the unprecedented measures taken against Trump — culminating with this week's indictment — are justified because he poses a unique threat to our precious democracy.  Just to review, we're talking about measures like Democrats impeaching him twice on the flimsiest of grounds.  Like federal law enforcement engaging in a coordinated campaign to smear him as a Russian stooge.  Like journalists dropping any shred of objectivity and professionalism to attack Trump, up to and including peddling obvious falsehoods.

Ukrainian Journalist Uses Makeup And Poses People To Make Them Look Injured.  This is not the first time Ukrainians have used this tactic of using crisis actors with fake blood and makeup to make them look like war victims.  [Video clip]

How the Media Doubles Down on Falsehood.  [Scroll down]  Still, there are people who blindly believe the media.  My older brother called me this week, and, in our conversation, we talked about how people, when challenged about this, would reply, "they can't put it in the newspapers if it isn't true."  Often when you point out the error of such a statement with facts, they give you that "deer in the headlights" look.  Hopefully, some events of late might actually open some people's eyes.  In an effort to look like they are combatting this issue, we are inundated with "misinformation checkers" (aka fact checkers), who often still miss out on important facts and whose checking often leans significantly to the Left.  And what's worse is that people still believe the administration despite its disastrous impacts on our nation: readiness, strength, increased drug traffic and deaths due to the open borders, the COVID and COVID vaccine lies, the inability of almost three-quarters of our youth to even qualify for military service, long-term inflation, high energy costs, woke policies, and so on; all with a complicit media.  And still the public hasn't learned.

Not ALL reporters are trash, but...  There are isolated instances of reporters who actually do their jobs, which last I checked was to provide information to people so that they can make informed choices in their lives.  But these days those reporters are rare, and fewer and fewer exist in mainstream news organizations.  Few politicians have the gumption to call them out, because all people who are required to deal with the media follow the dictum that "it is never wise to pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel."  That used to be true but is no longer.  Reporters don't care what you say, what is true, or whether you play nice with them.  They care about promoting whatever narrative they have in mind.  If you feed them what you want they will make you a hero; if not, expect to be savaged.

Mainstream Media's New Obsession: Labelling Criticism of 15-Minute Cities 'Conspiracy Theories'.  "Conspiracy theories" about 15-minute cities are "false", "unhinged", "dangerous" and "not to be believed", declare mainstream media in unified chorus.  "In recent years, conspiracy theories that were once almost unheard of have spread like wildfire, with a growing number of Australians now sceptical of things like vaccines, 5G and election results," News.com.au reports in one such article, titled, 'Inside the 15-minute city conspiracy theory sucking in gullible Australians'.  The article explains that 15-minutes cities (also called Smart Cities) are a common sense way of attempting to boost liveability for residents.  City dwellers in proposed Smart Cities — including Melbourne, Paris, London, Edmonton and Oxford — will have access to everything they need within a 15 to 20-minute walk, cycle or public transport trip, and that's really all there is to it.  "Anyone who has ever faced a long and painful commute will immediately see the appeal of having the daily essentials at their fingertips," the article assures readers.  However, "gullible Australians" who cannot appreciate common sense or convenience have been "sucked in" to a "dangerous conspiracy".  These "unhinged" conspiracy theorists actually believe that Smart Cities are "part of a secret plan by global elites to restrict people's freedom and movements" — a form of lockdown justified by climate action.

The Editor says...
When the government nannies tell you that "you have everything you need" in your neighborhood, they presume to know what you need, every minute of your life.  In a free country, you decide for yourself what you need, and where you would like to go.

Mainstream Journalism Is Dead, Long Live the Age of the Private Journalist.  You're more than well aware of just how deeply the mainstream media is obedient to the whims of the Democrat Party and leftist agendas.  It shamelessly pushes narratives that encourage strict obedience to the Democrat Party and even activist groups through fear and hate — with an emphasis on the "fear."  For instance, a couple of months ago, ABC News attempted to scare parents by telling them that if they don't cure their child's obesity right now, then they will have it for the rest of their lives and that includes all the health problems and issues that come with it.  The article encourages parents not to do this slowly by changing up their diet and having them get plenty of exercise, but by giving them weight loss drugs.  CBS just so happened to have a report on a new weight loss drug for kids, and it just so happened to be out at the time of the report and at your local drug store no less!

The Editor says...
That's not a news report, it's an infomercial.

Rathergate redux at the NYT?  And the media wonder why no one believes them any longer.  Earlier today, John picked up NPR's critical take on Rolling Stone's coverage of an arrest of an ABC News producer last year.  Be sure to read it if you missed it, but it's not the only mainstream media outlet that should be embarrassed this week.  Over the weekend, the New York Times dragged up the hoary conspiracy theory of the 1980 October Surprise, with a single source claiming he'd been duped into it 43 years ago — Ben Barnes.  Some readers may remember Ben Barnes from another conspiracy theory: the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) story that blew up in the faces of CBS News execs in late 2004.

Rolling Stone Magazine Faces New Journalism Scandal After Misleading Readers in a Big Way.  [Scroll down]  This is not the first time Rolling Stone has abused and discarded facts about a major story in order to (possibly) push an agenda.  The magazine landed in serious hot water several years ago after publishing a "bombshell" report about a gang rape on the University of Virginia campus.  That "bombshell," though, turned out to be entirely fabricated.  That story led to a major defamation case against the magazine.  They were found guilty, and the resulting damages ultimately resulted in the sale of the magazine.  Of course, the magazine has a well-known leftward bent, more recently calling Democrat Joe Manchin a destroyer of worlds and attacking ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The case of Siegel's report on Meek, however, isn't so much a story of lefty reporting.  It's a story of the inherent corruption of the media in general.

Time Is Running Out To Speak Freely About Free Speech In America.  Donald Trump's rise, his successful use of social media, and new media's refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship.  With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government's definition of "truth" and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.  The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.  We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.  But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.

Democrat Plans [are] Looking Bad, So Biden Pivots Again.  The left knows that the only way it can achieve its long-term goals is if the populace is not paying attention.  If the American people, or a large portion of them, at least, are spending all day on TikTok or Twitter or Facebook arguing about often petty and ridiculous ideas and fads, or, for the ones actually paying attention, are talking about irrelevant issues, the left knows that no one will notice when the left is doing something that will change the course of society for generations, in the most negative ways imaginable, or feverishly covering up the massive failures of their own ideology and policies.  These distractions are not something, at this juncture, that any rational American can afford to pay attention to.  The left is launching an all-out assault on society and the culture, a battlefield maneuver that has failed time and again in the past and resulted in countless deaths around the world.  You cannot afford to be distracted by the media.

Wonder why most of the media aren't trusted?  It is no wonder we have so much political corruption when the media are so biased.  They will create fictional stories to go after Republicans while burying true stories about Democrats.  It is absolutely pathetic!  And not once have they asked for scientific data to justify the destruction of companies that produce reasonably priced energy... because they don't care.  We have an absolutely corrupt and incompetent man as president who is actively destroying America with radical, extreme policies and massive taxpayer money to political supporters, and most of the media cheer about how great his policies are.

Save it for the jury.
Sacramento Bee Apologizes for Saying Charlie Kirk Called to 'Lynch' Transgenders.  The Sacramento Bee, a Northern California-based newspaper, has apologized for falsely claiming that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called to "lynch" transgenders.  Charlie Kirk had been scheduled to speak at the University of California Davis on Tuesday when Sacramento Bee opinion writer Hannah Holzer called the activist "another fascist" and said that he wanted to lynch transgender people.

The Democrat-Media Insurrection Myth.  The storyline put together by what passes for our news media is that Trump led an armed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 that necessitated a House Committee investigation of what happened that day (actually for the political motive to recommend Trump for an indictment in advance of the 2024 election).  The media's job, including CNN, MSNBC, and most newspapers was to refer confidently to "the Jan. 6 insurrection" as if that were a settled fact already in the history books.  What passes for our news media did not say that some people believe it was an insurrection and others believe it was only a riot by some buffoons and then present the facts and let the peasants decide what they thought about the matter.  No, what passes for our news media needed to state the conclusion of that "investigation" long before it was completed.

They Are Intolerant, Divisive, And Anti-Liberty — Call Them Leftists, Not Liberals.  Democrats have moved so far to the left in recent years that they should no longer be called "liberals," unless the true liberals among them start to stand up to the leftists who have taken over.  The term is misleading, giving the impression that Democrats support individual freedoms and accept people of different viewpoints, when increasingly they do not.  The word "liberal" gives yet more power to those who seek to take more of our liberties.  Right-leaning publications often use the term "liberal" when "leftist" would be better.  On the other hand, left-leaning newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times like to use the word "liberal" to describe their own illiberal political views.  It obfuscates how Democrats and their media allies have become more extreme, supporting censorship, authoritarianism, and racial division:  Twitter staff who denied conservatives their right to free speech and eagerly complied with censorship demands from the federal government were described by the Post as milquetoast "liberal employees."  MSNBC says those pushing the tyranny of wokeness are just naughty-sounding "liberal rascals."

Cable News Is Riddled With War Profiteers.  The problem with cable news is that — outside of perhaps Tucker Carlson, who seems genuinely committed to exposing truths and has paid the price for it in the form of the Majority Leader calling for his censorship from the Senate floor — it's not news.  It's state propaganda, by and for the special interests that have purchased the state.  These special interests include big agriculture, big pharma, and, of course, the private weapons manufacturers that comprise the military-industrial complex.

Trust the Science: White people driving cars are poisoning POC in LA.  When earnest reporters at the LA Times got ahold of the study, they couldn't wait to dissect the possible racism contained within.  Make the scientific argle-bargle accessible to your everyday white drivers (aka "THE BAD GUYS") so they would be educated on their transgressions, feel miserable about themselves, self-flagellate, and change their habits of perpetual vehicular oppression.  [Excerpt omitted for brevity, among other things.]  That lad certainly has all the SJW codewords down.  In another column, a second LA Times type waxes on about his drives, how he tries not to drive, and how guilty he should feel every time he drives.

The actual insurrection in DC went unpunished.  For two years now, we have heard about an insurrection that everyone knows was bogus.  The media deliberately lied in its vain attempt to ruin President Donald John Trump — one in a series of attempts by the real deniers of election results.  Tucker Carlson's revelation that the Capitol Police incited peaceful protesters has been dismissed by a media obsessed with lying.  The key to Pravda — the Soviet version of propaganda — was not to get people to believe it, but to get people to stop following the news.  Judging by television ratings in the 21st century, it is working.  It indoctrinates Americans to believe they are powerless and that resistance is futile.  So the lies continue.

Treason of the Science Journals.  At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments.  What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken.  In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.  New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory.  Fauci then cited the paper — in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published — as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.  "There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve," Fauci said at a presidential briefing on April 17, 2020, exactly one month after "Proximal Origin" was published.

AP Promotes Unfounded and Non-Evidenced Israeli Claim That Pro Trump Twitter Accounts Are Bots Attacking DeSantis and Haley.  As many major stories have shown in the past few years, the big battle over human control is taking place on social media platforms as they continue to be manipulated by government agencies.  The Twitter Files released have shown just how extensive the government manipulation of information has become.  The U.S. State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Defense Dept, and a host of ancillary networked agencies and public-private partnership all occupy this space.  Essentially, it is a fight for control of the public psyche.  In addition to the Twitter Files, stories averse to the interests of the state (Hunter Biden laptop) and fake stories created in the interest of the state (Trump-Russia) are all manipulated by the network of intelligence agencies, quasi government actors and the social media platforms.  This is not debated any longer.  There is overwhelming evidence of this reality now.

The Death of Expertise.  The "experts" told us that inflation was transitory, that the Green New Deal would lower energy prices, that trillions in new government spending costs nothing in taxes, and that Joe Biden's crippling recession reflects economic strength.  They told us that free speech is dangerous; that disinformation governance boards don't promote government propaganda; and that government agencies' blacklisting of news sites, social media content, and public dissent is something other than unconstitutional censorship.  They told us that border walls don't work, that skyrocketing illegal immigration is imaginary, that drug-traffickers aren't killing record numbers of Americans, that illegal aliens cost American taxpayers nothing, and that concern for border security is racist.  They told us that the deadly retreat from Afghanistan was a humanitarian success; that NATO has a military obligation to defend non-NATO Ukraine; that Russia blew up its own Nord Stream natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea; that fighting a lethal proxy war with Russia won't increase the likelihood of nuclear conflagration; and that escalating hostilities with Russia, China, and North Korea won't risk sparking World War III.  The "experts" were wrong again and again, but they held the most fashionable opinions.

CNN and Election Disinformation.  My friend and I sometimes argue about media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.  Why do they spread misinformation?
  A.   Are they grossly uninformed?
  B.   Do they know the truth but tell falsehoods anyway?
  C.   Do they think we are stupid or naïve?
My buddy feels that the media outlets know the truth but lie about it.  To me, it is more complicated.  The nice-looking journalists who read the teleprompters are genuinely ignorant.  On the other hand, the news producers probably know the truth but spread misinformation anyway.  Producers are the ones who select the topics, construct the programs, and hire the special analysts.

The Only Thing Conspiratorial About The Covid Lab-Leak Theory Was Media's Coordinated Dismissal Of It.  This week, Democrat activists posing as journalists were forced to admit a hard truth millions of Americans have known for years: The outbreak of the Covid-19 virus most likely came as the result of a lab leak in China. [...] Conservatives, who had considered evidence of a possible lab leak from the beginning, have seen this routine before and remember well the coordinated squelching of a dissenting origin theory.  We know exactly how these same self-professed truth-seekers went out of their way to accuse anyone who considered the possibility that Covid leaked out of a Chinese lab of promoting a "debunked" "conspiracy theory."  "This question about the Wuhan lab — we know it's been debunked, that this virus was man-made or modified or anything like that," then-MSNBC host Kasie Hunt previously said. "The Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis Is A Conspiracy Theory, Not Science," a June 2021 headline from Forbes reads.  Other outlets that attempted to dismiss the theory include NPR, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, CNN, NBC, and The New York Times, just to name a few.

Former Reuters science reporter: The media is lying about CO2 and a "climate crisis".  This corruption of news reporting into narrative journalism has been apparent for years to climate-hysteria skeptics.  Until recently, however, that revolution-by-evolution process hadn't become apparent to most of the rest of the populace.  Now, however, with all sorts of new data coming out about masks and natural immunity in the COVID pandemic, many more people have seen The Science exposed as based entirely on political agenda.  The mainstream-media refusal to cover new and conclusive meta-analyses of scientific studies that refute their three-year narratives in support of government emergency rule now demonstrates that corruption on a much broader scale.

Habitual liars: Democrats and the media blame Trump for Ohio train carnage.  A disastrous chemical spill occurs in East Palestine, Ohio, and Biden and Mayor Pete don't say a word or visit for weeks.  Shouldn't the media stop pretending that Biden is empathetic?  (Had the event involved a firearm, you know they would have been on site in less than 24 hours to exploit the tragedy as a means to a political end.)  After three weeks, President Trump shows up and the media goes into protection mode, blaming him for the carnage, asserting his "deregulations" were to blame[,] even though his rule-cutting had nothing to do with the cause of the wreck.  Yet, even if Trump's policies were to blame, wouldn't that be all the more reason for Biden and Mayor Pete to go?  I mean, they sure love to blame Trump for everything.  If Trump actually undid crucial safety regulations, shouldn't Biden and Mayor Pete have reinstated the measures?  [A recent] article in Politico shows the deplorable priorities of a significant majority of journalists.  They clearly care more about covering up for Biden's incompetence and inaction than they do about the people suffering from the chemical spill.

America Is Becoming a Corrupt Country.  Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails and had her staff literally take a hammer to destroy a hard drive.  Who are we to question the purity of her intentions?  The FBI has been corrupted at the top and lied about Donald Trump as candidate and president.  The great American newspapers published these lies — and won Pulitzers for it.  Now, it's clear their journalists were either duped or knowingly dishonest.  Yet, they still have the Pulitzers.  Fifty-one intelligence officials signed a dishonest letter just before the 2020 elections discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop and claiming it was probably a Russian hoax.  So what?  This steady drift toward dishonesty and toleration of blatant open hypocrisy is a cancer at the heart of American culture.

Are Helicopters Racist?  I call your attention to [...] the Los Angeles Times, more particularly a story that ran in the paper's Sunday print edition but appeared online Friday evening.  Los Angeles Police Department and County Sheriff's Department helicopters fly lower over black neighborhoods than others, we are told, causing all manner of misery for those living below.  Left unsaid but implicit in the article is that the only possible explanation for this is racism among the people flying the noisy whirlybirds.  The article is truly a shining example of agenda-driven journalism, in which the reporter, Jeong Park, had to ignore every last bit of relevant information regarding both air traffic control and crime in South Los Angeles so as to assign malign intent among the airborne cops and bring this embarrassment to print.  He even linked to an FAA document he apparently believed supported the argument, but which in fact undercuts it.  The piece's many deficiencies have been brought to the attention of several editors at the paper, yet as of this writing it remains online and uncorrected.

Truth in Government.  Whether it is the mainstream media, the social media giants, academia, Hollywood, or corporate America, these institutions lie about everything.  They lie that climate change is a mortal threat to civilization.  It's not.  In fact, there has been zero warming for the last eight years.  Has the media reported that?  They lie that gun violence is out of control.  It is not.  Americans are safer from guns 2023 more so than at any time in our history.  Your chances of being killed by a gun is lower by orders of magnitude less than your chances of getting hit by lightning.  They lie about abortion involving women's health when it is really the murder of children in the womb.  They lie that the nation has secure borders as millions illegally enter our country including terrorists and drug runners.  They lie that the rich pay no taxes despite the U.S. having the most regressive tax regime in the world where our richest citizens pay a disproportionate percentage of the nation's taxes.  They even lie about basic biology, exploiting the sad plight of victims of gender dysphoria.  In recent years there has been a 4000% increase in young females claiming to be the opposite sex.  Is no one in our vaunted institutions — academia or the media — interested in how this could be happening?  They lie about the police being murderous brutes when the truth is that overwhelmingly the police are honest, brave, and fair public servants doing a thankless job to keep our citizenry safe from criminals.  Americans need to demand truth from all our institutions.

Poll: Half Say Media Intend to Mislead, Misinform Public.  Fifty percent of Americans say the national media intend to mislead, misinform, and persuade the public, as just 35 percent say most news organizations could be relied upon, a Gallup and Knight Foundation poll found Tuesday.  While 50 percent say the national media tried to push a false narrative, only 25 percent say the national media do not intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.  Twenty-three percent neither agreed nor disagreed.

Canadian Broadcast Corporation: 'Freedom' is a Far-Right Rallying Cry.  I find myself at a loss for words after reading an article from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) on how the word "freedom" has become a "far-right" buzzword.  After pondering and deliberating and contemplating and a lot of other synonyms for "thinking" I found in the thesaurus, I eventually decided the best approach to this topic is an honest one.  This is the craziest, crazy-pants article from Crazytown I've ever read. [...] The premise?  The word "freedom" has become a dangerous "rallying cry" for right wingers in the Great White North, and, presumably, beyond.

Panel that awarded Pulitzers for Russiagate stories mum after scathing exposé on reporting failures.  The panel that awarded Pulitzer Prizes to the New York Times and Washington Post for reporting related to the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative has gone mum as it faces new scrutiny following publication of a four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) documenting the establishment media pillars' lapses from their claimed journalistic standards.  The 19-member Pulitzer Prize board for 2017-2018 was comprised of various journalists, professors and writers, including several current or former staff members of the New York Times or Washington Post.  Just The News reached out to 13 members of the panel to find out if the CJR exposé had prompted second thoughts about the Russiagate prizes.  Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute had an auto reply set, saying he was out of the office, while Steve Coll, former dean of Columbia Journalism School, had an auto-reply saying he is on sabbatical.  None of the other board members replied.

The Media Keep Lying To Protect Ilhan Omar.  After the House voted to deny Rep. Ilhan Omar a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee — using a precedent Democrats recently created but suddenly find deeply offensive — AP tweeted: "BREAKING: House Republicans have voted to oust Democratic Rep Ihan [sic] Omar from the House Foreign Affairs committee.  The vote to remove the Somali-born Muslim lawmaker came after her past comments critical of Israel."  Almost two years ago to the day, the Associated Press reported on the House removing another congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, from her committee assignments like so:  "BREAKING: The U.S. House votes to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees for spreading violent, racist rhetoric."  You'll notice that when Democrats denied Taylor Greene a committee seat it was "the House," but it is "House Republicans" when Omar is booted (and this was the case on NPR, PBS, Yahoo!, etc.).  House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has the power to unilaterally eject Reps.  Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the intelligence committee, but the entire House was needed to remove Omar.  Obviously both votes were largely along partisan lines, as almost all votes are these days.  It's a newsworthy fact, no doubt.  Yet AP editors left the partisan aspect of the story out of the headline for only one of the incidents, even though Democrats were the ones creating the precedent.

It is no wonder the media has lost the trust of the people.  No matter how many false predictions the UN, Biden, Kerry, Gore, and others make about natural resources causing an existential threat of climate change, the media just repeats the false predictions and calls it settled science.  People who tell the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally are falsely called climate change deniers to shut them up.  These false predictions are greatly harming the poor and middle class, but the subjective and biased media clearly doesn't care.  The media claims they care about laws and corruption, but they campaign for corrupt, career criminals like the Bidens and the Clintons.  The media claims that no one is above the law and the Justice Department is now an independent agency that doesn't care about political affiliation.  That is the biggest lie of all. [...] Journalists who believe it is their job to push a political agenda instead of reporting objectively and factually is a much dangerous threat to our survival as a great country than anyone who challenges elections.

The Supreme Court Is At The Heart Of America's Racial Division.  If you are trying to make sense of how our nation has become so toxic, a good starting point is the Supreme Court's 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.  That case radically altered existing law so that, for the first time in our history, it was impossible for any "public figure" to bring a successful defamation suit. [...] Since the 1960s, progressives have been using the race card to demonize and defame their ideological opponents.  In that vein, it would be hard to imagine a more classically defamatory article than that penned the other day by Renée Graham, an associate editor of the Boston Globe:  "Ron DeSantis's Fear of American History."  Graham outrageously slanders DeSantis by claiming that racism motivated him.  She compares DeSantis's refusal to allow the wildly ideological African American Studies AP Course to be taught in Florida to the actions of a slave owner who refused to allow his slaves to learn to read.  It is, she says, an act of "white supremacy."  Graham paints DeSantis as an evil and immoral person.  This relieves her of the burden of addressing the substance of the DeSantis Administration's complaints about the College Board course.  It is enough that she labels him a racist and white supremacist.

Straight Talk on the Latest Riots.  Riots broke out in Memphis and are rapidly spreading through the usual urban areas.  The purported rationale is the horrific beating to death in Memphis of Tyre Nichols captured on video and released by the police.  As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) observes, Nichols' beating was administered by "Black officers in a majority Black city with a Black police chief."  The officers involved have been criminally charged, but the media to which every Black killed by a cop is just proof that we are still in the Selma, Alabama world of decades ago — another case of some innocent Black person victimized by racist oppressors.  The odious Joy Reid at MSNBC highlighted a guest who blames Nichols' death on "white supremacy" and CNN's Van Jones opined "The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black.  But they still may have been driven by racism."

Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud.  Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages.  Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club:  Hamilton 68.  If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.  Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington PostMother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group's "research."  Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.

The Associated Press Says It's 'Dehumanizing' to Use 'the' in Descriptions — Such as 'the French'.  Are you among the group of Americans who use the word "the"?  Are you part of the people who employ it in the act of description?  If so, you've been told to stop — by The AP.  The Associated Press Stylebook has long been considered an authority on ways in which to format the printed word.  Many media outlets conform to its standards, and the latest one is quite a stunner.

Media outlets keep promoting 'forest defenders' and ignoring that they shot a police officer.  I really believed that once the facts of this story came out it would be over.  There was some room for questioning the story of what happened in the forest south of Atlanta initially.  Police told one story and protesters told another.  According to police, they entered the forest to clear out protesters who are trespassing and preventing construction of an approved project.  They found one man under a tent.  They asked him to come out and instead he fired a gun and hit a Georgia State Trooper in the abdomen.  The trooper was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery.  The protester who fired the shot was killed by police.  The alternative story pushed by protesters and their supporters is that the victim had been unarmed and "murdered" by police.  The trooper who was shot?  They strongly suggested he might have been hit by friendly fire.  Since then the official police version of events has been confirmed by evidence and the protesters' version has fallen apart.

Antagonizing the Scapegoats.  [Scroll down] [I]n view of the press' oft-repeated rush to smear its chosen targets, sinister suspicions suggest themselves.  The maudlin interviewer weepily bearing witness to the moving testimony of Jussie Smollett; the glum commentators endlessly recycling the "fine people" hoax; the monotonous chorus solemnly commemorating the all-but-sacred martyrdom of petty thugs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; the casual assignment of guilt by accusation (to police officers, the Covington school kids, Kyle Rittenhouse) — all this arouses our suspicion.  Even when these obscene abuses of the public trust are exposed, there is no retraction or apology; the brazen liars simply soldier on.  Perhaps no institution is more conspicuous in its utter moral failure than the contemporary American print, broadcast, and online media. [...] Contemporary journalists are, as a general rule, embarrassingly unimpressive, poorly educated, self-promoting hacks having no understanding of (or loyalty to) the American heritage (a phrase from which many would probably recoil as a "racist dog whistle").  Journalists represent the worst the American university system has to offer a society its brainwashed graduates routinely degrade.  Any truth a media activist deems detrimental (like the Twitter files) is buried.  Any lie deemed serviceable — no matter how dubious the source or implausible the claim — is amplified and promoted.  Every cherished falsehood is blared at the public until it's exposed, then the activist simply trumpets the next serviceable lie (e.g. "Russia Collusion," "hands up, don't shoot," and so on).

Media Claims 'Largely Peaceful Protest' in Atlanta, Mayor Quickly Demolishes That.  Saturday night brought rioting by Antifa people attacking police targets in Atlanta.  Now, the night started with a protest against the police, in the memory of one of their comrades, Manuel Teran.  Teran had been shot and killed by the police after he allegedly shot a cop, when police came to clear protesters out of an area they had been occupying where the city is constructing a police training center.  The radicals have had several people, in multiple incidents, arrested for domestic terrorism at the site, including for throwing Molotov cocktails at the police.

Who You Gonna Call (When the Cops Aren't Allowed to Help You)?  [Scroll down] If you need further evidence that the [Los Angeles] Times story is an advocacy piece, read no further than the first person quoted.  It is Patrisse Cullors, a cousin of Anderson and, though it goes unmentioned in the story, a major beneficiary of the BLM real estate windfall.  "There is no reason why law enforcement should be the first responders at traffic stops or accidents," Cullors said.  There are actually many reasons they should, but the reporter apparently wasn't up to the task of challenging Cullors.  Next comes the canard inevitably raised in stories like this.  Activists argue, says the Times, "that communities of color have historically borne the brunt of such enforcement."  Put aside the fact that in Los Angeles, as in every other city, "communities of color" are those where crime is highest.

What Is the NOTAM? Flights Grounded Across U.S. After Major System Outage.  All flights have been grounded and paused across the U.S. early this morning until 9 a.m. EST after the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM (notice to air missions) system failed, causing travel chaos across the country.  The FAA asked in a statement for time "to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information."  The FAA has said it systems was coming back online but that the NOTAM systems was still being restored.

The Editor says...
A NOTAM is a notice to airmen, not a notice to air missions.

Reluctant correction:
The definition of NOTAM.  was apparently changed 12/2/2021 to be more politically correct.

Here's the Problem With Mike Rogers 'Lunging' at Matt Gaetz on the House Floor.  In the midst of the battle over Kevin McCarthy becoming Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Rogers set newsrooms ablaze by "lunging" at Rep. Matt Gaetz.  At the time, Gaetz and others had just finished securing major concessions from McCarthy, and one ballot later, the deal would finally be sealed.  On the prior ballot, though, Rogers, who is set to chair the Armed Services Committee, was apparently angered by Gaetz voting present and chose to lash out.  Because Gaetz was on the receiving end of the rage, the press largely took Rogers' side, exuding a "serves him right" attitude about the ordeal.  That's not a shock given the press will take the side of essentially anyone who opposes someone they themselves oppose.

2022, Perhaps the Apex Year for an Era of Pretending.  In an era of great pretending, when you speak factual and pain truth, people thirsting will come for the sanity.  Yes, there's only so much hypocritical nuttery that can possibly fit into the social fabric of a nation, and we're full.  I see that dynamic starting to play out now.  Mainstream media are openly mocked everywhere for being the Baghdad Bob's they are.  The MSM credibility and influence essentially destroyed by the Potemkin villages and Eco-chambers they built around themselves.  The congressional J6 committee is yet another example of a proclaimed thermonuclear ICBM missile that ended up delivering a contrasting reality.  The fading whistle & pop akin to a dysfunctional bottle rocket.

Why you can't trust 'the science' about anything anymore.  To those who still care about science as a process that uses honest data to produce replicable results, the last couple of decades has been disheartening when it comes to everything from so-called "Anthropogenic Climate Change," to COVID's origins and treatments, to so-called "transgenderism."  Still, we consoled ourselves that there were certain things so cut-and-dried that they could not yield to politics.  For example, how certain diseases affect men and women differently.  A monkeypox study in The Lancet blows even that faint hope to smithereens.  There is something bizarre about a Lancet article entitled "Human monkeypox virus infection in women and non-binary individuals during the 2022 outbreaks: a global case series."  It had all the earmarks of a reputable study. [...] The fact that it referred to non-binary individuals was a bit concerning, but the casual reader would assume that the article focused on biological women, no matter what they claimed to be.  After all, we've long known that diseases affect men and women differently, including the fact that men and women perceive the onset of a heart attack in very different ways.  That makes sense, given that men and women have different organs, bone structures, and hormones.  The devil, as always, is in the details.  It turns out that almost half of the "women" involved in this study about monkeypox in women... were men.

Liberal media made slew of dubious claims about climate change, year-end report finds.  The Associated Press took $8 million in donations to fund climate coverage in 2022, with the news cooperative and several other major media publications engaged in dubious claims about climate change, according to a new, exclusive year-end report.  The "Climate Fact Check 2022" report, presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), stated that "climate alarmists" and members of the media engaged in claims about the relationship between manmade emissions and natural disasters, claims that clashed with "reality and science."  In February, the Associated Press admitted that they would assign more than 24 journalists across the globe to cover "climate issues" after receiving more than $8 million over three years from various organizations.

Keystone Pipeline Allowed to Reopen, Media Continues Lying about Spill.  The Keystone Pipeline runs from Alberta to Houston, almost in a straight line south down "Tornado Alley" in America's midwest, running from North Dakota to Texas.  The overall pipeline is 2,687 miles long, is owned by TC Energy, and carries 860,000 barrels of oil per day through its 30 inch diameter tubes.  The current price of oil per barrel is roughly $80.  So the pipeline is moving roughly $68.8 million worth of oil through its pipeline every day, or $25.1 billion per year.  The pipeline shut down on December 7th after a spill of 14,000 barrels of oil in rural North Kansas.  The Calgary, Canada-based company received permission from the Biden administration on Friday to reopen the pipeline, though it did not give a definitive date when it would restart.

A Life Beyond the State.  According to one estimate, the average American adult, whether on the right or the left, spends almost 12 hours a day watching and listening to media, much of it news and political commentary.  This interaction with media is largely a one-way street.  Viewers are not engaged in active discussion or thought; they are told what to think, even as they are encouraged to "like" and "follow."  With most media, such as the mainstream news channels or morning shows, they are harangued by anchors who raise their voices, lift their eyebrows, and employ all sorts of other gestures and expressions to end the discussion even as they read the "news."  Viewers are made to feel that they are ignorant or immoral if they dare to disagree.  This has certainly been the case from the beginning with reporting on COVID, when liberal media endorsed the Chinese lie that the disease originated in a "wet market" and followed up with a string of justifications for lockdowns and restrictions, including long-term school closures.  As with everything else, liberal media served as the handmaiden of the State.  This dependence on media is deadly for the life of democracy.

The 'Twitter Files' are the final nail in the media's credibility.  The vicious and coordinated attacks by mainstream news figures against independent journalist Matt Taibbi in recent days reinforce an essential point about the American news media: they think we are all drooling idiots.  Their response to Taibbi's release of the Twitter Files, which details the company's calculated suppression of a major news story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, underscores this exceedingly low estimation of its audience.  Outlets like MSNBC and the New York Times seem to hope the American public is ignorant of the fact that they got every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop story wrong from the start.  While real journalists tenaciously reported the facts, such as the New York Post's Miranda Devine , a disinformation machine comprised of Biden campaign officials, intelligence officials, liberal journalists, and Twitter higher-ups (with the omission of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was strangely left out of the loop) acted in brazen coordination to suppress the story.

MSM: Democrats Can't Be Election Deniers.  There's always a double standard for the radical left.  There's always a reason why it's "different" when Democrats say something racist, break the law, or question the results of an election.  Case in point:  Time magazine published an article claiming that Republicans who dub House Minority leader-elect Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) an "election denier" are wrong in doing so.  There's no doubt that Jeffries is an election denier.  We have the receipts.  He is actually one of many Democrats who have called Donald Trump an illegitimate president.  According to Time, the term "election denier" has become associated with Republicans who say the 2020 election was stolen because they "assert without evidence there was fraud in 2020 voting."  But the author says that calling Jeffries an "election denier" is misleading and "conflates different issues."  The real issue, which goes unsaid in the article, is that Jeffries and others in his party who have routinely denied the results of presidential elections won by Republicans are Democrats.  Since 2000, every single presidential election won by a Republican has been called "illegitimate" by Democrats.

Leftist Journo Still Believes Hunter Laptop Is Russian Misinformation and Trump Colluded with Russia.  In 2020, when we first learned about Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," we all knew it was real.  It wasn't until after the 2020 election was over that the mainstream media slowly but surely started to concede the laptop was genuine, but at least one left-wing journalist still thinks the laptop story is dubious.  David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief of Mother Jones and an MSNBC analyst, apparently still believes that the laptop isn't legit.

The Media Undertakers Must be Getting Exhausted.  Among the stories Twitter actively blocked was that of the salacious Hunter Biden laptop contents.  So shocking was the material on this laptop, so revealing of the perversity of Hunter and the corruption of Joe Biden, that one post-election survey reports that 16% of persons who voted for Biden said they would not have had they known of the contents of this laptop.  One major newspaper, the NY Post, did publish a story about it, and several online posters did as well.  The most detailed, should you care to see for yourself what was on the laptop, is [elsew]here.  The laptop reveals not only sexual depravity and illegal drug use, but corruption and influence buying as well.  Taibbi reports "Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be 'unsafe'."  The only person it was unsafe for was Joe Biden, the Democrat party's presidential candidate[.]  Even then, White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about it.  Several insiders questioned what was going on and received the untrue defense that the material was removed because it violated the company's "hacked materials" policy.  The laptop was never hacked.  It was abandoned by Hunter, then was unlocked while in the possession of the NY Post, and it and its contents are authentic.  At any other time in history of which I am aware such a scandal would have been front-page news in the weeks preceding an election.

Vicious dogma.  The COVID pandemic is just a flash in the pan when compared to the dogmatic hysteria surrounding most aspects of weather and climate.  When CBS News periodically covered the enormous blanket of snow that recently fell on Buffalo, NY and environs, they would then immediately jump to coverage of the world climate conference (COP 27) at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.  The abrupt juxtaposition caused me to burst out laughing.  Never once was it mentioned that the historically significant northeast blizzard happened a month before the beginning of winter, i.e., the middle of autumn.  Just about every news story regarding floods, wildland fires, drops in lake and river levels, high tides, etc. winds up including "climate change" as a significant component.  In this year's political season, even candidates for city council included climate activism in their proposed agendas.  Imagine, local political hacks saving their constituents from the weather.

