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NewsBusters Podcast: Zero Seconds for the Biden Family Business

By: Tim Graham — June 7th 2024 at 22:59
As Hunter Biden is tried on gun charges in Delaware, MRC Director of Media Analyisis Geoffrey Dickens joins the show to remind us how scoops about the Bidens (Joe, Hunter, Uncle Jim) in the New York Post and Politico are persistently ignored by ABC, CBS, and NBC. Perhaps the most brazen omission in the last few months is ignoring that the House Republicans charged that Hunter Biden lied to Congress under oath at least three times during his testimony back on February 28. At the time, reporters underlined the view that the House Republican investigation was a "sham" and that Hunter got the best of the Republicans that day. So omitting the GOP belief that the president's son lied under oath was predictably buried.  Other stories with juicy details were left on the cutting-room floor. Politico reported that the president's brother James Biden was cutting deals with businessmen in Qatar, the Mideast country that's presently hosting the leaders of the terrorist group Hamas. How many Americans know who James Biden is? People who watch network news to stay informed would be clueless.  We learned that in 2021, the CIA blocked federal investigators from interviewing Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother” Kevin Morris, according to IRS whistleblowers. Morris's daughter is now complaining publicly about Hunter Biden taking all of her father's money. In 2017, Hunter Biden used his dad’s appearance at a Sandy Hook school-shooting memorial event to coordinate a previously unknown meeting between the former vice president and a Chinese business partner, newly unveiled texts showed. No matter how embarrassing these stories could have been, the networks steered clear of them. Time after time, they drew ZERO seconds.  Enjoy the podcast below,   
☑ ☆ ✇ Politics – The Daily Signal

Time Magazine Betrays Its Tilt in Biden, Trump Interviews

By: Tim Graham — June 7th 2024 at 14:32

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.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Time Magazine Betrays Its Tilt in Biden, Trump Interviews appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Carville Lectures the Press to Crack Down Harder on Republicans: 'F**k Objectivity!'

By: Tim Graham — June 7th 2024 at 13:08
Let's be blunt: pro-Biden media outlets really don't care at all about what we think or what evidence we bring of their bias. Instead, Democrat journalists care most about how Democrats tell them how to report on things.  Our former colleague Jason Cohen at the Daily Caller reports that the cartoonish Cajun James Carville blasted the "professional center" in the news media and proclaimed "F**k objectivity" as this year's motto -- well, any year's motto since 2015.  Carville's "Politics War Room" podcast is co-hosted by Al Hunt, former Washington Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal and spouse of longtime PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff. Hunt told Carville that listeners wanted to know if the press should describe Donald Trump as the "disgraced former president." Another asked how Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings would have handled the verdict.  Hunt spoke first, saying hey, I spent almost 20 years running Washington bureaus, and it's an “outright lie” that the prosecution of Trump was orchestrated by Biden! Then Carville spoke:  CARVILLE: So this is the basic question. People say, you know, Trump is going to be the Republican nominee and we got to cover it, and Biden’s the Democratic nominee and we cover this. And if there’s something bad about Biden, of course, we’ve gotta print it. But if something comes up that is, can’t say good about Trump, but more favorable to him, like the Elie Honigs and the Fareed Zakarias of the world [!], that’s one way to look at it. We just tell the truth and let the people decide. Or, at times when the country is in great peril or the moral imperative is so significant, you don’t do that. He compared the current era to World War II, somehow comparing Trump to Japanese war commander Hideki Tojo. Then he cited the civil rights movement, where "one side was correct and one side was God-awful wrong." Let's forget that the wrong side were Southern Democrats, James!  Carville laid into New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, who recently claimed it's not his newspaper's job to defeat Trump, it's Joe Biden's job. Uh-oh!  CARVILLE: Now you have Joe Kahn, the new editor or publisher, whatever he is at The New York Times, saying, ‘We’re just going to cover this down the middle. We’re going to cover what it is.’ I don’t think that’s the role of the news media at a time when the entire Constitution is in peril. I don’t have anything against slanted coverage. I really don’t … I would have something against it at most other times in American history, but not right now. Fuck your objectivity! The real objectivity in this country right now is we’re either going to have a Constitution or we’re not.” And everything else, from Hunter Biden’s gun application to Judge Merchan’s, I don’t know, $35 contribution, to all of the bulls--t that the professional center feels like they got to put out. I can’t tell you that these are bad people. They’re extremely naive people who have no idea what’s at stake here in this election. As usual, the "stakes" require the most blatant partisanship that can be mustered by the press. "So I think we need slanted coverage, more slanted coverage and I think we got to recognize the threat that this guy and the MAGA, not just him, the entire MAGA movement, from [Justice] Alito and Trump on down is a serious, it's a clear, serious and present danger to the existence of the Constitution in the United States. And I mean that," he continued. Al Hunt  pushed back on Carville's use of the term "slanted," arguing, "we need fair coverage, and not false equivalency." Carville cast the two candidates as "A guy who’s lost a step against a career criminal who would end the Constitution."
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Column: TIME Magazine Betrays Its Tilt in Biden and Trump Interviews

By: Tim Graham — June 7th 2024 at 06:07
Does Time magazine really matter anymore? It still has a circulation of over one 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 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 were 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 eleven questions about the Trump prosecutions (and “revenge” for them), five questions about January 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 "light-hearted” 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 Robert Hur is a nobody, and 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 number-three Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo resigning to join 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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CNN's Oliver Darcy RAGES at 'Infernal' Wall Street Journal on Biden 'Signs of Slipping'

