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Does Time magazine really matter anymore?
It still has a circulation of more than 1 million, but that is one-third of what it was in 2012. Does anything it reports still resonate, or is it like a tree that collapses unheard in the solitude of the woods?
Time just secured an interview with President Joe Biden, when Biden has granted very few interviews to print news outlets. Time gained access to Donald Trump in April, and the first thing you notice when you compare the two interviews is the length.
At the top of the transcripts, Time claims the Biden transcript is a “28 minute read,” while Trump’s is listed as 83 minutes. Time’s “fact check” of the Trump interviews (“21 minute read”) is almost as long as the Biden interview.
Another noticeable tilt is the agenda of questions. Biden’s questions were overwhelmingly about foreign policy. There are three on inflation, three on immigration, and three on Biden’s age. There were zero questions on Hunter Biden and the Biden scandals. There were zero questions on the Trump trial or the Trump prosecutions.
Did Team Biden put any conditions on which questions could be asked? It’s a fair question, considering how selective they’ve been in handing out interviews.
By contrast, by my count, Time asked Trump 11 questions about the Trump prosecutions (and “revenge” for them), five questions about Jan. 6, two about potential political violence in 2025, four on fighting the “Deep State,” three on his “dictator for a day” joke, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment and seek a third term.
On top of that, Trump drew 14 questions on abortion policy and six on crime. It’s obvious from the Time transcripts that they consider Trump’s opinions on domestic issues to be much more controversial—and even extremist—than anything Biden advocates.
The rest of the media picked up on Trump’s abortion answers, and Biden didn’t have to provide any abortion answers.
Even the age questions to Biden were timid softballs, and Biden’s answer—suggesting he could take his interviewer Massimo Calabresi in a fight—was taken as a joke. Calabresi told CNN’s Jake Tapper it was “lighthearted” and “quite funny.” Biden responded to a follow-up about voter concerns with his usual spin: “Watch me.” Calabresi confessed it might be a “stock answer.” So, why not push through it? Why not ask, “Everyone’s been watching you, that’s your problem”?
Time could have asked Biden why his team refuses to release audio of his interview with stolen-documents special counsel Robert Hur, with the fear Republicans will exploit the audio in advertising. But Time pretends Hur is a nobody and that Biden’s stolen documents should already be forgotten. Hur refused to prosecute Biden, and Jack Smith just keeps prosecuting Trump.
It looks a bit rigged.
By contrast, Trump’s interviewer Eric Cortellessa lectured him: “I just want to say for the record, there’s no evidence that President Biden directed this prosecution against you.” Trump rejected that: “I always hate the way a reporter will make those statements. They know it’s so wrong.” Time, like other slavishly pro-Biden outlets, refuses to acknowledge that Biden’s No. 3 Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo resigning to join Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team of Trump prosecutors shreds the “no evidence” lie.
The Democrats running Time are hyperbolically raising fear that a president using the Justice Department might go after his political opponents, while somehow being blind and deaf enough to ignore that Biden is using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. They can’t believe anyone would object to their shamelessness.
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The post Time Magazine Betrays Its Tilt in Biden, Trump Interviews appeared first on The Daily Signal.
When the elected Democrat district attorney of Manhattan and his 12 (likely Democrat) Manhattan jurors convicted Donald Trump on artificially inflated felony counts of business accounting, you could count on leftist journalists to try to make it the Most Historic Event Ever.
We’re not even sure it won’t all be reversed on appeal. But “historic” is their word of choice … when they like the result.
In 1999, when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about sex with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, Geraldo Rivera was furious on the “Today” show: “It was a spiteful action, an action that they performed absolutely in violation of the framers’ intent. It was a legislative coup d’etat.”
Impeaching Trump twice was never a “coup” to NBC News. But the worst part of that spectacle was leftist activists like Rivera trying to speak for the framers of the Constitution. He was implying it wasn’t just a revolting result but revolting in the eyes of James Madison and the rest. The Left reveres nothing about the Founders, routinely denouncing them as a racist, sexist, capitalist patriarchy.
This regrettable citation of the Founding Fathers happened again with the Trump trial, and again in this case, the American revolutionaries were placed on the side of the Democrats.
George Stephanopoulos began his commentary on “This Week” with the second president: “In 1774, John Adams said representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Two hundred and fifty years later, the heart and lungs of liberty are facing what may be the ultimate stress test.” It’s John Adams vs. Trump.