McCarthy: Twitter Disclosures Show Biden Doesn't Want Free Speech, I Wonder What Facebook, Google Are Hiding.  On Friday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Jesse Watters Primetime," House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reacted to disclosures on Twitter's suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by saying he thinks the disclosures are just the tip of the iceberg, he wonders what internal machinations at Facebook and Google have been hidden, and the disclosures show "why the White House is going after Elon.  They do not want him to tell the truth and they do not want to have free speech."

FTX scammer gets kid gloves treatment by the media.  Sam Bankman-Fried, who often goes by SBF, has been doing a media tour to rehabilitate his reputation after scamming his customers out of billions of dollars.  It's actually going very well indeed for him.  Unsurprisingly so, since his victims were average folks and he spread his ill-gotten gains around to the media and the Democrat politicians. [...] It really has been remarkable how easily SBF has been treated.  His scam wasn't penny ante — it was large enough to rank among the largest ever pulled off.  In less than 3 years he managed to build an empire, acquire the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, partner with Mercedes Benz, advertise his wares with some of the biggest stars in the world, become the 2nd-largest donor to the Democrats after George Soros, and be lionized by the media as a savior figure.

IRS Watchdog Destroys Media Claim That Trump Ordered Audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe.  Liberal media outlets like the New York Times and MSNBC claimed former President Donald Trump ordered audits of former FBI chiefs James Comey and Andrew McCabe for political payback.  According to the Internal Revenue Service's internal watchdog, that's not true.  The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration determined that the IRS randomly selected Comey and McCabe for audits of their tax returns from 2017 and 2019 as part of a program the IRS uses to refine its technology, according to a report released Thursday.  The watchdog found no evidence of malfeasance on the part of Trump or any Trump-appointed officials.

Google Gives Millions To Boost Leftist Disinformation Peddlers Of Legacy Media.  Google and its subsidiary YouTube just gave a $13.2 million grant to the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network to combat "misinformation," in the Big Tech sites' "single largest grant in fact-checking" yet and the latest instance of the medical, political, and media establishments tightening their grip on the free-flowing digital public square.  For years, the world's elites have been trying to recapture the control they lost to the free flow of information on the internet.  They've shelled out millions for celebrities like Prince Harry to slander the First Amendment and hand-wring about an alleged "disinformation" crisis.  They've pressured individual tech companies to ban content, people, and entire platforms.  The Biden administration even tried implementing its own, now-defunct "Ministry of Truth," all to convince us that freedom of speech and inquiry is somehow dangerous and that the threat can only be neutralized by "trusted" experts seizing dominance of the information exchange.

Now the Truth Can Be Told.  In focusing on America's rising rates of violent crime leading up to the midterm elections, Republicans were routinely accused of playing a dirty trick on voters.  "We don't really have a common definition of what crime means," crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher asserted in an October interview with NPR.  Apparently, the range of activities that constituted a violation of statute made it difficult to discern what voters meant when they said "crime."  And when "crime" wasn't a nebulous concept that eluded the unsophisticated, it was cast as a problem presided over by Republicans.

Our Lying Idiot Media Really Is That Dumb.  It's not just that the media lies all the time in the service of its cause, but that its wretches no longer have the skill or even understanding to tell the lies apart from the truth.  And so they simplify matters in the timeless fashion of extremists by declaring everything they believe to be the truth and everything that they disagree with to be a lie.  Or disinformation.  Faced with Hunter Biden's laptop, they phone up a few experts from their contact list who tell them what they want to hear and the media proclaims it's Russian disinformation.  Faced with actual Russian disinformation accusing Trump of frolicking with prostitutes in Moscow, they cheerfully amplify it as loudly as they can.  And they are too dumb to even know any better.  Like their old Pravda predecessors in Moscow, they don't know anything except the party line.

NPR says bombs in Israel are "rare." They aren't, but the truth doesn't serve their narrative.  These are not "rare" events.  There are an average of more than one pipe bomb every day this year.  If NPR was doing its job, it would have known this information and reported on it way before deadly bombs exploded in Jerusalem.  And it is pretty obvious that the "rare" statement was meant to downplay Palestinian terror, and to avoid mentioning that this has been the bloodiest year for Israelis since 2015, and second deadliest since 2009.

FTX now right-wing according to Forbes.  I kid you not.  FTX — the crypto-fraud firm that just collapsed — is the brainchild of Sam Bankman-Fried, the second largest Democrat donor in the country.  He helped find Joe Biden's campaign, contributing more than any other than our old friend George Soros.  He spent $40 million on Democrats, and promised them $1 billion to help win the 2024 presidential campaign. [...] What is hilarious about this — actually there are many things hilarious about this — is that FTX is actually a darling of Forbes Magazine, who helped it vault to the top of the crypto world.  Forbes hyped the company, hyped Sam Bankman-Fried as a genius, and along with the New York Times turned SBF into a hero, genius inventor.  To the extent that Caroline the fraud was enabled, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Times were the chief enablers.

Yesterday's conspiracy theories are today's legacy media news reports.  [Thread reader] NBC Bay Area reporter @BigadShaban reported on the Pelosi attack based on source who saw body cam footage.  It was almost identical to what Miguel Almaguer said 11/4 that got him suspended.  DA says Pelosi will "need to explain... why he did what he did" [...] WashPost reports after all that "secret docs!" drama, Trump raid produced basically nothing of interest. [...] NBC reports the January 6 committee will ignore "law enforcement failures" in final report, instead making it all about Trump. [...] NYT reports the #2 man in the Oath Keepers, Greg McWhirter, was actually an FBI informant, talking to them for months ahead of the Capitol attack.  Oh the day he was supposed to testify in the Rhodes trial, McWhirter, 40, had a heart attack & couldn't. [...] If you said any of this — about January 6 and the FBI, Paul Pelosi, the Trump raid, SBF's virtue signaling — you would have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist.  And now, in the post-midterms news cycle... they are all just true.  Period.

Progressive 'Journalists' Claim Georgia Is Limiting Voting to Celebrate Robert E. Lee.  [Scroll down] In fact, Stacey Abrams, the Voting Rights Maven™, voted for the law about which these people are complaining.  As of this writing, none of the aforementioned media activists have bothered to correct their original tweets with the correct information.  Why not?  Because they are not journalists, they are activists.  Their aim is to influence, not inform.  Sure, we expect authentic reporters to make mistakes from time to time.  But one of the signs that an individual in the media is trying to practice journalism is how they respond when they mess up.  In this case, these folks didn't correct their error because the reality is that none of them care about the truth.  Their audience believes Georgia is stopping voting in order to honor a Confederate general, and that is just fine with them.  No wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low.

We Need To Talk About What Didn't Happen On Election Day.  A number of noteworthy things did not happen on Election Day 2022.  Everyone knows the red wave didn't happen.  But that isn't all that didn't happen.  The chaos at the polls that was going to be caused by the presence of citizen poll watchers did not happen.  Despite being hysterically predicted (hoped for?) over the past 18 months by reporters who wrote the same story with some version of the same headline [...] Every story breathlessly claimed that having citizen observers engaged in the election process was a "threat to democracy," with NBC News warning in early November, "Election officials are bracing for conspiracy-fueled threats — while still hoping for the best..."  The Biden administration did its part to sow seeds of dissension by launching in June 2021 a national hotline at the FBI for reporting "threats to election officials and workers," creating a task force to address "threats against election workers."  But nary a word from Attorney General Merrick Garland about protecting poll watchers, even though federal law makes it a crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with poll watchers.  Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be "Peaceful.  Lawful.  Honest."  Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process.

Voter Suppression: ABC, CBS Cast Doubt on Midterms, Blaming Violent Right-Wingers.  On Monday morning ahead of Tuesday's almost certain Republican tsunami at the ballot box, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS Mornings moved away from a fixation on abortion or vague warnings about the fate of democracy if voters choose incorrectly.  Instead, they engaged in voter suppression by hinting a vote for Republicans could be enabling violent individuals who'd cause violence and/or cause serious doubts to be raised about our country's future.

Six Reasons Corporate Media Failed to Frame MAGA for Paul Pelosi Incident.  [#5]  The media are trying to frame us for a crime they support — the physical assault of politicians.  [Numerous tweets]  Do the corporate media honestly believe we have forgotten how they laughed and made jokes about a Democrat assaulting Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)?  Do the media honestly believe we have forgotten how after Rep. Steve Scalise was shot by a Democrat assassin, they dropped the story after 18 hours?  Do the media believe we have forgotten how they blamed Trump for the leftists who caused violence at his rallies or how they ignored the firebombing of countless pregnancy centers, the SWAT-ing of Republican politicians, and told us Antifa attacks on state capitols were mostly peaceful?  And do the media honestly believe we have forgotten how after the terrorists in Black Lives Matter and Antifa wounded up to 50(!) Secret Service agents during a 2020 attack on the White House, the corporate media ridiculed Trump over reports of him being rushed to a secure location?

Could [Democrat] Politics Be Even More Childish?  Within the press, the demise of our political system is a talking point that must be repeated.  Jane Pauley, a longtime media operative for the Democratic Party, has tried to convince voters "the very future of our democracy" is in the balance in next week's elections.  Former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote last spring that "democracy is at stake" because the Republicans will lead a coup in 2024 to ensure the GOP presidential nominee is declared the winner of that election.  More recently, MSNBC political analyst and one-time New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas put the left's madness on full display.  He has decided that the midterms are "a contest between part of the country that believes in continued and expanded liberal democracy, effort to pursue a more perfect union, and a part of the country that is now attracted to the idea of fascism in the United States."  And of course the New York Times can't help itself.  It's screaming that "many voters" are "frustrated and resigned" because they have "fears" over the "fate of democracy."  If they do, it's because the media, in their constant campaigning for Democrats, have unleashed the torrent of lies.

Left-Wing Media Insists the Parrot Isn't Dead.  It's Just Resting.  In a couple of weeks, John Fetterman will be back home in Braddock, Penn., in his loft apartment, playing with his kids and continuing to recover from what we now know was a devastating stroke.  It's what he should have been doing since he suffered the stroke in May.  But because he and his campaign hid the severity of his condition from the media, his party, and especially his opponent, Mehmet Oz, it came as a shock to see the 49-year-old giant of a man in such a confused state.  Whether it was due to hubris or simple denial of reality, Fetterman's vulnerabilities were exposed for all to see.  That is, everyone but a certain segment of the left-wing media that is working very hard to tell us that we didn't see what we actually saw, that Fetterman didn't do that badly.

Seven Times the Media Lied about 'Disinformation' that was True.  Just about every time the mainstream media tells you that something is "disinformation," it turns out that it's the media that is pushing the lies.  Last week, Just the News put together a list of seven important times that the media told everyone something was "disinformation," but that later turned out to be true.  The list includes:
  •   Hunter Biden's Laptop
  •   The origins of COVID-19
  •   COVID-19 vaccines
  •   Pelosi's Jan. 6 role and calling in the National Guard
  •   The mistreatment of Jan. 6 defendants
  •   Irregularities in the 2020 election
  •   Critical race theory in schools

UPI hiding the decline in order to promote climate change agenda.  Last week, I ran across a UPI story that left me scratching my head.  Titled "In a surprise, global greenhouse gas emissions seem to be on the decline" by Daniel J. Graeber, it's purportedly evidence that there's good news on the climate change front.  The Joe Biden Inflation Reduction Act has caused a bunch of people to buy electric cars, and that, along with wind farms and increased solar capacity, shows we may have turned the corner on climate change, according to data.  Except here's the problem.  The data suggests no such thing.

The Mainstream Media Lied to Me About Conservatives.  Looking back, when I was a Democrat, I never personally knew any Republicans or conservatives yet my entire perception of what they stood for was based on left-leaning media filtering.  I felt that I was being informed when I was being highly misinformed about what an entire political spectrum generally believes and advocates for.  Even more so, as a black man, I bought into the bad-faith political position that "all Republicans & conservatives are racist".

Democrats Whistle Past the Graveyard.  November is almost upon us, and the consensus among credible election analysts is that any momentum the Democrats enjoyed this summer has evaporated.  Despite implausible claims about the ephemeral "Dobbs effect," the election was always destined to be about inflation, crime, immigration, and President Joe Biden's job performance — all issues that favor Republicans.  Yet the Democrats and the corporate media continue to engage in magical thinking about the midterms.  Their latest fantasy involves an all-but-extinct creature known as the "split-ticket voter."  After telling us for years that political polarization has rendered such voters very rare, publications such as the Washington Post have suddenly decided that they could be pivotal this year in several key battleground states.  Oddly enough, a number of corporate media outlets have simultaneously come to the same conclusion.

Using a "fact check" to deceive.  "Fact checks" are almost always intended to deceive or distract you.  During the Trump Administration, every "fact checker" in America needed you to know that every bit of hyperbole Donald Trump spewed out was a "lie," not an intentional exaggeration for effect and that the Babylon Bee was not a credible news source.  Fact checks, in other words, are about spinning you.  Misleading you.  Burning up straw men and then declaring victory.

Leftist Newspaper Lies about First-Trimester Abortion.  The leftist publication The Guardian published images of gestational tissue from the first nine weeks of pregnancy and misleadingly called it an embryo.  An article titled "What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks — in pictures," featured eight photos of the gestational sac, implying that it was an embryo, even though the embryo was removed during the abortion.  "Each of the images in the article shows a gestational sac but clearly the embryonic and fetal human beings have been removed from the images," OB-GYN Christina Francis told the Daily Caller.

Democrats take 'fake news' to new lows.  Democrats are expanding their misinformation campaign, devising new avenues to promote a false narrative.  In a stunning revelation, The Washington Examiner reported that over the course of the last year, Democrats have launched fake "local media outlets" to swing elections in favor of their candidates. [...] They've stooped to literal fake news outlets to promote themselves, which some might consider election interference, all while they lecture the public about the threat of Republicans and continue with the January 6 theatrical performance.  WaPo — which seeks to elect Democrats and push the leftist agenda everyday — complains about newspapers who push a partisan agenda.  They hilariously act like they are unbiased.  Yet, the WaPo and the NYT both won Pulitzers for peddling lies about Russia collusion for years.  How many times does the media have to see the absolute corruption and partisanship of the FBI as they target Trump and other Republicans with fictional crimes, while protecting criminals like Hillary and Biden, before they tell the public the truth instead of pretending that they are apolitical and that no one is above the law?

Huge percentage of Americans have 'no trust' in newspapers, TV, radio.  According to Gallup, nearly 4 in 10 Americans (38%) have "no trust" in America's media, including newspapers, TV and radio.  The political divide is stark.  Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents trust the media, but 70% of Democrats, whose agenda largely has been adopted by reporters and publishers, trust the media.  Overall, 34% of respondents trust the mass media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly."  But "Just 7% of Americans have 'a great deal' of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have 'a fair amount,'" the poll said.  At the other end of the scale, 28% say they do not have very much confidence and 38% say they have "none at all."

Reuters "fact check:"  We never said the vaccines would prevent anything.  There has been a considerable amount of understandable buzz and unrest making the rounds since a Pfizer executive was forced to admit to a European Union conference that they never tested their COVID vaccine to see if it would actually prevent infections or halt the transmission of the virus prior to it being rushed onto the market and mandated almost universally.  This has left many health officials and elected officials with pie on their faces and vocal sectors of the public demanding answers.  Stepping into the breach to quell the uproar this weekend is Reuters, publishing yet another one of their infamous "fact checks" to clear the matter up.

Hours Before Decrying 'Horrifying Images,' Mayorkas Was Told CBP Agents Did Not Whip Haitian Migrants.  You may recall an incident last year in which Leftists from Biden, all the way down to your neighbor with the "In This House We Believe" sign became absolutely apoplectic over the cruel and sadistic border agents riding down Haitian immigrants and whipping them.  Whipping them, I say!  Comparisons were even made to antebellum slavery as the Left worked itself into a full-on foaming-at-the-mouth rage.  Except, of course, that wasn't the case.  The agents were using the reins to control the horses and no immigrants were harmed.  There even were pictures of immigrant children petting the horses.  The truth eventually came out and of course was largely ignored by the media, Democrat politicians, and your neighbor.  But as it turned out, the government knew that the allegations were false, but decided to let the narrative take its course.

Ukraine and the Malevolent Legacy of the Obama-Biden Administration.  During the current Ukrainian war, the media has created a mythology that the Left was tough on Vladimir Putin's Russia.  And thus, now it simply continues its hard-nosed efforts in Ukraine.  But nothing could be further from the truth. [...] Indeed, many of America's current difficulties in Ukraine originate from the Obama-Biden Administration's former disastrous policies toward Russia birthed between 2009 [and] 2016.

Democrats Run 50+ 'Local' News Sites in Swing States to Spread 'Fact-Based' Propaganda.  Democrats are reportedly running dozens of "quasi-local" news sites across multiple swing states, producing pro-Democrat and anti-Republican content under a veneer of non-partisanship.  At least 51 of these "local" news sites across 10 swing states are being run by Local Report Inc., founded last year in Florida, Axios reported.  Six writers from "progressive" Washington-based The American Independent have also contributed to most or even all of the websites, according to Axios.  Many of their articles appear exclusively on the news sites, although the sites aggregate content from other sources as well.

Dem Operatives Behind Network Of Fake News Pop-Up Sites In Battleground States: Report.  Democratic operatives are flooding battleground states with more than 50 supposedly local media outlets that are really designed to promote liberal candidates, according to a bombshell investigation by Axios.  One man linked to the scheme is David Brock, the one-time conservative journalist who did a 180-degree turn and founded Media Matters For America, the controversial nonprofit that attacks conservative news sites.  Axios' investigative reporters Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley say the operation uses a "patina of independent local news content designed to put a sheen of original reporting on partisan messaging."  The 51 pop-up sites have names such as the Milwaukee Metro Times, Macomb Digest, Mecklenburg Herald, and the Tri-City Record, and are aimed at key swing states Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the report.

Democrats are operating a series of 51 'fake news' websites pushing left-wing stories in toss-up states.  A liberal political media operation being run out of Washington, D.C., and Florida is pushing left-wing stories in 51 different fake news outlets in order to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections, it is claimed.  The allegations came in a shocking new investigation from Axios that was published on Thursday.  The report alleges that in the past 12 months, multiple new 'news' website have appeared across the country, all run by a company named Local Report Inc.  They do report a wide variety of stories — but sprinkled throughout are news items pushing Democrat lawmakers and policies.

Media Falsely Links Hurricanes to Climate Change.  Here Are the Facts.  As Florida deals with the cleanup from Hurricane Ian — which ravaged the state, killed hundreds, and displaced thousands more — media outlets have peddled the idea that this tragedy is the result of climate change.  Some even suggested that Florida shouldn't get aid because some of its elected officials oppose federal legislation that would pump billions of dollars into various green initiatives.  The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws.  Now They're Seeking Storm Aid."  The subheadline read, "Senior Republican politicians in the state have opposed federal action against global warming, which is making storms like Hurricane Ian more destructive."  The Times report said that while Republicans in the state are requesting aid, they "don't want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive."  What was the cause, according to the Times?  "The burning of fossil fuels."  Of course.

Do Republicans Cause Hurricanes?  With the grim inevitability of Greek tragedy, three things always happen when a hurricane makes landfall in the United States.  First, the storm will be touted by the corporate media as evidence that anthropogenic climate change presents an existential threat to humanity and the planet.  Second, anyone who dares question the accuracy of this claim will be either ignored or denounced as a dangerous anti-science "denier."  Third, if the hurricane happens to hit a state with a GOP governor, he will be blamed for causing any resultant death and destruction.  In the case of Hurricane Ian, all three commenced more than 24 hours before the storm actually arrived in Florida.

The Media's Coverage of Hurricane Ian Proves They Think You're Stupid.  Democrats want to convince you that they can somehow control the weather and that all we need to do to prevent natural disasters is give them power.  That's either unmitigated hubris coming from Democrats or malicious lies.  Maybe both?  [Video clip]

'Absolutely Fake News': Even Liberal Former PM Dismisses 'Fascism' Brewing in Italy Claims.  Former liberal Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Renzi has dismissed alarmist claims in the global media that incoming Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a "danger to democracy", telling CNN "the idea that now there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news."  "Personally, I was against Giorgia Meloni.  I'm not her best friend.  We grew up together in politics, but we are, and will be, rivals, always," said Renzi, who served as Prime Minister of Italy for nearly three years until December 2016, and is the leader of the liberal "Italia Viva" party.  "At the same time, I think [Meloni] is not a danger [to] Italian democracy," Renzi continued.  "She is my rival, and we will continue to fight each other, but the idea that now there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news."

Gavin Newsom's laughable gripe about conservative media bias.  You have to admire the chutzpah of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who ludicrously claimed last weekend that Democrats were at a disadvantage because conservative media controls the story.  Really!  "These guys are ruthless on the other side.  Ruthless on the other side," Newsom said. "That prime-time lineup by Fox, they are ruthless.  They dominate the most important thing in American politics today, and that's the narrative.  Facts become secondary to narrative.  They dominate with illusion.  We are getting crushed."  It's the ultimate in projection.  On story after story, the media follow Democratic talking points to the letter.  Asking for young children not to be taught about sex becomes "Don't say gay."  Crime-ridden Democratic cities?  They're not that bad, the press says.  As Post columnist Michael Goodwin pointed out on Sunday, nowhere is this more true than with immigration.  The media have ignored or minimized the flood of illegal migrants, and ask no hard questions on President Biden's open-border policies.

Media midterm games at border.  If you're trying to understand why Democrats are making a comeback in polls despite President Biden's many failures, look no further than the political firestorm over the crisis at the southern border.  The battle offers a case study of how the media shapes public opinion by magnifying left-wing talking points, ignoring key facts and distorting conservative criticism.

It's Time to Stop the Left's 'Fact Check' Scheme.  [Scroll down] Both examples above are how the modern "fact-checking" regime works.  They don't like your opinion, so they add "context" that wasn't there in the first place, then disprove the context they added, knowing you will be flagged and possibly suspended from social media.  It seems impossible, but this is how modern-day fascism has crept into our society.  When considering where we have landed as a society, I always think of the book-burning scene in Indiana Jones.  In the scene, Nazi soldiers are throwing every book they disagree with on a massive fire and celebrating the destruction of opposing opinions.  Modern-day book burning doesn't look as dirty.  In my case, two young female "journalists" named Mariah and Kyley attempted to eliminate my opinion from society, most likely while sipping on a $7 latte in a trendy coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Miami Herald Warns That Christian Rhetoric Could 'Mobilize Fringe Mobs'.  The Miami Herald has discovered something about Republican politicians, and boy, is it a problem.  You may want to sit down for this one.  GOP politicians who are Christians use scripture in their speeches. [...] I know.  You're not really shocked or appalled, but this information came as news to the Miami Herald's Ana Ceballos, particularly when it comes to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who Ceballos' article says is "playing with fire."  The reporter goes all the way back to February to cite a speech DeSantis made at Hillsdale College to make her point.

The Political Party That's Built On Lies.  The Democrats' tower of lies has been constructed with the help of the media, which outside of a few exceptions, are no longer objective, or even pretend to be, and are instead propagandists for the party they are loyal to.  In just the last six years the media have perpetuated the stolen-by-Russia 2016 presidential election lie, the Stacey Abrams I'm-the-real-governor-of-Georgia lie, and the lie that the incriminating information on Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.  The press also lies about policies, casting Democrats' ideas in the best light possible, the Republicans' policies in the worst.  A recent and especially egregious example:  Both the Democrats and the media have been calling Florida's Parental Rights in Education law the Don't Say Gay Bill, a gross and intentional mischaracterization intended to vilify and poison.  Rather than promote freedom and prosperity, Democrats' policies enslave and impoverish middle and lower America while at the same time prop up the leftist ruling class and its cronies.  But no one would know this by listening to the media and their handlers in the party.

Zuckerberg's Admission Of FBI Meddling In 2020 Election Is Even Bigger Than It Seems.  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's admission last week that the FBI pushed the social media giant to censor Russian misinformation — and thus the Hunter Biden laptop story, as that's how the agency and Democrats characterized it — shortly before the November 2020 election is but a breadcrumb of a bigger scandal: the widespread interference by the FBI in the 2020 presidential election with the potential that the bureau coordinated its efforts with the Biden campaign.  When asked during a Thursday podcast with Joe Rogan how Facebook handles controversial news, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, Zuckerberg stopped his host to provide a backdrop to Facebook's decision to decrease distribution of the scandal.

FBI Reportedly Said to 'Routinely' Work with Social Media Companies to Censor 'Threat Info'.  Collusion between government and Big Tech goes deeper than Joe Biden's incompetence.  The FBI reportedly responded to the revelation it pressured Facebook to censor during the 2020 election by saying that the agency "routinely" works with social media companies to target "potential threat information."  The FBI "cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received," but does coordinate with "social media providers" to moderate content, according to an Aug. 26 FBI statement reported by Reclaim The Net.  This revelation comes after multiple efforts by various arms of the Biden administration to increase censorship leading up to the 2022 midterms.  The FBI claimed, according to Reclaim The Net, it "routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats."  How many companies is the federal government working with to censor free speech?

The Economic News Is All Bad, And The American Public Knows It.  Reporters and analysts are getting used to describing news about the U.S. economy as "mixed."  The public, however, knows it's all bad, because the results of President Joe Biden's economic and energy policies are hitting Americans right in their pocketbooks.  The latest ostensibly good news was Thursday's Bureau of Economic Analysis report that the second quarter decline in U.S. gross domestic product was a little less than previously stated: -0.6% instead of -0.9%.  That's good only if your definition of success is slightly slower failure.  The reality is that the U.S. economy is in serious decline and getting worse.

LA Times columnist blames Trump for crime in California.  It's hardly a secret that the crime rates in California are out of control.  We've been talking about this tragic fact here until we're blue in the face.  The critical question that everyone needs to be asking is "why." How did things get so far out of control?  Los Angeles Times columnist Anita Chabria gamely took a stab at the question on Friday.  She first listed the correct collection of suspects sharing the blame, including permissive, soft-on-crime laws and the permissive, soft-on-crime officials who enact and enforce those laws.  But she then sweeps those answers away and reveals the real culprit.  Clearly, the wave of killings and other crimes in the state of California is the fault of the Bad Orange Man.  Yes, folks, the person who has not been in office for more than nineteen months and has never lived in the Golden State must be at fault.

Mark Zuckerberg Admits On Joe Rogan That Facebook Censored The Hunter Laptop Story At The Request Of The FBI.  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, the social media giant received a warning from the FBI which prompted Facebook to limit the story's reach on the platform ahead of the 2020 presidential election.  The billionaire tech mogul said the FBI approached Facebook and warned it "be vigilant" before the New York Post story on the contents in Joe Biden's son's laptop.  [Video clip]

Zuckerberg's Meta going all in in censorship as the midterm election nears.  Meta, the corporate parent of Facebook, has announced its plans to control the flow of information on the site where most voters get their news.  You see, the public has to be protected from "misinformation" and the omniscient sages of Meta are just the folks to decude what is and isn't worthy of being shared with the public. [...] I am so old that I remember when the free flow of information was regarded as key to the democratic process.  But the ruling interests in the United States have decided otherwise, and as long as people default to using Facebook and Twitter for their communications, they will be sheep, herded by the oligarchs.

Trump-deranged media races again to tarnish ex-prez via unnamed sources.  In the wake of the FBI raid on ex-President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home, The Washington Post and New York Times are running breathless, anonymously sourced stories suggesting "grave" Trump misdeeds.  Have they learned nothing about crying wolf?  "Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought" in the raid, the WaPo reported, revealing nothing about the biases of its unnamed sources who have full license to distort or even lie — as similar anonymous sources did for years during the "Russiagate" fiasco.

Media is back to anonymous, one-source stories on Trump that we can't trust anymore.  It feels like old times.  In the wake of the FBI raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, the mainstream media are in a feeding frenzy the likes of which we haven't seen since he exited the White House.  The usual suspects, like The New York Times and Washington Post, which spent the four years of Trump's presidency consistently and spectacularly beclowning themselves, are at it again.  Dare we say that it has "all the hallmarks" of media incompetence?  Take The Washington Post:  Using its signature anonymous single-source style, it broke the alleged news that Trump was in possession of documents "related to nuclear weapons."  What exactly does that mean?  Honestly, based on Post's coverage of Russiagate, when so many "bombshells" fizzled when the details emerged, you have to wonder if it's the White House pastry chef's recipe for nuclear chocolate cake.

Stop calling them 'Asian' grooming gangs.  Last week's landmark report into grooming gangs in Telford made for truly horrifying reading.  It revealed that 1,000 mainly white girls had been subjected to horrific sexual abuse by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage since at least the 1980s.  Tom Crowther QC, who chaired the Telford inquiry, said that 'the overwhelming theme of the evidence has been the appalling suffering of generations of children caused by the utter cruelty of those who committed child sexual exploitation'. He then went on to say that the failure of the authorities to intervene was in part driven by 'a nervousness that investigating concerns against Asian men, in particular, would inflame racial tensions'.  'Asian' men?  This is an odd description of the perpetrators.  Crowther pulled almost no punches in his summing up.  But this was definitely one he did pull.  The members of the grooming gangs were not simply 'Asian' — by and large, they were Muslim men of Pakistani heritage.

Pulitzer Prize Board Stands by Awards Given to NYT, WaPo for Russia Hoax Reports.  The Pulitzer Prize Board on Monday [7/18/2022] announced it is standing by awards given to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reports on the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.  "In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign — submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize," the organization's statement reads.

That 10-Year-Old Abortion Story the President Ranted About Gets a Major Update.  In the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned, a viral story about a 10-year-old girl in Ohio being raped, impregnated, and unable to obtain an abortion spread like wildfire across the political sphere.  Major news networks covered it as truth despite the fact that it was a single-sourced account from an abortion doctor who provided zero corroborating details.  The story was then used as proof of how harmful Republican abortion bans are to the point that even Joe Biden got in on the act.  The president used the report to rail against pro-life laws, proclaiming "imagine being that little girl" while asserting that Ohio forces raped children to give birth.  Of course, not everyone was so gullible.

Gallup Poll:  Trust In News Outlets Hits a Historic Low.  The American people's trust in news outlets has hit a historic low, according to Gallup's annual survey on confidence in major U.S. institutions.  It's like they've discovered that "straight news" isn't their primary goal.  Both newspapers and television news have seen another drop in confidence over the past year, with each losing an average five percent of people who said they had a "great deal" of trust in such institutions.  Gallup has been measuring "confidence in institutions" since 1973, and annually since 1993.  Television news is now considered the second least-trusted institution in America, after Congress, with just 11 percent of respondents telling Gallup they have "quite a lot" of trust in television news.  Newspapers aren't much better at 16 percent.

This Is What Real Revolution Looks Like.  If you listen to the mainstream media you will know that from time to time spontaneous peaceful protests break out in the nation focused on various social issues.  You will also know that Antifa is largely a fiction of the 'delusional right' and that the real threat to the nation comes from a vast right-wing conspiracy driven by white supremacists.  In short, you will know nothing.

Media Melt Down over Roe v Wade being overturned.  Democrats and the Garbage Media are melting down and doing everything they can to spew lies and misinformation in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.  We'll start with Chuck Todd, who claims for the first time in his lifetime the Supreme Court has just taken away a 'right':  [Tweet]  Abortion was never a 'right' to begin with!  Our true rights come from God and that is what our Constitution seeks to protect.  It was 49 years ago that the Supreme Court wrongly concluded that abortion was a 'right' guaranteed by the Constitution.  The Supreme Court today didn't take away any 'right' to abortion, they pointed out that the 'right' never existed in the first place.  In fact, as Jan Crawford pointed out on CBS, another way of looking at it is that the right to life was given back to the unborn today, which was taken away 49 years ago:  [Tweet]

USA Today Reporter Resigns After Getting Caught Fabricating 23 Stories.  USA Today removed 23 of its articles from its site after an internal investigation revealed one of its reporters Gabriela Miranda had fabricated sources.  "After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda.  The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated.  The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified.  In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others" USA Today wrote in an editor's note published on its site on Thursday afternoon [6/16/2022].

USA Today removed 23 stories from website, other platforms following audit of reporter's work.  After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda.  The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated.  The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified.  In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.  As a result, USA TODAY removed 23 articles from its website and other platforms for not meeting our editorial standards.  The headlines of the articles are listed below.  Miranda has resigned as a reporter for USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network.

Truth is now in plain sight.  Post-injection death tolls have reached levels that are making it very difficult for the powers-that-be to keep the lambs sleeping and the vaxx zealots enthused.  Thus they are resorting to the oldest, tried-and-true tricks in the book, particularly the "if you tell a lie enough, it becomes the truth" method.  Politifact wrote the same, regurgitated article on April 6, 2022, declaring that mRNA and viral vector DNA injections are not the cause of countless sudden deaths in adults and kids.  The Poynter Institute, Politifact's parent organization, wrote nearly the exact same "fact check" article on September 24, 2021.  The effort has been persistent, consistent and coordinated among the monolithic mainstream media since the spring of 2021.  Pfizer-owned Reuters wrote a "fact-check" on April 29, 2021 entitled, "No evidence COVID-19 vaccines will cause an 'exponential rise' in deaths."  The next day, on April 30, 2021, USA Today wrote a "fact-check" entitled, "COVID-19 vaccines don't cause death, won't decimate world's population." FactCheck.org got into the mix on March 2, 2022, with an article entitled, "COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Deaths, Contrary to Misleading Graphic on Social Media."

NYC man nabbed in subway slashings had just been freed after knife dispute with cops.  A Queens man was arrested over the weekend for two random subway slashings in as many days — crimes he allegedly committed after being picked up, then let go, for brandishing a knife at cops.  Donny Ubiera, 32, stabbed two straphangers — one in the face and the other in the neck — without provocation in separate incidents Friday and Saturday morning along the Flushing-to-Midtown No. 7 subway line, the NYPD said in a statement.  The accused serial slasher had just gotten out of jail Thursday — with a single night of "time served" — for allegedly refusing to put down a large knife when confronted by Queens officers on the street and then trying to flee with it the day before.

The Editor says...
The news media consistently uses the term "random" to conceal black-on-white hate crimes.

The dystopian state of our nation.  What to do?  Wake up!  Vote!  Get involved with an election integrity project or a precinct project.  Fight back.  Say no to medical mandates!  Vote out the RINOs like McConnell, Graham, Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger, etc. — all the fake conservatives who just want to be part of the swamp long enough to get very rich without offending anyone else in that swamp.  We know who they are; Trump exposed them all to the sunlight.  Don't believe a word uttered on CNN or MSNBC.  Like the networks, their talking heads get their talking points from the Democrat party, and they never deviate, which is why they sound like mindless mimics.  There is not a critical thinker among them.  They might as well all be Kardashian cut-outs.  They are all Alinskyites now.