By: Tim Graham — June 6th 2024 at 07:47
CNN's Oliver Darcy was furious in Wednesday night's "Reliable Sources" um, "newsletter," with his email headline attacking "The Journal Infernal." You're writing from a rung in Hell if you've written anything that could help Trump the orange Satan. This isn't the editorial page. This is the news section. Darcy began:  The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better. The business broadsheet published and hyped a story Wednesday declaring that "behind closed doors," President Joe Biden has shown "signs of slipping." The story questioned Biden's mental acuity, playing into a GOP-propelled narrative that the 81-year-old president lacks the fitness to hold the nation's highest office. But an examination of the report reveals a glaring problem: Most of the sources reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes relied on were Republicans. In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusion based on GOP sources who, obviously, have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden's candidacy. That's not completely accurate. Linskey and Hughes explained in their story: This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.  Not only that, but the Journal reporters noted Team Biden was riding hard on the Democrats to stay "on message." The White House kept close tabs on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic lawmakers. After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths.  Darcy complained that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was prominently quoted, and that in a previous story, it was reported McCarthy said the opposite about Biden's sharpness. But readers can judge Republicans as having a partisan interest, and also suspect that Democrats aren't as willing to go on the record. But Darcy is crying foul about the whole media:  It is difficult to imagine that the newspaper, or any outlet, would run a similar story declaring that Trump is "slipping" behind the scenes based on the word of top Democratic figures — despite the fact that the Democratic leadership has demonstrated a much stronger relationship with the truth in recent years than their Republican counterparts. More broadly speaking, The Journal's piece pointed to a continued problem roiling the news media as it covers the 2024 election. Trump is permitted to fall asleep in court and make nonsensical public statements on a routine basis without any serious questions raised about his mental acuity. Meanwhile, Biden is judged on an entirely different standard. This different-standards lament is especially hilarious coming from the "Reliable Sources" team, since Darcy's old colleague Brian Stelter routinely attacked President Trump as mentally unfit and unhinged. He infamously brought on Trump-hating psychologists who insisted he was crazy and would end up killing more than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.  This quote in 2017 is especially amusing, since the people quoted in it are now the ones trashing the Journal, who have insisted "F-You, Biden's at his best ever!" “Look at the New York Daily News this morning. A column calling the President a madman. Saying that he is truly unhinged....Eugene Robinson’s column in The Washington Post. People are saying we have to talk about his health now before it’s too late. Eugene Robinson saying: ‘How long are we going to pretend that President Trump is fully rational? How long are we going to ignore the signs he’s dangerously out of control?’ And here is MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough raising the same point...That’s the question. I’m going to ask you, Jeff Greenfield. Is now the time?”— Host Brian Stelter on CNN’s Reliable Sources, December 3, 2017.
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NewsBusters Podcast: After the Trump Verdict, NPR Flogs Fox with Folkenflik

By: Tim Graham — June 5th 2024 at 22:55
> On Twitter (or X), NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep promised a diversity of viewpoints on the morning after the Trump trial verdict. It turned out Hugh Hewitt (and four lefties) were interviewed. Four to one is "diversity." It's better than nothing, and one leftist responded by tweet-screeching that "overt fascist" Hewitt was allowed to "lie with impunity" by Inskeep. The most laughable part of NPR is when it starts breaking out its analysis of Fox News, as they did after the verdict, and of course they turned to the network’s resident Fox flogger, David Folkenflik.On Friday night's All Things Considered and again on Sunday morning on Weekend Edition -- he said Fox "stacked the deck" and created a "30-mile buffer for Trump." Fox treats Trump vs. Democrats as Good vs. Evil. FOLKENFLIK: You know, with few exceptions in conservative media - think of the Daily Wire, Federalist, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit - you know, this insulates Trump from having to grapple among his base or people who are leaning conservative with revelations of the trial and repercussions of the verdict - little sense that Trump has agency here. They're told to see him as a victim of political persecution. They hear his fight is their own fight. You know that old Fox slogan - we report, you decide? It's MIA, missing in action, here. These people lack any introspection. As if NPR is we report, you decide? NPR isn’t putting a buffer around its listeners? NPR doesn’t present left vs. right as good vs. evil? As if NPR doesn’t suggest they represent Democracy, and the Republicans are Autocracy? Well, Autocracy begins with not letting your opponents speak, and NPR specializes in not letting opponents speak much. On Tuesday's All Things Considered, for example, they refused to consider Republicans speaking on taxpayer-funded airwaves on Biden's new border policy or the Merrick Garland hearing. The Garland story only quoted Garland touting his own integrity. The Biden story had Biden and a Democrat pollster! Reporter Franco Ordonez was asked to describe what the Trump campaign said, but then he placated his audience by adding "That said, these are some of the toughest measures by a Democratic administration." On Sunday, it was more of the same with Folkenflik. This verdict was a "sober moment," a "moment for reflection," and conservatives flunked.  Fox offered "an embrace of an us versus them rhetoric, no desire to have her audience wrestle with the implications of this, that Trump's own actions may have put him and landed him in this position." Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 
☑ ☆ ✇ Politics – The Daily Signal

Beware When Leftist Journalists Use Founders to Attack Trump

By: Tim Graham — June 5th 2024 at 16:37

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.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Beware When Leftist Journalists Use Founders to Attack Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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LOL at AP: Oh No, Joe Biden's 'Shifted Far to the Right on Immigration'

