Tag: MSM

It’s media day in our year-end Three Martini Lunch awards and Jim and Greg have plenty to say about how things were covered – if they were covered at all.  Specifically, they look at the stories the mainstream media covered far too much, the ones they conveniently ignored because they didn’t fit their narrative, and they highlight what they saw as the best stories of 2022.

Call Them What They Are: Smear Merchants

 

Do you remember the days when the New York Times was considered to be a respectable newspaper? I found this surprising statement about the executive editor:

Long-time executive editor Abe Rosenthal was famous for his public dedication to impartial and unbiased journalism, combined with the understanding that journalists generally tended to lean leftward in their personal views. Later NYT executive editor Joseph Lelyveld said of Rosenthal, ‘Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.’

I was even more surprised to learn about this assessment of the NYT by William F. Buckley:

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Here’s a stomach-turning bit of broadcast manure: Fox & Friends idiot woman spouting red-shirt talking points drenched in the purplest of prose, and I do not mean imperial.  Nigel Farage: NATO is facing one hell of a risk – YouTube This is an ostensibly on-side media outlet interviewing Nigel Farage, whom I adore, on this […]

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A week ago it looked like Israel might be on the cusp of electing a new, Bibi-free government that included an Arab party.  This wasn’t going to be a cosmopolitan suck-up government; the parties involved were not exactly moderate, yet their only path to power was to cooperate with those who normally would be their […]

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Neither conformity nor non-conformity are value propositions in and of themselves outside the context of the object or the impetus of the subject. To do as others do simply because others do is no more informative than not to do as others do simply because they do. The problem with conformity today as it reaches […]

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No matter how loud the chorus of deceit, nor cavernous the echo chamber of lies, nor thunderous the stampede of conformity, there is no sound loud enough, nor conspiracy of fools vast enough, to negate reality or silence the truth, so long as their remains even a single, solitary voice that dare speak it. Preview […]

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So, What Did We Learn?

 

What we “discovered” last night is that President Trump is unwilling to stop talking, and that he will pursue any rhetorical rabbit in his eagerness to engage a critic, even if it means throwing away an opportunity to make a significant point. He isn’t a debater, he’s a brawler.

But we already knew that.

Sea Change: No One Blaming Iowa on Trump!

 

I’ve scoured all the usual suspects across the Internet, excluding social media, only because … raw sewage. But neither the alphabet media nor the NY or LA Times nor the Post nor Pravda has attempted to blame Iowa on Trump.

If anything, they seem to be hoping the whole kerfuffle is forgotten before someone ties their performance to a long string of epic political blunders. Like nominating Hillary so she would retire the DNC’s massive debt in 2016, or staging the most ham-handed coup attempt in the history of the republic in the name of protecting democracy. A move so reminiscent of mid-20th-century fascism that their preemptive accusation of fascism against the opposing side signaled their own transparent perfidy.

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Going over Rush’s transcripts from yesterday’s show, Rush stated that the Mueller report does not exonerate Trump. Therefore, Rush and @fredcole are in agreement!  In other news, the temperature in Hell is rapidly decreasing to 32 degrees Fahrenheit . . . Sort of. Rush says there is no evidence of collusion, obstruction, or any wrongdoing. […]

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Post Me Too, we are seeing an attempt to derail Judge Kavanagh’s appointment based on completely uncorrobated accusations.  Yet the establishment in both parties, which pretends to be subject to fainting spells  over Trump’s behavior, has very different standards with respect to WJC.  Obama had a difficult re-election campaign in 2012.  He had Clinton give […]

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Here’s the latest news on my iPhone’s lock screen. I can’t recall the MSM saying anything like Obama “made bold claims” or that reactions to his SOTU were “mixed,” can you? As usual, they’re not lying. But they ain’t telling it like it is either. Preview Open

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Captain Smith Has Left the Bridge

 

Looks like the Mainstream Media has decided not to go down with the SS Clinton Feculence.

Since the Clinton campaign of 1992, the general leftward tilt of the MSM morphed into open, full partnership with the Democratic Party. For a quarter of a century, every effort was made to downplay, spin, or defend the utterly sleazoid behavior of both Clintons.

The surprising success of both Trump and Sanders revealed the extent to which the ruling establishment (of which the MSM is a key component) was loathed. Also, as the MSM has become younger and even more expressly leftist, they must have felt a disconnect between their institutional obligations to their official candidate (Hillary) when another guy (Sanders) was taking positions closer to their own views.

When It’s Not Punching Down

 

Although a weaponized bureaucracy, academia, and pop culture are also in the running, with good reason most of us believe that media bias is the single biggest advantage the Left has over conservatism. Bush lied to get us into Iraq.  Sarah Palin was a moron. Romney was a heartless vulture capitalist. The 2008 economic crisis was capitalism’s fault and had nothing to do with government overreach. Bush’s mistakes during Katrina show how racist he was and caused the deaths of thousands while Mayor Nagin’s and Governor Blanco’s ridiculous behavior isn’t even worth mentioning. The only Republicans who aren’t motivated by hate for the poor, gays, immigrants, women, minorities, and Mother Earth are backwards idiots who take the Bible too seriously. All of these beliefs and countless others have been adopted by large swaths of our population, and every one of them was advanced with the help of the mainstream media.

One can only imagine how different Washington would look today were the media merely fair. Of course, I’d love for CNN to have ferociously sought to destroy Lois Lerner instead of politically incorrect rodeo clowns, but had our esteemed Fourth Estate simply gone after Lois and the clown with equal fervor, we’d still be doing far better electorally. Note how much better we do in state and local elections where the national media has far less sway.

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I was sucked in, like so many people. I believed that the White House was in chaos, because the media did a great job of creating that image for me, and it just made sense. Until one post when @mjbubba pointed out that I’d bought into the Left’s picture of Trump’s administration and the leader […]

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Fidel Castro: 60 Years of Fake News

 

castroA panic is sweeping the land – or at least something like it has unnerved CNN, Vox, and other precincts of progressive sensibility. They are alarmed that millions of Americans are being misled by “fake news.”

As someone whose inbox has lately bulged with items about Hillary Clinton’s impending demise due to a concealed, terminal illness; who has shaken her head at “breaking news” that Turkish coup plotters had gotten their hands on NATO nuclear weapons at Incirlik air base; and who has sighed at the endless iterations of stories like the “47 Clinton friends who mysteriously turned up dead,” I don’t deny that misinformation, disinformation, rumors, and malicious gossip appear to have achieved new salience in the national conversation. I shun right-leaning publications and sites that traffic in this sort of drivel.

You know there’s a “but” coming, and here it is: The death of Fidel Castro reminds us that the respectable press, the “two-sources” press, the press that enforces standards and performs reality checks and practices “shoe leather” journalism and all that, has been peddling “fake news” about Cuba and Castro for 60 years.

If Dems Will Rig a Debate for Clinton, What Won’t They Do to Win?

 

No matter what the election outcome next week, the media will be big losers. This campaign season has seen much of the media rip off their veneer of objectivity, too often acting instead as an unofficial campaign arm working to elect Hillary Clinton.

The latest revelation — that the town hall moderator overseeing a Democratic primary debate gave CNN contributor Donna Brazile a peek at expected questions, and Brazile then fed Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff a question expected to come up in the primary debate against Bernie Sanders — confirms the too cozy relationships between the politicians and the so-called journalists and officials who are supposed to be helping Americans get unbiased information about candidates.