A friendly reminder that many gun control groups routinely inflate school shooting numbers.  [Threat reader]  [Scroll down]  Are these all instances of gun violence?  Yes.  Are they all problematic in their own right?  Yes.  But packaging these as part of some "school shooting" epidemic is dishonest nonsense.  [Indeed], they literally count a cop who shot himself in his own vehicle vaguely near an elementary school.  Presumably overnight.  In mid-JULY. We've got a 25-year-old fatally shot [and I quote here] "near a school playground."  On a Sunday evening.  A 17-year-old fatally shot outside of an elementary school... on Veteran's Day, when school wasn't in session.  It doesn't get less absurd.  They include an instance where, after a night game for an adult league flag football league, a man fatally shot a member of the opposing team because of an on-field dispute... solely because it happened behind an elementary school. [...] We've got an instance where a stray bullet struck a window of an elementary school while no one was inside the building.  We've got "a couple shots fired near a middle school baseball field on a Friday evening while a 20 year old and friends were taking batting practice," apparently not directed at anyone associated with the school, and as far as anyone can tell there were no injuries.  There are bullets hitting the outside wall of a middle school gym in the early morning before anyone was on the campus, likely during an unrelated drive-by shooting.

BBC accused of altering alleged rape victim's quote to avoid 'misgendering' transgender male attacker.  The woke BBC is being accused of outrageously altering an alleged rape victim's quotes by replacing pronouns to be more inclusive in an effort to protect her transgender attacker from "misgendering."  The Times of London broke the story that the British media outlet previously quoted a woman who claimed she was raped by a transgender male and then altered her words to be politically correct.  Her quotes were part of a report from 2021 on lesbians who have been "coerced into sex with transgender women."  The story was published on Oct. 26, 2021.  It covered a lesbian campaign called "Get the L Out."  Gay women were candidly asked about their sexual relationships with transgender women.

There were WMDs in Iraq.  Despite evidence to the contrary, there is the continued belief that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.  Between the Democrats, the media who serve as their propagandist, and those who have an irrational hatred of George W. Bush, there has been a refusal to give up the lie that nothing was found in Iraq.  One of the reasons given by former President Bush for going into Iraq — beyond Hussein's government funding international terrorist activities that did target Americans — was weapons of mass destruction were in fact found.  In other words, the weapons were not the only reason, but also the financing of international terrorism.  A 'weapon of mass destruction' is not just nuclear, but other weaponry meant to harm a large number of people through unconventional means.

Daily Beast releases apology to Hunter Biden's laptop repairman.  The Daily Beast has issued an apology to the Delaware computer repairman who acquired Hunter Biden's laptop for wrongly claiming in a past story that the computer was "stolen."  The apology to John Paul Mac Isaac appeared in a Wednesday [5/25/2022] editor's note attached to a story the Daily Beast published in Dec. 2020 alleging the laptop was pilfered, Fox News reported.  "An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Hunter Biden's laptop as 'stolen.'  We have removed that word, and we apologize to Mr. Mac Isaac for the error," the editor's note reads.  Isaac, 45, was left with the infamous laptop after Hunter Biden abandoned it at his shop in 2019.  The repairman came to legally own the laptop after the president's son neglected to ever pick it up.

Seven Ways The Texas Tribune Is All-In On Climate Fearmongering.  A recent piece in The Texas Tribune lists seven alleged ways climate change is already impacting the state of Texas and its residents.  When not outright false, the listed claims are extremely misleading.  Real-world data indicates the state of Texas faces no severe imminent threat from climate change.  Two writers, María Méndez and Erin Douglas contributed to the article, "Seven ways climate change is already hitting Texans," which runs the gamut of common alarmist lines.  This isn't the first time Erin Douglas and The Texas Tribune have published false information about the impacts of climate change on Texas.

Man shot and killed on NYC subway in broad daylight, cops say.  A deranged gunman shot and killed a 48-year-old straphanger aboard a Manhattan subway train Sunday morning in what cops are calling an unprovoked attack.  The shooter, who was still on the loose Sunday afternoon, paced back and forth in the last car of the northbound Q train around 11:42 a.m. before he opened fire on the random victim seated inside, police and sources said.  "Completely random," one police source said.  The victim, whose name wasn't immediately released, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital where he was later pronounced dead, police said.

The Editor says...
The news media in New York is always very quick to excuse cold-blooded killers as "deranged" and the killings as "totally random" — especially when the shooter is black and the victim is not, which is almost always the case, and apparently was the case this time.  The newspapers' writers dare not suggest that blacks are racist or that they target white people just because they're white; but if the colors were reversed, hate crime accusations would fly.

Signs of a False Flag
 1.  Asks you to respond emotionally rather than intellectually.
 2.  Strips the event of context, such as the contemporary factual setting, geopolitical reality, or historical awareness.
 3.  Demands a rush to judgment before a diligent, independent inquiry occurs.
 4.  Collectivizes judgment, by taking an individual event, and demands you blame an entire culture, religion, race, ancestry, community or country for it.
 5.  The only explicable motive offered for the offending action is irrational evil or utterly stupid immorality, as it is against the rational interest of the offender to commit the act for the reasons alleged.

Congrats To The Media For Finally Finding A White Supremacist.  Assuming the gunman who shot up the Buffalo, New York, grocery store really was motivated by anti-black racism, let's do what the media do when faced with an Islamic terrorist who goes on a killing spree in America and just refer to him as a "lone wolf," a mentally unstable individual who in no way reflects any broader phenomenon or trend.  Except, unlike with violent Muslim extremism, that characterization in this case would be true.  Despite what the media, Democrats, leftists, and, of course, the permanent Washington bureaucracy say (over, and over, and over again), there is no imminent, large-scale threat from white nationalists.  It doesn't exist outside of Joe Biden's TelePrompter.

There was Another Mass Shooting in America.  You Didn't Hear About It Because the Suspect is a Chinese Communist.  [Scroll down]  The Orange County Sheriff's Department tweeted the known facts about the mass shooting on Monday.  "The Laguna Woods church shooting investigation has continued through the night.  Teams continue to process the scene," the sheriff's department said.  "The suspect in the Laguna Woods church shooting has been identified as David Chou, 68 years old, of Las Vegas, NV," the sheriff's department added. [...] Except there is a problem with the narrative:  The suspect isn't a 'white supremacist.'  Nor is he one of the many African-American assailants who have been charged and convicted for attacking Asian-Americans.  The suspect is a Chinese-born man named David Wenwei Chou, a 68-year-old resident of Las Vegas.  His motivation for the mass shooting was described in a hand-written note in Chinese left on a car dashboard, as was reported by the L.A. Times.  "David Wenwei Chou, 68, of Las Vegas, left notes in Chinese in his car stating he did not believe Taiwan should be independent from China, said Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes," the Times reported.

A Tale Of Two Mass Shootings.  In the span of one month, there were two mass shootings.  Both took place in New York.  Both were racially motivated.  Both shooters were violent extremists.  But the media tied only one of them to a mainstream political party.  Can you guess why?  Immediately after the identity of the alleged Buffalo shooter — initially charged with one murder and suspected of killing 10 — became known, the chattering class was insisting that he was not a "lone wolf" and pinned the blame for the massacre on "right-wing extremists" who "control the Republican party."  The Rolling Stone called the 18-year-old Payton Gendron "a mainstream Republican." [...] A Los Angeles Times op-ed declared that "The Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-right ecosystem that's gone mainstream."  New York Times weighed in with an article headlined:  "Replacement Theory, a Fringe Belief Fueled Online, Is Refashioned by G.O.P."

Guess how the Buffalo shooter identified himself politically.  The alleged supermarket killer is self-described as authoritarian left — so why isn't this being reported?  If the alleged Buffalo killer's "manifesto" is authentic, he was deep into communist ideology and now is an authoritarian leftist.  Why is this being kept under wraps?  The teenager accused of murdering ten people last Saturday in Buffalo, N.Y. also allegedly posted a 180-page "manifesto" online that the national media are selectively exploiting, leaving out key facts.

Press pumps up Joe Biden.  "History will be kind to me," Winston Churchill said, "because I intend to write it."  Britain's great statesman did as he promised, but Joe Biden has an even sweeter deal.  He doesn't need to put pen to paper because a cottage industry of so-called journalists is already twisting truth to make the failing president a victim, if not a hero.  It's as if somebody in an old newsroom called out, "Sweetheart, get me rewrite," and a thousand scribes raised their hands to volunteer to make Biden look like something other than the second coming of Jimmy Carter.  History, schmistory.  No need to wait — this is fiction on the fly!  "What Choice Does Biden Have?" The New Yorker magazine asked, before answering:  "With the impending evisceration of Roe v. Wade, partisanship is the only course for a President in our broken system."  See, the "system" is always "broken" when Democrats don't get their way.  Only when they win is America a real democracy.

The last people anyone should trust to tell or determine the truth are journalists and government officials.  There are many examples of where the media colluded with the Democrats to intentionally spread misinformation to the public.  Here is a small sample:  Democrats in Congress have repeatedly challenged elections where they lost yet they weren't called treasonous, weren't said to be against democracy, where we didn't have endless hearings, and they weren't silenced.  Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and others repeatedly lied to the public about Obamacare, but the media not only didn't silence them, but they also supported them.  Obama and Hillary concocted a lie about Benghazi, as Americans were killed, and the media never silenced them.  The Obama administration used the media to spread lies to get support for the Iran deal, yet the media never silenced them.  Most of the media still supports the deal that enriched Iran, which continues to spread terrorism and pledge death to America.  The media and others intentionally spread the lie of "Hands up Don't Shoot" that ginned up racial hate against cops.  How many cops have been killed and injured because of that intentional lie?  Yet, no one who spread the lie has been silenced.  The media, DNC, the Hillary campaign and government employees colluded to spread the lie about Russian collusion to destroy Trump and they have not been silenced.

Media Hoax:  No, Kevin McCarthy Did Not Say Trump Should Resign Over J6.  There they go again.  The left and NeverTrump infotainment propagandists are busily twisting and spinning their claims that then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wanted President Trump to resign after J6.  The implication being that he was so personally mortified by the "insurrection" (that wasn't) that he personally wanted the president to resign as a traitor.  Or something.  However, and completely unsurprisingly, if you listen to the audio they are touting as "evidence," you can clearly tell that he is discussing a particular circumstance:  Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans pursuing removal of Trump from office via the 25th Amendment.

Carter 2.0 — Media Runs Interference for Joe Just Like They Did for Jimmy.  Now that Joe Biden's approval rating has fallen — it's hovering in the low 40s, and it can't get up — the Main Stream Media have come up with a new line of defense for their man.  Okay, goes this new line, Biden isn't doing so well, but that's to be expected — because no president can do well.  That is, the problems are just too tough, the job is just too hard, the country is just too polarized, yada yada yada.  As we shall see, history suggests that the American people won't buy an argument based on hopelessness, which we can call the desperation defense.  After all, Americans tend to be optimistic and solution-oriented.  And so if an elected official can't solve the problem, throw him out and give someone else a chance.  That's the American Way.

Superhero Obama Fights 'Online Lies'?  The New York Times sounded a little giddy on the front page of its "Business" section April 21 with the headline "Obama Joins Fight to Curb Online Lies."  This spin strongly suggests former President Barack Obama never lies.  He's a valiant warrior against lies.  That came after a badly disguised press release at CNN.com on Obama "urgently throwing himself into the fight against disinformation."  As usual, they make it sound like a superhero has landed whenever Obama arrives on the scene.  Never mind PolitiFact giving Obama the "Lie of the Year" in 2013 for when he said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."  Never mind Obama's baldfaced lies in 2012 that the Benghazi consulate attack wasn't a terrorist thing; it was a protest of an Islamophobic YouTube video that got out of hand.  As if the Islamic radicals brought grenade launchers to a "protest."  This underlines why the liberal media should not be trusted in a "disinformation" fight.  They have a frustrating tendency to put themselves on the side of "information" and conservatives on the side of "disinformation."

No, Trump Did Not 'Storm Off the Set' of Piers Morgan's Interview Show.  On one level, the claim by media personality Piers Morgan that Donald Trump "stormed off" the set when he brought up the 2020 presidential election is just plain creepy.  But if the only side of the story you get is from Morgan trying to goose ratings for his new show — the side the mainstream media wants you to see — Trump comes off as an unhinged maniac.

Deceptive Edits:  Audio Contradicts Piers Morgan, Shows He Warped Trump Interview Ending in Promo.  Audio provided by former President Donald Trump's team to Breitbart News of the end of Trump's interview with Piers Morgan proves that Morgan and his team deceptively edited the interview to make it appear as though it was a contentious ending when it was not.  A 30-second promotional clip that Morgan released on Wednesday afternoon seemed to show Trump flying off the handle and walking out mid-interview as a righteous Morgan asked him tough questions about his views on the 2020 election.  But the full story seems to indicate that Morgan's team deceptively edited the clips together to make it as nasty as possible for Trump — and to drive up the ratings for Morgan's new show.  Morgan's new show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, launches next week on Talk TV, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers — If They're Not White.  Frank James, the man arrested for Tuesday's New York City subway shooting, is a black nationalist and outspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics.  A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that.  In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, James's race is not mentioned.  The same is true for the coverage offered up by Reuters; the Washington Post only mentioned James's race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for "low-income Black youths."  Media critics on the right say that the conspicuous omission of James's race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which deemphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders.  But is it a real pattern?  Yes.  A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders.  These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender's race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020 and the protests that followed.

Ten Steps to Totalitarianism.  Does anybody still think totalitarianism can't happen here?  Ask yourself how many of these steps we've already galloped past. [... #4] Control over Communication:  There is a reason Western governments have begun aggressively attacking free speech as "misinformation" or "disinformation": the power to communicate ideas to the broader public threatens governments' monopoly over "official" truths.  Traditional forms of mass communication — newspapers, radio broadcasts, and television shows — are operated by so few corporations that the State has no problem influencing, if not outright controlling, the information disseminated to the public.  In contrast, social media platforms and independent publishing sites permit citizens (in theory) to bypass State censors, regulators, and other information gatekeepers to communicate directly with large numbers of other citizens.  See why governments spend so much time targeting free speech as "hate speech" or "harmful information" that must be banned?

The Chicago Thinker Staged a Media Regime Takedown This Week.  This week, the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics (IOP) and The Atlantic magazine hosted a "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" conference, and we have to hand it to IOP Director David Axlerod for bringing in true experts on the subject.  The conference featured some of America's greatest purveyors of disinformation, such as Barack Obama, Brian Stelter, Anne Applebaum, and a few token conservatives, including Jonah Goldberg and Adam Kinzinger.  The media, government, and academia elites speaking at the conference weren't expecting to be challenged as they self-righteously spewed more lies — but our team at the Chicago Thinker was prepared to hold them accountable.  Student journalists from the Chicago Thinker respectfully listened, asked honest questions, and reported.  Our efforts soon went viral, garnering millions of views on social media.  We successfully turned the IOP's "Disinformation Conference" on its head and sparked a national conversation about the corporate media's disinformation.

Has Biden become expendable?  [Scroll down]  Before the 2020 election, a story broke regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, which was abandoned at John Paul Mac Isaac's Delaware repair shop.  Along with reports that Biden's laptop contained disturbing images of a sexual nature, there were allegations that presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son had compromising financial dealings with Ukraine worth millions of dollars.  Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter, confirmed on Fox's The Tucker Carlson Show that Hunter's troubling emails were legitimate.  The New York Post confirmed the authenticity of the laptop and published articles regarding some of its shady contents.  That's when the formidable socialist propaganda apparatus went into full cover-up mode.  The New York Times and Washington Post dismissed the laptop story.  Democrats attacked anyone discussing the laptop and labeled the entire subject a Russian disinformation scheme.  Social media banned The New York Post from sharing the story, and countless bloggers sharing the story saw their social media accounts suspended.  Now, 18 months after Biden became president, the corrupt media have come out to say Hunter's laptop is genuine.

The Legacy Media Have Not Conceded the Laptop Reporting — And They Don't Deserve Credit.  In the last two weeks, the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post all came forward to admit that the Hunter Biden hard drive — which I originally reported a year and a half ago in the lead-up to the 2020 election and saw those outlets dismiss and smear the stories as "baroque mythology," "made up," "Soviet tradecraft," and "disparaging Biden" — was authentic.  However, despite initial admissions, the media are now stopping short of acknowledging the reporting on the information the hard drive contained — namely, that Joe Biden was a direct beneficiary of Hunter's deals.  Instead, they are inviting the people who come from the very institutions that outright lied and purposely misrepresented the laptop and its contents in the first place to continue lying and misrepresenting the laptop and its contents.

The media lies about Obamacare ... and everything else.  Now that Joe Biden's touting Obamacare and bringing President Obama along for the ride at the White House, the media still acts like Obamacare is great even though Obama and others continuously lied to get it passed and then lied about the results.  It's par for the course because they are such a dishonest crew.  The media also is a great supporter of Obama and Biden as they lied to get the deals done with Iran which continues to support terrorists and continues to pledge death to America[.]  The media acts like it is treasonous to oppose election results and that no one did it before Trump.  Yet they always support Democrats who challenged results in 2000, 2004, and 2016 in Congress.  The media and other Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president for four years.  They impeached him twice for pure garbage.  The media and others spread the lie that a white cop shot Michael Brown when his hands were up, and he was backing away.  How many cops have been injured and killed because of this intentional lie?

A World Gone Mad.  Governments everywhere, including here in the USA, have abandoned God, good government, law and order, common sense, and traditional Judeo-Christian values.  They have jumped in with both feet into the dark and shadow without bothering to look back at seeing what they have already wrought. [...] The political absurdity and hypocrisy has reached the highest level I have ever seen.  The 3.8% unemployment announced in February is an historic achievement, but the 3.6% unemployment rate during the Trump years is a crisis.

The Unanimously Liberal Tilt of the 'Fact Checkers'.  Now that the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings are complete, we have collected another fascinating exhibit of the leftist tilt of "independent fact checkers."  Just try and find a single fact check on anything Judge Jackson said.  Try and find a single evaluation of any statement by a Democratic politician touting Jackson — from Biden and Dick Durbin on down.  Checking liberals and Democrats is apparently not listed among their job duties.  On March 28, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates addressed Judge Jackson's qualifications.  Bates claimed what speaks to the strength of her public record "is the multitude of fact-checks from the press, from retired judges, and from former prosecutors who have dismantled attacks brought by a small group of GOP senators."  "Dismantling" Republican critiques is the job of the Fact Check community?  That's what it looks like.

The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020.  The left-wing news media didn't just poison the information environment with their incessantly negative coverage of President Trump going into the 2020 election.  They also refused to give airtime to important arguments of the Republican campaign — both pro-Trump and anti-Biden — which meant millions of voters cast their ballots knowing only what the media permitted them to know about the candidates.  To measure the true effect of the media's censorship on the election, the Media Research Center asked The Polling Company to survey 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), six of which (all but North Carolina) were called for Biden.  We tested these voters' knowledge of eight news stories — all important topics that our ongoing analysis had shown the liberal news media had failed to cover properly.  We found that a huge majority (82%) of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of these key items, with five percent saying they were unaware of all eight of the issues we tested.  This lack of information proved crucial:  One of every six Biden voters we surveyed (17%) said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories.  A shift of this magnitude would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden, and Donald Trump would have comfortably won a second term as president.

Flashback: MSNBC, CNN, CBS told viewers Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.  The New York Times last week confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's missing laptop, a story which was originally dismissed as Russian disinformation by many liberal media outlets leading up to the 2020 presidential election.  Television hosts, guests and journalists quickly took to the airwaves in October 2020, reassuring viewers that the laptop was "unverifiable," likely tied to the Kremlin, and the product of a smear campaign orchestrated by former President Trump and his allies.  "We start this hour with the tale of international espionage connected to a close confidante of the President of the United States," MSNBC's Ali Velshi said on Oct. 17, 2020.  "The president was reportedly warned that his personal attorney, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was the target of a Russian intelligence operation, a story that is unraveling to reveal allegations of disinformation, dirty tricks and a federal probe over Russian efforts to disparage Joe Biden."

15 Media Personalities Who Have Permanently Damaged Their Reputation by Peddling the Lie That the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was the Work of Russian Propagandists:.  MSNBC's executive producer Kyle Griffin; Publisher of the Ink Anand Giridharadas; Daily Beast reporter Wajahat Ali; Managing editor of Truthorfiction.com Brooke Binkowski; NBC News correspondent Heidi Przybyla; Writer Chip Franklin; MSNBC contributor Ben Rhodes; Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot; MSNBC's Naveed Jamali; Mother Jones Publication; CNN anchor and Humpty Dumpty cosplayer Brian Stelter; CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian; MSNBC Morning Joe's regular contributor Dave Aronberg; and CNN anchor Jim Sciutto.  Congratulations to you — dark marks all around!  For a little fun, we'll have to run this list against the list of folks who insisted Trump colluded with Russia (that's for another time).

The Press Has Lied To Drag The United States Into War Before.  Don't Think They Won't Again.  When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the "Ghost of Kyiv" to that Snake Island story to old photos taken years ago, you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it censors conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less).  It wouldn't be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war. [...] George Orwell, who fought alongside Republican forces, wrote in his memoir "Homage to Catalonia" that "for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie."  "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.  I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened," he recalled.  "I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.'"

Liberals, Conservatives, and Russia:  The Drama Triangle.  With friends like liberal media, who needs enemies?  Their virtue signaling and political spin over Ukraine is so revolting that if I didn't know better, I'd turn against Ukraine like so many conservative commentators already have.  But having lived in both Russia and Ukraine, I know better.  Just as revolting is seeing previously trusted conservative sites and TV hosts defending Russia and tarring Ukraine.  Children act like that when adults apply reverse psychology.  What's their excuse?  I'm not naming names because I'd like to believe they are acting in good faith and are simply misguided by crafty spinners.  Reading Russian and Ukrainian sources in the original, I know exactly who in this war is spinning lies and who is fighting for truth and freedom.  Believe me, not every enemy of the liberal media is our ally or deserves sympathy.  Sometimes the enemy of our enemy is an even bigger enemy.

Tucker Carlson Revisits the Media People Who Manipulated the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.  On his evening broadcast [3/17/2022] Fox news host Tucker Carlson took a historic look at how the media manipulated the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to protect Joe Biden as a candidate.  These same media personalities claim they are credible, and viciously attack anyone who points out their lies.  The example of the Biden laptop should forever dispatch any credibility they claim to hold.  [Video clip]  Not included in the Carlson review, but one of the most transparently biased segments on the Biden laptop issue, was the interview between CNN disinformation specialist Christiane Amanpour and Liz Harrington.  Given the recent revelations about the authenticity of the Biden laptop, watch this video of Amanpour trying to protect the regime.  [Video clip]

Why was the Hunter Biden laptop story covered up?  It's now a familiar pattern — a sensational news story is dismissed by serious journalists as bogus fake right-wing agitprop.  You'd have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to believe that.  You don't want to be one of those.  Then, a year or so later, the same important media organs, the same authorities who made you feel crazy for thinking that the story might be credible, turn around and tell you that, yep, it was true all along.  It was just politically awkward to say so at the time. [...] When the New York Post reported in October 2020 on Hunter's marvellous laptop — and the potentially incriminating documents on its hard drive — the New York Times, CNN and others went to great lengths to attack the Post's reporting:  it was, liberals insisted, a Trump-led hit job so therefore not credible.  Twitter and Facebook actually censored the story.  There was an election on and almost nobody wanted to be accused of doing anything that might stop Joe Biden kicking Trump out of the White House.  But the Hunter laptop story raises serious concerns about the Biden family and the role Joe Biden played as Vice President, especially in 2014 when he took the lead on the Ukraine crisis.  It's well-known that Hunter had a ludicrously well paid job at the Ukrainian mining company Burisma, despite having little qualifications for the role beyond his surname.

Another Round of Ukraine Hoaxes Discovered?  The propaganda out of the Ukraine/Hollywood association is continuing unabated.  In a Twitter video today, pushed by Buzzfeed Journalist Christopher Miller, the claim is, "President Zelensky walked to a hospital today to visit wounded Ukrainian soldiers and award them with state honors for their sacrifices."  [Tweet]  However, alert researchers noted the woman to Zelenskyy's left, in the video, is a physician named Inna Derusova.  She was reported to have died on February 26th.  [Tweet]  As we said from the outset, do not take anything at face value.  Question everything that is being presented.  The level of western propaganda to support the intents of the U.S./NATO and multinational community are extreme.

Media Outlets Continue To Portray Pro-Biden Lincoln Project as 'Republican' Organization.  The Lincoln Project is a scandal-plagued super PAC dedicated to supporting President Joe Biden and helping Democrats win elections.  In October 2021, for example, Lincoln Project operatives dressed as neo-Nazis crashed a Glenn Youngkin campaign event in a misguided effort to besmirch the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.  (It didn't work.)  Nevertheless, mainstream media outlets continue to portray the Lincoln Project and its senior members as "Republicans" or "right-of-center" pundits whose opinions actually matter, or are substantively different from those of a generic liberal pundit.  (They aren't; they don't; they aren't.)  Last month, the Hill published an article about how "Republicans are reveling in their hatred of Joe Biden."  It includes several quotes from Lincoln Project adviser Stuart Stevens, who is described as a "prominent GOP consultant."  Stevens, who wrote a book renouncing his former party, does not even consider himself a Republican.  He has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and Republican politicians to the genocidal maniac's Nazi enablers.

The Six Biggest "Fake News" Stories About The Russia-Ukraine Conflict.  [Scroll down]  Before I start making points about the fake news being shoved down our throats with Ukraine, I first must make my high-level opinion clear:  Russia's behavior has been horrific, they are the cause of the war, and I strongly support Ukraine with the conflict, particularly the Ukrainian people.  Meanwhile it is also obvious that there is a concerted effort being conducted by the left and their media to mischaracterize the realities on the ground.  The photographs I reference — which include the picture that is featured in this article — have been plastered everywhere, particularly on social media platforms and have been misrepresented by scores of blue check mark buffoons on Twitter.  The truth is, these images show President Volodymyr Zelensky during military exercises last October in the disputed Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine, months before Russia's invasion.

Be skeptical about media coverage of Ukraine.  If you have been monitoring the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, it is amply clear that a narrative is being pushed.  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being compared to Winston Churchill during World War II; he is leading his people during perilous times to become an inspiring figure.  He refused a safe passage offer from the U.S. with the quip:  "I need ammunition, not a ride".  He streams videos from the deserted streets of Ukraine and posts photos with his cabinet.  Photos of Zelenskyy surface in military gear on the battlefront.  To sum it up, Zelensky is being portrayed as Churchill, Rambo and social media influencers all rolled into one. [...] It is all so poignant and inspiring until you fact-check the images.  The photos of Zelensky in military gear were from February 11, 2021, and April 9, 2021.  The photo of the Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint was a 2005 photo from the West Bank.  Neither the first lady of Ukraine nor the former Miss Ukraine is joining the armed forces.  The teary farewell of Ukrainian soldiers amidst the invasion was actually a photo of the happy homecoming moment of U.S. Marines.

'Fact Checkers' Silent as Lyin' Joe Biden Perpetuates Disgusting Capitol Riot Whopper.  In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, it became very clear that the mainstream media and Democrats were going to milk the incident for all it was worth.  Initial reports talked of Capitol police officers being "murdered" by Trump-supporting rioters as they broke through glass doorways and breached the Capitol building.  It was those early false stories that were in part used by Democrats to make their impeachment "case" against then-President Donald Trump.  Within a few days, that narrative along with others began to implode.  But it took a few weeks before we saw the first major signs that the media was trying to correct itself.

The Right 'Loves Putin' And Other Lies The Media Tell About Trump And Russia.  What is it about Russia and Vladimir Putin that forces the American national media to lie, make things up, and blurt out statements that have no basis in reality?  The latest fiction is that Republicans and conservatives have a newfound affinity for Putin.  If you only watched MSNBC or read The New York Times, you'd be forgiven for holding the impression that all of Fox News and the Republican party have draped themselves in Russian flags and set up GoFundMes for the invasion of Ukraine.  The Times on Sunday [2/27/2022] ran the headline, "How the American Right Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Russia," by Emily Tamkin. [...] Her argument might have been a little stronger if she included more searing examples of praise for Putin, like the time Trump called him a "master tactician."  Wait, sorry.  That was actually how The New York Times itself described the Russian president in mid-February.  And also in October 2020.

Facebook's Election Fact-Checker Spreads Fake Footage Of Artillery Impacts In A Populated Area In Ukraine.  When Russia launched an attack on Ukraine earlier this week, people around the world watched in shock and horror as airstrikes hit the country and tanks began rolling in.  "The prayers of the world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces," wrote President Joe Biden in a tweet Wednesday night.  But in the last few days, it's become clear that while some of the footage and images being disseminated across social media are depicting the tragic beginnings of a new war, some are not actually what they appear.  Some of the photos and footage being shared on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok appear to be fake, some are from previous conflicts years ago, explosions in other countries, or even from video games.

A New Age of Barbarism.  Political leaders in the US, Canada, Germany, and France — all NATO countries — got back on script yesterday. [...] The part we do not see is that many of these people — together with media organs and administrators of many deep-state bureaucracies — are absolutely thrilled to start a new season.  Away with the appalling mismanagement of the pathogen.  Away with public anger toward the lockdowns and mandates.  Forget the collapse in children's literacy, the rise in cancer, the waves of depression, the trucker protests, the collapsing polls of many elected leaders, and forget too the inflation, the federal debt, supply-chain snarls and goods shortages.  Forget all the astonishing botches of everything.  Life was never as good in living memory as when we had a solid foreign enemy named Russia with a leader with a name and a face.  Everything wrong with the world could be personalized, and with storybook thematics:  good vs evil, freedom vs despotism, democracy vs dictatorship.  This great struggle was so good for both sides that they made it last 40 years.

Cops, convoys, conservatives, and tyranny.  The Mainstream Media inform us that Canadian authorities have "cleared out" the truckers who had the temerity to think they could peacefully protest their government's COVID vaccination-and-quarantine mandates.  Note the choice of terminology:  "Cleared out," as one would clear out an infestation of vermin.  In the propaganda game, words must be chosen carefully and deliberately, and the propaganda-meisters of today (who not only "manage" the news, but frequently just invent it) make the infamous Dr. Goebbels look like a mere tyro. [...] Anyone who's spent time on America's highways and observed big trucks knows that the Confederate battle flag (the "Stars'n'Bars") is an emblem frequently displayed on such trucks, and not just in the South, in numbers far in excess of those few that were seen on Canadian trucks.  But the handful of such flags seen on the Canadian trucks were enough for "journalists" to declare that such flags were proof that the Freedom Convoy was in reality a rally of "white supremacists."

Why They're So Afraid of the Truckers.  [Scroll down]  Claims linking the Canadian truckers' convoy to Nazis appeared in the Guardian, Vox, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, the (ironically-named) Independent, NBC, Reuters, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and many more.  Each of those 10 sources contains a line similar to this, "The truckers have been joined by various groups, including some displaying Nazi symbols and damaging public monuments."  None contained one picture or video to support the smear.  The smears remind us of the recent effort to associate the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia with fascists.  In that incident, anti-Republican activists, including the Lincoln Project, donned costumes to pose as racist supporters of the candidate.  We're also reminded of the recent criminal conviction of Jussie Smollett for staging a fake hate crime to smear Trump supporters.  We're also reminded of the many successful lawsuits by Nick Sandmann who the media falsely accused of hate crimes.  A more responsible media would have provided proof before coordinating yet another smear against a political movement.

The absurd 'Russiagate' Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post.  "For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest," the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, "that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."  Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by the Washington Post and the New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.  It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy that we now know never existed.  Oh, it was "deeply sourced," in that deep-state Democratic bureaucrats, furious that Trump had won the White House, were falling over themselves to talk anonymously to reporters.

Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake Destroys Fake News Media.  Trump-endorsed Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake's first television campaign advertisement will air.  Her ad will only run during news shows on news stations across Arizona.  Lake has a history of exposing fake news [...] and she is doing it now with a commercial that they must play.  The video, titled "Rigged Elections Have Consequences" calls out the fake news media for their silence on the 2020 election and lists the terrible consequences we face, including our weak southern border.

Revisionist Media 'Explainer' Articles Insist Nobody 'Spied' on Trump.  There's a second wave of media reaction to John Durham's latest filing on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.  The first wave was silence, hoping somehow the whole story would vanish.  Now, the second wave is "Explainers," which attempt to hem and haw defensively through the whole business.  The Associated Press "Explainer" was headlined "How the latest Trump-Russia filing generated buzz."  This article was sent to me on Twitter by a fellow who apparently hates Donald Trump with the energy of a thousand suns, so that illustrates the type of people who eagerly share these dismissive articles.  The AP reporter on this was Eric Tucker. [...] This is the threat that Durham represents.  He is exposing that everything the Clinton campaign did here was to politicize national security agencies, sharing its smears with the FBI and the CIA to spur spying on Trump advisers, to inflame media coverage, and then to taint the judicial process through the Mueller team, where 11 of 16 prosecutors were Democrat donors.  Five of them were Clinton donors.

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations.  One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government's criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann.  That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann's waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts.  In doing so, it revealed that "enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge."

Don't believe what Canadian media tells you about the Freedom Convoy.  Hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered across Canada last week to support the Freedom Convoy that trucked across the country to Ottawa to non-violently protest what have become, for some, the most oppressive and fickle health regulations in the world.  Our Prime Minister denounced them all yesterday as swastika-carrying inciters of violence who promote "hate rhetoric" and are "abusive towards their fellow citizens." [...] The Associated Press in Toronto outright lied, claiming there was "little sympathy in a country where more than 80% are vaccinated."  Most in the crowds were probably vaccinated.  "Three shots & I still can't get a haircut," one man's homemade sign said.  This was about freedom.  And a people sick of moving goalposts.  "Many people were outraged by some of the crude behavior," the AP lied.  But there was no crude behaviour.  It was lying.  Our Prime Minister did this too.

Axios Tries, and Fails, to Spin the Bad Economy.  At Axios, Dan Primack tries to wave away the terrible polling on the state of the economy by pretending that it is the inevitable "byproduct of a politics in which the economy is reflexively disparaged by those out of power."  It's not.  It's the "byproduct" of an economy that isn't good.

All the Lies That Are Fit to Print.  Ashley Rindberg's [new book] exposes the New York Times and its longstanding ideological roots.  Rindberg offers an illuminating historical study of how the Times repeatedly has engaged in spreading lies about National Socialism, Communism, and other authoritarian regimes and various political situations around the world.  This has been a clear pattern for decades, claims Rindsberg, and it's not difficult to see what he means.  During World War II, for example, the Times refused to acknowledge the gravity of Hitler's regime, and the correspondents would often, quite literally and openly, use Nazi propaganda points in their articles.  Was it denial of the reality that Hitler's regime brought about or actual antisemitic support for the regime?  In 1935, Frederick Birchall, one of the Times' journalists, wrote an article about the Olympics that were then taking place in Berlin.  The anti-Jewish riots were happening during the athletic event yet Birchall decided to minimize them and focus on the glory of the Olympics.

Why Newspapers Refuse to Correct Errors.  Many iconic U.S. newspapers sport slogans that seek to explain their mission — and self-image.  "All the News That's Fit to Print" has been called "the seven most famous words in American journalism."  "Democracy Dies in Darkness" was an overtly partisan call to arms.  But the most telling section of a newspaper's true values is its "Corrections" page.  That's where journalism distinguishes itself from just about every other profession, routinely and straightforwardly admitting its mistakes.  Who else does that?  It is a soul-crushing enterprise.  A single misspelled name is all it takes to ruin an otherwise stellar article.  We reporters may forget the topic of the piece we wrote last week, while the error five years ago is seared into our memories.  But it is also crucial:  Reader trust is the lifeblood of journalism.  If you can't believe what you read, why bother?

Avenatti and the Media Swindlers.  If you want to feed on fake news, be bombarded by endless praise-filled coverage of scoundrels whose fame is undeserved, and listen to just plain idiocy, keep watching television news.  With the latest conviction of former media star Michael Avenatti, I've made my case.  Not only does the story of his rise and fall illustrate my point, but the failure of the media that gave him so much praise and coverage is not the end of it.  Their lack of curiosity about his funding, even to this day, further condemns them as mere propagandists for the Left.