By: Tim Graham — June 5th 2024 at 12:34
President Biden's newly announced pseudo-crackdown on illegal immigration caused the Associated Press to worry if it would help him: "Will Biden’s new border measures be enough to change voters’ minds?" AP reporters Jill Colvin, Stephen Groves, and Adriana Gomez Licon wrote Biden addressed "a major liability for his reelection campaign by taking executive action to significantly restrict asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border." But the labeling was comical:  Biden has shifted far to the right on immigration since his winning campaign four years ago, when he criticized Trump’s immigration priorities and promised he would restore asylum protections. Biden's almost Full MAGA?? And yet, when you are "far to the left" of Trump on border control, you're merely an "immigration advocate" to the AP linguists.  Sue-Ann DiVito, a 61-year-old realtor from the Philadelphia suburb of Jenkintown who became an immigration advocate during the Trump administration, says Republicans have been successful at spreading anti-immigrant messages in communities like hers, making some of her friends who are Democrat worry about the high number of people arriving in the U.S “I think that’s why we see people who would normally support immigrants are now more quiet,” DiVito said. The AP article ends with the "immigration advocate" warning that whatever Biden does on the Border, Trump will be "a million times worse."  Surprise! Sue-Ann is a Democrat donor.  At least the AP trio acknowledges the polling on immigration is brutal for Biden -- 56 percent of Americans say Biden’s presidency has hurt the country on the issue of immigration and border security, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. That’s far higher than the number (37%) who said the same about Trump’s time in office. Even among Democrats, only about 3 in 10 say that Biden’s presidency has done more to help the country on immigration and border security, while about the same share say it has hurt.  Hispanic adults are also more likely to think Trump’s presidency helped the country with immigration and border security, compared to Biden’s. About half of Hispanic adults in March said that Biden’s presidency had done more to hurt the country on immigration and border security — a potentially alarming number as Trump’s campaign works to chip away at Democrats’ advantage with Hispanic voters. Hence, he had to disappoint the radical left open-borders crowd:  “President Biden had no choice. He saw what was going on at the border. The numbers were higher than ever in terms of people trying to come here to seek asylum, and he knew he had to do something,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. The radicals were quoted, if not exactly labeled, to highlight splits among Democrats:  Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she was “profoundly disappointed.” During a news conference with immigration advocates outside the Capitol, Jayapal pushed the administration to take action that would provide relief for immigrants already in the U.S.
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Column: Beware When Leftist Journalists Use Founding Fathers to Attack Trump

By: Tim Graham — June 5th 2024 at 05:56
When the elected Democrat D.A. 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 1998, 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 Geraldo 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 their 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 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,” he 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 co-equal 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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Editors' Pick: Facts Underline Team Biden Pushed Bragg's 'Criminal Trial' of Trump

By: Tim Graham — June 4th 2024 at 11:40
The "independent fact-checkers" have repeatedly pounced on Donald Trump claiming Biden and his team are behind Alvin Bragg's prosecution, especially CNN's Daniel Dale, who was a triggered Tigger on this accusation.  Margot Cleveland at The Federalist offers some hard facts for the pro-Biden media to face in an article headlined "Joe Biden’s Fingerprints Are All Over The Criminal Prosecutions Of Donald Trump." At least Dale would feint toward Bragg relying on prosecutorial help from Matthew Colangelo, who came over from being the #3 official in Biden's Justice Department. But Team Biden's involvement came much earlier:  As I previously reported, the incestuous relationship between the Manhattan D.A.’s office and Team Biden began as early as mid-February 2021. Then, “Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office.” As The New York Times reported at the time, Pomerantz was to work “solely on the Trump investigation” during a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison. “But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly ‘been helping with the case informally for months.’” Even Democrats’ most reliable Old Grey Lady (of the evening) acknowledged, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” Soon after the Manhattan D.A. hired Pomerantz, two of his colleagues, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, also took leaves of absence from Paul, Weiss to serve as special assistant district attorneys on the Trump investigation. “For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden.” Imagine a pro-Trump law firm was volunteering time inside a public prosecutor's probe of Biden or Hillary Clinton. Would CNN suggest you couldn't link it to Trump? Cleveland notes the Paul,Weiss firm were also shoveling campaign cash:  As I previously reported, during Biden’s first run for the White House, “the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests.” Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, also topped the list of Biden fundraisers, bundling at least $100,000 for the then-candidate. At the time, Karp wrote in an email: “As someone who cares passionately about preserving the rule of law, safeguarding our democracy and protecting fundamental liberties, I’ve been delighted to do everything I possibly can to support the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket.” Biden’s relationship with Karp continued after his election, with the president including Karp and his wife at a state dinner with the Australian prime minister. Karp and his fellow Paul, Weiss lawyers continue to fund Biden’s re-election campaign. In fact, Biden’s connection to the firm is so strong Bloomberg branded Paul, Weiss the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center.” The pro-Biden law firm collaborated with the pro-Biden media to make sure Trump stayed on the path to indictment and conviction: But for Paul, Weiss lending Pomerantz to the Manhattan D.A.’s office to control the Trump investigation, the former president likely never would have been charged. According to Pomerantz, Bragg had decided “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges,” indefinitely suspending the investigation. Pomerantz made those claims in the resignation letter he tendered to Bragg in early 2022, which was deliberately leaked to The New York Times. “Pomerantz’s letter and his claims that Bragg had suspended the Trump probe triggered a political firestorm, which the Manhattan D.A. sought to quell by telling the public the investigation was ongoing.” Soon after, Bragg capitulated, hiring Biden’s high-ranking DOJ lawyer, Colangelo, who proceeded to indict and convict Trump.
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NewsBusters Podcast: LOL! Media Claim 'No Evidence' the Trump Trial Was Partisan

By: Tim Graham — June 3rd 2024 at 22:16
Reporters might admit the Trump convictions are a "political gift" for the Democrats, but they still claim there's "no evidence" the prosecution was political -- and especially, that anyone could claim Biden and his administration were behind it. The networks strongly suppressed the painfully obvious notion that Democrats are prosecuting Trump to damage his re-election chances. In a piece puffing up Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Washington Post reporter Shayna Jacobs wrote: "Some thought the case was weak. Others — namely the defendant and his allies — continue to insist without offering evidence that it was a politically motivated attack on Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election." The paragraph right before it noted Bragg was an elected Democrat. An Associated Press "fact check" by "news verification reporter" Melissa Goldin concluded: "Throughout the trial Trump has said, without evidence, that the indictments were politically orchestrated by Democratic President Joe Biden and his administration in an effort to keep him out of the White House. But Biden and his administration have no control over this prosecution. The case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor." Even that doesn't acknowledge Bragg is an elected Democrat, and it doesn't mention former Biden Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo joining Bragg's team to get Trump. It also happened on TV. ABC's George Stephanopoulos exploded at Trump lawyer Will Scharf when he insisted Biden was involved. CBS analyst John Dickerson lamented on Friday morning: “But when you say things like Joe Biden is behind this, for which there is no evidence, that sows doubt, and we have a really, really recent example of what happens when you sow doubt in the system, people take matters into their own hands.” (Translation: January 6 riot.) The networks also attacked Trump by associating him with violent messages on social media. On PBS NewsHour, reporter Laura Barron-Lopez announced "I was working with Advance Democracy, a nonprofit investigative group that tracks far-right social media." The group is run by Democrat Daniel J. Jones, a former Dianne Feinstein staffer who was also associated with Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm Hillary Clinton hired to create the phony Steele Dossier.  NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly also played masquerade in an online report: "Advance Democracy, a nonprofit that conducts public interest research, said there has been a high volume of social media posts containing violent rhetoric targeting New York Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg..." You know a group is on the Left when the media refuse to label them accurately. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Like and share! 
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'Meet the Press' Has ONE Decent Hunter Biden Question, Jeffries Has Ludicrous Answer