The front page of the June 3 New York Times was topped with an editorial—labeled “News Analysis”—from its White House correspondent Peter Baker. He picked Patrick Henry as the Trump opponent.
“The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come,” Baker began. Henry “feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable.” In Henry’s words, “Away with your president, we will have a king.”
Never mind that historians pointed out Henry was inveighing against the Constitution before it was ratified. Baker channeled the Democrat line: “The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.”
Inside the paper, the headline over Baker’s essay was “If a Felon Becomes President, Can Anyone Limit His Power?” The text box underlined the theme again: “Revival of a long-ago fear that a U.S. leader could try to be a king.” All that followed was the argument ad infinitum that Trump’s second term would result in “unfettered abuses of authority.”
What Baker and Stephanopoulos refused to understand was that this rhetoric of a president abusing authority can also be applied to President Joe Biden. On CNN, Scott Jennings mocked Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., on how Biden ruthlessly ignored the courts and the Congress in offering $165 billion in student loan “forgiveness” to win younger voters.
“You’re a member of Congress,” Jennings told Auchincloss. “Does it not offend you that the president of the United States is usurping your authority?” The eventual answer was no.
The Democrats and their media enablers use “history” to establish how there is a “right side,” and that is their leftist agenda. Undercutting democratic norms and coequal branches of government is admirable when the ends justify the means. The Founding Fathers are just yellowed paper puppets in their relentless power games.
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After posting a devastating $77 million loss in 2023, the disgraced and doomed Washington Post is about to turn to artificial intelligence.
The post Nolte: Desperate Washington Post Turns to AI After Brutal $77 Million Loss appeared first on Breitbart.
President Joe Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on May 19 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black college. The networks touted the speech but didn’t put any “fact-checkers” on it. It contained at least four fibs.
In an echo of his 1987 lies that crumbled in his first presidential campaign, Biden claimed, “I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college.” A newspaper obituary for his maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan noted he graduated college.
He repeated his story that his son Beau died of a brain tumor after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major—he won the Bronze Star—living next to a burn pit.” In 2019, FactCheck.org noted the science on cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq was “insufficient,” but Biden tells that story often.
Then Biden uncorked his typical race-baiting: “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election.” Georgia’s Legislature passed a bill in 2021 that said no person should “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” within 150 feet of a polling place. It doesn’t mean you can’t have water!
Biden also claimed, “there’s a national effort to ban books—not to write history, but to erase history. They don’t see you in the future of America.” The leftists all said that “erasing history” bunk about Florida’s education standards, when it was crystal clear that black history was mandated, not erased.
None of these fact-check moments made the front-page New York Times story gushing over the Morehouse speech. It mentioned Biden spoke of deaths in his family and left out the “burn pits” part.
Biden’s recent lie that inflation was at 9% when he became president was so blatant that most of the liberal “fact-checkers” called it out: AP, CNN, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and The Washington Post. (Lead Stories and Reuters did not.) We’ll see if these latest Biden falsehoods get checked (again).
They could also check Biden’s four whoppers in remarks the day before at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta.
The president told his backers, “I wasn’t going to run again after my son died because of being in Iraq for a year in those burn pits.” He said, “We were supposed to lose in 2020.” He claimed Donald Trump told Time magazine, “States should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate the abortion bans.” Trump did not say that. Biden also claimed Trump said there were “really good people on both sides” in Charlottesville protests, implying he praised neo-Nazis. That’s an ongoing hoax.
At a Sunday afternoon campaign event in Detroit, the president again dragged out the line, “I’m the first in my family ever to go to college.”
A Sunday night speech at the NAACP brought more of the tired-brain gaffes. Biden claimed he was vice president “during the pandemic.” He said Obamacare was “saving millions of families $800,000—$8,000 a year in premiums.” The White House transcript adjusted it down to $800.
Then he returned to “folks wanting to ban books” and “erase black history, literally.”
He misquoted Trump as saying, “I’ll be a dictator on Day One” and “just inject bleach” to cure COVID-19. He bungled in claiming Trump said if he lost, there will be “bloodshed.” Trump implied an economic “bloodbath.”
The more Biden mangles the facts, the more you can be sure that national TV coverage is going to edit out the embarrassing parts. Call it “erasing history as it unfolds.”