American Truckers Organizing Freedom Convoy to DC but Here Come the Censors.  The Freedom Convoy that made it across Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa is now occupying the streets in front of Parliament and is being supported by people in their efforts against vaccine mandates. [...] American truckers are now trying to follow in the footsteps of their Northern brethren — organizing a similar convoy from California to Washington, D.C., to stand against government overreach.  But Facebook is trying to stop them, removing the page from which they were organizing the effort.  Facebook claimed that the page was violating policies around QAnon.  Just as there was an effort to smear the Canadian effort by Justin Trudeau and some in liberal media, even claiming it was somehow associated with Russia, it looks like they're going after the U.S. effort.

Canadian Media Claims Russia is Behind the Truckers Freedom Protest.  As if the media can't get anymore desperate to brush aside the fact their own citizens are adamantly opposed to the vax mandates, this fake news host just claimed the entire thing is due to Russia.  Once again proving the leftist media will do anything to make up a news story in order to fit their current agenda, which currently appears to be start a war with Russia to deflect everyones attention away from the fact people are openly rebelling against them.  If a war does start, make no mistake, the government will try to round up people who have zero to do with Russia and everything to do with not complying with the leftist globalist agenda.  [Video clip]

When Will People Finally See the Obvious?  Consider the number of things the Left has been willing to lie to the American people about in recent years.  The short list includes:  COVID, suppressing its origins and effective means of treatment; January 6, 2021, touted as worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined and jailing Capitol trespassers for over a year without trial dates; Hunter Biden's laptop, immediately and roundly dismissed as "Russian disinformation"; destructive and deadly riots blithely labeled "mostly peaceful protests"; and parents at school board meetings protesting critical race theory viciously defamed and treated as would-be "domestic terrorists."  But between all of these (and so many more) major news stories, Americans en masse have begun to wake up and search for the truth outside what's being spoon-fed (and in some cases shovel-fed) to them by the corporate left-wing media. [...] So why has this leap of faithlessness not jumped over to the obvious facts of the 2020 election?  Those currently in power have a clear track record of covering up the truth on major news stories, but we're somehow supposed to believe what they say about the 2020 election?

Is This 'Leaked' Video Real Or Staged?  The Khaki-clad Patriot Front group was out protesting again today — This time at the March for Life in Washington DC.  Two weeks ago this mysterious khaki-clad group showed up at the Chicago March for Life for some reason. [...] In spite of all that there seems to be little media interest in digging deep to find out what's really going on with this group and who its members are.  There is, however, plenty of interest in videos that purport to show Patriot Front members using Nazi language and gestures.  One that is said to have been leaked is making the rounds.  Does this seem staged, or authentic?  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Ask yourself:  Who would benefit if it's genuine?  Nobody.  Who would benefit if it's fake but believable?  The Democrats.

Gorsuch, Sotomayor Push Back On NPR Story Claiming He Refused To Wear A Mask Despite Request.  Associate Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor put out a joint statement on Wednesday denying a recent report that Gorsuch refused to wear a mask during oral arguments, forcing Sotomayor to participate in proceedings remotely.  National Public Radio legal correspondent Nina Totenberg claimed in a Tuesday column that Gorsuch refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts that all justices wear masks during oral arguments as a result of Sotomayor's fears about the Omicron variant.  Sotomayor, who has diabetes, "has not attended the justices' weekly conference in person, joining instead by telephone" as a result of Gorsuch's refusal, Totenberg wrote.  "Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us.  It is false.  While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends," the two justices said.

NPR's Story About a SCOTUS Spat over Justices Wearing Masks Looks Like a Massive Pile of Fake News.  It seems even the most prestigious legal institution in the land is not immune to COVID, that is the politics of it all.  The Court did strike down the employer-based COVID vaccine mandate the Biden administration was pushing that was going to be enforced by OSHA. Yet, it didn't come before we all saw how wrong the liberal wing of the Court was on the issue.  I'm not talking about legal differences.  I'm talking about facts.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed that 100,000 kids were hospitalized with COVID and on ventilators.  She also said Omicron was just as deadly as Delta.  Not true.  This is what happens when you only watch CNN or MSNBC all day.  These people are deciding the fate of millions in the workforce and four of them consumed, digested, and believed in pure science fiction.  Luckily, that OSHA mandate was struck down 6-3.  Yet, the COVID antics have not stopped.  There are reports that Chief Justice John Roberts ordered all members to wear a mask at oral arguments.  Justice Gorsuch refused which forced Justice Sotomayor to work remotely.  Now, here's where the red flag comes in — it's an NPR story.

More about NPR.

Conspiracies as Realities, Realities as Conspiracies.  Consider that the Trump election of 2016, the transition, and the first two years of the Trump presidency were undermined by a media-progressive generated hoax of "Russian collusion."  The "bombshell" and "walls are closing in" mythologies dominated the network news and cable outlets.  It took five years to expose them as rank agit-prop.  Robert Mueller and his "dream team" consumed $40 million of Americans' money and 22 months of our time — to find the nothingburger that most of the country already knew was nothing.  Yet the subtext of the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House was the media narrative that Trump, as Hillary Clinton put it, was an "illegitimate" president, due to Russian collusion.  Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed on national television that Trump was a "Russian asset."  Former CIA head John Brennan assured the nation that the president was "treasonous," due to his supposed "lies to the American people."  All sorts of politicians, retired military, and news anchors echoed the charges.  The lies and myths of has-been British spy Christopher Steele made him a leftist hero.  They were repeated ad nauseam as truth.

Associated Press = Associated Propaganda.  If nothing else, the past two years have demonstrated with blazing clarity how the ruling elites live by one set of rules and impose an entirely separate set of rules on the unfavored, ostracized, dispossessed and deplatformed.  As a member of the print, broadcast and internet media for the past 30 years, I cannot emphasize enough how complicit so-called mainstream journalists are in perpetuating such double standards and stoking hatred of dissidents.  The Fourth Estate will spare no one — not even the dead — in its ruthless pursuit of absolute power over political narratives.  Let us consider a widely disseminated hit piece by Associated Press investigative reporter Michael Biesecker published on Jan. 3.

Is the tide finally turning?  On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business "skin-backs."  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that's particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.  I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.  So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

Fact Check:  Fact-Checkers Falsely Claim They Are Fact-Checkers.  Defending the ruling regime in Washington is a tough job with a lot of moving parts.  To keep everyone on message and to make sure that only the regime's message is the controlling one in the public square, you need committed politicians, woke multinational corporations, corporate media, and devoutly loyal followers who will echo that message far and wide.  Not all of these echo chambers are created equal.  For example, in the corporate media, some get to host to the fancy nighttime cable shows and make massive salaries while others have to handle the less glamorous and talent-demanding work, like pumping out endless "fact checks."  These lower-level operatives serve their purpose in service of the regime, however.  They supply the committed masses with clickbait that can be amplified by those eager to believe that the regime's message is not only preferable but is the absolute and only truth.  They exist to make us believe that to be on the side of the regime's message is to be on the side of the facts.

January 6 and the real 'Big Lie'.  [Scroll down]  The real Big Lie has been — and is still being — aided, abetted, and promoted by the Big Liars in the mainstream media.  No longer lie-detectors, they are lie-projectors, smear merchants, enemies of the people so full of it that industrial-sized enemas couldn't clean them out.  Bizarrely binary, they are nothing more than Deep State-approved mouth organs of the Democrat party, essentially state-run organizations when Democrats are in power and sworn enemies of the state when Republicans hold office.  They are Merchants of Menace.  The clowns at MSNBC, the Lolita-lovers at CNN, the "ladies" on The View, and the partisan pseudo-journalist hacks at fish-wrap factories like The New York Times and The Washington Post all routinely say the same things... in the same way.  They consistently beclown themselves but are not open-minded enough to realize it.

Top five media lies of 2021.  [#2] Ma'Khia Bryant was murdered by a racist police officer:  In April, a police officer shot Ma'Khia Bryant, a black teenager in Columbus, Ohio, as she was trying to stab another girl.  The footage from the officer's body camera made it very clear that the shooting was justified and the officer acted to save the woman's life.  The corporate media ran with the story that Ma'Khia Bryant had been murdered by a police officer because of her race.  Many outlets, such as the New York Times and The Daily Beast, even claimed she was unarmed at the moment of the shooting.

Pandemic Response Will Be Used As Model for "Climate Crisis" Response.  Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have assured worried populations that their policies would contain the virus, prevent infections, and save lives.  After two weeks of shutting down the country and sealing ourselves off, we would "flatten the curve" and then proceed with our lives as normal.  As we round out the second year of the "two weeks," I also recall that Biden's COVID advisor Dr. Anthony Facui assured us that once we hit 70% vaccination rates, we would no longer see surges in coronavirus cases. [...] One of the advantages about living through this pandemic is that we have the ability to see scientific "experts" fail in their projections in real time.  We have also observed politically connected bureaucrats stifle robust and essential scientific debate, as they colluded with the media to silence well qualified opposition to the latest pet theories and policies.  For example, Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email to Facui concerned about the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement developed by Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns.  The two organized a media smear campaign to paint these scientists as "fringe".

A Myth is Born:  How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies That Outlives The Truth.  When a Texas cattleman, seventy-nine, died last September in New Mexico after contracting covid, his family never anticipated the worldwide headlines that would ensue.  In a ballyhooed press conference, New Mexico Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase, the state's top health chief, announced New Mexico's first ivermectin "overdose," soon adding a second fatality allegedly from "ivermectin toxicity."  Now, Scrase has acknowledged that his repeated, what he called "offhand," assertions were groundless.  Two deaths were not caused by ivermectin, a long-used generic drug that was emerging as a covid treatment.  Instead, he said that the pair died because they "actually just delayed their care with covid."  That is a big difference.  Scrase backpedaled on December 1 in a little-noticed online press briefing and only after we pressed his agency to provide evidence for its claims of so-called "ivermectin deaths."  Officials had repeatedly said they were awaiting a toxicology report on the cattleman's death.  Yet we learned that the report was never even ordered or done, and, moreover, the man's death was ruled by the state's coroner as being from "natural" causes.

In 2021, Media Did More to Erode Trust Than to Repair It.  The case of actor Jussie Smollett's fake hate crime came to a conclusion this month, revealing that media outlets still are eager to pounce on a racially divisive story and cast blame, but reluctant to examine themselves when the story falls apart. [...] Earlier this month, Smollett was convicted of five of six counts of disorderly conduct, all stemming from his lies to Chicago police about the "hate crime" he staged with the help of others.  And how did the media react to this outcome?  Not well, and in some cases, not at all.  ABC News, which had featured Smollett and allowed the actor to elaborate on the hoax in 2019, failed to tell viewers that his trial was underway.  When Smollett's guilty verdicts were announced, the entire prime-time lineup on MSNBC completely ignored the news, despite the fact that the network was one of the principal promoters of Smollett's original claims.  An incredible headline on CNN muttered:  "Jussie Smollett guilty on some charges," blatantly downplaying the multiple verdicts.  It would have been more accurate to say "most charges," or even better, the precisely accurate "five of six."  And finally, some wondered why we were talking about the Smollett verdicts at all.

Glenn Greenwald Points To The One Moment That Changed The Pandemic And Destroyed Trust In Media.  Journalist Glenn Greenwald said in a Tuesday [12/28/2021] Twitter thread that there was one single moment that changed media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic — and that when it "flipped overnight," it destroyed trust in media.  The death of George Floyd — at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — and the massive protests it inspired prompted a near-180 turn from multiple media outlets that had just spent the previous weeks telling Americans that the only patriotic thing to do was stay home to stop the spread of the virus.  "This was a pivotal moment in the pandemic's history," Greenwald began.  "For 4 months, the message was clear and unrelenting:  everyone must stay home.  Those who leave — even to go to a deserted beach — are reckless sociopaths.  It flipped overnight to endorse a mass protest movement liberals liked." [...] "That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient," Greenwald continued, referencing experts who had joined media broadcasts to argue that systemic racism and police brutality posed greater health risks than the rapidly-spreading virus.  "Corporate media celebrated a [...] lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests."

Biden's Approval Ratings Are Inflated.  There has been a lot of publicity around Joe Biden's poor approval ratings, but I think his actual standing with the electorate is worse than they indicate.  Take, for example, the Rasmussen survey, which I think is valuable because 1) unlike other polls, it samples likely voters, and 2) it polls constantly, publishing a three-day rolling average.  Thus, whether the numbers are "right" or not, they are a good indicator of trends.  In Joe Biden's case, the trend has been obvious:  his approval rating quickly dropped to around 42%, and there it sits.  But I don't believe that 40+% of voters, surveying the wreckage of the last year, actually think that Biden is doing a good job.  Some of them are lying to the pollster, out of party loyalty.  We saw the same thing during the Obama administration.  It is more revealing to see how voters assess a president's performance on specific issues.

People Demand Rachel Maddow, MSNBC Apologize for False COVID Comments.  [Scroll down]  But Fauci wasn't the only one facing criticism today.  The other person was Rachel Maddow.  However, it wasn't for anything that she said recently; it was for comments that she made back in March that people were now calling into question.  Viewers were demanding an apology from Maddow and MSNBC for this video from March 29, in which she claimed that if you were vaccinated, it would stop the virus in its tracks and prevent transmission. [Tweet with video clip]  Maddow said, "Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person."  "A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she continued.  "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people."  Maddow stated that vaccines "would get us to the end of this," meaning the end of the pandemic.  This is just untrue.  While the transmission is allegedly less likely, vaccinated people can still get the virus and spread it.

The Covid fear factory is trembling.  [Scroll down]  At this point the question naturally arises:  Why is it that the public health establishment and the media are working hard to generate a tide of public hysteria around Omicron? [...] It's not by chance that the media is obsessing about case count.  Case counts are one of the most deceptive measures of pandemic severity when symptoms are mild to non-existent in the majority of the infected.

What do the UK Vaccine Surveillance Reports tell us?  [Scroll down]  Each time when we've heard "The pandemic of the unvaccinated" from the media and politicians, we can be reasonably sure that they are not talking about the actual health of those people, for whatever reason, do not take the vaccine.  Instead, they have actually been concerned about "Overwhelming the healthcare system" with unvaccinated people.  However, the raw data from the UK health systems shows that more vaccinated people than unvaccinated ones were using the healthcare system.  There is no such "raw data" available in the U.S. All we can find is some kind of rate.  CDC once had a CDC MMWR report that was based on the data from 13 U.S. jurisdictions.  That report stated that, once Delta appeared, vaccinated people reduced their risk of infection by five times, and both their risk of hospitalization and risk of death by more than ten times.  The report acknowledges that the data from 13 jurisdictions "might not be generalizable," and that's true.  It's nonsense.  Nevertheless, the Mainstream Media and politicians immediately started to propagandize based on that report.

Here There Be Monsters.  Tech company oligarchs, media conglomerates, and pharmaceutical companies have collaborated with the federal government to encapsulate Americans in a fantasy of incomplete, misleading, false, and contrived information.  Unlike the federal government, the predominant social media are not constrained in disregarding the First Amendment, and routinely engage in outright censorship and speech suppression.  As long as it serves the government's purposes, curtailing its opponents' free speech is fine.  All U.S. "mainstream" media are owned and controlled by six corporations.  Those corporations call the shots on what does and does not get news coverage, how that coverage is fashioned, and its content.  To believe the U.S. "mainstream" media represent a free press is more an act of faith than believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.  Acts of outrageous media hypocrisy occur on a daily basis, always favoring the Left/government's preferences.  News censorship and content control are hallmarks of totalitarian government, and the U.S. checks both boxes today.

[The] Associated Press [is] lying about consensus on COVID vaccines for children.  On 15 December the Associated Press (AP), one of the world's premier wire services, ran a lengthy report titled "How a Kennedy Built an Anti-Vaccine Juggernaut Amidst Covid-19."  The report, written by Michelle Smith, examined the efforts of Robert Kennedy, Jr. to warn against what he perceives are the risks associated with the current Covid vaccines, and particularly how those risks pertain to children. [...] Anybody who takes the trouble to do even a little research will quickly find out that no such consensus exists.  This is very easy to show.  To wit, less than a week before the Associated Press filed its report an international conference was held.  It was co-sponsored by an organization called Global Covid Summit, which is an international alliance of physicians and medical scientists "committed to speaking truth about Covid pandemic research and treatment."  This organization has more than fifteen thousand members from around the globe, many of whom are recognized as top experts in their fields.

Here is the Mainstream Media in Israel Fabricating a Story.  If you wanted to see how corrupt the mainsteam media outlets are across the planet, here is several Israeli news organizations working together to fabricate the entire pandemic fraud that has swept the world.  They even recorded themselves setting the entire thing up, luckily, it allows us to see just how far they're going to setup these stories about hospitals being overwhelmed, mass deaths, etc.  [Video clip]

Fake News Newsweek Mocks Trump for Having 200 Tickets Left Unsold in Arena That Holds 21,000.  You really cannot trust a single thing the fake news mainstream media is reporting anymore.  On Saturday night [12/18/2021] President Trump held an event with Bill O'Reilly in Houston, Texas at the Tokyo Center.  The arena was packed to capacity.  But you wouldn't know this if you read fake news Newsweek.  The far-left publication actually mocked President Trump for the 200 tickets that were not sold before the event started this afternoon.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Pravda.  Interesting short segment from Sky News interviewing the smiling U.K. Health Minister Gillian Keegan about the intense U.K. response to the Omicron variant and the new restrictions announced by government officials.  Great Britain is preparing for hundreds-of-thousands of Omicron cases.  [Video clip]

The High Price of Bidenomics.  American humorist Edgar Wilson Nye famously observed, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."  Recently, the White House and its numerous allies in the "news" media have been telling an increasingly skeptical electorate a similarly self-refuting tale about the Biden economy.  Typical of the stories that have appeared in major news outlets is this howler from CNN's Julian Zelizer, who insists that there is "a huge disconnect between the economic data and the way voters are feeling."  Anyone naïve enough to believe such balderdash will be disabused of their illusions by reading Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that the consumer price index (CPI) has risen by 6.8 percent during the 12-month period ending in November.

Liberal Media Pushes Bonkers Conspiracy Theory About Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is moving to create a civilian corps in his state to help when natural disasters like hurricanes hit.  Twenty-two other states already have the exact same thing, but the media is portraying it as a private militia to do DeSantis' personal bidding.  This is the same media that is constantly accusing others of spreading conspiracy theories.

Willie Horton and the Democratic Party's Greatest Fear.  [Scroll down]  Fast-forward to November 21, 2021. In the tranquil suburban community of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a vicious bigot named Darrell Brooks — free on bail with multiple pending felonies, one being his recent attempt to run over his onetime girlfriend with his SUV — allegedly drove through a Christmas parade, running down as many innocent people as he could, killing at least five, injuring some sixty more.  Media-watchers have already begun to comment on how relatively little detailed coverage there has been.  We have noticed blatant photo-editing techniques used to lighten the perpetrator's skin in media photos.  We have seen a surprising lack of MSM interest in both the man's history and his apparent motive.  We have seen, if anything, a textbook case in how to all but bury a story too big to dismiss.

Why Jussie Smollett deserves to be punished for his shameful hoax.  On January 29, 2019, African American actor Jussie Smollett who is gay claimed that two masked men wearing MAGA hats hurled racist and homophobic abuses at him.  He claims that they proceeded to punch him, pour a chemical substance over him, put a rope around his neck and berate him with "this is MAGA country."  He also claimed that he had received a hate mail consisting of a barrage of racist invectives.  The US mainstream media gleefully carried and amplified the story because it fits their narrative of far-right Trump supporters persecuting a gay man of color.  Instances such as these explain why very few in the US trust their news media.

The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the "White Supremacist" Label.  Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a "white supremacist."  Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact.  Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist" was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one's own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).  Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true.  This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event:  a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation.  Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.

It was an act of intentional, race-based, black-on-white, vehicular homicide.  It was not accidental.
Waukesha Parade Attack:  Debra Messing Blasts Media For Downplaying Massacre As An 'Accident'.  Actress Debra Messing took aim at the media for "minimizing" the attack that occurred at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  Darrell Brooks has been charged with intentional homicide after driving his SUV through a crowded street commemorating the holiday season, resulting in the deaths of six people ages 8 to 81 and injuring dozens more.  However, many media outlets had been referring to the attack as a "parade crash," downplaying the intent prosecutors have leveled against the career criminal.

Everything the Media Told You About Kyle Rittenhouse Was Wrong.  Last week's acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with the murder of two men in Kenosha, Wis., likely came as a shock to millions of Americans who had relied on the media to inform their understanding of the case.  From the time Rittenhouse killed two men on the streets of Kenosha last August, media characterizations of the event suggested his conviction was a foregone conclusion.  He was a troubled kid, "a high school dropout who viewed law enforcement as his personal heroes" and had "an affinity for guns."  Many took pains to point out that he had attended a rally for then-president Donald Trump.  A New York Times report found that he "showed strong support for officers."  The Daily Beast referred to him as a "fanatic."  The men Rittenhouse shot in self-defense quickly became sympathetic figures.  Anthony Huber, who attacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard, died doing something "heroic," according to CNN — which was quoting Huber's girlfriend.  In a piece that has since been edited, the network described Joseph Rosenbaum, a convicted child rapist, as somebody who would "make you laugh out of nowhere."

It's time to revisit the coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse.  [Thread reader]  With the news that he has been acquitted on all counts, don't forget the ways that Dems and the corporate press came together to craft a false narrative in his case. [...] We need to start with the media coverage that framed this case in the public mind.  To the press, Rittenhouse was as good as guilty when the news broke.  So naturally, to @CNN, the people he shot in self defense were heroes & those defending him had "justified murder."  [Tweets]  This wasn't just limited to CNN.  [The New York Times] put out what amounts to a hit piece on Rittenhouse because his "social media accounts showed strong support for officers."  They even put out a piece about how right-wingers attacking protestors was some sort of phenomenon.  [Tweets]  Never to be outdone, @MSNBC said the shooting was white supremacy and then went on to blame — who else — President Trump for "fueling violence," sowing "chaos and disorder" and "encouraging vigilante justice"[.]

How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison?  Let Us Count the Ways.  Americans, already disgusted by the FBI, manufactured Trump Russia scandals, and counterintelligence investigations into concerned parents like they're members of Al Qaeda, closely watched this case and were repulsed by the chicanery used to prosecute Rittenhouse.  They're supposed to be the justice guys, right?  It's a wonder that Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all counts.  You can blame Leftist propagandists or your laziness if you believed that Rittenhouse's assailants were black, or that his gun was illegal, or that he brought it "across state lines," or that he was a "chaos tourist" and a "vigilante."  But there's a special Mike Nifong-sized ring of hell for prosecutors who introduce these slanders into a courtroom, knowing that their subterfuge might put a kid away for the rest of his life.  Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus did this in many ways, by invoking lies — that they knew were lies — into pre-trial bail hearings, motions, and then ultimately into the courtroom itself in the trial.  All of these lies were dutifully transcribed by friendly journalists.

The Rittenhouse trial:  Our corporate media and big tech are truly sinister.  Nothing more conclusively proves the depraved nature of the American media than the Rittenhouse trial.  The then-seventeen-year-old, as numerous videos of the event proved, was clearly under attack by the three men who chased him and he subsequently shot in self-defense.  There is simply no doubt about that.  There was no racial aspect to what happened.  The two men who died were criminals.  Jacob Rosenbaum had just served fifteen years in prison for anally raping five boys, ages 9 [to] 11.  That night he set a dumpster on fire, was swinging a heavy chain around and screaming the n-word.  Huber, the man who had hit Rittenhouse with a skateboard, also had a criminal record for domestic abuse.  So did Grosskreutz who admitted under oath to pointing a gun at Rittenhouse's head before Rittenhouse pulled the trigger injuring his arm.  Jacob Blake, the thug whose shooting by police got the riot going thanks to the media, was a rapist as well.  He was in the act of kidnapping a child and threatening the police with a knife when he was shot. [...] There are people today, even after the verdict, who think Rittenhouse shot Black men, that Rittenhouse was there, in the city his father lives in, to purposefully engage with BLM rioters, that his gun was illegal.  None of that is true.

Goal Of Rittenhouse Prosecution and Media Manipulation Is To Render "Citizens Not Being Able To Defend Themselves".  [Scroll down]  So the narrative is Kyle Rittenhouse is a militia member who crossed state lines with a weapon to shoot peaceful protest is protestors.  None of those things are true, other than he did cross the state line.  Like that's some big deal nowadays, but he wasn't carrying a weapon.  The weapon was already in Wisconsin.  He was lawfully able to possess it in Wisconsin.  That's why the judge threw out the charge of being a minor in possession.  He wasn't in an militia.  Remember there's certainly no evidence introduced to that.  And he didn't shoot peaceful protestors.  He shoot shot three extremely violent people who tried to kill him.  So that media narrative is out there.  It will never go away.  And that has framed the case for political purposes, that this is white supremacy on trial here.  So you have Black Lives Matter protesters out there claiming racism for a white kid who shot three white people.  This has nothing to do with race yet.  That's what it's turned into.

Once more with feeling!  Media coverage of the Rittenhouse case was hot garbage.  We covered this territory during the trial but now that it's over it's worth remembering that the media's coverage of this case was terrible from the moment it happened.  Today, Drew Holden put together a thread hitting some of the lowlights: [...]

10 Media Myths Exploded During the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial.  [#1] "White supremacist":  There was never any evidence that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist," even by the time Biden made that false claim last September.  The prosecution confirmed that fact during the trial when it failed to produce evidence of any kind that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist" or had racial motivations.  The owners of the car dealership who asked Rittenhouse and others for help were Indian-American. [...] [#7] Rittenhouse "crossed state lines":  It is true that Rittenhouse is from Antioch, Illinois.  But he was working last summer as a lifeguard in Wisconsin, and his father lives in Kenosha — a fact that tripped the prosecution when they tried to portray Rittenhouse as a kind of outsider, a "chaos tourist" who neither cared about nor was familiar with the local community.

Kyle Rittenhouse and the False Narrative.  The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is an important moment in American culture, because this isn't just about Kyle Rittenhouse. [...] For me, the unacknowledged heroes of the Rittenhouse case are the intrepid videographers who were on the scene recording what was taking place on the street.  Without them, Rittenhouse would probably be facing a real risk of being convicted for double murder.  Why?  Because he's dealing with a dishonest prosecutor, who doesn't hesitate to say things he knows are misleading; dishonest detectives, who don't hesitate to twist the truth; and a dishonest media, which has been brazenly lying about what happened between Rittenhouse and his combatants for a whole year. [...] If you read media accounts of the confrontation, you would get the clear impression that it was Rittenhouse who was chasing Rosenbaum, not the other way around.  For anyone reading these accounts, it would seem that the men were minding their own business when Rittenhouse decided on his own to hunt and gun them down.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's all about the narrative — facts [notwithstanding].  Jussie Smollett was not attacked by MAGA-hatted white thugs; the media treated his initial story with complete credulity.  Christine Blasey Ford provided no supporting evidence for her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh; the media treated her as a groundbreaking heroine.  The high schoolers of Covington Catholic did not mock a Native American man; the media treated them as evil white supremacists.  Jacob Blake was not wrongfully shot by police; the media treated his shooting as a case of systemic police racism.  No evidence was ever presented that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd based on race; his case nonetheless became the point of the spear in our "national conversation" about racism.  How many facts will die at the hands of media-crafted narratives?  As many as need to die in order to achieve political utopia for the left.

Retract Every Russian Collusion Story and Fire Everyone Who Wrote Them.  [Scroll down]  But the [Washington] Post should not just unapologetically correct the phony stories on Millian; every single article, column, and video that supports the now-debunked Russian collusion hoax should be retracted with a lengthy explanation.  Tom Hamburger, who was in cahoots with Simpson from the start and met with Simpson and Christopher Steele in September 2016 to accelerate the narrative weeks before the presidential election, should be fired.  Immediately.  So, too, should Helderman.  And Post editors should force the pair to return the Pulitzer Prize they won, along with several New York Times reporters, in 2018 for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."  This unfolding scandal is not only about how inaccurately the media covered Sergei Millian or the bogus Steele dossier.  There was no collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians.  Period.  And everyone knew it at the time.  Tom Hamburger knew it, Rosalind Helderman, everyone at MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and more knew it was fabricated garbage peddled by a well-known paid smear merchant who was disguising another paid political operative as a "western intelligence officer."

Trump Dossier Coverage 'One of the Most Egregious Journalistic Errors' in History, Admits Corporate Media.  Axios, one of the leading D.C.-based corporate media outlets, has admitted that reporting surrounding the now infamous Trump-Steele dossier was "one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history," in an article slamming news-media colleagues for the years of fake news reporting.  "...[T]he media's response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid," wrote Sara Fischer on Sunday morning, as it becomes increasingly clear to the nation's journalistic class that not only were they willingly duped for years, but that they have made almost no efforts to correct their outright falsehoods.

The Russia hoax was the journalism version of check kiting.  The Russia hoax, as President Trump correctly called it, is turning out to be a legal problem for some and a credibility collapse for journalism. [...] In the real world, the victims of check kiting end up in the courts, trying to get their money.  In the media world, they click the channel off or cancel their subscriptions.  Can anyone read a story based on sources close to the information and take it seriously anymore?  I don't.  I take those stories as seriously as I do those polls based on "adults."  Let's hope Mr. Durham understands how important his task is.  He owes the country an explanation for how something like this could happen.

When Liberal Media Narratives Blow Up.  Today it's Kyle Rittenhouse.  Not long ago it was young Nicholas Sandmann.  And, of course, for four years or so it was the Trump-Russia collusion business.  What do these three episodes have in common?  That would be the fact of a wildly untrue liberal media narrative. [...] So what do we have here?  What we have is a crystal clear pattern of the media substituting liberal bias for the facts of a given story.  The center of the story of the moment could be Kyle Rittenhouse or Nicholas Sandmann or Trump-Russia collusion.  It could be, heaven knows, all manner of other news stories.  But the one constant in each is that the liberals at these liberal media outlets deliberately — say again deliberately — report the facts of a case with a far left bias.  Now the liberal narrative of Kyle Rittenhouse seems to be falling apart in a court of law.  The question is, will the liberal media learn from this?  Will it finally learn that in reporting the news it's the facts, not the political bias of a liberal narrative, that should rule?  Don't bet the ranch.

Joe Biden Calls Satchel Paige "The Great Negro" — Media Immediately Says Biden Did Not Say What You Saw Him Say.  Comrades, the ministry of truth does not want you to misunderstand what Joe Biden is saying in these prepared remarks.  Do not believe your eyes and ears, Joe Biden is not saying:  ..."You know, I've adopted the attitude of the great negro at the time, pitcher in the negro leagues went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, into the, major league baseball after Jackie Robinson, his name was Satchel Paige".  Joe Biden is NOT saying this, according to U.S. media immediately afterward.  [Video clip]

A Deeper Divide.  After the George Floyd death the mainstream media covered BLM in expected flattering terms.  So much so that Main Street believes that in a typical year police kill anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 unarmed black men.  The real figure last year was eighteen.  The U.S. Crime Victimization Study also reveals a different story:  In a normal year like 2019, among violent crimes involving a white perp and a black victim or a black perp and a white victim, 70 to 90 percent of such incidents are black-on-white crimes.  True statistics aside, American society's generators like universities, media, entertainment, and Big Tech continue to spread the view that oppressors rule the nation and that slavery defines American history.

Turley: The media oddly missed the "crash and burn" of Rittenhouse prosecutors this week.  They didn't miss it at all — national media outlets just tried their best to report around it.  We have covered the errors and outright violations committed by Kenosha prosecutors in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and so our readers are aware of what Jonathan Turley describes as the "crash and burn" of the murder case over the past week.  Most media consumers have instead been fed a narrative of judicial bias and bizarre attempts to inject race into a case where the accused, the alleged victims, and most of the witnesses are all white.

The Leftist Media Lied Through Their Teeth about Kyle Rittenhouse.  One clip after another shows just how many lies the liberal media was willing to concoct in order to pain Kyle Rittenhouse as the bad guy.  Now, that the case has been seen and viewed publicly, most intelligent people are realizing all of the lies the liberal media told, i.e.  "A white supremacist," who was "looking to murder protesters."  Is just that, more lies from a media who makes the story up as they go.

How did we get here?  Can this mess be fixed?  [Scroll down]  Long ago, there was a day, we are told (because none of us was around to witness it), when most people believed what they read in a newspaper.  Gradually, that myth faded.  We learned that journalists weren't always truthful.  Today, a scant 14% trust what the media, press, or journalists have to say.  That's part of the price we pay for undermining truth.  Lying, conniving, and propagandizing journalists get a fair share of the blame.  But few people understood journalism's function even in the good old days.  Journalists do not tell the truth.  They tell what people tell them.  If a reporter or commentator limited his published words to "the truth," he would publish little with certainty apart from the date.  I've yet to meet a journalist, and I've met thousands, capable of ferreting out "the truth" in complex issues.  Some do better than others by compiling an array of evidence and testimony.  But in the end, it's the same story: "so-and-so says so."  It's unavoidable, a hazard of the genre.

Media Reveals Just How Misleading They Can Be When It Comes to Rittenhouse Coverage.  We've written before about how the prosecution seems to have been imploding its own case in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.  There was the opening statement where the prosecutor, Thomas Binger, claimed that Rittenhouse was chasing Joseph Rosenbaum rather than the truth that it was the other way around. [...] Today was perhaps the capper of them all that completely blew up the case.  The defense was questioning Gaige Grosskreutz — the third man Rittenhouse shot.  Grosskreutz admitted that he advanced on Rittenhouse and pointed the gun at him and it was only after that, that Rittenhouse shot him. [...] We see how media is portraying the trial today so we can see just how misleading it is because we know what happened at the trial.  We can't always see all the facts in a story that the media reports on in the way we did here.  Yet, this is how they are casting the trial?  Are they kidding?  And they wonder why Americans no longer trust them?  This is a perfect example of why.

3 points about the news media.  [Thread reader]  The vast majority of disinformation, propaganda and lies that flooded the country over the last 5 years did not come from MAGA boomers on Facebook or 4Chan teenagers but the largest and most influential liberal corporate media outlets.  These are not cases where media outlets erred.  They deliberately lied.  The way to know that is they refuse to acknowledge evidence proving they lied.

Never Trumpers and Black Lives Matter Have the Same Backer.  The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories.  A group of "principled" Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.  The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical.  And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out.  Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans "whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts."  Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.  The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin and his running mate Mindy Finn.  Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media's writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign.  Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up.  The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic.  The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.  And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.

Our mostly complicit, compliant, sycophant press has no concern about facts, only Democrat power.  What happened to Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond dwarfed Watergate.  Most of the media not only didn't care about the corruption of the Democrats, but were also major participants in seeking to destroy a candidate, and later president, they didn't like.  Special counsel John Durham has started to hit paydirt with three arrests so far, the tip of the iceberg, and the story is essentially buried because the media don't care, and they don't want the public to know the truth.  If the public learns the truth, they will see how dishonest, corrupt, and dangerous the media are.  They will set out to destroy anyone they don't want in elective office.  The truth and evidence are never necessary when they are campaigning for Democrats.

Our Media Apparently Decides Who Won the NJ Gubernatorial Election.  Apparently, our corrupt media now calls elections and decides who wins.  The Associated Press called the race for New Jersey Governor.  Unsurprisingly, they called it for totalitarian progressive Phil Murphy.  They called it while an investigation is going on and 40,000 votes, giving Murphy the edge, miraculously appeared in Bergen County.  This was after 100% of the vote was reported in.  There is no way Red districts went for Murphy in this climate.  Yet, that appears to be what we are supposed to believe.  Murphy is 20,000 votes ahead of Republican opponent Jack Ciatarelli.  Why is the media calling races and why are they doing it before the investigation is completed?