By: Tim Graham — June 3rd 2024 at 17:30
On Sunday's Meet the Press, after a typically contentious, extremely interrupt-ious interview with a Republican -- in this case, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) -- substitute host Peter Alexander interviewed House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) about the Trump trial, and then there was a single question on the Hunter Biden trial. Jeffries claimed that it was okay for President Biden to proclaim "my son has done nothing wrong," which is laughably false.  It was the usual "loving father" defense, as if that excuses the lying, just as Joe Biden claims he never discussed business with Hunter, which is also preposterous and a proven Pants on Fire lie. At least Alexander puts a little spin on the ball with a quote from The Wall Street Journal editorial page:  PETER ALEXANDER: Sir, let me ask you about another question that we'll be watching and will make headlines this week. Hunter Biden, the president's son, goes on trial for gun charges beginning tomorrow. President Biden said last year, quote, "My son has done nothing wrong." The Wall Street Journal, as you see here, the Editorial Board said at the time, quote, "That's a highly inappropriate message from a president. He's essentially telling prosecutors that they are wrong to bring an indictment because Hunter is innocent of any criminal behavior." Why was it appropriate for President Biden to publicly comment on his son's case? REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES: President Biden commented as a loving father, as I would hope any loving father would do. Hunter Biden of course is entitled, as was Donald Trump, to the presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his peers. And this Justice Department is going to proceed in that fashion, present the facts and the law. And then we'll all have to wait for a determination that is made by a jury as to Hunter Biden's guilt or innocence. That was it! Alexander quickly moved on to Israel and Hamas. "Fact-based" reporters don't point out that Hunter Biden has done many things wrong, starting with the crack cocaine and hookers.  A few questions earlier, there was an amusing demonstration of how robotic Hakeem Jeffries can be with his "extreme MAGA Republican" talking point. Four times in one answer, and five times overall! Alexander asked if Democrats should be concerned that Trump will use the Guilty verdicts to become stronger. JEFFRIES: Extreme MAGA Republicans are going to continue to lie for Donald Trump. President Biden and Democrats are going to continue to solve problems for hard-working American taxpayers. Extreme MAGA Republicans will continue to lie for Donald Trump. PETER ALEXANDER: Sir, those – REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES: President Biden and Democrats are going to work on delivering real results as has been the case for the last three and a half months. And we're going to see that extreme MAGA Republicans will continue to lie for Donald Trump and present no real vision for dealing with the issues of importance to the American people. That's a contrast. And I'd rather be on President Biden's side of that contrast than on the extreme MAGA Republican side. On the fifth one, Jeffries asked: "Can the extreme MAGA Republicans point to a single issue where they've actually made progress for the American people? A single issue? They cannot."
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CNN Pundit Scott Jennings Thwacks Democrat on Biden's Student-Loan Erosion of Law

By: Tim Graham — June 2nd 2024 at 16:10
The Democrats are unloading some impressive cognitive dissonance in touting themselves as the defenders of the rule of law while Biden boasts of ignoring the courts (and Congress) in single-handedly forgiving $167 billion in student-loan debt. On CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, CNN analyst Scott Jennings went after young Rep. Louis Auchincloss (D-Mass.) on which part of the judicial system we "have to respect" after the Trump trial. Auchincloss claimed "What Joe Biden said was we have to respect the integrity of the judicial system. When you contrast that with what Speaker Mike Johnson said, which was I'm basically going to lean on my Supreme Court friends to overturn this -- a gross abuse of the separation of powers -- I think that law and order contrast is actually quite sharp for the American public." Biden knows something about "gross abuse of the separation of powers"! Jennings went to work:    AUCHINCLOSS: It's 5 percent have to see this wedge now of one party upholds law and order, and one party is out there voting against border security legislation and trying to defund the FBI. JENNINGS: I'm a little surprised to hear you invoke the respect for the justice system, because, within a 24-hour period, Joe Biden says we have to respect the judicial system, absolute respect. And yet he tweets in the centerpiece of all of his speeches right now is, the Supreme Court tried to stop me, but I did it anyway on student loans. So I'm just wondering which part of the judicial system do we have to respect? Which ones are good and which ones are bad? AUCHINCLOSS: So, just as a point of law here, the Supreme Court ruled that his use of the HEROES Act in 2003 was illegal. He did not use the HEROES Act of 2003. BAKARI SELLERS: Correct. AUCHINCLOSS: He used a different legal mechanism... JENNINGS: He just kept going. AUCHINCLOSS: ... because he upheld the Supreme Court's ruling and found another legal manner. JENNINGS: You're a member of Congress. Does it not offend you that the president of the United States is usurping your authority? Sellers jumped in to say "I would argue that the offense here probably is Donald Trump." A little later, Auchincloss offered a KJP-style answer to Jennings as host Kasie Hunt touted the "progressives" thinking Biden hasn't been rough enough on Trump:  HUNT: But on this -- on this thing, on this convicted felon thing, there are -- there are progressives in your party saying he's not going far enough, he's not hitting it hard enough. What do you think? AUCHINCLOSS: Because the president has a sense of responsibility to the integrity of the judicial system to say, first and foremost, right out of the gate, we must uphold the rule of law. And that contrast, the actions are going to resonate louder than the words.
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Media Use Conspiracy Theories To Attack Justices

By: Tim Graham, FOX News — June 2nd 2024 at 12:55
The Liberal media have bombarded the Supreme Court justices with crazy conspiracy theories to undermine a conservative toehold in government The latest is the silly flag controversy.
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Liberal media use conspiracy theories to attack these Supreme Court justices

By: Tim Graham — June 2nd 2024 at 07:00
The Liberal media have bombarded the Supreme Court justices with crazy conspiracy theories to undermine a conservative toehold in government The latest is the silly flag controversy.