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Bungling Biden’s Commencement Whoppers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Deputy PM Robert Kaliňák laid the blame for the assassination attempt against Robert Fico at the feet of the media for stoking division.
The post Slovak Deputy PM Blames Media for Fico Assassination Attempt as Shooter Reportedly Confesses to Police appeared first on Breitbart.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not like Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record—and Donald Trump’s.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed that other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk; namely, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 156.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics—for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic—most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies—drove massive job losses. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So, Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
But that wasn’t Biden’s worst mangle. He claimed to CNN that “no president’s had the run we have had, in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”
That’s ridiculous! It’s a baldfaced lie. Inflation was 1.4%, again, due to the pandemic. Burnett didn’t check his facts, during or after the interview. She pushed him to acknowledge inflation was bad, but she didn’t suggest he was lying.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted: “And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward.”
And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward… https://t.co/1lgapFWYgp
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 9, 2024
That would be Daniel Dale, who’s almost entirely deployed on TV to “fact-check” Trump. Since Trump’s Manhattan trial began in mid-April, Dale has appeared nine times to “check” him. He has not appeared to check anyone else. On April 18, Jake Tapper said, “He’s handy to have around at times like this.”
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here and declaring it “false” is a lame spin.
On Tuesday, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor—and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying leftist billionaire George Soros is “a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
If a conservative DA received big money from a pro-Trump PAC, CNN would call him or her “Trump-backed” without hesitation. CNN deploys Dale not as a “fact-checker” as much as a spin spoiler.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview appeared first on The Daily Signal.
When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.
But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.
Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.
Rasmussen finds that Trump’s characterization is the majority view:
60% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” as Trump said in 2019, including 30% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, including 21% who Strongly Disagree.
That is an extraordinary finding. Respondents were asked this question:
Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The media are “truly the enemy of the people”?
And a clear majority said that they agree. The press has utterly squandered whatever respect it once enjoyed.
The Rasmussen survey also asked about the Democrats’ “bloodbath” hoax:
Former President Donald Trump recently said that it would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win in November. Which is more likely, that he was talking about auto workers losing jobs or that he was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters?
The result:
Forty-nine percent (49%) of voters believe Trump was talking about auto workers losing jobs when he warned of a “bloodbath,” while 40% think Trump was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.
Basically, Democrats follow the Democratic Party press and swallow the Democrats’ talking points:
Among voters who Strongly Approve of Biden’s job performance as president, 78% believe Trump’s “bloodbath” comment was about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. By contrast, among voters who Strongly Disapprove of Biden’s performance, 84% think Trump was referring to auto workers losing jobs.
But again, returning to good news, most voters believe that the media’s coverage is driven by the Biden administration’s talking points:
Among all Likely Voters, 63% believe it is likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign, including 42% who say it’s Very Likely. Twenty-nine percent (29%) don’t think it’s likely media coverage is dictated by the Biden campaign, including 11% who say it’s Not At All Likely.
Majorities of every political category – 78% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats and 61% of unaffiliated voters – believe it’s at least somewhat likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign.
So even half of Democrats admit that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are servants of the Democratic Party. The bottom line is that the liberal press serves certain functions on behalf of the Democratic Party: it reinforces Democrats’ talking points and keeps Democratic voters riled up. Those are valuable contributions, to be sure. But the days when the liberal media could actually drive public opinion are long gone.
Some things even the Babylon Bee can’t make up:
Bed bugs found at MSNBC’s Manhattan headquarters caused staffers to scatter ahead of the left-leaning network’s Super Tuesday coverage, The Post has learned.
According to a memo obtained by The Post, an “unidentified insect” was spotted Sunday in the recently revamped studio 3A — home to special election coverage and “The Rachel Maddow Show” — at 30 Rock in Midtown.
Additional studios on the third floor were also shuttered “out of an abundance of caution.”
Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you tell the difference between a bed bug and an MSNBC news person? They are both repellant parasites. You’d think professional courtesy would make MSNBC welcome bed bugs.
When you watch Walter Cronkite, my recent piece should have read, “you not only CBS but hear it too.” That was certainly true, particularly of Cronkite’s Vietnam coverage, but as Douglas Brinkley explained in the 819-page Cronkite, there’s more that people should know.
Cronkite had worked with Sidney Lumet to adapt the radio show “You Are There” for television. Lumet directed Network, which Cronkite saw in a private screening. As Brinkley notes, the film “hit close to home,” as “much about TV newsgathering was a sham.” As anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) explained:
Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth. Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF!