Democrats Traipsing Through Strawberry Fields.  Start with critical race theory, one of the major issues in school board elections nationwide and in the Virginia gubernatorial race.  Former Bush Republican, now a Trump-hating liberal Democrat, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace declared that critical race theory "isn't real."  Her strawberry fields analysis of a Republican sweep in Virginia, the GOP winning the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general positions was, "So, I think that the real ominous thing, is that critical race theory, which isn't real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection-endorsed Republican."  Maybe in the cocooned studios of MSNBC, critical race theory is some QAnon or white supremacist conspiracy theory, but to voters it was quite real, and concerning.  If critical race theory is not real, someone should tell Amazon as they offer numerous books on the subject, in education and mathematics, how to teach it in school and how to respond to "microaggressions," meaning any viewpoint that challenges the CRT agenda.  Defeated gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe told fellow Democrat Chuck Todd shortly before the election that critical race theory has "never been taught" in the state's public schools and that the fight to ban the theory from school curricula is a "racist dog whistle."  McAuliffe also claimed that eventual gubernatorial victor Glenn Youngkin "wants to ban critical race theory."  Chuck Todd missed the obvious follow up question of why something that doesn't exist or isn't taught would need to be banned?

'Miss Occupy Cockpit in trouble now': Southwest 'Let's Go Brandon' pilot narrative takes odd twist in audio doubletake.  Southwest Airlines 'Let's go, Brandon!' claim may not be all it's cracked up to be according to social media sleuths[.]  Associated Press reporter Colleen Long claimed over the weekend that a Southwest Airlines pilot on her flight signed off with "Let's go, Brandon!" but the audio being passed around with her story seems to have some major inconsistencies.  First off, according to Twitchy, there is real doubt as to whether the pilot said "Let's go, Brandon!" or "Let's go, Braves!" because the audio is clipped.  But the media ran with the much more controversial "Let's go, Brandon!" pretty much on the word of an AP reporter.

Is the story about the Southwest pilot saying 'Let's Go, Brandon' all wrong?  It was a made-to-go viral story: a Southwest pilot, after making his little announcement about the flight to passengers, closed by saying, "Let's go, Brandon."  The next day, an AP reporter tweeted out that she tried desperately — and unsuccessfully — to get to the cockpit to interview the pilot about what he said for her story about "Let's go, Brandon."  The response was instant, with leftists demanding that he get fired and one likening him to an ISIS-supporter.  But what if the whole narrative is wrong?  It's beginning to look as though that's the case.  If you listen to the pilot, when he mumbles "Let's go..." at the end, it doesn't really sound like "Brandon."  It's more likely that the pilot said, "Let's go, Braves."  [Video clip]

7 Insane Things I Just Learned About How U.S. Elections Are 'Rigged'.  [#6] It's No Longer Media Bias, It's Media Lies:  As my opening to this essay explains, I'm aware media bias has been transcended by outright propaganda.  In her book, however, Mollie [Hemingway] makes an excellent point about this after detailing other cases proving this shift.  She makes it in relation to what I'd call a relatively minor offense — The New York Times publishing a Trump-smearing piece from an anonymous author it described as a "senior administration official," meaning "someone in the upper echelon of an administration."  Of course, it turned out this person wasn't any such thing.  He was just a mid-level bureaucrat.

McAuliffe buys 'fake news' ads in effort to sway voters, Fox News investigation finds.  Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe has spent nearly $100,000 advertising "fake news" websites on Facebook during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, Fox News can reveal.  The Democrat's advertisements, which have been viewed up to 3.5 million times so far, are hidden on a Facebook page with a similar name to a local news website.  The ads link to third-party websites that ostensibly publish local news, but exist to promote Democratic candidates.  The websites have been widely described as disinformation and "partisan propaganda."

Axios Blames American Consumers, Not Bad Policy for Labor Shortages.  Blame the American consumer!  That's the approach liberal outlet Axios used to explain away the atrocious labor shortages affecting the U.S. economy, and not President Joe Biden's economic policies.  Axios published a snobbish piece headlined, "Unruly customers threaten economic recovery."  The outlet's asinine argument was that "increasingly violent and combative customers," angry about "long wait times and mask mandates," were causing workers to quit, hamstringing a recovery that hinges in part on employees "returning to work."  But unlike Axios, The Wall Street Journal editorial board didn't hesitate to pin the labor shortage blame on the proper culprit:  "Bidenomics."  The Journal suggested two specific sources for what has been causing the worker shortage.  The sources it mentioned were: "government and employer vaccine mandates that set ultimatums for workers" and Democrats making "quitting an easier economic option" through a litany of federal unemployment benefits.

Age-Adjusted Mortality Is at 2004 Levels.  Yet They Tell Us Covid Is Worse Than the 1918 Flu..  Last week, the media again tried to ratchet up the public's fear over covid-19 by labeling it more deadly than the 1918 flu epidemic.  "COVID-19 Is Now the Deadliest Disease in U.S. History," reads one headline from an NBC TV affiliate.  Considering the realities of cancer and heart disease, that headline is absurdly false.  Perhaps the author meant "communicable disease."  A TIME headline was at least arguably factual, declaring, "COVID-19 Is Now the Deadliest Pandemic in American History."  But even the TIME headline is only arguably true if stripped of all context.  If we actually look at disease mortality proportionally to the population, the 1918 epidemic was far worse than covid.  Considering that the US population in 1918 was one-third its current size, we find that deaths per million from the flu epidemic totaled about sixty-five hundred per million.  Covid, by comparison currently comes in — in the official numbers — around twenty-two hundred per million.  But this is all part of a larger pattern — one well embraced by the media — of presenting information with as little context as possible.

Gallup: Trust In The Media Sinks to 36 Percent, Second Lowest Ever.  Can the mistrust of the media get much greater?  Gallup pollsters reported on Thursday [10/7/2021] that American trust in the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36 percent, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."  Overall, just seven percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29 percent "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32 percent record low in 2016, during the Donald Trump vs.  Hillary Clinton battle.  More than half of respondents sound fed up:  29 percent of the public currently registers "not very much" trust and 34 percent say they have "none at all."

What the press is leaving out about the Arizona election audit.  The ethical corruption of our national new media has extended to a degree that once would have seemed unimaginable.  We were exposed to yet another remarkable example with the reporting on the long-awaited audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona. [...] While the audit did find that a hand-recount of all of the original ballots did widen Joe Biden's margin by several hundred votes, the press deliberately and steadfastly ignored and left unreported the most critical results of the draft audit.  Included among those original ballots, the most comprehensive election audit ever conducted established the following:
  •   More than 23,000 mail-in votes were cast under voter IDs from people who should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved.
  •   More than 10,000 voters cast ballots in more than one county.
  •   More than 9,000 mail-in ballots were returned and counted than had been mailed out of registered voters.
  •   Thousands of official results did not match those who voted, and thousands more were cast in-person in the name of those who had moved out of state.
  •   Logs and data files related to the election had been deliberately erased from the Election Management System (EMS) server, in violation of the law.
  •   Thousands of original ballots were duplicated more than once.
  •   Auditors were never provided with the required chain-of-custody documentation for the ballots, causing increased ambiguity regarding the accuracy of the election results.
  •   None of the various systems related to the election had numbers that would balance and agree with one another.
  •   Maricopa County officials actively interfered with the audit, withheld subpoena items, and refused to answer questions that are normally standard in such audits.

Outlets That Poured Gas on Phony Border Patrol Story Forced to Correct Their Fake News.  Mainstream media outlets are, with egg on their face, issuing clarifications and corrections to their stories that falsely smeared Border Patrol agents who were defending America's southern border for actions they didn't take using equipment they don't have.  The timing makes sense as attention strays again from the U.S.-Mexico border following an influx of some 15,000 illegal immigrants — many of them Haitians who'd previously fled to South America — who set up a makeshift "Bidenville" under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.  Despite the half-hearted mea culpas, their mission to distract from the border crisis by creating a new boogeyman has already done its damage.  The El Paso Times, one of the original propagators of the phony story, issued a meek "clarification," rather than a correction or retraction which would have been more suited to the literal fake news that launched a national firestorm and triggered condemnation from the White House that caused an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Activist Media Has Done an Exemplary Job of Deceiving the American People on COVID-19.  When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the activist media has performed masterfully. [...] Ever since it became apparent that the COVID-19 outbreak would be a serious issue, the Democrats and their close friends and allies in the activist media have been trying to convince us that we're all gonna die slow, painful deaths after being infected.  The press has been on a full-on crusade to terrify the American people into abiding by lockdown orders and mask mandates.  They used fear to make us more amenable to government encroaching on our lives. [...] Since the government wants to push mandatory vaccines and use the pandemic as an excuse to impose intrusive measures to control the populace, the activist media seeks to persuade the public that this is all for their own good.  It launched a whole persuasion campaign specifically designed to confuse and terrify people into complying with the government.

Look past the hand-waving, and you'll see a wide open Mexican border.  Soon after Bill Melugin of Fox News began beaming drone footage of the many thousands of Haitians gathered under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, Biden's open borders zealot in charge of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, ordered two nearby border checkpoints abandoned.  The reason given was to redirect those personnel to help process the Haitians.  The media reported that those checkpoints had been "closed," leading the viewer to believe that traffic had been rerouted.  But that was not the case.  The fifty thousand vehicles those checkpoints inspect during an average week continued to move through, only now no one was checking them for drugs or trafficked humans.  This happened while Mayorkas was giving a news conference under the Del Rio bridge, insisting that the U.S. border was definitely "not open."  In fact, the border in the Del Rio sector was wide open.

Russiagate, More Like Watergate.  CNN Chief Media Reporter Brian Stelter hopped on the set of Reliable Sources last weekend, and offered his take on Special Counsel John Durham's recent indictment of former Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann, calling Durham's probe a "total bust."  This was in the context of accusing other networks like Fox and OAN of a pattern of "lie, rinse, repeat." [...] A long list of press figures — from Stelter's own CNN colleague and shameless intelligence community spokesclown Natasha Bertrand, to reporters from The New Yorker, Time, MSNBC, Fortune, the Financial Times, and especially Slate and The Atlantic — were witting or unwitting pawns in a scheme to sell the public on a transparently moronic hoax, i.e. that Donald Trump's campaign was communicating mysterious digital treason to Russia's Alfa Bank via a secret computer server.  The story sounded absurd from the start, and was instantly challenged by experts.

What the New CDC Report on Unvaccinated Left Out.  A newly published CDC study prompted the MSM to run headlines like "New study finds unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die from Covid, CDC says," "Unvaccinated people were 11 times more likely to die of covid-19, CDC report finds," and "Unvaccinated People Are 11 Times More Likely To Die Of COVID-19, New Research Finds."  It surely looks scary if you read only those headlines.  I was curious about what the report actually says, and doesn't say.  Below is what I found.  [#1] The purpose of the report is for propaganda:  The report admits in its Discussion section that "the data assessed from 13 jurisdictions accounted for 25% of the U.S. population, and therefore might not be generalizable."  But it still suggests that "[t]he data might be helpful in communicating the real-time impact of vaccines (e.g., persons not fully vaccinated having >10 times higher COVID-19 mortality risk) and guiding prevention strategies, such as vaccination and nonpharmacologic interventions."  No wonder the MSM outlets quickly spread this message around.

Sensational headline alert:  There has been ONE CASE of measles reported.  This is hardly worth reporting.
Army base hit with highly contagious disease as thousands of Afghan refugees flood into America.  A case of measles has been identified at Fort McCoy Army Base in Wisconsin as thousands of Afghan refugees are housed there temporarily while they await resettlement in the United States.  Fox News was able to view an internal government email on Sunday [9/5/2021] that confirms a case of measles at Fort McCoy.  "All those who had been in contact with the infected person at base have been isolated, and post-exposure prophylaxis and inoculations are in process," the email stated.

The Masked Ball of Cowardice.  What's transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative.  The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments.  Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP's narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP's policies.  Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Tamarius Davis
Shooter opened fire on Miami Beach tourist, danced over body: witness.  A Georgia man "randomly" shot and killed a tourist in a Miami Beach restaurant and danced over his body as the man tried to protect his 1-year-old baby from the gunman, reports said.  Tamarius Blair Davis, 22, of Norcross, Georgia, was allegedly high on psychedelic mushrooms when he opened fire on 21-year-old Dustin Wakefield at close range before he danced over his body in view of horrified onlookers dining outdoors at La Cerveceria de Barrio on Miami Beach's famous Ocean Drive on Tuesday night [8/24/2021], witnesses and police said.  "After the shooting, he was dancing on top of the guy," a witness, who didn't want to be identified, told CBS Miami.

The Editor says...
Why do reporters think blacks always shoot "randomly" selected white people?  The selections are not random.


How Data Manipulation Is Used to Support the Desired Narratives.  Who uses data manipulation?  Governments, businesses (individual or entire industries as we constantly see in martial arts/self-defense), the media, and social organizations with an agenda.  These groups or organizations utilize information to create a narrative on a topic for a specific reason, most often for their own benefit.  The data itself could be entirely legitimate and authentic (though it may not be).  It's how it's spun that's important, and most people rarely dig deeper [...] Remember, data manipulation has multiple benefits, and it's usually very subtle yet sudden.  If it fits a person's narrative, they will often support it.  Even if it's different from the original source manipulating the data in the first place.

Covid Disinformation:  Post Reporter Tries to Make Mask Fanatics Seem Heroic.  Sydney Page, in an "objective" news piece, amplifies the opinion of a mother, Wendy, whose extreme opinions lack scientific evidence and logic.  Page does her best to make Wendy's opinion seem common when in reality it is an extreme position in response to a mask policy with which many agree.  The author's implicit assumptions and tacit agreement with the view she reports destroys her credibility. [...] First, Page does not mention that Tennessee Holler is a far-left website that promotes its own agenda by amplifying voices in favor of universal mask mandates and COVID vaccinations.  This is missing context that would allow the reader to understand that this is another issue campaign for a left-wing pressure group.  Second, to say that the mother's take has gone "viral" is Page's opinion stated as fact, though unsupported by evidence.  To go "viral" takes a bit more than 30,000 likes on a social media site.  You can buy 30,000 likes on Twitter right now for about $360 for context.

Memphis Media Reports 16 Year Old Dies Of COVID, Waits Until End Of Report To Inform He Was Fully Vaccinated.  This is FAKE news at its most dangerous.  Memphis media has reported this week that a 16-year-old football player at Westwood High School died from COVID-19 and pneumonia over the weekend.  Sunday, the principal at Westwood High sent out an automated message to students and parents about the death of Azorean Tatum but did not say how he died.  SCS has not released any details.  Quintina Bucker said her son Azorean Tatum, who went by the name Zo, collapsed at school on Aug. 13 and was taken to Baptist Children's Hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID.  Buckner admitted her son, who had asthma, [and] was vaccinated.  [Video clip]

Untruths and consequences.  To any sane person, it appears our elites and their media sycophants are engaging in an unprecedented preposterous statement tournament.  They must get up every day, snicker once or twice, and try to think of the most ridiculous, least verifiable piece of ludicrous prevarication they can attempt to pass off as truth.  And why shouldn't they?  A significant percentage of Americans seem willing to believe anything at all.  So, President Biden says there are no Americans trapped in Kabul.  Alright, now tell us the one about the three bears.  His Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, says we need to get the military out of Afghanistan first, so we don't risk anyone getting hurt.  Yes, forget about the thousands of American civilians trapped in Kabul.  Ignore the pictures of mothers throwing their babies over fences.  Um, Jen, we send our troops to places specifically to confront danger and instability... and often to fight the bad guys.  That's why, unlike civilians, they are armed to the teeth and wear body armor.  That's why they have attack helicopters, A-10 Warthogs, missiles, rocket launchers, grenades, and submachine guns.  Or used to, before the Biden administration decided to donate them to the Taliban.

Another DeSantis 'Scandal' Implodes.  Did you year about the latest "evidence" reported by the "news" media that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is both terrible on COVID and corrupt?  The Associated Press published a story yesterday that quickly gained traction among the "Ron Deathsentence" crowd — primarily comprised of bored resistance warriors and nervous leftists seeking to kill his political career (many journalists fall into both categories, of course). [...] Beyond the headline, which seems specifically engineered to generate shares, go viral, and create the appearance of an ethical and COVID-related cloud over DeSantis (we've seen this play before), the "story" falls apart.  There's nothing newsworthy here, aside from the governor of a large state in the midst of a nasty seasonal COVID spike proactively providing life-saving treatments to eligible residents.

'Case': Another semantic Trojan Horse.  In our new world of pandemic panic porn, it is important to remember that the word "case" is not a term of art.  It is not a medical term or a legal term.  It is just another word with a broad meaning that has been commandeered by people who want to control you.  This seemingly innocuous word is being used as a blunt instrument to stampede you into doing what the globalist elites want you to do.  It is widely used when the media, Big Tech, and government experts (the "infomob") lie by omission.  When you hear that there are x "new cases" in any context, this should immediately prompt you to ask questions about the number:
  •   Are these just positive COVID tests?
  •   Are these hospitalized people?
  •   Are these people who are not sick at all?
  •   Are these re-testings of the same people who have to be tested daily to keep their jobs?
  •   Are these people with other medical conditions?
The infomob wants you to envision these "cases" as hospitalized people on respirators, gasping for breath.  What if most of these are just positive tests?  If so, were these done with the PCR test?  The fact is, the PCR test is so highly parameterizable that you can set it to find whatever you want.  This is one of the reasons the CDC has quit using it.

Phony Doctor Starts To Laugh While Pretending To Cry About COVID Live During Newscast.  A good crisis actor is hard to find these days.  That is what CBS found out during the evening news with Norah O'Donnell.  This supposed doctor who goes by the name of Mia Meyers starts out talking about how people need to take the Delta variant seriously because of its transmissibility.  She then starts into something about 'our children before launching into her crocodile tear routine, which morphs into full-blown laughter.  Fake news strikes out again!  [Video clip]

Why Don't They Believe Us?  Imagine your confusion as the same people who spent three months telling you not only that masks don't work, but that there are several reasons you shouldn't wear or purchase them, suddenly introduce mask mandates.  We're "following the science," they tell you.  This seems to make little sense, but a pandemic is no time for questions. [...] The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don't, that masks don't work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of "health intervention," that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a "mostly peaceful" form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are "still learning," that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn't have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn't, that you shouldn't take Trump's vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another ... are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don't, you will be a second-class citizen.  Understand vaccine hesitancy now?

Conservatives are Obsessed With My Pillow Vote Fraud Conference, According to Obsessed News Networks.  Funny how we only hear about dangerous threats from those networks who declare them dangerous.  Let's take a look over a list of items we are told are absolutes in our political landscape these days:
  •   Conservatives the country over are committed to The Big Lie.
  •   Donald Trump is blindly followed by every Republican.
  •   Qanon feeds the mindset of anybody who is right-of-center.
These truths are well known and perpetually broadcast, but there is a core foundational reality behind these maxims.  The subjects in each of these entries is followed more intently and the information is disseminated to the populace with far more energy by the mainstream press industry.  It is interesting that while I am supposedly obsessed with President Trump I learn about his opinions and activities mostly through journalists.  While I get accused of fostering the push of denying the 2020 election results I only hear instructions on the matter via CNN and MSNBC, and as someone allegedly transfixed by Qanon's dictates I only ever hear about the directives from this nebulous source from clips of Brian Stelter and Chris Hayes.

Are These Stories Real?  Or Are the Media Trying to Overcome 'Vaccine Hesitancy' by Using Fear Porn?  [Scroll down beyond the highly dubious anecdote.]  On the whole, I'd take my chances on my own rather than to submit to the tender mercies of someone who obviously holds me in contempt.  I have some questions about the entire story.  For instance, according to the CDC, there has not been a single COVID-related death in Alabama under 40 in over a month.  There have only been 110 such deaths in Alabama since the pandemic started.  There is no public data, so far as I can find, that gives the number of intubated patients, the number of patients in the ICU by age, etc., since the vaccine became available.  The absence of empirical data to back up undocumented anecdotes doesn't give me great confidence in the story.  And the source is a Facebook post.

Allegedly overwhelmed hospital's parking lot is empty
Media Reports Florida Hospitals are 'Overrun' — Then One Person Actually Went to Hospital at the 'Center of Storm' to Check.  There is a tremendous amount of effort being expended in the mainstream media to hold up Florida as a complete failure when it comes to the COVID pandemic.  On Friday, the Associated Press reported that Florida broke the 'record' with more than 21,000 new cases in the state.  One of the key contentions was that hospitals were closed to being 'overrun,' a common claim in COVID reports that have nearly all turned up hollow.  "The Florida Hospital Association said Friday that statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations are nearing last year's peak, and one of the state's largest health care systems, AdventHealth's Central Florida Division, this week advised it would no longer be conducting nonemergency surgeries in order to free up resources for COVID-19 patients," the AP reported. [...] One citizen decided not to take the Associated Press or any other mainstream media outlet's word for it and decided to check it out for themself.  Dr. Shay, Phd., who goes by AMA Black Patriot on Twitter (@DrShayPhD) went to a hospital at Cape Canaveral, Florida, which the AP had used as the location for one of its report.  "So the Associated Press wrote an article saying that Cape Canaveral, FL hospital is bursting at the seams with Covid patients," Dr. Shay tweeted.  "I had to go see for myself, so I drove there.  The first set of pictures are of the hospital's parking.  More to follow."


Mollie Hemingway:  Partisan Hearings Taking Jan. 6 Riot Out Of Context Are A "Joke".  Mollie Hemingway made the case Sunday [8/1/2021] on FNC's "MediaBuzz" that the January 6 Capitol riot committee hearings are being held by partisan Democrats who are taking events out of the wider context of escalating political violence in 2020.  ["]If you want to talk about consistency, you have to deal with the fact that we have a political party that embraced a movement to defund the police for an entire year and now we're pretending that they care so much about the police. [...] The defund the police movement, which the media and other Democratic partisans strongly celebrated, which was supported across the country by Democratic politicians, was something we saw in the past year.["]

Here is an example of tabloid sensationalism.
Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds.  The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.  The new research builds upon what is known as the "social cost of carbon", a monetary figure placed upon the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide emissions, by assigning an expected death toll from the emissions that cause the climate crisis.  The analysis draws upon several public health studies to conclude that for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature.  This additional CO2 is equivalent to the current lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.

The Editor says...
Carbon dioxide is not carbon, nor is it a lethal pollutant, in the quantities seen in ordinary air.  With the exception of coal mine accidents, volcanic eruptions, or extremely rare events like this one, nobody dies from inhaling carbon dioxide.  You will likely never see a death certificate that lists inhalation of second-hand CO2 as the cause of death.  Carbon monoxide is poisonous, but carbon monoxide is not carbon dioxide.  Follow the science!

Unrestricted Mass Border Invasion Continues.  The head for the Rio Grand Valley (RGV) sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, Brian Hastings, sent an alarming tweet message earlier today [7/25/2021].  According to Hastings:  "It's the hottest part of the summer and apprehensions are skyrocketing!  USBP Apprehensions surpassed the 1-million milestone in June.  NOW, this week alone, #RGV has apprehended more than 20K illegally present migrants."  One million illegal aliens walk into the country while Joe Biden claims to be concerned about the spread of COVID-19?

The Editor says...
Another million illegal aliens walked into the country, yet the total number of illegal aliens (reported by the news media) remains a constant 11 million.  It never increases.

The Antifa/FBI Coalition.  Over two dozen people were killed during the Antifa and BLM protests in 2020.  It is routinely reported that "five people died as a result" of the Jan. 6 disturbance.  This is a totally accurate statement, however, it is still misleading.  Only one of the deceased died as a result of violence.  She was actually murdered by a government official.  Relating these deaths allows the media to routinely describe Jan. 6 as a "deadly insurrection" as opposed to the "mostly peaceful" protests by Antifa and BLM.

A reporter lies about Trump's statement regarding vaccines.  My mantra for some time now has been that there was nothing "abnormal" about Trump's presidency.  Since Trump has left the White House, it's become patently clear that the abnormality during the Trump years came entirely from the Democrats and their media operatives, with support from the Vichy Republicans. [...] But the Trump haters were relentless and, as if to prove that the sickness was all theirs, on Sunday [7/18/2021] one of them instantly and proudly perverted Trump's words to claim that he was anti-vaccine.  Remember, please, that Trump was the one who pushed aside regulations and freed up money so that there was a vaccine within less than a year of COVID's appearance in America.  It was also Trump who began the vaccine program with assistance from the military, which is very good at processing vast numbers of people.  Since he left the White House, Trump has watched the Biden administration make a complete hash of the program.

The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned.  [Thread reader]  The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia was blackmailing Trump — the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump was long a Russian agent.  It was Harding who published was one of the most sensationalized stories of the Trump era: that Manafort repeatedly met Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy.  It was utterly fabricated.  Everyone knows it's [false], never happened.  Yet the Guardian has never corrected or retracted it[.]  Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies he's been peddling for years, that not even Mueller's huge team found.  Because it advances liberals' interests, journalists are uncritically spreading it.

The Democrats' Topsy-Turvy Spin Machine.  Everything appears to be topsy-turvy: the chairman of the joint chiefs and the chairman of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, made almost identical statements about critical race theory.  The Democrats now claim the Republicans are the ones who wished to defund the police, and now they suddenly have discovered the virtue of voter identification, which, up until yesterday, they had been shrieking from the roof-tops was tantamount to the restoration of slavery.  Apparently, it's not Jim Crow after all.  The media are so absurdly partisan they will try to allow the Democrats a free pass across the barricades on those issues.  But the accumulating disasters for the Biden Administration will not be entirely absorbed by the (agonizingly slow) return to work of Americans after COVID and the miracle of the Warp Speed vaccine development, (for which Trump must receive no credit). The media can't cover for this "Gong Show" administration indefinitely, but I must admit they have lasted longer than I expected, given their invertebrate response to almost everything else.

MSNBC Agrees With Radical Race-Baiter:  GOP Wants 'American Apartheid'.  In [the] wake of President Biden huddling, on Thursday [7/8/2021], with radical left-wing activists who pretend to be "civil rights leaders," MSNBC on Friday [7/9/2021] touted National Urban League President Marc Morial coming out after that meeting and hurling the vile accusation that Republican-sponsored voting reforms and the U.S. Supreme Court were conspiring to create "American apartheid."  Rather than fact-check such a horrendous lie, the partisan cable channel endorsed the disgusting rhetoric instead.  "Civil rights leaders gathering with President Biden....We know they want more action on federal voting rights," anchor Chris Jansing announced while filling in for Stephanie Ruhle in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour.  She eagerly pointed out that "all of this is happening after the Supreme Court upheld Arizona voting restrictions and the president of the Urban League, Marc Morial, talked about that after the meeting at the White House."

Democrats Can't Stem the Flow of Revelations No Matter How Hard They Try.  Virtually every legacy media story about the 2020 election includes the phrase "baseless claims of voter fraud" in disparaging President Trump and anyone else who dares to point out the need for full forensic audits to sort out the mountain of election irregularities that continue to be uncovered.  It reminds me of the endless repetition of the word "gravitas" during the 2000 presidential campaign, as the Democrat-media agitprop worked overtime to disparage George W. Bush.  Check out the DuckDuckGo search results for "baseless claims of voter fraud" below.  The leftwing and legacy media are good at repeating Democrat narratives; after all, most of them are Democrats (or at least vote Democrat).

Biden Does Not Need A Domestic "Terrorism" Agenda Unless He Is About To Violate American Rights.  One of Joe Biden's first actions upon entering the White House was to initiate a 100 day review of the government's domestic terrorism policies, and I think this says a lot about what path his presidency is bound to follow.  Yes, the media continually argues that the Capitol protest on Jan 6th was a vast conspiracy on the part of conservatives to "overthrow" the democratic process and commit insurrection.  In fact, all it really amounted to was a large protest which was less violent than the majority of Black Lives Matter protests across the nation over the past year.  The media also incessantly mentions the five deaths that occurred on the day of the protest while continuing to ignore the fact that NOT ONE of those deaths has been attributed to the direct actions of protesters, and at least three of the deaths were due to natural causes.  Why does the mainstream media keep lying by omission?  Because they have to keep the narrative alive that the capitol protest is a sign of some underlying conservative "evil" that must be contained or destroyed.  We don't really give them much to work with, so they have to create reasons out of thin air to convince people to hate us.

"Trigger" is being canceled because it triggers.  [Scroll down]  The media often refer to groups they like as "communities."  As in the "gay community" and the "black community" and alphabet groups such as "LGBTQ community."  They could instead simply refer to "gays" and "blacks" and "LGBTQs" but they gratuitously add the word "community" because they like the nice connotation.  As an aside, the media's lumping of the members of this or that group together as a "community" suggests that the members all think the same.  But to the media, that's OK, so long as the sameness in their thinking is media-approved.  Meaning they are all thinking like the media thinks — like leftists.  As you learned a few paragraphs ago, diversity in viewpoints is bad.  And so the media will tell you that the "gay community" hates Republicans (hate is now OK, so long as it's directed at Republicans, because Republicans are hateful) as if gay Republicans don't exist.  Here's my bigger, trigger point.  Notice that they never use "community" in connection with groups they dislike, some of which are truly and consciously communal.  They never mention the "Christian community" or even the "church-going community."  And you'll never hear them mention the "gun-owner community" or the "hunter community" or the "gay Republican community."  Nope, the word "community" carries good connotations which the media reserves for groups it deems good.

You've got to be kidding:  WaPo lavishes credit on Biden for recovering economy.  This post would be more appropriate in the Babylon Bee as satire, as journalists and the Biden administration collude to rewrite history to give Biden the credit for the economic recovery that was well underway because of Trump and red states before Biden took office.  Even though the vaccines were developed so fast because of Trump and one million shots were being given each day prior to Biden taking office, the Democrat talking points regurgitated by most of the media say there was not a distribution plan prior to Biden taking office.  It is pretty [...] amazing that one million doses were already being given and tens of millions more were in the pipeline when supposedly the Trump administration had no plan.

Subterranean Homesick Blues 2021.  Some guy using the handle Cultural Husbandry had a string of tweets about the media's string of lies.  [For example,]
    Epstein committed suicide
    McAfee committed suicide
    Biden won the election
    COVID came from a wet market
    Conservatives are all terrorists
    Ivermectin doesn't work
    HCQ doesn't work
    Biden doesn't have dementia
    The jab isn't making anyone ill
    Fauci was consistent
    Masks work
    Cuomo didn't kill old people
    Dominion systems were secure
    Hunter Biden is an artist
    Trump colluded with Russia
    Jan 06 was an insurrection
    Transwomen are real women
    BLM is mostly peaceful   [...]
We have got to win the White House back.  And this time, fire every political appointee on Inauguration Day, and ditch everybody above a one-star general or admiral.  And then shrink the central government — including the Milley-ized Military — to the point where a presidential election is less important than a soccer game.  And readers know how little I care about soccer.  If covid 19 taught us anything, it is that the government is too big, too powerful, and too stupid to protect America.

Controlling the World Is Easy.  [Scroll down]  Whenever you heard raw numbers of cases, hospitalizations, or deaths it was because those numbers were bad.  When they weren't so bad, you started hearing percentages.  Why?  Because certain ways of presenting information can make it seem better or worse than it really is. [...] Going from 10,000 deaths per day to 20,000 deaths per day is a 100 percent increase in the number of deaths.  So is going from 1 death per day to 2 deaths per day.  If you want to scare [...] people in the hope that they continue watching your news program, you headline the story with, "There has been a stunning, 100 percent increase in the number of COVID deaths in just 24 hours."  You're not lying, it's an accurate statement.  It's just presented in an absolutely fraudulent way to manipulate the audience.  That's what so much of what the left does has become.

Disclosure: The Four "Swedes" in Custody For Gang Rape Are Somali Citizens.  Ostentatious headlines in Aftonbladet, Expressen and other media declared that "six Swedes", later "eight Swedes" had been arrested for a rough gang rape on a Finland ferry.  Nya Tider is now the first newspaper to reveal that not even the white lie that the arrested Somalis are "Swedish citizens" is right — all the detainees are Somali citizens, and of all the suspects only one has a Swedish citizenship.

Fox News's Chris Wallace accuses Republicans of being the party that is defunding the police.  "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace pushed Republican Study Committee Chair Rep. Jim Banks on the Democratic issue of defunding police departments, suggesting that the Indiana lawmaker's party was actually responsible for cutting funds to law enforcement.  During a segment on rising crime in U.S. cities, Banks appeared after former Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), now a senior adviser to President Joe Biden, who blamed Republicans for "defunding" police by failing to support what amounted to a $350 billion bailout for poorly-run blue cities that suffered additional economic distress during the COVID-19 pandemic due to extensive, prolonged shutdowns.

The Not-So-Great American Pastime.  [Scroll down]  Perhaps the easiest example of pretending is CNN.  It pretends to be a news organization, a reliable source, journalistic in its approach.  Its sillier sister, MSNBC, at least affords viewers some respect by delivering its preposterous daily scripts via personalities so cartoonish in visage, voice and delivery that one cottons on rather quickly to the schtick — propagandizing, after all, differs from pretending.  Both networks amount to 24/7 televangelism for leftist doctrine, but CNN folk are obvious hypocrites, while MSNBC's on-air personalities seem to be actually insane.  The executives at each of these cultural ministries are culpable of Felony Pretending, while their audiences are essentially accomplices after the fact.

Rep. Nunes:  Republicans Shouldn't Talk to Mainstream Media.  Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) claimed that 95 percent of media are the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and urged Republicans to stop talking to them or going on TV with them.  "I still — for the life of me — can't understand why Republicans talk to 95 percent of the media, which is fake news," Nunes told Alex Marlow [...] on Wednesday [6/16/2021].  "But look, fake news isn't the proper term.  It's the propaganda arm of the Democrat Socialist Party.  That's what it is," Nunes said.  Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly called mainstream media "fake news."  "So it's no different than the Chinese Communist Party — it's the propaganda they put out.  [It's] no different than what the Soviet Union did with the old Pravda media.  And it's, quite frankly, no different than how Putin controls the media today, where 95 percent of his media in Russia is propaganda for the Putin regime," Nunes continued.

Former Trump Official Slices Fauci Apart Over Hydroxychloroquine Fiasco.  Donald Trump scored a major win over the liberal media. [...] Hydroxychloroquine has finally been proven as an effective treatment for COVID.  Russian collusion was a hoax.  The Russian bounty story in Afghanistan was another whopper.  Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op.  And Hunter Biden's laptop is real.  The hydroxychloroquine one is significant since it was weaponized heavily against the Trump administration.  The president was trying to save lives and all the media did was attack him.  It's why they're the opposition press.  And Dr. Anthony Fauci's refusal to endorse the treatment caused thousands of unnecessary deaths.  That's the allegation that Peter Navarro, Trump's director for now-defunct Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, said he had around 60 million tablets of this stuff that could have been used to treat some 5-6 million patients.  Fauci refused to budge.

My Top 10 media lies.  No. 1 is the oldest and biggest:  Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016 and might be a Russian agent.  That scam involved crooked FBI agents and led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who took two years to conclude there was no evidence to back the charge. [...] Remember Lie No. 2, the "Muslim ban" that wasn't?  Or No. 3, the mantra that the 2017 tax cuts were only for the "rich" despite studies showing 80 percent of the population benefitted?  How about the "kids in cages" firestorm, complete with gripping photographs of migrant children in metal containers?  That was Lie No. 4 and the hottest story going, with Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushing to the border with photogenic outrage.  They vanished when it was revealed the Obama-Biden administration built the cages and the heart-wrenching photos were from 2014.  Apologies, corrections and retractions came in bunches, right?  You must be kidding.  Big media and big tech are too big to admit error.