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Column: Smearing Alito and Thomas as Racist Insurrectionists

By: Tim Graham — May 31st 2024 at 07:08
It’s hard to believe, but our “news” media think Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wife hanging a flag upside-down outside their home for a few days is a much more serious matter than an attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. That story was quickly squashed. Start with taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, which never managed to produce a single feature story on the foiled Kavanaugh assassination, but has provided multiple stories in the Alito Flag Frenzy. They use fake-neutral headlines like “Flag displays at Justice Alito’s homes concern judicial watchdogs.” Make that “Democrat law professors.” NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, who tried to strangle the Clarence Thomas nomination in the crib, couldn’t muster any concern for Kavanaugh’s safety, but found the time for Alito-flag coverage. The idea that this slavish pal of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was going to furrow her brow about the bias of judges was a laughable matter. Everyone with political eyes can see that the media are toeing the Democrat line that a Supreme Court with a conservative majority must be discredited. Forget all of their bleatings that Trump was undermining confidence in government. “Objective” reporters always undermine confidence in government when conservatives have a toehold.  The latest decision they hated was an Alito opinion in a 6-3 ruling that the South Carolina legislature could move a sizable number of black voters out of the competitive 1st Congressional District into the black-majority 6th District. The majority ruled that this was a political gerrymander, which is legal, and not a racial gerrymander, which is illegal. But they ruled against the NAACP, so there was hell to pay. On “All In with Chris Hayes” on May 23, the host lamented the decision and brought in MSNBC’s regular extremist Elie Mystal to concoct a theory on Alito’s majority opinion. “The throughline between the Alito flag story, the Clarence Thomas coup story, and their wives, and what we saw today from the Supreme Court in this gerrymandering decision,” he said, “is that they don’t want black people’s votes to count equally.” As for Thomas, forget that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has a white husband, you’re only a sellout if you’re conservative. “I mean, he ain’t married to Ginni Thomas for nothing all right...like that’s what the man thinks.” He claimed Thomas does not think the 14th Amendment “can be used to protect the voting rights of black people.” On the Left, black voting rights translate into the ability to elect Democrats. That’s not the right to vote at all. It’s the right to be represented by a Democrat. If you don’t agree with that principle, you’re in favor of “diluting” black votes.  In Mystal’s conspiracy brain, “when people like Alito and Thomas support the insurrection, what are they saying? They’re saying that Trump won -- lost the election but won the white vote...won the white vote by a lot.” He claimed they think white votes are “the only votes that matter.” This character assassination of Alito and Thomas as racist insurrectionists is considered weighty legal analysis on MSNBC. On the Left, anything that disturbs their domination of government is an “insurrection,” which is why they endlessly associate every conservative with the January 6 riot as much as they can. They are the ones who can’t stand dissent and an actual democracy where conservatives disturb their dreams of complete dominance. 
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Column: Overdoing the Coverage of the ‘Hush Money Criminal Trial’

By: Tim Graham — May 29th 2024 at 08:14
The Democrats want to run for office on the issue of "Democracy," because they think the Republicans are somehow opposed.  They never sound stranger than when they warn that a re-elected Donald Trump will use the powers of government for revenge on his political enemies. They can't grasp the fact that many voters see a vast conspiracy of partisan prosecutors trying to convict and imprison Trump before the election as a way of ending Trump's political career forever. That can be seen as revenge for Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. The media elite endlessly promote these prosecutions, implying each of them could be politically lethal, but somehow none of them are. They have promoted elected Democrat Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's trial as a "hush money criminal trial." Putting the word "criminal" next to "Trump" is one of their favorite tactics.  Curtis Houck at NewsBusters examined every story and mention of this Trump trial for 38 days, starting with the morning of jury selection on April 15, on ABC, CBS, and NBC -- their morning and evening newscasts and Sunday politics programs. The three networks offered 573 minutes and 25 seconds of breathless coverage. ABC dominated the competition with almost 237 minutes of coverage in its three formats. The  incessantly negative tone was set by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, who worked as a spin controller for Bill Clinton, who was himself a tornado of scandals. NBC aired 199 minutes, and CBS came in third with 138 minutes of coverage. "CBS Mornings" host Gayle King expressed her worry "that the audience just hears white noise when they hear all these cases running together." They sound frantic and upset that the audience won't accept all of their must-vote-for-Biden energy. One reason this sounds like white noise is that the networks aren't fair and balanced on ethical messes. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) faced a corruption trial starting with jury selection on May 13, but in the NewsBusters study period, there was only 7 minutes and 56 seconds of Menendez coverage. That's 72 times less than the Trump trial. ABC spent nearly four hours on the Trump trial, but only gave Menendez's trial 23 seconds.  This pattern doesn't bode well for the start of the Hunter Biden trial on June 3 for illegal gun possession. Republicans can see that the networks are national messaging machines for the Democrats. Independents and Democrats can see that if they're paying attention to the pattern. The media seek to damage the Republicans, and perform damage control for their allies.  Too often, the newscasters seem to be offering not political news, but the political weather -- and for Trump, it's always dark and....Stormy. It almost doesn't matter if any of these prosecutions are successful. The Mueller investigation wasn't successful in "getting" Trump. But it succeeded if the goal was to rain constantly on Trump's parade. For his entire presidency and post-presidency, Trump's coverage is routinely 90 percent negative, and a big reason is all this prosecutorial aggression.  The same pattern can be observed with congressional hearings. The Pelosi-picked panel that investigated January 6 was rewarded with live coverage of every minute of their propagandistic presentations. But when the Republicans took the gavel from Pelosi, their  oversight hearings into Joe Biden's ethical problems didn't get live coverage. Often, they drew zero coverage. The contrast is so obvious that no one with a television should attempt to argue that the media are objective, or nonpartisan, or fair.  This is just the latest sordid spectacle that reaches back to Richard Nixon and Watergate, through Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, and even George W. Bush and the scandal of inaccurate intelligence on Iraq. The so-called "first draft of history" in the liberal media is a fire-breathing editorial that cannot be trusted.
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Column: Laughing at Brian Stelter's MAGA-Fascist Fiction