Network also cast Walter Cronkite’s daughter Cathy as Mary Ann Gifford, an heiress kidnapped by the Ecumenical Liberation Army. In the style of Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Gifford joins the Ecumenicals in bank robberies, which they record on film. When the Communist Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield) uses the footage in her “Mao Tse-Tung Hour” show, Gifford calls her out.
“You f—— fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?” Hobbs tells Gifford to “blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass!”
Network bagged four Oscars, and for cinéma vérité about television it’s hard to beat. On March 10, if anybody watched Network instead of the Academy Awards it would be hard to blame them.
As in Christian Nationalism Nonsense, and the always insightful Mark Tapson explains it for you:
The label “Christian nationalism” is the new Progressive dog-whistle for “scary American patriots.” It signals to Progressives that Americans who love God and country – which used to be the norm before our descent into a post-Christian, post-patriotism culture – are a subversive danger to democracy. Christianity, after all, imposes a moral code that chafes Progressive libertines, and nationalism, with its emphasis on state sovereignty and secure borders, frustrates their globalist ambitions.
Whenever Christians wave the Stars and Stripes, wear a MAGA hat, or pray that God blesses our country, the Left hyperventilates over the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy on the rise. They envision America becoming a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which white male Christian mullahs hang homosexuals and imprison women for seeking abortions. The Left’s vision of the separation of church and state, therefore, is one in which Christian patriots and their values are best excluded from the halls of government power entirely.
And so on, with Heidi Przybyla of Politico terrified that these Christian nationalists, “believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” So much for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” from the Declaration of Independence. The woke leftists, in effect, now issue a declaration of war.
Add Christian nationalist to “white supremacists,” “MAGA Republicans,” “semi-fascists,” and those 2016 loser Hillary Clinton smeared as “deplorables.” These all signify that the speaker doesn’t like you, but there’s more to it. Pronouncing people enemies of the state is to justify violence against them. This comes at a time when the Biden Junta (“Our Democracy”) has a domestic Nazi-Soviet Pact working, and sees the greatest threat from those citizens who want the nation to be great. So all those deplorable Christian nationalist and MAGA types could wind up excluded from more than the halls of government. Don’t say it can’t happen here.
CBS has fired Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter who was “pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal, and the Hunter Biden laptop.” After dumping Herridge, “CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.” These files, “likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS” and are now “presumptively the property of CBS News.”
Joseph Klein traces these issues to Dan Rather, but they really go back to CBS “anchorman” Walter Cronkite, once billed as the most trusted man in America. As Douglas Brinkley showed in Cronkite, many of Cronkite’s dispatches during WWII “were propagandistic.” Cronkite coached John F. Kennedy about “getting across” on television, and long before Watergate, Cronkite “orchestrated the secret tape recording of the Republicans’ credentials committee meeting.” This was conducted, “under the shady rationale that the covert act was good for democracy.” According to Brinkley, “it was a real black eye to Cronkite,” who said of Jimmy Carter, “He’s got one of the best brains of anybody I’ve known.”
Cronkite wrapped his regular broadcast with “that’s the way it is,” but as one wag put it, when you watched Walter Cronkite you not only saw CBS, you heard it too. That was also true of Dan Rather, who in 1986 made news his own self. A man confronted Rather demanding “Kenneth what’s the frequency?” and duly beat the fertilizer out of the CBS anchorman. The network put it off to mistaken identity, which could be true in one sense.
Government and establishment media are Siamese twins, joined at the mouth. As Catherine Herridge confirms, cross the government and you’re a goner, with your documents confiscated. Consider also former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, author of Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, published in 2014.
Readers learn that CBS News president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, advisor to Obama and up to his eyeballs in the Benghazi scandal. Joel Molinoff came to CBS after serving the Obama White House as director of the Intelligence Advisory Board, and before that worked for the NSA. CBS also hired Mike Morell, formerly a deputy director of the CIA. So as Attkisson explained, CBS stories on Benghazi, Obamacare and so forth might as well have been written by the White House.
Attkisson’s computer was infiltrated with spyware proprietary to government agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The intruders planted classified information, adding “the possible threat of criminal prosecution.” Ten years later, those who expose the scandals of the Biden Junta can be sure that Big Brother is watching.