The State of Black America.  Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world.  You would think that black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue.  Sorry, liberals, to trouble you with facts.  But indeed there are facts.  And the facts tell a far different story than what we are hearing.  Let's start with the most recent annual report of the Census Bureau:  Income and Poverty in the United States:  2019.  According to this report, annual real median household income in the U.S. increased 6.8% in 2019, the largest annual increase recorded by the Census Bureau going back to 1967.  Black median household income in 2019 increased 7.9%, the largest on record and, per American Enterprise Institute economist Mark Perry, "almost nine times the average annual increase of 0.90% over the last half-century."

The Editor says...
Hmmm... Who was the President in 2019, when blacks were doing so well?

Media Caught In Yet Another Massive Anti-Trump Lie; Will Election Fraud Be Next?  More than a year after the events at Lafayette Square happened, and after endless media claims that President Donald Trump had peaceful protesters forcibly cleared for a photo op, we finally know the truth.  Trump was right.  The media were lying.  And anyone who trusted the news accounts was a fool.  It's enough to make us start to wonder why anyone should trust the media's insistence that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.  Yesterday, the Interior Department's inspector general released a report about what actually happened in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.

When "Fake News" Is Actually Fake.  In the last 24 hours, we've seen what a complete shambles the mainstream media have become.  First up, someone at the New York Times was formatting a fake story about watermelons on Mars — perhaps this was a training exercise for a new employee? — but somehow managed to press the "publish" button, and this appeared on the Times website: [...] But wait — there's more!  At yesterday's presser for Vice President Harris in Mexico, a Univision reporter got up and slobbered all over the VP.  The Media Research Center has the story, and here's the relevant part of the transcript: [...] There's only one problem:  Univision says Maria Fernanda doesn't work for Univision.  Univision issued multiple statements distancing themselves from Fernanda.

Father Biden Celebrates Mass(Acre).  The press did its part to help usher in Tulsa Massacre Day, running breathless stories with inflated casualty figures ("300 black dead!  No, 3,000!  Wait, make that 30,000!"), always being careful to avoid mentioning the white dead or the fact that the authorities pretty much had the situation under control until the armed black mob showed up (most historians agree that it was a black who fired the first shot).  And although airplanes were indeed used in the course of the riot for observation of crowds and fires, the press added — unchallenged — lurid and questionable accounts of planes dropping bombs on blacks, blitzkrieg-style (in fact, the only offensive use of a plane during the riots was when a white pilot flew over the black part of town dragging a banner depicting a massively overweight white woman, hoping it would make the blacks look up and stare long enough to be disarmed).  Of course, the good news — trumpeted by Biden during his speech — is that black Tulsa was rebuilt, and today the community is stronger than ever at almost 16% of the city.  Not mentioned by the president was that the city also has one of the worst crime rates in the U.S., hitting a three-decade high in 2020, a year in which far more Tulsa blacks died due to homicide than in 1921 due to the riot.  But don't worry; no one will call that a "massacre."

The Media's Wuhan Lab Scandal Looks Worse and Worse.  You'd think that after the Covington kids disaster and the Steele dossier calamity the American news media would get the message.  Which is to say, report facts, not liberal narratives.  But of course, ain't happening. [...] Trump Derangement Syndrome is a disease that continues to amaze.  Otherwise rational people — journalists in this case — are so consumed with TDS that they quite voluntarily throw any semblance of standards over the side to guarantee their anti-Trump bona fides with their also-TDS infected liberal media colleagues.  The Covington kids were racist!  Liberal media heads nod in unison, eventually brought to the realization — not coincidentally helped by lawsuits — that there was zero truth to their carefully structured narrative of arrogant white kids tormenting an aging Native American.

Facebook's Speech Suppression Argues for Repeal of Section 230 and a Facebook Stock Price of Zero.  A lot of people have egg on their face for dismissing the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.  As ABC News's Jonathan Karl said this week.  "Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them."  Or if Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said them.  "We still don't know where coronavirus originated," Cotton said in January 2020.  "Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company.  I would note that Wuhan has China's only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus."  Cotton never said he was certain the virus came from a lab leak and never suggested a leak would have been deliberate.  But as a Trump supporter, he was quickly smeared, as liberal writer Matthew Yglesias shows in a painstaking analysis, for pushing "conspiracy theories" (CBS News), "spreading rumors that were easily debunked" (Politico), "repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked" (Washington Post), and "repeat[ing] fringe theory of coronavirus origins" (New York Times).  In each case, Yglesias points out, writers mischaracterized what Cotton actually said.

Another Deranged Trump Vengeance Fantasy from Vanity Fair.  It takes no great imagination to determine what is probably the focus of the mind of Vanity Fair's Bess Levin.  Even a quick perusal of her articles over the past year reveals her disturbing obsession with Donald Trump 24/7.  So obsessed is Levin with Trump that she will even lie in her articles to make up fake quotes about him such as her March 8 screed in which she put a false quote in Lindsay Graham's mouth where he supposedly said, "I'm willing to overlook the fact that Trump has probably beaten a few homeless people to death."  Most responsible periodicals would have said "no" and maybe had her checked by a therapist.  The fact that she remains employed at Vanity Fair says something about the ethics that magazine.

Transgender Censorship:  USA Today Erases 'Hurtful' Words From Female Athlete's Op-Ed.  On Saturday [5/22/2021], USA Today published an op-ed written by Chelsea Mitchell, one of three female athletes at the center of a legal challenge to Connecticut's unfair transgender rules that allow biological males to compete against females in women's sports.  Apparently facing some backlash a few days after publication, USA Today altered Mitchell's words and claimed that she had used "hurtful language."  On Tuesday, USA Today slapped an "Editor's Note" at the top of the article.  The note reads, "This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY's standards and style guidelines.  We regret that hurtful language was used."  What language was so "hurtful" that USA Today altered it three days after publication?  The publication removed every mention of the biological term "male" and replaced it with the indeterminate word "transgender."

Fact-checking the fact-checkers.  It is time for the news business to admit that "fact-checking" is a tiresome, misleading, and dishonest blight on actual reporting.  It hardly existed in Fleet Street when I left Britain in 1997.  Checking facts was understood to be the core of a reporter's job, not something sloughed off to someone else.  Perhaps this was because British education was mostly essay writing, not checking multiple-choice boxes.  Students quickly learn to write fluently when faced with blank sheets of foolscap and limited time to fill them.  Quality obviously varied, but educated people were assumed to be capable of coherent composition.  The residual challenge was knowing the facts or, in the case of reporters, finding them out.  So, it was startling at first to encounter America's bifurcated system, in which "fact-checkers" monitor reporters like gamekeepers trying to catch poachers.  And it's far worse now than it was back then.  Fact-checking has grown beyond recognition in the past 25 years and chokes the news business like a parasitic vine.

The Covid Lab Leak went from terrible, racist conspiracy theory to plausible overnight for the mainstream media.  [Thread reader]  If you don't believe me, look at these stories side-by-side, then vs. now.  You may remember that much of the really bad coverage was focused on @SenTomCotton's suggestion that we better understand the potential for a lab leak from Wuhan.  The difference in framing here from @nytimes between May 2020 and May 2021 is... stark.  [Illustrations]  But it wasn't just NYT.  There's a lot of ammo from @CNN, too.  Not even two months ago, they ran a piece writing off the lab leak theory as "like something out of a comic book."  Yesterday, the tone had changed, without any reference to their own role in the previous debate.  [Illustrations]  But if you go back further, @CNN's coverage gets even worse.  Early in 2020, they ran CCP talking points suggesting it was all a political tactic based on "disinformation."

Don't let the media get away with U-turning on the lab leak theory.  The theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory has completed its year-long trudge — from fringe nutjob idea to mainstream and expert-approved opinion.  Leading scientists and epidemiologists such as none other than Dr Anthony Fauci were so quick to dismiss the 'lab talk'.  It was first portrayed as a hare-brained wild and tacitly racist conspiracy theory driven by paranoid Republican senators and fever-dream right-wing media.  Now it is seen as not only an acceptable theory worth more study, but one that has broken through into the mainstream.  This has happened in a matter of days.  Where does Sen. Tom Cotton go for his apology?  Interestingly enough, the lab leak theory started gaining more traction — not only in the international community, but in the scientific community in the United States — right around the same time that questions of United States government funding of EcoHealth Alliance, a research and collection group of bat coronaviruses in China, may have lead to gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Will the 2020 Madness Last?  Before 2020, the American people tired of the media farces surrounding such events as the Duke lacrosse team, the lies about the Covington kids, and Jussie Smollett's hoax about being attacked by white racists.  Will they return to their earlier skepticism about media hype when it increasingly seems like the media and the government mostly lied when denying the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab engaged in "gain-of-function" engineering of dangerous viruses?

Exactly How Corporate Media Launders Opinion To Attack Inconvenient People And Facts.  A New York Times business correspondent in Hong Kong, a weekend editor at The Guardian who lives in New York, a British Business Insider reporter with a focus on the Saudis, and the executive editor of The Daily Beast.  A 48-year-old blogger who works for Rachel Maddow, a union activist who covers "extremism, far-right politics and media disinformation" for The Huffington Post, and the 29-year editor of the Arkansas Times.  A breaking news reporter at The Washington Post who wrapped up her most recent internship in May 2016, a 2016 University of Pennsylvania graduate who covers "young people doing big things" for Forbes, a 45-year-old former George Will intern who writes for CNN, and David Frum.  What do these people have in common, aside from their political ideology?  Every one of them is a part of a machine that launders smears and opinions through newspapers, magazines, and television channels, presents the cleaned-up product as unimpeachable truth to the public, and then uses the fresh-minted facts to protect friends and hurt enemies.  It's called "the news," and here's how it worked for Arkansas' Sen. Tom Cotton's completely plausible theory that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab.

Cruz Decimates Brian Williams After He Goes Full Dem Operative on Him.  Folks on the left have been freaking out at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for criticizing the "woke ad" put out by the military. [...] CNN's Jake Tapper even pushed the garbage that Cruz was spreading "Russian propaganda," as we reported earlier.  CNN once again showing their "objective reporting."  But even Tapper wasn't as bad as MSNBC's Brian Williams.  Again, remember, Brian Williams is promoted as an objective journalist.  But he's hardly that.  Here was his response to Cruz's remarks, giving him the nickname "Kremlin Cruz."  [Tweet]  How is that journalism?  Or even close to being an accurate description of what Cruz was saying?  They know his point; they simply choose to twist it to attack him.  It's not news, but flat-out bias, acting like a Democratic operative.  Now, let's remember these are the folks who spread Russian disinformation for the past four years to try to delegitimize the duly elected American president.

LA Times slammed for article praising lockdowns and downplaying effect on economy.  The Los Angeles Times was slammed Wednesday [5/19/2021] over a business column claiming coronavirus lockdowns saved lives without harming the economy.  The column, titled "The evidence is clear — COVID lockdowns saved lives without harming economies," cited published data and concluded "lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates" and "had a very modest role in producing economic damage."  In the article, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Michael Hiltzik criticized red-state governors like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for opposing lockdowns.  He also suggested that California's stringent lockdowns are the reason why the state now "boasts among the lowest case, hospitalization and death rates in the nation, as well as a recovering economy."

LA Times Op-Ed:  The Evidence Is Clear... The Lockdowns Didn't Trash the Economy.  Whoever wrote this is on bath salts.  Is this for real?  I mean I know media bubbles are dense, but this is something else.  This is not even grounded in reality, folks Apparently, the COVID lockdowns didn't trash the economy and it saved lives.  Both are demonstrably false.  That's the hottest of hot takes regarding the virus.  Dare I say, it may be worse than what Anthony Fauci has said about the vaccine and mask-wearing.  It could rival that, maybe.  The fact is that millions of jobs were lost, mental health issues spiked, our children weren't learning, people did die, and the lockdowns didn't do anything to stem that.  It's an airborne virus.  It was going to spread no matter what and what we've learned is that staying locked up inside was probably the worst thing for people to do.

Let's Talk About Reporting in War Zones.  The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. [...] Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.  Here's the thing:  There's nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes.  It happens all the time in the Middle East.  CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein's atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open.  The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.  This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza.  The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it's never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance.  That's because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity.

Propaganda War, Maricopa Board of Supervisors Leaks Senate Letter to Media Before Sending [it] to [the] Arizona Senate.  Earlier today [5/17/2021] Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward noted the Maricopa Board of Supervisors (BoS) was engaging in a propaganda war against the people of Arizona and the State Senate.  It didn't take long for evidence to surface.  The Board of Supervisors [sent] the media a copy of the 13-page letter they claim to have sent to the Arizona Senate.  However, AZ Senate President Karen Fann has never even see the letter.  The BoS sent the letter to the media before they sent it to the AZ Senate.  Yeah, propaganda.

The decline and fall of the Associated Press.  Once, long ago, in a land far away, the best journalists tried to stand aloof from the stories they reported.  The idea was simple and powerful.  If journalists tried to be neutral and kept their reporting separate from their opinions, analysis, and speculation, then the public would believe them.  Those days are long gone — and the media's credibility is gone with them.  Journalists and media organizations are now smack in the middle of many stories they cover, in part because they want to be.  They want to spin them, to set 'the Narrative'.  Imbued with this new mission, many journalists have become partisan protagonists.  They have deliberately blurred the lines between facts, analysis and opinion — and downplayed the traditional role of presenting the facts neutrally and letting readers decide.  That's a dramatic change in journalistic norms and a disturbing one for both the media and the public.

Israel exploded AP's offices; Hamas exploded AP's reputation.  This weekend's literally explosive revelation that the Associated Press served as a human shield for Hamas has repercussions.  In an editorial today [5/18/2021], the New York Post called into question years of AP's coverage of the Hamas terror group's attacks on the sovereign state of Israel.  This comes after Israel told AP to evacuate its offices in a Hamas-owned building because it was going to blow the building up because it housed Hamas's spy operations.  AP howled and cried unfair.  The rest of us said, huh?  Hamas was AP's landlord?  How [...] is that ethical?  Imagine AP renting from Al Qaida or ISIS.  Maybe it did.  The New York Post asked, "If AP really didn't know it shared space with Hamas, why trust its reporting?"  Good question.

How the AP Slanted Border Coverage to Hide the Crisis.  Typically, news organizations rush to cover crises, real or perceived.  The Associated Press has taken a different tack, using its influential style guide to play down the human drama unfolding at the southern border.  While internal Customs and Border Protection documents repeatedly refer to an immigration "surge" at the border, according to records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the AP recommends journalists no longer use such descriptions to avoid offense and maintain supposed "neutrality." Other documents, circulated internally throughout Customs and Border Protection in May, instruct officials on processing "the surge of undocumented individuals as efficiently as possible."  The move by AP, a response to left-wing activists who demanded gentler language from reporters when covering immigration, fundamentally changed how newsrooms across the country covered the Biden administration's response to a historical influx of migrants in the president's first 100 days in office.

Ri-i-i-ght.
AP Denies Any Knowledge Gaza Office Building Was Shared with Hamas Terrorists.  The Associated Press (AP) denied any knowledge that Jala Tower, the building housing its offices in Gaza, was also shared by Hamas terrorists, as claimed by the Israeli military and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the office block was bombed on Saturday [5/15/2021].  AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt denied that the news organization knew Hamas was in the building.

The Editor says...
To put this as politely as I can, I find it impossible to believe that the people working in a professional news-gathering organization, in a volatile part of the world, would have been oblivious to terrorists in their office building.  That level of cluelessness is almost incomprehensible.  I'm not the only one who's skeptical.

AP Pretends It Didn't Know It Was Sharing a Building With Hamas.  After an airstrike struck a building with terrorist tenants that included Hamas and Al Jazeera, controlled by Qatar, a backer of Hamas, the main story in the media was about... the media.  Specifically the AP's presence in the same building.  "We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP's bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.  They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there.  We received a warning that the building would be hit," the AP's statement says.  And the AP is complaining about what?  Israel warned it that the building was a target.  AP chose to share a building with Hamas and pretend not to know about it.

Confirmed: the AP Is Incredibly Ignorant and Yes, Hamas Was in the Building.  We reported yesterday how the AP was furious that Israel had leveled the building in which they had offices in Gaza because they were sharing it was Hamas.  We asked the basic question: how could they not know they were sharing the building with Hamas?  The AP issued a statement saying they'd been in the building for 15 years — and had no indication that Hamas was in the building.

If AP really didn't know it shared space with Hamas, why trust its reporting?  After an Israeli airstrike Saturday destroyed a high-rise office tower on the Gaza Strip, the Associated Press, which had offices there for 15 years, complained, claiming it had no idea the building was also home to Hamas.  If it's true that AP was so unaware — and the evidence suggests it's unlikely — how can anyone trust its reporting in the region?  The Israeli military ordered the 12-story al-Jalaa Tower, which hosts AP and Al Jazeera offices, evacuated an hour before the strike, saying it was being used by Hamas military intelligence.  For a week, tensions between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza, have been at their highest since their 2014 conflict, with Hamas raining thousands of rockets into residential areas of the Jewish state.  Israel later shared some intelligence with the United States.  "We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building," a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi told the Jerusalem Post.  "I understand they found the explanation satisfactory."

Associated Press is slammed for saying it was unaware of Hamas intel operation in their building.  The Associated Press has been accused of lying about whether it knew Hamas maintained a military presence in its Gaza headquarters.  Israeli forces destroyed Jala Tower which had been the AP's headquarters in the Palestinian territory for 15 years, and was also where Al Jazeera was based.  Politicians and journalists in the United States rushed to condemn the bombing, claiming the Israelis had endangered the lives of the journalists.

Israel showed US 'smoking gun' on Hamas in AP office tower, officials say.  Israel shared intelligence with the US showing how Hamas operated inside the same building with the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera in Gaza, officials in Jerusalem said on Sunday.  Officials in more than one government office confirmed that US President Joe Biden's phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday was, in part, about the bombing of the building, and that Israel showed Biden and American officials the intelligence behind the action.  "We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building," a senior diplomatic source said.  "I understand they found the explanation satisfactory."

The AP goes Sgt. Schultz.  After its customary warning to protect civilian life, the IDF took out the 12-story Jala Tower housing Hamas military intelligence offices as well as offices for Al Jazeera and the Associated Press.  As far as I can tell from reports such as this photo-filled story in the Daily Mail, no lives were lost in the bombing.  The Biden administration nevertheless found the occasion fit to lecture Israel yesterday "that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility."  According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli authorities have showed Biden administration officials the "smoking gun" proving that Hamas worked out of the building.

USA Today Editorial Says Republicans Are Bigger Threat Than 9/11 Hijackers After Cheney Ouster.  Rep. Liz Cheney's ouster proved Republicans are a bigger threat than the 9/11 hijackers who killed thousands of Americans, according to a USA Today editorial.  The removal of Cheney from her leadership position suggests that the GOP has endorsed election fraud conspiracy theories, USA Today editor David Mastio wrote in a Thursday editorial.  Endorsing such conspiracy theories, which allege that President Joe Biden didn't actually win the election, poses a bigger threat to the U.S. than 9/11 hijackers ever did, he said.  "The fact that the majority of Republicans believe our election was stolen is a sure sign that more violence is to come," Mastio wrote, according to USA Today.

How the New York Times has published lies to serve a biased narrative.  On April 15, the Biden administration acknowledged there was no evidence that Russia ever offered bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, walking back a report that wounded former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election.  Four days later, the Washington, DC, medical examiner revealed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered by rampaging Trump supporters during the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, as reports had claimed, but had died of natural causes.  Both stories were based on anonymous, unidentifiable sources, but had become deeply enmeshed in the public consciousness.  Both confirmed the assumptions of the nation's left-leaning media and academic elite, while damaging their political enemies.  And both were driven by The New York Times, where malicious misreporting has been the practice for a century, argues journalist and media commentator Ashley Rindsberg.

The Incredible Vanishing Flu.  Seasonal influenza, also known as "the flu," visits America every year, similar to tornados, thunderstorms, heat waves, and snowstorms.  As tracked by the CDC, over the past decade symptomatic flu cases ranged from 9 to 45 million cases per year in the US.  Hospitalizations varied from 140 to 810 thousand, and deaths from 12 to 61 thousand, depending on the particular year, strain of influenza, and effectiveness of the vaccine.  This year, "flu activity is unusually low at this time" according to CDC surveillance.  Since late September 2020, they recorded only about 2000 cases, a minute fraction of the tens of millions of cases in past years.  Hospitalizations this flu season are minimal with only 224 confirmed influenza hospitalizations from September 2020 to mid-April 202, nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in past seasons.

Hey, LA Times — Don't Tread on Hillsdale College.  On April 23, Julie Appleby, a senior correspondent with the Kaiser Health News network, published a piece in the Los Angeles Times headlined, "Michigan's Outbreak Worries Scientists.  Will Conservative Outposts Keep Pandemic Rolling?" implying that both the sleepy Michigan town where I live, and the college I attend, are biohazards: [...] Appleby needs to choose.  Is Hillsdale bad because it "jumped the line" to distribute unused vaccines or is it evil because it isn't properly concerned about the illness?  She won't, of course.  Her obsession with a college in a region of the country where she has no obvious connection belabors a more deep-rooted hatred.  Appleby's "reporting" isn't a good-faith criticism but an attempt to call down the Eye of Soros on her political enemies.  She wants to destroy the way of life my neighbors and I enjoy.

Corporate News Outlets Again "Confirm" the Same False Story, While Many Refuse to Correct it.  One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news.  When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have "independently confirmed" the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it). This is an obvious scam — they have not "independently confirmed" anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been "confirmed" by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind.  It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used.  One of the most vivid examples occurred in December, 2017, when CNN falsely reported what it hyped as "a major bombshell":  that Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive.  Within an hour, NBC News' Ken Dilanian and CBS News both claimed they had "independently confirmed" this fairy tale.  When it turned out that it was a complete lie, all based on a false date on an email to Trump Jr., these outlets embarrassingly corrected it hours later and then simply moved on as if it never happened, never explaining how multiple outlets could possibly have all "independently confirmed" the same blatant falsehood.

The Giuliani Walk Back Gets Worse and Exposes Collusion in Mainstream Press.  The fact that the news organizations are working in tandem on narratives blows up in their hands.  It was another example of an important news outlet having to retract a major news story, as Bonchie reported yesterday, when The Washington Post had to retract its prior claim that both Rudy Giuliani and the news network One America News had been informed by the FBI that they had part of a Russian disinformation campaign.  "This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings," the outlet says in part of its retraction.

Fake News Still Gaslighting America with Phony Polls.  Opinion polls, particularly in the buildup to a presidential election, are not designed to reflect public opinion, but instead to shape it.  For the media, objectivity is only of historic interest, a journalistic tenet from a bygone era.  Now most of the media is embedded within the Democrat party, serving as an advocacy arm or political action committee to influence elections and agendas.  A CNN staffer, who bragged that he was "one step down" from a director, admitted to an undercover Tinder date, actually a real journalist working for James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, that CNN was "creating a story" that "we didn't know anything about," calling it "propaganda" to help remove President Trump from office.  The epitome of fake news.  Fake news media have many gaslighting tools at their disposal.  Some outlets doctor audio or video tapes to make their "bad guy" appear racist or doing something illegal.  Or, they make their "good guy" look like Mother Teresa.

Media Promotes Fake Narrative That Biden a Moderate.  Stephen Collinson is well-known among conservatives as the most hackneyed of the hacks at CNN.  The Twitter account called CNN Politics promoted Collinson's latest online essay with the words "President [Joe] Biden to showcase his moderate radicalism in his big congressional address."  "Moderate radicalism"?  Doesn't that make about as much sense as "quiet loudness"?  Collinson argued:  "Biden's quiet radicalism is expressed through a huge pandemic rescue bill, a larger proposal that redefines the concept of infrastructure, and a massive health and child care blueprint."  In other words, a socialist blueprint. [...] But Biden's "superpower" here is the media elite.  They are the ones who have sold Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden as moderates.  This has grown increasingly ridiculous, but they keep shifting the "center" to the extreme left. [...] This isn't "news."  It's just sales.

Meghan McCain calls out 'rigged' media, throws 'The View' under the bus for burying Hunter Biden scandal.  Reacting to a discussion about Fox News supposedly pushing false narratives, self-described "token conservative" and vocal Never Trumper Meghan McCain dropped a truth bomb about how corporate media liberals, even on her TV program, seemingly pick and choose what stories to cover, with advancing a left-wing agenda foremost in mind.  Ignoring Hunter Biden's various alleged scandals was a fundamental error of omission by the mainstream media, she asserted.  "Let's go down the list of things every day that are inaccurate on CNN and NBC, and then we'll talk about fairness in the media," McCain also declared on The View.

The Fourteen Most Troubling Obama And Kerry Lies About The JCPOA Iran Nuke Deal.  Joe Biden and his foreign policy team are negotiating with Iran, trying to get the U.S. back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ("JCPOA") Iran nuclear deal.  Many support this objective, not realizing that the JCPOA allows Iran to build nuclear weapons in the near future, and place the United States, the Sunni Gulf States, and Israel in grave danger.  The support for returning to the JCPOA stems from naïvité.  Much of Obama and Kerry told America about the JCPOA was not true.  Most of the MSM covered up the lies back then and are still not reporting the truth about the deal.

The far-left Los Angeles Times says...
There is no absolute right to refuse vaccination.  We're getting closer to the point where every American who wants to be vaccinated will have gotten their needle stick.  A quarter of Americans say they don't plan to be vaccinated; in vaccine-friendlier California, that's 1 in 5.  Of those who don't plan to be immunized, some worry about the newness of the vaccines, while others just don't like vaccines in general, despite the mountains of proof about how many lives they save, and some stubbornly refuse to believe that COVID-19 is all that dangerous.

The Editor says...
Tyranny is far more dangerous than any disease — especially a disease which isn't "all that dangerous," as many sensible people believe.  Mandatory vaccination is especially dangerous when the vaccine — or whatever it really is — is experimental, and it is impossible to know its long-term side effects.  Mandatory vaccination(s) will inevitably put everyone in a position of having to prove they've had their shots, which would require a so-called vaccination passport to enter public buildings, fly on an airplane, or vote, to name a few examples.  This is a quick and easy recipe for abject tyranny.

Master Class In Speaking Truth To Power As Ben Domenech Exposes Chris Wallace's Journalism Grift.  Ben Domenech visited Fox News tonight and gave a master class in speaking truth to power when he humiliated Fox News' most insufferable, nepotism-enriched grifter and BlueAnon conspiracy theorist, Chris Wallace.  Wallace had just finished his regular routine of pretending to be totally oblivious to the lavish praise he heaps on America Lasters and the seething hatred he harbors for America Firsters.  This time around, specifically, he was pretending to be really surprised at just how well he thinks Biden's speech went (shocker!), and how well he truly believes in his heart of hearts it will be received by the American people (shocker!).  Wallace, of course, is doing what he and his propagandist pals always do:  they tell whatever story they want to be true for as long as they want and then when it's revealed to be a steaming pile of idiocy and lies, they simply turn the page and pretend it never happened.

USA Today's publisher Gannett apologizes after being caught helping Stacey Abrams hide encouragement for Georgia losing the All-Star Game.  The largest publisher of newspapers in the United States by total circulation has been caught red-handed engaging in Orwellian rewriting of history to help Stacey Abrams hide her promotion of the boycott of her home state of Georgia by the MLB all-Star Game.  Ms. Abrams is regarded as a savior by many on the left, even future presidential material, and is even excused for delusionally claiming to be the actual elected governor of Georgia after losing that race by tens of thousands of votes, despite the left's new dogma pronouncing it a crime against democracy to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden's election.  Her promotion of the doctrine of Black "voter suppression" when IDs are required for voting, and her energetic promotion of registration and vote gathering efforts by Democrats have given her a status as an untouchable goddess, apparently.  Even as Black registration and turnout in Georgia put the lie to the suppression narrative.

A Great New Idea for Reducing Police Shootings.  [Scroll down]  The "news" that is plated for us mostly is fake.  It is not the Torah.  It is an enterprise that seeks to generate profit among us by baiting us into clicking and into becoming "followers" and ginning up their ratings, all while the media also seek to sway public opinion.  Hitler proved with Der Stürmer that an entire country could be brainwashed and turned politically by newspapers.  Stalin proved the same with Izvestia and Pravda.  Americans have proven no different, no less gullible and malleable.  A concerted full-court press by CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Twitter, and Facebook is enough to sway elections.  Lies may abound before the voting, with other uncomfortable news stories suppressed like the one about Hunter Biden's laptop.  Then, after the final election tallies are announced, a day or two of apologies for lying can be offered to Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley at Senate hearings, and that refreshes the ground until next time.  We live amid lies.

Fake Chicago Police tweet about Derek Chauvin not being removed by Twitter, CPD says.  Twitter is refusing to remove or attach a warning to a doctored image that purports to show a Chicago Police Department tweet that states, "We are all Derek Chauvin" — despite that the post is not real and the agency has made several attempts to have it taken down, CPD officials tell Fox News.  The altered image began circulating on Twitter at the beginning of the weekend and features a picture of Chauvin, the recently convicted Minneapolis Police officer, underneath the five-word sentence, which appears in bigger font than is customarily used on the social media platform.  By Saturday, the post had garnered approximately 38,600 retweets and 175,000 likes, according to local news site CWBChicago.

Abortion Pills Are Not 'Medication'.  Many in the media are increasingly referring to abortion pills as "medication" — but their terminology couldn't be further from the truth.  That's because the purpose of medicine is to save lives.  The purpose of abortion is to end them.  The most recent example came when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that women may temporarily receive the drug mifepristone — the first of two pills in a chemical abortion — by mail.  The news comes months after the Supreme Court granted the FDA's previous request to reinstate a federal requirement that says women must obtain it from a health care provider in person.  Now, the FDA will halt enforcing this requirement during the pandemic.  In their reports, outlets from the New York Times to Teen Vogue referred to mifepristone as "medication."  In order to distinguish from surgical abortion, many in the media already use "medication abortion," "medical abortion," or "chemical abortion" to describe an abortion administered by pill.  But only recently have major outlets begun switching the words around to use phrases such as "abortion medication" to call abortion itself a type of medicine.

WaPo Writer Doesn't Get Concerns About Driving Near Protesters, Here's an Explainer.  Washington Post opinion writer Radley Balko tweeted that he didn't quite get why some people were so worried about "inadvertently driving near a protest, getting stuck in front of a wall of protesters, then getting pulled out of their car and beaten."  [Tweet]  In his tweet, he referenced a ridiculous article from "The New Republic" which claimed Republicans wanted the "right to crash cars into people" and that Republicans were endorsing a "terroristic tactic" against "protesters."  [More tweets]  As I've covered the protests/riots over the past year, I've seen many encounters that have ranged from minor harassment to someone ending up dead.  I'm not sure what Balko has been watching over the past year, but BLM/Antifa people are constantly blocking cars in the street and getting into encounters with drivers.

Corporate Media And Other Race-Baiters Have Incited More Violence Than Trump Ever Did.  Adam Toledo is a name that has likely saturated your newsfeed over the past month.  He was a 13-year-old Mexican-American boy who was fatally shot by a police officer on Chicago's West Side not one month ago.  This week, that name was overshadowed by Ma'Khia Bryant, a black teenager who died at the hands of law enforcement in Ohio.  In both cases, leftist politicians and Twitter-verified "journalists" couldn't get the story out fast enough, absent facts, video, or nuance — but the headlines wrote themselves:  "Racist Cop Shoots Unarmed Minority."  Also in both cases, the stories turned out to be completely wrong.  On Wednesday we learned that Bryant wasn't just standing in her driveway unarmed, or just casually holding a knife, or even dueling with another armed kid in a "knife fight" when the officer discharged his weapon.  After the officer arrived, she lunged with a knife at another black girl she had pinned against a car, after having already charged a different girl nearby.  She was armed and dangerous.  And the officer, although accused of being a racist pig by even the White House, instead saved at least one black girl's life.

Cuomo, Lemon:  NBC Committed 'Malpractice' By Not Showing Knife.  While doubling down during Thursday's [4/22/2021] CNN Tonight handoff on their support for Officer Nicholas Reardon's decision to shoot knife-wielding Ma'Khia Bryant, CNN hosts Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon blasted outlets like NBC who didn't show the knife in Bryant's hand while reporting on the shooting.  The pair accused such outlets of "journalistic malpractice" because they weren't being honest (an ironic notion given who was flinging it).  Their knock came as NewsBusters drove part of the Thursday news cycle with a report exposing NBC's deception against their audience; editing out a key part of the 911 call and not showing the knife, before silently adding them in an update.  "And, we've got to be honest about these things.  And if we're not honest about these things, as journalists, then it is a dereliction of our duty as journalists.  It's journalistic malpractice not to do it," Lemon opined to his friend.

Will the Times apologize for lying about Officer Sicknick's death?  An unruly crowd entered the US Capitol on Jan. 6, while then-President Donald Trump addressed a rally several blocks away.  One member of that crowd, Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman and a veteran, was shot by the Capitol Police.  The next day, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died in the hospital.  On Jan. 8, The New York Times reported that Officer Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher by violent Trump supporters.  This story was quickly repeated by numerous other media outlets.  Millions believed it.  The story was false.  Sicknick died of two strokes, which occurred many hours after the invasion of the Capitol.  The blue-check-media fallback was that bear spray used by the Capitol invaders had caused the officer's strokes.  That also turned out to be false.  After a curiously long delay, the DC medical examiner's office released its report this week, and it concludes that Sicknick suffered no injuries, internal or external.  He didn't have a reaction to bear spray, the chief medical examiner reported.

Media Pants on Fire.  Media trust is at an all-time low, a majority of Americans believing that, "Most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."  An Axios commissioned survey found that only 46 percent of Americans trusted traditional media, the lowest number ever recorded in the 20 years of this survey.  Gallup found similar distrust of the media, with only 40 percent of Americans having "a great deal" or even "a fair amount" of confidence that the media reports the news "fully accurately, and fairly".  The low point was a 32 percent level of trust in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president and he correctly labeled the media as "fake news".  20 years ago, media trust was much higher, in the mid 50 percent range, despite Dan Rather at that time, a major network news anchor, lying about George W Bush's National Guard service.  In other words, the media is lying to us and we are catching on to the lies.

Officer Sicknick Died of Natural Causes, Not Riot Injuries.  This was just another massive lie used to gaslight the American people and justify an ongoing manhunt for Trump supporters who had the audacity to protest an illegitimate election.

Glenn Greenwald on what the truth about Officer Sicknick's death says about the media.  We learned yesterday that Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes.  The significance of that admission was not just for Sicknick's immediate family, some of whom already seem to have known he didn't die from an attack with a fire extinguisher.  The real significance was the way in which this undercut the media's confident framing of his death as a victim of the Jan. 6 riot.  Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald took this occasion to point out how this lie got going and why the media desperately wanted it to be true. [...] The partisan motivation for this to be true was so overwhelming that doubt about it was treated as a kind of heresy.  The media's progressive voices worked as the equivalent of Hockey goons to punish anyone who dared to say different.