By: Tim Graham — May 24th 2024 at 06:02
Is The New Republic still an opinion journal, or has it turned into a science-fiction magazine? For their June issue, the magazine put Donald Trump on the cover with a Hitler moustache over the headline “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like.” They published eight fever-brained visions of Trumpian fascism in a second term. Former CNN host Brian Stelter penned a fictional article titled “Revenge and Freedom From Fact: On the media in a fascist America.” It’s unintentionally funny to decry “freedom from fact,” and then write an entire article based on nothing but your own twitterpated potboiler instincts. Stelter offered a few real-world niblets – like ugly trolling tweets he received -- in the soup of his MAGA-fascist fiction. He asked readers to “imagine” a second Trump inauguration with “very motivated activists” breaking through the White House perimeter, and they appear to be wearing press credentials (which are fake). Then Stelter imagined one tweeted video of a CBS correspondent offering a water bottle to a protester who was pepper-sprayed, and the right-wing narrative becomes: “The media is complicit. They’re in on it. THEY are trying to assassinate OUR president.” In retaliation, Team Trump, “fed up with years of accountability journalism” [!] bans most reporters from entering the White House grounds, citing threats to the president’s life. “As Truth Social fills up with memes equating journalists with ‘terrorists,’ networks are given 24 hours to remove their equipment.” In the end, “Fox and Newsmax are allowed on the White House grounds so officials can claim that ‘real’ news is still represented.” The weirdness of this nightmare is striking compared to the actual reality of the first Trump term, where the Trump team could barely keep out CNN’s Jim Acosta for a week, while CNN had six other credentialed White House reporters. Stelter’s fictions only grow more humorous from there. There’s the actual Jussie Smollett-inspired verbiage: “Outside a pro-Trump rally in Florida, a local TV reporter is badly beaten by a group of men bearing MAGA merch.” Ignoring that the Obama administration was more litigious against reporters than any other president (including Trump), Stelter imagines “IRS agents commence audits of top newsroom editors…DOJ attorneys consider Espionage Act charges against adversarial reporters.” There’s also a serious shooting in this script In a swatting incident, “a caller to 911 claims there is a violent intruder inside the home of a CBS anchor. Police arrive en masse, and amid the chaos, an officer accidentally shoots the anchor’s wife, seriously injuring her.” That’s not hyperbolic enough: “The same MAGA-heads on social media downplay the violence by digging up the victim’s past tweets praising Hillary Clinton; some even parrot the Trump spokesman [over earlier network outages] and call the injury ‘a good start.’” In Stelter’s unreality show, Meta websites and Google’s search engine lurch to the right, Target sells extra-large American flags (horrors!), and Disney theme parks have “American pride days (while curtailing gay pride events.)” Stelter concluded that Trump fans “have been primed for revenge and for freedom from fact. If the chill descends in 2025, no one can claim to be surprised.” It’s far more realistic to imagine that a second Trump term will begin as the last term ended, depending on who controls Congress. Stelter’s “mainstream media” will be ready to push more impeachments and special prosecutors and criminal trials. There will be zero introspection about their “freedom from fact” journeys with Russian collusion theories and Kremlin-organized Hunter Biden laptop conspiracies. Perhaps we should imagine a fictional scenario of just how mentally incapacitated President Biden gets in a second term. Is he ruling... or drooling?  
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PBS Anchor Geoff Bennett Whines to Bill Maher: Trump's Scandals Should Be 'Disqualifying'

By: Tim Graham — May 23rd 2024 at 10:29
PBS NewsHour isn't normally an interview stop for comedians, but Bill Maher made an appearance on Tuesday night to promote his new book, a collection of his TV monologues. Overall, it honored Maher's HBO career in much the same way as Robert Costa on CBS. Host Geoff Bennett proclaimed Maher has "positioned himself as the ultimate truth-teller, who takes equal pleasure in punching at the left." Oh no! Then came a clip of Maher: It's not my fault the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF." The most notable part came when Bennett complained to Maher: "What do you think accounts for the durability of Donald Trump as a political figure? By any objective or rational standard, the challenges facing him, the scandals, the criminal trials -- all of that should be disqualifying. And yet he's competitive!"   BILL MAHER : Competitive? He's winning. I mean, he's… BENNETT: Yes, the polls — some polls have him ahead, yes. MAHER: Most polls do, and in the states that matter. I mean, if I had to bet on this election — well, I wouldn't, but — I mean, I wouldn't. Yes, I wouldn't, because I couldn't bet against him. Certainly, it's at least a 50/50 that he's going to beat Biden. That's a great question, if only someone would write a book about Donald Trump. [Laughter] The funny part of Bennett question is brandishing an "objective or rational standard." PBS "progressives" simply don't understand that many Americans see an enormous double standard on scandals, that Bill Clinton can do what Trump cannot. Joe Biden can wildly exaggerate his life story, and Trump cannot.  Maher then repeated his CBS routine that Trump is insane, but voters overlook his bluster on the stump and on social media:  MAHER: I truly believe he's insane, in the sense that people talk about the malignant narcissism as if its some sort of quirk. It's more than a quirk. It's a real thing. But as a friend of mine always says, insanity photographs. You can't you can't take your eyes off it. There is a certain charisma quality to that, when somebody is just nuts,. And he is. He doesn't really ever think about what he's going to say. People give him credit for plotting this. He doesn't plot. Everything is just as it comes out of his mouth. One of the great advantages he has as a political candidate is that no one takes him seriously on policy pronouncements, because he just says anything and always has and always will. So, it's like, well, we can't really take it seriously. When he gets into office, he'll probably do the right thing. We like him. He's our kind of guy. So, that's actually kind of a great advantage when you are a politician. PBS types also can't understand that people are choosing policies, and not just people. They're not happy about inflation and untrammeled immigration. They don't like porny books in schools and transgender ideology and "systemic racism" talk. That's where "our kind of guy" comes from.  PS: Bennett also asked Maher about how he's been accused with all the "phobics" over the years:  BENNETT: Over the course of your career, your critics have said, that you are homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, sexist, fatphobic, ableist.What do you make of all that? MAHER: Well, I tell the truth as I see it, and I don't pull punches. That's always been the bond with my audience. People are hypersensitive, and I mean, I could go down that list. I don't think we have time. And I don't think you really want to get into every one of them. But they're all not true. I mean, I like all people. But there are things that have to be said about Islam. There are things that have to be said about health in America. There are things that have to be said about gender and what we're teaching children about it that are valid.
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NewsBusters Podcast: Can The Networks Report on Bob Gold Bars Menendez?