One of the big stories in the New York Times today is another Clarence Thomas smear, but with a twist: “Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages.”
The story is about Crystal Clanton, who graduated from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in 2022. She is coming off a clerkship with Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, who calls her “an outstanding law clerk.” Justice Thomas has now hired her to clerk on the Supreme Court.
For the last seven years, Crystal Clanton has been dogged by reports of an email that she allegedly wrote, in which she supposedly said, “I hate black people.” The Times story admits that they have not seen any such message, and are relying on reporting by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, perhaps the least trustworthy source in America.
In 2017, Clanton was running field operations for Turning Point USA. Mayer did a hit piece on Turning Point that included a variety of allegations, including the one against Clanton. Mayer claimed to have seen a screen shot of the text. The story has dogged Clanton ever since. When she was offered a clerkship on the 11th Circuit by Judge Pryor, seven left-wing members of Congress lodged an ethics complaint against Pryor, based on Clanton’s alleged text. That complaint was investigated by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the complaint to be without merit and dismissed it.
This January 2022 story has the details. Clanton left Turning Point after the claim against her was first made, but the Second Circuit found it to be false:
The Turning Point executive “had determined that the source of the allegations against (Clanton) was a group of former employees,” [Second Circuit Chief Judge Debra] Livingston wrote. “One of these employees was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not.”
Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton when they interviewed and hired her. And both determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton were untrue and found she was highly qualified to serve as a clerk for them, Livingston wrote.
“There is nothing in the record to dispute any of this,” she noted.
Charlie Kirk is also quoted in that story:
“The media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue,” Kirk wrote. “I have first-hand knowledge of the situations reported on and I can assure that the media has made serious errors and omissions. The sources of these reports are a group of former employees that have a well-documented desire to malign Crystal’s reputation.”
The employee who was fired had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” Kirk wrote.
Crystal Clanton got to know Ginny Thomas when she worked at Turning Point, and she was evidently so distraught about her departure from that group that she lived with the Thomases for nearly a year. So Thomas knows her well. He wrote a letter in connection with the Second Circuit investigation:
“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
Clanton didn’t respond to the Times’s request for comment in the story they published today, but back in 2017 she told The New Yorker that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am, and the same was true when I was a teenager.”
So there the matter rests. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that the Left never forgets. No matter that she was cleared by an investigation by one of the nation’s courts of appeals; once the Left gets its hands on a smear it never lets go. It will never stop trying to destroy your life. And of course, The New Yorker and the New York Times are two of the worst offenders.
Also, what makes this old story worthy of the Times’s A section? Only the fact that Justice Thomas is involved. The Times doesn’t care about a law clerk of whom few people have heard, but it cares deeply about smearing the country’s top conservative African-American. But what, exactly, are we supposed to infer from the Times story? That Clarence Thomas is weirdly favorable to those who hate black people?
A final irony: Supreme Court justices have no doubt hired any number of clerks who have written and spoken favorably about DEI, which actually is racist. But there is no controversy there: on the contrary, endorsing that form of racism is a badge of honor.
Dan Senor’s most recent Call Me Back podcast features Matti Friedman. Among many other things, Friedman is a former AP Jerusalem bureau staffer. It is his AP experience that prompted him to think through the wide world of sickness that we see in the reaction of the outside world to Israel’s current life-and-death struggle with Hamas. Senor asks good questions and lets the incredibly articulate Friedman speak.
Senor has posted the podcast with this introduction:
Every day we see news accounts “reported” by reputable journalists. There is typically one frame in the post-10/07 War: “Gazan Palestinians are the victims of Israel.” How does this happen? How do journalists actually operate in Gaza and around the world? And is this a window into what had Hamas figured out long before 10/07 — that the forces of barbarism could manipulate the intentional press reaction to their massacre of 10/07? That is why we wanted to sit down with Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism.
He writes regularly for The Free Press and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Before that he published Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, and before that Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.
Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hamas’s takeover of Gaza that led him to study with great detail how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs and the international community, and how they are working from the same playbook right now, perhaps quite masterfully.
I urge interested readers to check out the podcast below.
Here are the show notes citing Friedman’s work discussed in the podcast (I especially commend Friedman’s 2014 Tablet column linked below):
“The Wisdom of Hamas” — The Free Press.
“What if the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?” — The Free Press.
“There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'” — The New York Times.
“An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth” — Tablet Magazine.
“What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel” — The Atlantic.
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