The New York Times Has Just Been Caught In Two Monstrous Lies.  On Tuesday, the public learned that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes.  Just a few days before that, the public learned that the "Russian Bounty" story was fake.  In other words, in the span of a week, the "newspaper of record" has been exposed for grossly misleading the public about two major stories — both designed to discredit President Donald Trump. [...] Start with Sicknick.  The New York Times was the paper that reported he'd been killed by a pro-Trump protester who threw a fire extinguisher at Sicknick during the Jan. 6 incursion into the Capitol Building.  The Times claimed that, after being struck and suffering a "bloody gash on his head," Sicknick "was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support" where he later died. [...] What did the Times base its story on?  Unnamed sources, of course.  There were no pictures.  No videos.  No on-the-record accounts.  No medical examiner's report.  The story fell apart, as news emerged — no thanks to the mainstream press — that Sicknick had texted his family about being in good spirits that night.  Then we learned that he'd returned to his office after the events at the Capitol, and only later went to the hospital.

A New Poll Shows the Pollsters Aren't Even Trying Anymore.  You've probably noticed a barrage of approval rating polls being released in the past month or so, and nearly all of them show Joe Biden as a president for the ages.  We've seen such high numbers as 60% approval in some surveys.  Perhaps Biden is just that much of a unifier, despite pushing the most radical, divisive agenda in modern history?  Or perhaps there's something else going on with these polls.  Yeah, it's the latter.  Random thought, but if your sample is coming out to a raw D+31 sample, perhaps there's something wrong with your pool that you are originally drawing from?  Are they just calling people in blue states?  Further, if you look at the internals, they only weight the poll to D+9, while the 2020 election was Biden +4.  The margin was even smaller in the vote totals for the House, for example.  In other words, the country much more evenly divided than shown here, but according to these pollsters, we are in a new era of peace and unity.  The purpose of this is clear: to push a narrative of inevitability going into 2022 for Democrats.

Democrat-run institutions are cheating to prop up the Biden administration.  In three months, Joe Biden has exffectively erased all American norms.  Worse, he's done so by executive fiat rather than the legislative process.  It's likely that only Democrats (and not even all Democrats) support him.  Nevertheless, a Pew poll, which the media is shilling, assures us that he's got a 59% approval rating.  Dig into the poll, though, and it's a lie [...].  In other words, we are being sold a narrative that has nothing to do with the truth.  First, about that poll. [...] It turns out that, as to some of those things, we know that most Americans oppose Biden's policies.  On Court-packing, an October poll that the New York Times conducted showed that 58% of likely voters oppose it.  Americans feel even more strongly about voter ID:  75% of them support it.  Americans also disapprove of Biden's border policy, with 55% of them saying he's doing a bad job and only 29% saying he's doing a good job.

MSM Edits Police Bodycam Footage And Removes The Part Where 13-yr-old Adam Toledo Is Seen Holding Firearm.  Dan Herbert, a Chicago attorney who has represented a number of police officers involved in deadly use of force incidents, says the officer who shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo "absolutely had a reason to fire" if he believed the teen possessed a gun while turning toward him.  The Civilian Office of Police Accountability — the city's police oversight agency — on Thursday released body camera videos and other related materials two days after Adam's family was shown footage of the March 29 shooting in Little Village.  The footage shows an officer chasing Adam in an alley while shouting at him to stop.  Adam appears to pause near a fence bordering a parking lot at the end of the alley and turn toward the officer with his hands up but just moments before he threw away his gun.

CBS News Edited Police Body Cam Video To Mask Teen Holding A Gun Before He Was Fatally Shot.  CBS News deceptively cropped body camera footage that showed a 13-year-old boy holding a gun before he was fatally shot by Chicago police in March.  A law enforcement officer fatally shot Adam Toledo during an encounter in response to gunshots heard on a police scanner.  Police said Toledo ignored "verbal directions, fled, used significant force, and was armed with a semiautomatic pistol," which is why the officer fired.  Body cam footage released this week appears to show Toledo holding a weapon moments before he was shot, but CBS News posted a clip to its website and Twitter page that cropped out the footage showing the teen's alleged firearm.

Media pushes false narrative of racism.  The riots that have erupted after the killing of Daunte Wright reinforce a familiar pattern.  This response is rooted not only in tragedy, but in a distorted perception of reality.  Chelsea Handler, for example, suggested that people of color have a "50-50" chance of being shot by police.  This is a complete distortion, but fits a broader pattern.  My latest report for the Manhattan Institute, based on multiple surveys, shows that being exposed to news and social media, having left-wing views on race, and being anxious or depressed explains a great deal of how much racism a person perceives.  And when someone says racism in America has risen, this perception is almost entirely a figment of their imagination.  In fact, racist attitudes and behaviors have been declining for decades.

Liz Cheney Plays the Fool After Anti-Trump 'Bombshell' Collapses.  Yesterday, Joe Biden's own intelligence community dropped the news that the "Russian bounties" story used to target President Trump was absolute garbage.  Of course, some of us knew it before the 2020 election and reported that (see That 'Bombshell' Russian Bounty Story Was Just Officially Shown to Be Garbage).  Once again, "right-wing" news outlets were proven right while CNN and other "unbiased" outlets were made to look like the unreliable, partisan sources they are.  But on the political side, there was one figure who went all-in on the nonsense in order to try to keep the perpetual war in Afghanistan going.  That person was Rep. Liz Cheney.

Fake news on Afghanistan and Russia:  The media's bounty of lies.  Remember when the press and leftist politicians badgered President Trump?  A story came out from the New York Times in 2020 claiming that Russia was paying bounties to Talibanites to kill U.S. troops stationed there.  (As if these Islamofacist maniacs might not be motivated otherwise to do it themselves.)  Oh, the brouhaha it drew!  President Trump was constantly blamed for not taking the problem 'seriously' and America-hating Democrats had a field day of playing patriot.  It came out during election season, and Joe Biden played it to the hilt, being Mr. Patriot and all, despite never serving.  The aim of all this tiresome crap, played over and over and over on the nighttime news, was to Get Trump, by bringing back that old dead cat about Trump being Putin's puppet.  Turns out that this bounty claim was, like a lot of these stories, a naked, total lie.

U.S. Intelligence Now Says Story of Russian Bounties on American Troops Likely False.  After the media blew up a story about Russian military putting bounties on American troops in an effort to shape a Russian collusion narrative against the administration of President Trump, the U.S. intelligence community now says that story was likely false.

Conrad Black's Tour de Force.  Today [4/13/2021] Conrad Black has an outstanding take-down of the WSJ's foolish anti-Trump editorial (on Friday).  The WSJ editorial is titled "The GOP's Trump Problem" — see, Trump is the problem. [...] Black covers a lot of ground.  I'll try to summarize the main points, while urging readers to follow the link — you won't regret it.  Black talks turkey, explains the facts of political life in lucid terms.  Black's basic thesis is that the WSJ has things exactly backwards.  Trump is not the problem for the GOP. Rather, the Never Trumps are the problem.  Trump had a remarkably successful term, especially in light of the constant betrayals and the concerted Dem and Deep State assault on our constitutional order.  The reality, contrary to the WSJ's view, is that Republicans want more of the Trump agenda — whether led by Trump himself or by a Trump approved proxy.  In fact, the disastrous start and likely deepening national crisis we are experiencing under the Zhou Baiden regime (whoever or what cabal actually is pulling the strings) favor this solution for the GOP, in Black's view.

The GOP's Trump Solution.  The Wall Street Journal on Friday [4/9/2021] published an editorial headlined "The GOP's Trump Problem."  It gets things terribly wrong.  The GOP is Trump's party and it is the Wall Street Journal that has the Trump problem.  Having been commendably supportive of the former president through most of his term, the Journal joined in the general embarkation of NeverTrumpers over the ostensible election results.  The theory that inspired this headline is Trump had his chance but lost the election in a manner practically indistinguishable from defeated incumbents Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992 (when there were no suggestions of questionable results).  The editors suggest further that Trump had exhausted any grounds he had for contesting the fairness of the counting of ballots, and that it was his duty to go quietly into that good night and do everything that he could to elect Republican senators in Georgia to preserve the Republican majority in the Senate and to enhance the likelihood of the reelection next year of Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.

Dangerous Word Games:  Nets Drop 'Mostly Peaceful,' Riots Are Now 'Protests'.  The left's Orwellian redefining of words took a dangerous step Monday as all three of the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) started to refer to the riots of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota as "protests," effectively dropping the "mostly peaceful" label they were mocked for using in the summer of 2020.  All of this followed an apparently accidental shooting where a police officer seemingly went to use her Taser but discharged her duty pistol instead.  The first showing of the media's dangerous rebranding of riots came earlier in the day when an activist journalist screamed at Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon, saying "there was no riot" as he described how his officers were attacked with projectiles.  "The officers that were putting themselves in harm's way were being pelted with frozen cans of pop, they were being pelted with concrete blocks," he told the press.  The truth didn't matter to the broadcast networks as they gaslit their audiences.  "A curfew now in place following protests and clashes with police," announced ABC's World News Tonight anchor, David Muir during the opening tease.  And as CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell teased the "violent protests," NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt noted that "protesters clashing with police."

Our Honesty Crisis:  How We Talk about Race.  Less than two weeks later, Noah Green rammed his car into Capitol Police officer William Evans and killed him near the fencing that surrounds the Capitol.  When Green emerged from his car with a knife, he was shot and killed.  Afterward it was revealed that Green was a follower of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.  It does not bother me that Green was black or followed Farrakhan.  It bothers me that he killed a Capitol Hill police officer a week ago, and we won't talk about that story for very long.  On the other hand, three months after Officer Brian Sicknick died, many people still believe he was beaten to death by white supremacists with a fire extinguishers at the "insurrection" because the media lied so loudly about it.  All of it goes to show that if the lie is big enough, a lot of people do not even notice the correction — even if the victim's own mother tries to correct the narrative.

Another, Clearer Take on the Chauvin Trial.  I leave it to you to decide why, from the Trayvon Martin case to the George Floyd case, the media has so consistently misrepresented the facts.  Whether it is that unskilled reporters are covering these matters, or that the press is simply looking to attract consumers with florid tales, or that the media looks forward to destroying urban areas with false tales of murderous white racists (amid a shortage of real ones), I cannot say. [...] (I'd also note that it is my experience that reporters' deadlines often conflict with the way trials proceed, so that too often the prosecution (or in civil matters, the plaintiff) case is presented just before deadline and the cross examination occurs too late to be covered in that day's edition, leaving only a false, one-sided version of the day's action.)

The Hunter and Jim Biden story
  •   Wasn't hacked material
  •   Wasn't Russian misinformation
  •   Is something people deserved to know before voting
  •   Big tech + corporate media tried to make sure that didn't happen
  •   And now they're going to gaslight you about all of it.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Offers Correction After Printing Biden's Lies About GA Election Law Bill.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) issued a correction on a story that made some false claims about Georgia's election law reform legislation.  The newspaper made the mistake of printing Democrat talking points, specifically remarks made by President Biden, instead of the truth.  AJC originally falsely reported that voting hours had been cut in the bill and failed to note that early voting days had been added for general elections while shortening the time for early voting in primary run-offs.  The newspaper printed the correction at the end of a story on liberal filmmaker and actor Tyler Perry.  Perry owns a large production company in the Atlanta area.  Perry was quick to come out against the Georgia legislation signed into law by Governor Kemp.  He voiced hope that the Department of Justice will look into "the unconstitutional law".

Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves.  The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post.  Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers.  On Sunday [3/28/2021], the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that "defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies."  It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in "a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another" in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense.

These 6 Stupendous Hoaxes Are Reasons to Give Media Narrative About 'Asian Hate' the Hairy Eyeball.  But not every political battle is 1963 Birmingham and not every political foe is the KKK.  Reported violence against Asians is not necessarily Birmingham all over again.  The narrative that it's President Trump's fault because he used the phrase "China virus" last year strains credulity.  The all-too-eager anti-Trump media, however, amplifies this message.  Indeed, this story and others, including the COVID lockdown/mask information, and the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6th, all have taken on the tell tale signs of hit-and-run narrative-run journalism.  Caveat emptor.  We've seen the media fail to let facts get in the way of a too-good-to-check-story with disastrous results.  Here are just a few. [...]

Chris Wallace Falsely Claims New Georgia Law Bans Drinking Water While In Line For Voting.  Fox News' Chris Wallace claimed Sunday Georgia voters are prohibited from being given food or drink in line at the ballot box under a law the state's governor signed last week.  "Let's take a look at some of the provisions in Georgia," Wallace said during an interview with South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.  "The one that I think is creating the biggest fuss, it prohibits, it makes it a crime to give food or drink to voters waiting in line.  Senator, why on Earth if Americans are willing to wait hours to vote, would you make it a crime for people to come and give them a bottle of water?"  [Video clip]

The Commonalities Between the Rise of the Nazis and the Tactics of the American Left Cannot be Ignored.  [Scroll down]  Third, the Nazis perfected the art of indoctrinating the citizenry through propaganda and "fake news." Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, is credited with saying:  "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." and "Think of the press as a great keyboard on which government can play."  This strategy has been and continues to be used to great success by the American left and their fellow travelers in the mainstream (Democrat) media.  Whether it is the Russian collusion hoax, the so-called armed insurrection on January 6, 2021, climate change as an existential threat to mankind, suppression of voting rights, white supremacy running rampant, the necessity of lockdowns for the Covid pandemic or a myriad of other fabrications, they left lies with impunity as a means to their ends... as did the Nazis.

Grassley To DoJ: Why Has No One Been Charged With Crimes Over False Kavanaugh Allegations?  Good question, especially since this happened two and a half years ago.  Will the Department of Justice enforce false-statements laws consistently, or only when special counsels are involved?  Thanks to Senate Democrats' sandbagging in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, a number of people came out of the woodwork to make clearly false allegations to the Senate as a way to derail his appointment to the Supreme Court.  Grassley wants to know when they will face charges — and it's not the first time the ranking Senate Judiciary member has asked.

Truth And Lies In A Digital Media Era.  Those in the media who speak to us and desire to control us, but still want to avoid outright lies, do so by shading the truth, offering spin, or using phrases such as, "it's my opinion", "as I remember it" and, the chart-topper, "at this point why does it matter?".  They know they operate in an environment where falsehoods and misrepresentations can take root before there is an opportunity to measure the validity of allegations or assertions.  Such liars know the truth but deform and simulate it. [...] We live in a time when the bulk of our fellow citizens have been indoctrinated rather than educated.  Rather than learning facts — including relatively objective history — they are encouraged to think of themselves in terms of relationships to one another.  What is important to them is what is trending in digital social media and who the influencers of the moment are.  Status comes from horizontal acclaim.  Digital social networks have replaced real social networks.  This leads to a society adrift, with people desperate to have someone to guide them.  Mainstream news organizations and digital social media platform providers seek to fill this need.

US Media's Misleading Framing Of Atlanta Police Officer's Comments About Shooter Used In Chinese Propaganda.  American media's misleading framing of a police officer's description about why a man shot up multiple massage parlors in Atlanta was used by China's state-run media outlet Sunday [3/21/2021].  The Xinhua News Agency, the official state-run press agency of the People's Republic of China, repeated a misleading claim suggesting Cherokee County Sheriff Capt. Jay Baker made excuses for Robert Aaron Long, who stands accused of killing eight people in Atlanta.  The misleading claim suggested Baker told reporters — in his view — that it "was a really bad day for" Long.  "8 lives taken, 6 of them Asian.  And the killer was just 'having a bad day'!" Xinhua News Agency tweeted Sunday.

The mainstream media's anti-White racism is escalating.  [Scroll down]  The media's racial obsession is a way to maintain the Democrats' political power, by silencing the opposition, and to drive ratings.  Eventually, though, the real-world consequences are going to be disastrous.  If our children are consistently told that Whites are not just racist, but akin to the KKK or even Nazis, the means that waging war against them is within the pale of moral behavior.  I am deeply concerned that the media will incite someone — or a group of someones — to take up arms in the imaginary war against "White supremacists" and start targeting people based upon their skin color.

The Real Reasons Why Millions Of Americans Will Defy Covid Mandates And Vaccines.  I suspect a large portion of the public is at least partially aware when they are being pushed or lured into a specific way of thinking. [...] The media does not objectively report facts and evidence, it spins information to plant an engineered narrative in the minds of its viewers.  But the public is not as stupid as they seem to think.  This is probably why trust in the media has plunged by 46% in the past ten years, hitting an all time low this year of 27%.  Except for pre-election season spikes, mainstream outlets from CNN to Fox to CBS to MSNBC are facing dismal audience numbers, with only around 2 million to 3 million prime time viewers.  There are numerous YouTube commentators with bigger audiences than this.  And, if you sift through the debris of MSM videos on YouTube, you'll find low hits and a majority of people that are visiting their channels just to make fun of them.

Numerous Liberal Outlets Claimed to Independently Verify Debunked WaPo Story.  Shocker: the media lied to the American public once again.  We learned recently that the Washington Post, after claiming to have verified a story from anonymous sources, did no such thing for one particular "bombshell" story.  The Post initially reported in January that Trump told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office to "find the fraud" in the state, telling them that they would be a national hero if she did.  The call took place on December 23rd, and was just released, proving that Trump never said that.  In reality, Trump said that this unnamed official would be praised when the "right answer comes out" and encouraged them to examine mail-in ballots in Fulton county.  The recording was discovered in this unnamed official's computer trash bin after they said they didn't think a recording existed.  Without their gross incompetence in what appears to be them trying to cover her tracks, this bogus reporting would've never been exposed.

5 Other Totally Bogus Stories Designed To Hurt Trump The Media Got Away With.  The correction by The Washington Post concerning false information about a phone call between former President Donald Trump and the Georgia secretary of state's chief investigator is no anomaly.  The neglect of truth and preference for anonymous sources is deeply ingrained in the corrupt left-wing media's strategy.  "You will notice that establishment media errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies always slant one way — against me and against Republicans.  Meanwhile, stories that hurt Democrats or undermine their narratives are buried, ignored, or delayed until they can do the least harm," Trump said in a statement Monday in response to widespread corrections from The New York Times, CNN, ABC, and so on.  The Washington Post correction struck right to the core of why journalism is dying and has been for years, and it served as a reminder of the media's lack of ethics and standards throughout the Russian collusion scramble.  Here are five major Trump-Russia stories the media botched. [...]

The Media Lied about Brian Sicknick's Death.  Remember how we were told, shortly after the mass trespass at the Capitol, that 5 people had died because of the "act of sedition" or "coup" and that all Trump supporters were responsible for their deaths?  I do.  In any case, it turned out that that information was, at best, partially true.  In regard to Brian Sicknick, the police officer who sadly died that day, it was absolutely untrue.  For one, the only person actually killed on Jan. 6 was Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was shot in the neck by an LEO for crawling though a window.  She was unarmed and not doing anything violent.  The other three people who died died of "medical emergencies," whatever that means, not injuries sustained during the day's events.  And that leaves Brian Sicknick, the police officer who sadly died on Jan. 6.  The problem is that, while Democrats blamed Trump supporters for his death and even let his body lie in state, there's no evidence that he died because of anything protesters did.  In fact, despite the media preaching for months that he died after being bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher, that appears to be entirely untrue.

Audio That Debunked Fraudulent Trump Quotes [was] Found On GA State Government Device:  Report.  An audio recording that forced multiple major news outlets to issue corrections to stories that attributed fraudulent quotes to former President Donald Trump was reportedly found on the device of the chief investigator of the Georgia secretary of state's office.  Trump made a call to the chief investigator, Frances Watson, on Dec. 23 to discuss alleged fraud in the 2020 election, asking her to look into votes cast in Fulton County, Georgia, especially.  Reports of the call published the next month by The Washington Post, CNN, and others quoted Trump as telling Watson to "find the fraud" and claiming she would be a "national hero" if she did.  An audio recording of the call published last week showed that Trump made neither statement, debunking news outlets' claims that were sourced back to a single anonymous source.  The recording of the call was obtained through an open records request to the Georgia secretary of state's office.  Officials reportedly located the file in a trash folder on Watson's device, according to CNN.

Audio shows the media got the Trump-Georgia story all wrong.  It's one thing if a single news outlet publishes a fraudulent anonymously sourced "scoop."  It's another thing entirely if multiple newsrooms claim they independently "confirmed" the fraudulent "scoop" with anonymous sources of their own.  The former can reasonably be explained away as a simple error; the latter is not so simple.  It's unrealistic so many sources would be wrong about the same thing.  It's more likely competing news outlets spoke with the same anonymous individual or individuals, which leads to uncomfortable questions about whether the media were merely fed bad information or were intentionally manipulated. [...] If you can believe it, the Washington Post bungling its "bombshell" report isn't the most scandalous thing about this episode in media malfeasance.  No, the most scandalous thing is:  Several newsrooms claimed they independently "confirmed" the most [condemnatory] details of the Washington Post's since-corrected "scoop."

If This Week You Learned Biden is 'Hopeful' And Tucker Carlson Is Evil, Congratulations, You've Been Lied To.  If you hadn't watched the president's prime-time address, you might think it was something — anything — other than the most depressing, defeated, and resigned speech since President Jimmy Carter held the office.  You might think he hadn't devoted his third sentence to a baseless attack on his predecessor, and the entire rest of his address to death, sadness, loneliness, and despair.  You might think he hadn't literally threatened the American people, warning, "We may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track, please, we don't want to do that again."  Rather, to read The Washington Post homepage's featured commentary on the address, you'd think "Much of that speech was about hope."  "It was about seeing a shaft of light at the end of a dark horror," Robin Givhan, a 56-year-old woman who once won a Pulitzer for "witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism," wrote.  "His white French cuffs and his crisp pocket square," she went to tell us, "evoked all of the institutional power and authority at his disposal to make things better."  "[H]is mere presence on television," she insisted, was a declaration of "his pride in the country's progress."  If you're wondering why you didn't see any of this, don't worry:  It didn't happen.

Another Opinion Columnist Pushing War With Iran Who Doesn't Actually Exist.  There is at least one more foreign policy opinion writer from the Mujahideen-eKhalq (MEK) whose existence is dubious, based on a study by a social media analyst and statements from a defector from the group.  Amir Basiri, who contributed to Forbes 9 times, the Washington Examiner 52 times, OpenDemocracy, Algemeiner, and The Hill once also appears to be a fabrication.  The MEK is an Iranian exile group for which John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and other foreign policy luminaries have given paid speeches.  Dems like Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean have also spoken on their behalf.  But the group has American blood on its hands, has been accused of practicing forced sterilization, and their belief system has been described as a mixture of Marxism and Islamism.  Its supporters claim they, and their front group the National Council of Resistance of Iran, are a sort of government-in-exile, despite nearly nonexistent support for the group within Iran.  They also have waged a substantial disinformation campaign in the Western press, in particular targeting conservative media.

When Minorities Vote GOP, the Media Smears Republicans as Racists.  In just one week, the Washington Post churned out two op-eds on the same theme, "The GOP is Now Just the Party of White Grievance" and "The Republican Party is Making Jim Crow Segregationists Proud".  The D.C. Democrat paper doesn't bother clarifying why Democrats from two generations ago would be thrilled that 1 in 5 black men voted for President Trump.  Ever since the election, the media has been beating its narrative drum with one message.  CNN howls that Republicans are the worst racists.  The New York Times insists they're even more racist than that.  And MSNBC will counter that only white racists would vote Republican.

So where are the nightly network news pictures of all the 'kids in cages'?  The media posted fake news stories with "kids in cages" pictures dating the Obama/Biden years in their four-year collusion with Democrats to destroy President Trump.  So where are the nightly televised pictures today of kids sleeping on cement floors in crowded facilities?  Somehow, we do not see them. [...] Where's Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who went down for a photo-op wearing white, in order to weep in front of an empty parking lot, and compare illegal immigrant detentions during the Trump administration to Nazi concentration camps?  Where is the Hollywood crowd who have always protested Trump's actions?  I must assume none of them really cared and it was always a political attack or else they would be actively protesting.  The Biden administration also clearly doesn't care about how contagious the coronavirus, which migrants are bringing in with them, is.  They are not quarantining the migrant kids who are sick or the kids who have had contact with other sick people.  Nope, they are crowding them into jail-like facilities and then sending them around the U.S. to expose others.

The Roots of Insurrection:  Antifa Exposed.  The mainstream media — silent on the Marxist ideology, violence, and militancy of groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) — deceptively reported that the protests they inflicted on over 200 U.S. cities in 2020 were "mostly peaceful."  It deceitfully transformed the mayhem into a "summer of love."  Widespread rioting, looting, arson, murder, assaults, and destruction of property and businesses went unreported.  Such abject failure explains why polls consistently rank the media among America's least trusted institutions.  Given media complicity with radical groups, it's not surprising that the Los Angeles Times dismissed Andy Ngo's Unmasked:  Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy as unserious, "supremely dishonest," and "self-serving." [...] It says he's fixated on the "imaginary threat of Antifa" and ignores the "real danger" from far-right extremists.

How the Media Distorts Debate and Details of HR 1.  A piece of legislation working its way through Congress would upend further the way Americans conduct elections.  But the way many media outlets are covering it, one would think the bill — which Democrats designated as HR 1 or the so-called For the People Act — is just a simple, uncontroversial "reform" that most Americans agree with.  It's far from that. [...] For instance, media outlets frequently portray HR 1 as a "voter rights" bill.  Outlet after outlet describes the legislation this way, despite vagueness about exactly what voting rights are being threatened. [...] Are Americans really uniformly in favor of effectively nullifying state voter ID laws, or handing over all power for overseeing elections to an increasingly partisan federal agency?  As studies have shown, voter ID laws don't appear to affect minority voter turnout at all.  So why is that election integrity measure considered voter suppression?  It looks like HR 1 has nothing to do with protecting voter rights and everything to do with manipulating and nationalizing how we conduct elections.

Things that don't make sense, except to Democrats.  [Scroll down]  Now that cases, deaths, and hospitalizations are declining rapidly we see fewer stories.  They have to get the $1.9 Trillion leftist slush fund passed before the public is allowed to learn the truth.  I also am seeing frequent reporting complaining that not as many people are getting tested.  The media, bureaucrats and other Democrats should be cheering that fewer people are scared and fewer people feel the need to get tested but they are complaining.  The cheers should be very loud because even with fewer people testing, the positivity rate has dropped rapidly.  It's as if the media and other Democrats would rather keep destroying the economy and children instead of getting schools and businesses open.  The cheerleading and campaigning for Democrats is what reporters do.  How is that valuable to the American people?

Correcting the Biden Administration's Lies About the Border Crisis.  What is happening right now on the border and within the United States regarding illegal immigration is being misrepresented by the Biden administration and much of the media.  Most nightly television broadcasts do not even mention the chaos on the border, what is causing it and what the government is doing in response.  When they do, they merely copy the administration's talking points that are inaccurate and misleading.

Developing some perspective on the Capitol riot.  In the last few days we've seen a series of hearings in the House and Senate on the January 6 riot at the Capitol.  After all the talk, we still don't know some of the basic facts of the riot, especially the circumstances surrounding the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, the only law enforcement officer and only non-rioter to die in the violence.  But in spite of the gaps in our knowledge, a sense of perspective on the riot — Who was involved?  What did they think they were doing? — has begun to emerge.  First, the riot is often referred to as an "armed insurrection." A search of the Nexis database of newspapers, websites, and cable news transcripts finds 2,339 times since January 6 in which the riot was described as an "armed insurrection."  On many other occasions, the rioters were described simply as "armed."  But the description requires an asterisk that is rarely, if ever, applied.  A small number of the rioters did indeed have baseball bats or bear spray, and a few used flagsticks or even, in one case, a crutch as weapons to assault Capitol police.  But the armed insurrectionists did not use any firearms.

Ron Johnson Gets FBI to Admit That No Firearms Were Seized During the Capitol Riot.  Ever since the riot in the US Capitol on January 6, we have struggled to find out exactly what happened there.  As time goes on, we are finding that just about everything we were told about that event is false.  We know, for instance, that one of the rioters, the one who took the video of the execution of Ashli Babbitt, was on the payroll of CNN and NBC, see ["]Leftist Videographer John Sullivan Was Paid by Major Media Organizations for Footage of the Capitol Unrest["].  We know that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was not beaten to death, and we also know that nearly two months after his death, the FBI still refuses to give a cause of death or charge anyone with a crime, see ["]FBI Director Wray Is Asked About Brian Sicknick's Cause of Death, His Response Is Just Not Acceptable["].  We know there were no "kill teams" looking for Mike Pence or anyone else.  We know the guys with zip ties picked them up from where Capitol Police dropped them.  We have yet to see any evidence that any member of Congress or senator aided the rioters.

Attack of the Woke Teen Career Killers.  [Scroll down]  This is why newspapers can't be trusted anymore.  Reporters need to have a normal person's understanding of what words mean, so they can get on with the story.  If a field is described as "barren," we don't need to know the precise size, type and amount of vegetation per square foot.  But if we find out that by "barren," reporters mean "lush," then every word becomes suspect, and we're going to need six paragraphs detailing the precise amount of greenery in the field.  Not one word they use can be believed.  More to the point, if reporters call someone a "white supremacist," we need to know if the Times' definition of "white supremacist" includes a person who:
  ·   questions race preferences in hiring and college admissions;
  ·   believes most people are in prison because they committed crimes; or
  ·   admires Western culture.
[...] These sourpuss zealots are in such a mad race to show their wokeness, they are useless as conduits for the news.  What they do isn't "reporting."  It's terrorism.

The Great Hacking of Vermont's Electrical Grid That Never Happened.  Prominent media critics keep insisting that inaccurate reports from prominent institutions are completely different from the made-up "fake news" found on Facebook and other social media networks.  But do news consumers see them as completely different?  The net effect is the same: something that is not true gets communicated far and wide, and the correct information is spread on a much smaller scale.  A new poll found 52 percent of Democrats believe Russia "tampered with the vote tallies" to make Trump the winner in the presidential race.  There is no evidence of this.  When the big-name media institutions and elected Democratic officials twist the news to the point of falsehood, it's not surprising that so many of the rank-and-file would believe something that isn't true.

Lying About Obama.  Jack Cashill has written over a dozen books, including two about the mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, one about the Trayvon Martin case, and two — now three — about Barack Obama.  His new book, Unmasking Obama:  The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is a definitive account not only of Obama's eight years in office but also of the transformation of most mainstream American political journalists, largely during the Obama era, from relatively objective reporters of the facts — emphasis on "relatively" — to dedicated partisans of the left, ready and eager at every turn to cover up unpleasant truths (however important) about Democrats and to promote outrageous lies (however destructive) about Republicans.  Fortunately, in the age of the Internet, the mainstream media have competition.

A culture of lies.  Almost everything you are being told to believe by the mainstream media is a lie.  The legacy media has long since chosen sides and will brazenly cover up anything that could reflect poorly on Democrats, yet will assiduously traffic in any and all innuendo, hearsay, and slander that they feel will harm Republicans/conservatives/Trump supporters.  They gleefully promulgate prevarication in their unending quest to damage Democrats' political opponents.

How many people would still be alive today without media COVID malpractice?  If there's one thing we've learned from the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's that the mainstream media duped us time and again.  Not surprisingly, trust in the Fourth Estate is at an all-time low.  According to Axios, nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with the statement that "journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."

What a Reporter's Arrest at a BLM Riot Tells Us About the Media.  [Scroll down]  While working for the Des Moines Register, [Andrea] Sahouri had repeatedly covered publicity stunts by Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad.  Even after her arrest, the paper continued to use Sahouri to cover the protests and Samad, including glamorizing the arrest of a BLM organizer busted over the vandalism of a cop car.  There's a basic conflict in having an activist, especially one that has a history with a hate group, covering a cause she's passionate about, especially after she's been arrested.  The Des Moines Register has gone on insisting that Sahouri is a journalist who was wrongly arrested.  But Robnett, her fellow activist and boyfriend, isn't a journalist.  He appears to work in marketing.  Journalists don't bring their boyfriends along to a rally unless they're there to take part in the event.  During the BLM riots, leftist members of the media frequently blurred the line between activism and journalism.  But Sahouri may be one of the more egregious examples.  The Register, Amnesty International, and other left-wing organizations continue to attack the police, but have refused to ask basic questions about Sahouri's extremist background.  Or why she was arrested, along with her boyfriend, while another Register reporter wasn't.

Brainwashing Achieved!  Democrat Voters Overwhelmingly Believe "Trump Supporters" Are The #1 Problem In The Country.  The #1 goal of the liberal media ever since Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015 was to smear his supporters as "racists, bigots, sexist, deplorable scum of the earth".  In early 2021, they added "domestic terrorist" to the list.  Sadly, according to a brand new poll, the media smear campaign has proved to be effective.  A new poll from Echelon Insights shows that the #1 "concern" for Democrat voters is "Trump supporters".  Yes, really.  Not police brutality, gun violence, healthcare, student debt, or 7 of the other items they were asked about.  Trump supporters. [...] The media makes the money machine churn when they can divide the people, and the results of this poll show they are doing an exceptional job.

Why The Texas Blackout Has The Greens So Scared:  Deflecting blame to a more exciting apocalypse.  Within days, most of the country was seeing "with our own eyes" and feeling "in our bones" a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were left frozen (and inoperable).  This constituted a double whammy to the huge global warming establishment.  First was the cold, when the "science" had confidently predicted a steadily warming Texas.  Second was the failure of renewables, vastly exacerbating the problems for the energy grid.  Within hours the mainstream media had risen to the challenge.  Journalists employed their familiar word games, quickly substituting "climate change" for global warming.  Readers might be a tad confused if they read "The brutal cold striking Texas is emblematic of a world facing more unpredictable weather due to the rising impact of global warming" but substitute "climate change" for the last two words and presto, the sentence works.  To be sure, that's only because "climate change" is a meaningless term.

Exposing Fact-Checker "Mistruths" on 2020 Election Lawsuits.  Virtually all "fact-checkers" are members of the Democrat-media complex.  They are an important component of the Left's political tactics seeking to discredit contrarian voices they deem not to be "politically correct" and undermining dissent on Democrat agendas.  Not surprisingly, "fact-checking" has nothing to do with checking the facts, but rather is a tactic to discredit material that effectively undermines the Democrat-media narrative.  A good example is Snopes: [...] Snopes is not alone in their leftwing bias.  The same bias applies to the "fact-checkers" at Politifact, Facebook, Twitter, Washington Post, and other media-connected checkers and supposed ombudsmen.  All are supposedly affiliated with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies' International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), but they routinely and blatantly violate the number 1 principle of ICFN:  a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The mainstream media's quandary ... and panic.  [Scroll down]  When mainstream press isn't covering up information that is damaging to the progressives cause, it fabricates stories against conservatives like the Russian collusion hoax or reporting that the riot in the Capital on Jan. 6 was an insurrection led by Donald Trump.  Both of these stories were lies from start to finish.  But both lead to poisoning the minds of countless Americans against the president and two impeachments against him.  Yet during the summer of 2020, the press presented the Antifa and BLM riots as mostly peaceful demonstrations.

Everything is Fake in Utopia.  When Democrats gain power through fraud, everything that follows becomes fake as well. [...] When deception is normalized, tech giants can routinely conceal Biden's unpopularity.  On Biden's campaign trail, mass manipulators scripted questions for audience members to ask him.  Not even a month into office, the phony administration requested its media allies brief them on questions they intend to ask.  White House press conferences will still be theatre, but Jim Acosta will no longer have a part.  Our fraud-in-chief was filmed repeating "salute the marines" after someone likely relayed the command to him through an earpiece.  If you ask the fraudsters, Biden actually said "good-looking marines," and we all misheard him.  We're supposed to believe that Biden complimenting the looks of male marines is more sensical than a party of manipulators secretly telling a senile puppet what to do.  I'll take door number two.  When everything is fake, Joe Biden is a "devout Christian" who supports abortion, Black Lives Matter, and the most radical factions of the LGBTQ lobby.  It doesn't matter that these movements are antithetical to Christianity because fake is the new normal.