By: Tim Graham — May 22nd 2024 at 22:40
The latest NewsBusters study found 573 minutes of Trump-trial coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC, but less than eight minutes for the trial of Sen. Bob "Gold Bars" Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey. It's funny how GOP scandals always "overshadow" the Democrats when the networks create the "news." On Tuesday, CNN.com posted a Gregory Krieg article headlined "Trump circus overshadows Menendez trial." Krieg explained "Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption trial, which began eight days ago in the nearby U.S. District Court, has been an afterthought to just about everyone." Menendez "is likely pleased to have his legal drama playing out in relative obscurity. It’s a similar dynamic for his Democratic colleagues as they navigate the final months of his term." "Relative obscurity" is something the media can create, and curate. In the same way, they can create "relative notoriety" for their enemies. Meanwhile, the media are already dreading the Hunter Biden trial, which only one half of the media will find interesting. Inside the liberal bubble on PBS's Washington Week with The Atlantic, host Jeffrey Goldberg asked NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep: "Hunter Biden is not running for president, there's a big difference. But the question is, how is this going to affect the mood and happiness and effectiveness of Joe Biden?" Inskeep replied: "For Democrats, this is going to be noise. I presume, without knowing their programming choices, that it's going to be all over Fox News, that it's going to be all over right wing media, and there's going to be a lot of focus and a lot of attention and a lot of energy directed at that." NPR infamously proclaimed in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was "not a story," but a "pure distraction." Meanwhile, over the weekend the president kept bragging about how his son Beau died from cancer after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major – he won the Bronze Star —living next to a burn pit.” In a different speech, his son served "in Iraq for a year in those burn pits.” Biden exaggerates about his own record, and the record of his family. No one expects pro-Biden networks and newspapers to fact-check the braggodocio.  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
☑ ☆ ✇ Politics – The Daily Signal

Bungling Biden’s Commencement Whoppers

By: Tim Graham — May 22nd 2024 at 14:03

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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Column: Bungling Biden's Commencement Whoppers

By: Tim Graham — May 22nd 2024 at 06:00
President Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on Sunday morning, 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 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. They mentioned Biden spoke of deaths in his family, and left out the “burn pits” part. Biden’s recent lie that inflation was at nine percent 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 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 Detroit 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 dictator on day one” and “just inject bleach” to cure Covid. 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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PBS Host Slams 'Damaging Denialism' Among Trump's Possible Veep Picks

By: Tim Graham — May 21st 2024 at 20:21
The taxpayer-funded PBS NewsHour keeps obsessing over clips from NBC's Meet the Press where host Kristen Welker pesters Republican senators who refuse to commit to conceding the 2024 election before anyone votes. Two weeks ago on the Monday night pundit panel of Amy Walter and NPR's Tamara Keith addressed Sen. Tim Scott refusing to knuckle under to six questions. This week, it happened again, when host Geoff Bennett -- formerly of MSNBC -- played video of Welker fighting with Sen. Marco Rubio. Bennett warned "the so-called big lie about the 2020 election has now become this big litmus test for Republicans. And it's expanded to their willingness to accept the results of the 2024 election." At least this time, PBS let Rubio say Democrats have refused to accept every presidential defeat since 2000. Bennett didn't address the point that liberal media outlets don't ask Democrats if they'll accept defeat...noting they didn't really accept it in 2016. Keith accurately noted that Trump refuses to concede defeat in 2020, but talked about "permission structures." She said "now you have Republicans out there, mainstream Republicans, creating sort of a permission structure, saying that, if it's fair, then maybe I will support the results. They're not willing to commit in advance." It would be fun to tell Keith to her face that NPR also demands loyalty, and when Uri Berliner stepped out of line, he was pressured into resigning. Bennett then declared: "And he's not the only one. Senator Tim Scott would also not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. This has very much become party orthodoxy now." He complained this has become GOP "orthodoxy" and proclaimed "we know how damaging this denialism is for our democracy" and wondered "is there political utility in Republicans rallying around this issue?" There is political utility in Republicans pushing back on Democrat spin on Meet the Press. But to this unanimous trio, it's about excessive loyalty to Trump. Amy Walter answered: "When you see folks like Marco Rubio or those other candidates you discussed going on TV and answering questions like this, they really aren't speaking to voters. They're speaking to an audience of one. And that is Donald Trump. Many of them are essentially in tryouts to be the vice president." This loyalty segment began with Bennett bringing up the "pilgrimage" of Republicans to the Trump trial. Keith argued "By making that pilgrimage up there, often dressed in the Trump uniform, they are standing behind him quite literally and signaling certainly to Republican base voters, it's OK. You don't need to worry about this thing, no matter how it turns out. This is fine. Don't worry." Bennett pointed out House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on the scene, and "by being there, he is effectively leveraging his speakership and all of the symbolic weight and significance that carries against the justice system." You know it's a Democrat network when an elected Democrat DA and a Biden-donating judge are presented as the entire "justice system." Walter noted this is one way Speaker Johnson holds on to his job, by pleasing Trump. Transcript is below:  PBS NewsHour May 20, 2024 7:42 pm Geoff Bennett:  And he's not the only one. Senator Tim Scott would also not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. This has very much become party orthodoxy now. Tamara Keith: And this is very similar to language that many Republicans, including Mike Pence, landed on after the 2020 election and before January 6, where they didn't want to go all the way as far as Trump is going and say that the election was stolen, but they wanted to say, well, you should look into it. And what they're saying here is, well, we will support the results if it's a fair election. But it's worth noting that former President Trump really only thinks an election is fair if he wins. And I will just remind you that, after 2016, he won, and then he claimed that there was election — there was voter fraud in California and New Hampshire because he didn't win those states. So he is someone who has a very lengthy, proven track record of denying election results. And now you have Republicans out there, mainstream Republicans, creating sort of a permission structure, saying that, if it's fair, then maybe I will support the results. They're not willing to commit in advance. And that creates a permission structure for mainstream Republican voters to say, well, if they're OK with this, then I can be OK with this. Geoff Bennett: And, Amy, we know how damaging this denialism is for our democracy. How does it play politically? I mean, is there political utility in Republicans rallying around this issue? What does it do for moderate Republicans or independent voters, who are going to be the swing deciders in this election? Amy Walter: When you see folks like Marco Rubio or those other candidates you discussed going on TV and answering questions like this, they really aren't speaking to voters. They're speaking to an audience of one. And that is Donald Trump. Many of them are essentially in tryouts to be the vice president. What we know about this president, it's always been the case, but I think it has even ratcheted up in the most recent time period, that he looks for loyalty above all else, and especially in his vice president, the person who will be with him if he gets back to the White House. He wants to make sure that, no matter what, this person is going to stand with him.
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NewsBusters Podcast: Eek, The Alito Bandito Flies the Flag Upside-Down