Boycott the Gaslight Media and Save America.  There is one major lesson that conservatives and frankly all Americans must learn:  never accept at face value the reporting of any news event.  By foolishly acquiescing to the version of a story put out by the denizens of the mainstream media, the citizenry allows the ruling oligarchy to set the narrative and exploit the inevitably fabricated incidents that further their cause.  In place of "mainstream media," they ought to be called Gaslight Media, for their role is not to report the truth, but rather to manipulate the public into a mental state conducive to obedience. [...] These statists are aware that once their version of a story has been repeated ad nauseum for days or weeks the bulk of the populace will accept it as the truth, thus, achieving near-permanent status in the national discourse.

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.  What took place at the Capitol on January 6 was undoubtedly a politically motivated riot.  As such, it should not be controversial to regard it as a dangerous episode.  Any time force or violence is introduced into what ought to be the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, it should be lamented and condemned.  But none of that justifies lying about what happened that day, especially by the news media.  Condemning that riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was.  There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists.  The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.  Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago.

The Media Has Been Lying About The Capitol Protests.  Look up any story about the storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, and you will find it described as a "deadly riot" that killed five people.  Worse still, one of the deaths was that a police officer who — the story goes — was killed by rioters after getting hit in the head by a fire extinguisher.  Then there is the story of the protestor who "carried Zip Ties into the Capitol," which led to accusations that the protestors intended to take hostages.  There have also been endless media descriptions of the event as an "armed insurrection."  And there were stories claiming that, as Reuters put it, "Capitol rioters meant to 'capture and assassinate' officials."  What is common about all of these media-fed narratives?  Not one of them is true.

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot.  What took place at the Capitol on January 6 was undoubtedly a politically motivated riot.  As such, it should not be controversial to regard it as a dangerous episode.  Any time force or violence is introduced into what ought to be the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, it should be lamented and condemned.  But none of that justifies lying about what happened that day, especially by the news media.  Condemning that riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was.  There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists.  The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.  Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago.  And anyone who tries to correct these falsehoods is instantly attacked with the cynical accusation that if you want only truthful reporting about what happened, then you're trying to "minimize" what happened and are likely an apologist for if not a full-fledged supporter of the protesters themselves.

The Impeachment Show.  Lost in the tedium and general lack of interest in the impeachment show put on by the Democrats last week is the general weirdness of our ruling class.  What we see in politics and in the media is presented as if it is completely normal.  No one ever points out the facts or the contradictions with reality.  The presenters and their subjects are all super-serious, as if everything they are saying and doing is completely normal.  The reaction to the very peaceful demonstrations by Trump fans last month is a great example of this weird disconnect.  We live in an age where everything is monitored by millions of mobile-phone cameras.  As a result, everyone got to see hours of amateur video shot during the subdued protests in Washington back in January.  Yet the carrying-on by the politicians and media is disconnected from what we saw online.  If you are a left-wing partisan, all of it confirms your belief that Trump is a magical orange Hitler commanding an invisible army of Hitlers.  Of course, for these people, everything confirms this belief.  They are insane.

NYT Retracts Story First Published on Jan. 8 That Capitol Hill Police Officer Was Killed by a Fire Extinguisher Thrown by Protesters.  Wow, what coincidental timing.  The story claiming that a police officer was murdered by Trump supporters during the Capitol Hill protest on January 6 is, for all practical purposes, retracted by the NYT the day after Pres.  Trump is acquitted on the impeachment charge of having instigated those protests — which were declared by Democrats and the media an "insurrection" against the government. [...] Julie Strong at American Greatness has been aggressively pursuing this story for weeks, and two days ago she published a column that noted efforts by media outlets — including the NYT — to slowly back away from narrative created by the early reporting done by the NYT and acknowledging that the cause of Sicknick's death was still undetermined.  The narrative built around that early reporting was that he was struck by a demonstrator wielding a fire extinguisher — a narrative advanced by both liberal and conservative media outlets in their effort to railroad Donald Trump over the past 5 weeks.  That narrative has now unraveled because there simply is no evidence to support the claim that the fire extinguisher episode actually happened.

The 'Insurrection Hallucination' and How We Got There.  It's no secret the media has lots of ways to gaslight you.  One of those is failing to report significant happenings.  Another is booking and quoting people whose views they want to advance because they target those they dislike.  Yet another is spreading outright lies, like the contrafactual assertions that Antifa-BLM riots around the country for the past four years were "mostly peaceful" or that President Trump wanted people to inject bleach to kill the spreading virus.  This week, despite their best efforts, a lot of those lies and liars have been unmasked.

The Times' Superspreader Lie About Officer Sicknick.  Like so many fabricated storylines intended to damage Donald Trump and his supporters, the New York Times cited anonymous sources to support a shocking claim in an article alleging Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a Trump "insurrectionist" on January 6.  "[P]ro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials," Times reporters claimed January 8, the day after Sicknick died.  "With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.  He died on Thursday evening."  That horrifying account quickly made its way into the vernacular of journalists, lawmakers, political pundits, and regular Americans without dispute.  CNN, as Raheem Kassam detailed here, for weeks repeated the line as fact.  Ditto for MSNBC.  In a tirade earlier this week, "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough called Donald Trump a "cop killer" and raged that GOP Senators wouldn't vote to convict. [...] But the narrative about what happened to Sicknick is quickly unraveling, as I wrote earlier this week.  Not only is CNN, the network that helped perpetuate the initial storyline for more than a month, questioning the circumstances about Sicknick's death, so too is the New York Times.

Our Tarnished Institutions and the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  The only bright side to this situation is that the people now cannot ignore the lies being pumped out by what we thought were our institutions.  We can thank Trump for that.  He said what he would do, and then did it.  The contrast to business-as-usual was stunning and refreshing.  We liked it and wanted more of it.  Which the swamp could not allow.  Russia!  Russia!  Russia!  Ukraine!  Impeachment!  Systemic racism!  BLM!  Pandemic!  Insurrection!  Is there a previously-trusted institution which hasn't cried wolf about the bad orange man in the last four years?

Tucker Carlson Lays out Some Uncomfortable Questions About the Capitol Riot.  Recently, RedState reported on a CNN article that included a very interesting passage regarding the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who passed sometime after the Capitol riot on January 6th.  Though a story that he had been beaten to death by a fire extinguisher had spread far and wide in the media, it turns out that an investigation found no signs of trauma on his body, nor have investigators been able to find any video of him sustaining wounds that could have taken his life.  The latest theory by investigators is that he may have had a reaction to pepper spray being used that day, though that's purely speculation at this point. [...] One of the things Tucker talks about is the idea that five people died as a direct result of the riots, a statement that has been made more times than one can count by the news media.  In regards to what we actually know right now, he notes that one person died of what appears to have been a heart attack while on the phone with his wife.  Another man had a stroke, and there's no evidence he was even part of the riot that day.  Another woman died after passing out, possibly being trampled by the crowd as a result.  In other words, of the five people listed as dying that day due to the riots, three of them were unquestionably accidental.

Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes Lose Their Minds 'Inciting' Against GOP And Reveal Next Step to Control the Narrative.  [Scroll down]  The GOP got "hundred of thousands of Americans" killed?  When did that happen?  "Then helped a deadly attack on the Capitol."  No, as far as I know, the GOP denounced any violence and were themselves threatened with a bomb at the RNC.  No, actually there wasn't "unprecedented death" for a pandemic.  Unfortunately, there are deaths in a pandemic as there have been all over the world.  Had Trump not been in power, if Biden had been there, it would have been far worse.  Biden wouldn't have cut off travel with China and it would have been exponentially worse.  "Destruction and misery and mourning."  Yes, there was a lot of that from mostly Democratic lockdowns, where Democrats denied aid, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proved, until after the election, exacting the most harm to the economy believing it could adversely affect President Donald Trump.  There was also a lot of that during the BLM/Antifa riots that the Democrats not only failed to condemn, but actually embraced by donating to a rioter bail fund, supporting violent rioters over the people and the police being harmed, and attacking efforts to curtail the riots by law enforcement and the federal government.

Accurate List of 2020 Election Fraud Cases Shows 81 Cases Total, 30 Still Active.  We've heard over and over from Big Media that President Trump and his team lost numerous court cases linked to the 2020 election.  But this is not accurate.  Here's what we identified from our research of an accurate and updated list of court cases:
  •   There are 81 court cases to date based on the 2020 election
  •   In 45 cases President Trump was the plaintiff
  •   In 34 cases President Trump is not the plaintiff
  •   In 2 cases President Trump is the defendant
  •   In 72 cases illegal voting is alleged
  •   In ZERO of the 72 cases where illegal voting is alleged has evidence been allowed to be presented
  •   30 cases remain active

CNN Finally Acknowledges the Story Media Spread About Officer Sicknick's Cause of Death Isn't True.  Earlier this week, the body of Officer Brian Sicknick lay in state in the U.S. Capitol.  Everyone honored his life and service.  But the government is having trouble building a murder case there has still not been an official determination as to his cause of death.  After being part of the force during the actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, he went back to his office.  Some hours later, he collapsed and then later died.  But what has been determined is that the story largely spread about his death, that he was hit by a fire extinguisher by protesters has been discounted, according to a CNN report, because they found no blunt force trauma to his body and there has been no evidence otherwise found, such as video or witnesses, that the incident even occurred.

Hit-job journalism misses the target again.  The hit-job interview is a staple of British journalism.  There is, I suppose, an obvious attraction to it: while it can destroy its subject, it can also make the career of a journalist.  And yet for the reader, listener or viewer, it can also be deeply boring — for the simple reason that if the journalist makes clear their conclusion from the outset, there's no chance of having a reasonable discussion.  People who agree with it rejoice, those who don't switch off.  Nothing gets learned; no ideas are properly discussed.  Such was the case with an interview published in last week's Sunday Times by the journalist Decca Aitkenhead.  Her subject was Professor Jordan Peterson, and, like everything to do with Peterson, the interview has kicked up a fair amount of fuss — principally because it was so mean and hostile.

Crucifying Jordan Peterson.  [Scroll down]  Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead for the Sunday Times of London.  The story appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead.  In the recording (which as of Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the microphone.  Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson's illness, complete with vivid particulars.  And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic, sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.  But — and this is why Peterson felt compelled to post the audio of the interview — Aitkenhead's piece for the Times proved to be a masterpiece of pure snideness and dishonesty.  She reduced Peterson's deep learning and richly nuanced wisdom about life to "bracing advice about how to be a real man."  She caricatured the multitudes of people whose lives he's helped to turn around as "young men who idolise him" as a "fantasy father figure."

The war on Jordan Peterson.  Leftist hatred for the Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson is really something to behold.  He stands as an example of what happens to someone who strays from the crazy line of thinking by modern campus bigots.  Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.  Let's start with the professor's crime.  Simply put, Mr. Peterson does not share the monolithic, prevailing liberal orthodoxy on university campuses dictating that Western White males are the world's evil oppressors and anyone who does not belong to that evil race is a victim trapped in circumstances beyond his or her control.

The 'Big Lie' And Big Liars.  There's a media-perpetrated myth that Joe Biden is a moderate; that he's an honest man.  He is not, and never has been.  He's a politician, a Democrat, who now has the authority of the United States government behind him.  The Big Lies are spread daily from the podium of the White House press briefing room.  Jen Psaki and her red hair have returned from a CNN contributor gig, and after disseminating lies for the Obama State Department, this "Ginger Goebbels" freely spouts whatever words fit their needs at the moment.  Unbound by reality or any challenge of the one they paint daily, even when it contradicts the one they painted the day before, the lies just keep getting bigger.  They inherited "no plan" for vaccine distribution?  Schools can't reopen unless billions are spent hiring more teachers when all data shows schools are safe?  But they're the "party of science"?  No lie is too small to tell, none too big to swallow, and none are or will be challenged.

Op-ed calls very real conservative censorship, purge a 'vapid new conspiracy theory' by Rupert Murdoch.  From the left's standpoint, claims that the 2020 presidential election — which was marred by millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots sent out because of the pandemic — was stolen is a "big lie," insisting there is "no evidence" to support the assertion.  Never mind that three out of four Republicans with eyes that can see believe it to be true — an anomaly dismissed as just a bunch of rubes being manipulated by former President Donald Trump.  This being the same cabal that insists conservatives are not being censored by Big Tech.  No, it's just more conspiracy-mongering on the right.  Just ask Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall, who said in op-ed that "there is a new dangerous conspiracy afoot, and it's being amplified by arguably the most important person in all of political media:  Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch."

Stop credulously calling China a 'people's republic'.  The effect of re-labeling is well known, and it is widely used by the politicians. [...] Oppressive regimes, aware of the power of labels, use them to their full advantage, and include positive labels right into the official names of their states.  Names like "United States" or the "Russian Federation" tell you little about those countries' political organization, but how about words like "democracy" or "republic"?  I started wondering, why do we in the West parrot those words even when they are manifestly misleading?  Is there really a "Peoples' Republic of China"?  In the huge geographic area so designated, people have zero input into how they are governed.  This is decided for them by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wise chairman of the Communist Party.  So why not call it — in the Western press at least — the "Communist Dictatorship of China"?

The Media Told Us a Violent Revolt Was Coming.  What Happened?  It is worth noting today that media outlets are reporting Joe Biden will serve his first full day as President of the United States, and no American cities are burning.  No one is calling for the end of the Republic.  America still stands. [...] We have been told conservatives were going to revolt, trying to overthrow a fairly elected incoming President.  Instead, what we saw yesterday was a peaceful transfer of power.  Alleged flyers calling for an armed protest never happened.  The protests at 50 state capitals never materialized.  It's like all these hyped-up mini-revolutions were never going to happen, but some people who are not conservatives needed for these events to happen to further their own agenda.  Let's get something straight:  The armed mob that attacked the Capitol building was not representative of the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump in November.

Media trust hits new low.  For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios.  Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.  56% of Americans agree with the statement that "Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."  58% think that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."  When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.

Trust In Media At All Time Low:  Majority Believe Reporters Purposefully Trying To Mislead People.  Each year, the American people seem to trust the media less and less.  This year's annual survey from Edelman shows trust in traditional media and social media are at all-time lows.  The annual trust barometer, shared exclusively with Axios, found fewer than half of Americans trust traditional media for the first time since the survey began.

GOP Leaders in D.C. Don't Represent 74 Million Trump Voters.  The media lie.  All the time.  They lied about former President Barack Obama's economy; they tried to make us believe the worst economy since the Great Depression was a great economy.  Then they lied about President Donald Trump's soaring economy.  They tried to make us believe the best economy in 50 years, maybe the best economy ever for middle-class Americans, was a bad economy.  They lied about the Black Lives Matter riots.  For months, we saw radical communists, Marxists and violent thugs riot, loot, burn, mug and murder while attacking police officers with bricks, pipes and Molotov cocktails.  They burned entire downtown business districts to the ground, such as those in Minneapolis and Kenosha, Wisconsin. [...] They killed over 30 people.  They caused over $2 billion in damage.  Yet liberal politicians and the liberal media ignored it all, or made believe it never happened, or made believe it was "peaceful," or encouraged it, or supported it.  In many cases, they did all of the above.

Media Lie About Supposed Capitol Hill Attacker, Here's the Real Story.  It's almost like the mainstream media want to raise the temperature and stoke unsubstantiated fear.  Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they want to do.  That was made apparent again today after a lie was trumpeted by several major media outlets before being shown to be mostly false.  I'm talking about the story that a man provided "fake" inauguration credentials while carrying 500 rounds of handgun ammunition on his person in an attempt to enter the Capitol area.  This was supposed to be proof of an elevated threat, with the assumption being that this guy was there to shoot the place up as a probable QAnon disciple.  The real story is way, way less exciting.

In today's America, the wise person willfully suspends belief.  Twenty years ago, I believed most of what came over the nation's airwaves.  Ten years ago, I was becoming quite the skeptic.  Today, after years of unrelenting attacks on the President, I don't believe any of it.  It's all lies, half-truths, and misinformation, designed to influence elections and steer the collective mentality toward accepting the loss of freedom, the loss of constitutional rights and, eventually, to embrace communist ideas and authoritarian policies.  I'm not sure when it all went south, but I think it was probably long before I first became aware that there was a problem.

Trump, supporters likened to Nazis, Saddam's Ba'ath Party in cable-news demonization duel.  President Trump and his supporters were likened to dictators, despots, terrorists, and genocidal maniacs this week by dueling cable news competitors and elected officials.  MSNBC viewers watched programming on Wednesday with analogies to the Ba'ath Party under Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, while CNN's were warned about large amounts of "Nazis" and "Klan" members permeating the Republican Party.  The cable news punditry was punctuated by Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California likening Mr. Trump to the terrorist who orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — Osama bin Laden — during an interview with "PBS NewsHour."

Three crucial questions remain unanswered about Capitol siege.  One thing recent history has taught America is the first storyline of major tragedies or controversies is never the most accurate.  Americans were told by the Bush administration that they were sucker-punched by a surprise attack on 9/11 by terrorists, only to learn the CIA and FBI had significant advance evidence of the plot and its players and failed to connect the dots.  Susan Rice originally told the nation that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was carried out spontaneously by a mob angered by an anti-Muslim video.  The attack, it turned out, was pre-planned and carried out by an al-Qaeda-aligned terror group in Libya.  The country was assured Christopher Steele's dossier provided credible evidence of Donald Trump colluding with Russia, when in fact the CIA and FBI knew almost immediately it was uncorroborated and based in part on Russian disinformation.  And now just a week after the heinous and deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol, the final narrative of what actually happened is still being written, revised and unmasked.

We Need a New Media System.  Media firms work backward.  They first ask, "How does our target demographic want to understand what's just unfolded?" Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.  It's why Fox News uses the term, "Pro-Trump protesters," while New York and The Atlantic use "Insurrectionists." [...] What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population.  For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a "Just the facts" newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

Is Truth Irrelevant?  It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.  For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically.  Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.  Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty.  That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well.

Media Have Hypocritical Double Standard on Trump vs BLM Protests.  Wednesday was proof that how corporate media and Democrat politicians report and comment on acts of civil unrest depends upon who is engaged in the rioting.  Six months ago The New York Times, which has been described as the national "newspaper of record," made excuses for rioters who attempted to take over the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon.  It reported that "the nightly assault on the federal courthouse has been part of a much wider peaceful resistance ... that began assembling nearly two months ago in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police."  The Times continued, "the aim, as it has been in other cities, was to assemble for sweeping police reform and racial justice."  Reporting on Wednesday's protest in Washington, D.C., The Times' "peaceful resistance" suddenly became a "mob."  Instead of "assembling," the protesters engaged in "rampage" and "chaos," incited by President Trump, which became a "part of his legacy."

Enough! There Was No Riot, Insurrection or "Storming!"  Enough!  Enough of the gaslighting by the press.  Enough of the gaslighting by the party of slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, want, deprivation, envy and murder of the unborn in the womb.  Most especially, enough of their "Republican," enablers, who believe they can gain political favor or DC cocktail circuit invites, by promoting these blatant lies.  What is even more egregious, these lies have already become, "common knowledge." [...] Aside from a couple of bozos who broke a window to get in, I clearly saw Capitol Police opening doors for protestors to enter, while appearing to cordially chat with them as they strolled through the building.

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted "Coup".  At no point yesterday was the American government at risk of being "overthrown," as members of Congress have laughably suggested.  Per usual, our guardians of consensus can't bring themselves to describe what unfolded with any degree of dispassion or calm.  Instead we're told by the incoming Senate Majority Leader, for example, that January 6, 2021 will now "live in infamy" right alongside December 7, 1941.  Elected officials issued emotional notices that they were "okay," like they had just narrowly avoided being crushed in an earthquake, or escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11.  This is made all the more odd because the only person upon whom lethal force was committed appears to have been a Trump-supporting woman who was shot point-blank in the throat by a Capitol Hill police officer.  She's now dead.  Congress was temporarily inconvenienced.  Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they'd abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds.  "Domestic terrorism," "insurrection," and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of "making sure something like this never happens again."  Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail.

Things That Need to Be Said About Today's Chaos in D.C..  [Scroll down]  Secondly, it's fascinating that the media and Democrats have all of a sudden figured out that violence and rioting are wrong and should be condemned.  We all remember how for months last year they painted violent Antifa/BLM rioters and agitators as "peaceful protesters" even as businesses were looted and burned to the ground, entire city blocks were turned to ashes, federal courthouses and officers were attacked with incendiary devices, and neighborhoods were invaded.

Just What Were You Expecting?  [Scroll down]  Whether walking on the street or gathered on the Capitol steps, people were waving flags and as far as I could see, nobody was throwing punches.  Nobody was throwing bricks or Molotov cocktails.  In fact, one video clip I found very interesting, was one group of protestors who managed to gain entry to the Capitol Building, was walking/strolling through Statuary Hall, and they were all staying inside the velvet guide ropes running down the center!!  Nobody toppled any statues over or anything like that.  Surely not some "maddened mob" as the media kept hyping all afternoon long.  Here are some things that bother me.  First of all, the media.  The way they were hyping this, you would think there was an all out assault by heavily armed rioters, hell bent on killing everyone inside the building.  The media kept using the words, "shots fired," implying that the "mob" had shot somebody, maybe even a policeman.  Turns out, it was a Capitol policeman who shot an unarmed female protestor.

C-SPAN Brings Steve Scully Back After He Admitted To Lying About Debate-Related Incident.  C-SPAN announced on Tuesday that it is bringing back disgraced host Steve Scully effective immediately despite Scully's admission, last year, that he lied about a debate-related incident that unfolded on social media.  Last October, before the second presidential debate, Scully falsely claimed that he had been hacked after a tweet appeared on his Twitter account that solicited advice from Trump opponent Anthony Scaramucci about how to deal with President Donald Trump at the debate, which he was set to host.

Cosmopolitan now promotes obesity as 'healthy'.  After decades of promoting stick-thin, big-cleavage women as sexy, Cosmopolitan women's magazine has a new schtick:  Promoting obese women as healthy. [...] They use young women of course, whose bodies can probably resist many of the problems of obesity at first.  That's a deception, because obesity eventually accumulates in problems if it's not eventually gotten rid of.  But this isn't stopping Cosmo.  Its obesity-is-healthy claim is about as accurate as the other falsehoods going around — that men can become women, or that racism causes COVID.  It's fantasyland stuff, and coming more and more from the left.  So much for "following the science."

The media are lying about Trump's phone call with Raffensperger.  The mainstream media and Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, are utterly disgraceful, dishonest, and manipulative people.  Raffensperger released a private phone call that the media immediately claimed — falsely — showed Trump begging Raffensperger to fraudulently find enough votes for Trump to win.  In fact, Trump called Raffensperger to get him to stop obstructing the fraud investigation. [...] Here's what really happened on the phone call.  First, Trump wasn't the only person on the phone.  Also present were Mark Meadows, Mike Pompeo, and multiple attorneys.  There isn't the slightest chance that they would have allowed Trump to beg Raffensperger for illegal votes or to threaten him.  Second, contrary to what the media implied, Trump was not operating off the premise that he lost Georgia.  If that had been the case, it would indeed have been wrong for Trump to beg for Raffensperger to "find" votes for him.  Instead, Trump was operating from the assertion that he won Georgia.

Gallup Poll Shows Most Americans Share Trump's Lack of Trust in Honesty of Media.  One important public service President Donald Trump has performed for the American people has been to pull the veneer back and fully expose the incredible bias of the establishment media.  Only 28 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup last month rated the honesty and ethical standards of journalists as either "very high" or "high."  Contrast that with police officers, who earned a combined 52 percent rating in those categories, down just 2 percentage points from 2019, despite the massive "defund the police" protests nationwide.

Biden is Not 'President-Elect' Until Congress Counts Electoral Votes on January 6, 2021.  Let us say it all together, "Joe Biden is not the president-elect."  Americans have been bombarded with fake news about Biden's status in the 2020 presidential election.  Facebook, Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, PBS have all declared Biden the winner.  But this is far from over.  We have reported on massive election fraud from multiple sources.  The media refuses to do so, therefore we must tell the truth.  [Video clip]

How to Steal an Election in Four Steps.  [Scroll down]  In truth, President Trump likely received between 74.5 million and 76.5 million votes, winning both the popular vote and the electoral vote handily.  The media reported none of this, except anecdotally as Republican griping.  They reported that Biden had won, and that he was the president-elect, though he was not because the count was still in progress.  Major broadcast media refused to carry important updates by the President of the United States and ridiculed anyone who questioned the integrity of the election:  Trump was a cry baby:  Giuliani was unbalanced; Sidney Powell was a conspiracy theorist.  When Fox News chose to ignore stark reality in favor of the lie (Tucker Carlson accused Powell — perhaps the most respected attorney in Washington — of making claims she could not substantiate) it lost a huge chunk of its viewership to Newsmax and OANN, networks on which the news is not scripted in advance.  The Left went into, "Why can we all just get along" mode.  "A time for healing," said the newspapers.  They defended mail-in voting, the count stoppages, Dominion software, etc.  Evidence did not matter to them, only selling the narrative that Biden was the victor.  They enlisted the help of Trump-hating Republicans like Mitt Romney, Chris Christi, and Paul Ryan to implore Trump, the overwhelming winner, to concede.

5 Reasons Why You're Not Crazy to Question the Election Results.  You've gotten the memo from the leftist chin-strokers on social media.  It's simple.  You're insane for questioning the 2020 presidential election result.  Joe Biden is the president-elect, so you just run along and ignore the copious news stories about election fraud and get over it.  Man up!  Political titans on Capitol Hill look visibly concerned when asked by MSM reporters about the president and his millions of voters who aren't convinced that this election wasn't filled with fraud.  The party of Governor Stacey Abrams, President Hillary Clinton, and "Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances" dares to point the magenta cat-toy-feather-wand of shame at Republicans who can't believe that the candidate with the most momentum and the power of the incumbency didn't win.  You're not wrong.  And you're not crazy.

The Trump-Hating Media Prepare For A Long Nap Under Biden.  [Scroll down]  The national media are, by virtually any recognized metric, now collectively far to the left on the political spectrum.  They hate Trump, capitalism, America's history and culture, and all the blue-collar, hard-working, tax-paying schlubs out there who make it all possible.  The media began the year in COVID-19 denial, pretending, along with leading Democrats, that the fast-spreading virus was nothing to worry about.  They quickly did an about-face after realizing that virus could be weaponized politically against Trump.  Since then, Americans have been subjected to non-stop propaganda on everything from vaccines and hydroxychloroquine to lockdowns and mandatory masks.  The goal:  weaken Trump, and turn Americans into terrified "yes" people, subservient to bureaucrat-scientists such as Anthony Fauci.  That's what's also behind the media campaign to blame Trump, not the communist Chinese, for the novel coronavirus.  No sooner had the virus emerged than the media were reporting that Trump had "slashed" Centers for Disease Control spending, implying he had left us vulnerable.  Wrong.  His budgets increased CDC spending every year.

This Tennessee Data for Masked vs. Unmasked Counties Would Be on Every Front Page, if the Results Were Different.  As you may have heard, we've sort of got a "casedemic" problem here in Tennessee.  That means lots and lots (and lots) of people are testing positive for COVID-19.  That's about all we know for sure, of course.  Nevertheless, hand-wringing from media, politicians, and local 'health authorities' is seemingly neverending, as are local reporters in my neck of the woods being filmed standing in front of that FEMA body truck they don't bother to tell us has been sitting in front of the regional hospital, unused, SINCE MARCH.  Hospitals aren't overwhelmed by any measure, and even the death toll isn't really all that impressive either considering that Tennessee is actually below the national average in deaths per million and most people who are dying are either already super old or super sick.  Indeed, while COVID does tragically hit some people hard, most 'cases' are quite mild and often non-symptomatic, driven by panic at every sniffle or people being forced to test for work and other reasons.  And there is increasingly solid evidence that not everyone counted as a 'COVID death' is really a death caused by COVID, but rather someone who had a positive PCR test at some point in 2020 before dying.  When you have a highly contagious respiratory virus going around, particularly one that is seasonal and seems to be boxing out the flu, an increasing percentage of those who die will likely have it.  These 'scary' numbers lie at the root of the ongoing panic and give continued justification for our overlords to continue to exercise control over society.

Soviet-Style Media Propaganda in America.  Pick a theme from the last four years:  Trump-Russia collusion, Trump has told a bazillion lies, Trump is an authoritarian, Trump will get us into a war with North Korea, it's impossible for Trump to get a vaccine by the end of the year.  Yada yada yada.  All of these things and more — including themes that have nothing whatsoever to do with Trump — were flatly untrue.  Which, in a society where the media is honest, would have been reported by that media.  A real media this minute would be investigating the results of the 2020 election and whether or not the President and his supporters are correct that there was indeed at least some election fraud.  But, of course, that's not what the media is doing.  They simply ignore the evidence, repeatedly label the very idea of voter fraud "baseless" — and move on.

Mike Pompeo slams reporter over coverage of wife's alleged COVID diagnosis.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slamming a reporter over the handling of coverage of his wife's alleged COVID-19 diagnosis.  In a series of tweets Thursday, the nation's top diplomat refuted a now-deleted post which claimed that he and wife Susan Pompeo had attended a State Department holiday party one day before testing positive.  "My wife and I did not attend any State Department nor White House holiday parties — your statement is patently FALSE," Pompeo wrote.  "This isn't journalism and it's worse than gossip — it's unethical and potentially unlawful.  Stay tuned."  After Bloomberg reporter Nicholas Wadhams took down the tweet, Pompeo posted a screenshot along with a message reading, "Good to see this tweet — with patently false information — was deleted.  I won't hold my breath for an apology."

Are Democrats In Trouble In 2022?  [Scroll down]  [W]hat Democrats like Adam Nagourney determinedly call "protests against police abuses" consist largely of arson, assault and looting.  Nothing says "I'm against police abuses" like looting a pharmacy, liquor store or jewelry store.  There is a reason why countless stores in urban areas were boarded up, and in many cases remain boarded up, and the reason isn't that someone is "protesting against police abuses."  Further, Democrats in a number of cities, like Seattle, Portland, Chicago and Minneapolis, proved to be so sympathetic to rioters that they were unwilling to take effective measures to stop them.  Voters noticed.  One more thing:  Nagourney's statement that riots, looting and arson were "heavily covered on local television" is revealing.  The [New York] Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the broadcast networks and other reliable Democratic outlets tried to suppress information about the riots that took place across the country, precisely so that such information would not damage the Democratic Party.  But they failed, mostly on account of local news coverage, which was less dedicated to the Democratic cause and more interested in letting viewers know what was going on.

Tainted Tallies Tell Tall Tales.  [Scroll down]  Speaking on an episode of War Room:  Pandemic, [Rudy] Giuliani asserted that the American people have not yet had the opportunity to examine evidence that appears to have corrupted some vote counts in key battleground states.  "Facts have been kept from them," Giuliani declared.  "Not a single court decision has had a hearing yet.  They haven't heard from a single witness.  They haven't looked at a single tape.  They haven't listened to a single recording.  There are thousands of them."  Amber Athey voiced the sentiments of many when she wrote, "The media has been claiming since the election ended that President Trump's claims of voter fraud are 'baseless' and 'without evidence'.  That just is not true.  The President's lawyer gave examples of [voter fraud.] ... But everyone is too busy mocking him to pay attention." [...] A December 2020 Fox News national survey of registered voters found that 68% of Republicans, 26% of independents, and 10% of Democrats believe that the election was stolen from Trump.

Print this article and save it before it goes down the Memory Hole.
Yes, It Was a Stolen Election.  As Americans continue to watch the 2020 election controversy unfold, the very same publications that spent years lying about President Trump's "Russia collusion" are once again telling us what we are dutifully supposed to believe.  The Los Angeles Times, for instance, assures us that Trump's "baseless" and "dangerous" claim "that the election was rigged to benefit Joe Biden" has been thoroughly "debunked."  The New York Times proclaims that "Trump's false election fraud claims" are founded upon nothing more than a "torrent of falsehoods."  Sneering at "how Trump drove the lie that the election was stolen," The Washington Post mocks Republicans who "are still pretending that there was election fraud."  And CNN.com warns that "Trump's obsession with overturning the election" has now begun to spiral "out of control."  But so much for what the comic books have to say.  What follows is a compilation of vital facts that will demonstrate, to anyone interested in following the truth wherever it may lead, that the 2020 presidential election was indeed rife with fraud, and that Joe Biden, if he should in fact be sworn into office next month, will be an illegitimate president from the very start.

WaPo's excessively red Covid map
A thread on this viral map, which attempts to paint a very scary picture.  [D]epending on where you live, it is almost certain someone at your Thanksgiving gathering will have COVID.  Look at all that red!  But, the map has massive problems.  The map comes from the Washington Post, but it is based on the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning tool from GA Tech.  The goal of which is to show what the chances are of having a COVID positive person attend a gathering.  A worthwhile project. [...] This is the Washington Post map, side by side with the map from the actual data source.  Same map, but Wapo makes the "artistic" choice of making the reds much darker and scarier. [...] The larger problem lies at the bottom of the Wapo map.  It says the map "assumes actual case prevalence is 10 times as high as laboratory-confirmed case count."  This, for lack of a better word, is bonkers.


The Vaccine Naysayers Got It Wrong.  Today I'm reminded of the host of media experts who flogged the seriousness and reliability of the Steele dossier for months and years only to evaporate when we later learned that document wasn't reliable.  To his great credit, the Washington Post's Erik Wemple devoted 10 articles to tracking down some of the dossier's promoters and asking them how they felt about it in retrospect.  As I pointed out at the time, a lot of the journalists he spoke with had no comment.  People like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who made the dossier a key part of her program for years simply moved on to greener pastures.  There was zero price to pay for being so wrong for so long about something so important.  I'm reminded of that today because of this Twitter thread by Glenn Greenwald highlighted by Twitchy.  Greenwald points out that some of the same outlets flogging the the dossier were also confident that a vaccine by the end of the year was a pipe dream.  Stop and enjoy the smug condescension in this first clip from MSNBC:  [Video clip]

When Journalism started to die.  Some conservatives may believe that the Fourth Estate lost its luster in the '90s and signed its integrity over to the Democrat Party, but the death throes came much earlier during the Vietnam War.  We lost over 58k casualties in that war and it is the only military conflict that we walked away from.  Yet the truth is that we never lost a major battle in Vietnam, even Barack Obama admitted that fact.  We lost the war over here, thanks to the fake news spread here by the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite. [...] Don't know much about his personal beliefs but he blatantly lied about the war and the Tet offensive.  Until Cronkite's public verdict that the 1968 Tet offensive was a "defeat" for the U.S. the majority of Americans supported our nation's involvement.  Cronkite falsely claimed that the Vietcong had held the American embassy for six hours and that the offensive "went on for two months."  The facts show that Tet was actually a major defeat for the communist enemy[.]

Frauds: The Election, Media, Congressional Dems, and the FBI.  The first of this week's two biggest stories was Friday evening's action by the Supreme Court refusing to hear the lawsuit brought by Texas and other states respecting the evident fraud in the balloting in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan. [...] The second most significant matter, in my view, was the clear gaslighting the media and former intelligence officials carried out on the Hunter Biden story, hiding the fact that he's been under criminal investigation since 2018 for bribery, tax evasion, and money laundering from, among other sources, China.  Drew Holden and Arthur Schwartz rounded up the evidence of this gaslighting.  That it was effective in its bad faith effort at keeping relevant information about Chinese bribery of the Biden family and their consummate corruption in time to affect the election is clear.  One survey reports that nearly 10% of those who voted for Biden in key states would not have had they known about this scandal which the major media deeply hid from them.