By: Tim Graham — May 20th 2024 at 22:54
The New York Times considered it front-page material that leftist neighbors snitched on Supreme Court justice Sam Alito. A flag flew upside-down in his yard in the days after January 6. This same Democrat rag published an assassination threat to Justice Kavanaugh two years ago on Page A-20. Liberal or leftist neighbors of the Alitos showed their photos of the flag to the Times, and were rewarded with anonymity by reporter Jodi Kantor: "The half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal." Wait -- they didn't want to "add to the contentiousness on the block" while they shared photos of their neighbors to The New York Times. The networks launched critical stories. On PBS, NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett brought it into their Friday night Week in Politics segment. That’s fascinating. Because on June 10, 2022, the NewsHour couldn’t devote that segment to assassination threat against Justice Kavanaugh! NPR didn’t have a Friday night feature on Alito, but they did discuss Alito on Weekend Edition Saturday, your breakfast treat for liberals. Remember, NPR never aired a feature story on the assassination threat against Justice Kavanaugh. That was simply skipped, or spiked. ABC anchor David Muir started swiping at the top of the show: Justice Alito "under fire" for flying flag upside down "for days" after the January 6 riot. "He's now blaming his wife!" Reporter Terry Moran claimed Alito was "embroiled in controversy" (and they're the embroilers). Moran found "Legal experts say" it's a real appearance of conflict of interest! CBS turned to Capitol Hill reporter Scott MacFarlane, whose entire job seems to be rehashing January 6. The upside-down flag meant Alito could be lumped in with "rioters and election deniers." Justices "should not be swayed by partisan interests," CBS lectured in its report that was aiming to please their won partisan interests.  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts:   
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Politico TILT: North Idaho Is Extremist, Far-Right, Ultra-Conservative

By: Tim Graham — May 20th 2024 at 11:46
You can tell Politico is firmly on the Left by how outraged it is by "ultra-conservatives" limiting abortions in red states. Politico's Magazine posted an article by freelancer Cassidy Randall reporting on the alleged craziness of northern Idaho. No one expects this kind of an article from the congressional districts of "Squad" members. The headline:  North Idaho Has Drifted to the Extreme Right. One Republican Thinks It’s Hit Its Limit. One candidate is testing the power of a moderate coalition to stand up to extremism in a region that has been powerless to its advance. Including the headline, Politico offered 28 uses of "extreme," "extremist," or "extremism" on the right, and 14 uses of "far right." This does include the uses in quotes, which are selected by the reporter. They saved "ultra-conservative" for tweets:  Ultra-conservative policy on a range of issues like abortion dominates in north Idaho — but this Republican candidate thinks a new moderate coalition is ready to take a stand against extremism in his own party.https://t.co/RI82aKSoP7 — POLITICO Magazine (@POLITICOMag) May 19, 2024 Sometimes, the "far-right" and the "extremist" would overlap....suggesting overkill. "The political shift happening in north Idaho is taking place just as the rest of the country is seeing increasing extremism in state legislatures and far-right brinksmanship in Congress." (Politico links to The New Yorker!) The star of this story is Jim Woodward, a state senator who beat his rival Scott Herndon in 2018. But in 2022, Herndon ran again, and it "became personal and attack-driven, with mailers and local ads calling Woodward 'Liberal Jim,' showing him wearing a mask, claiming he would 'control your kids by turning schools into ‘woke’ indoctrination centers' and that he supported critical race theory and allowing transgender children to compete in school sports." Woodward told Politico he was blindsided by the “the viciousness of it.” He "hadn’t campaigned all that hard in retaliation, figuring that as the four-year incumbent in a small community, people knew him well enough to dismiss Herndon’s claims." Politico accepts Woodward at face value, but Herndon's website lists Woodward's liberal votes. So what about people who support abortion on demand, at any time and for any reason? Isn't that extreme? Not to Politico or Democrat donor Cassidy Randall. They're presented as "left-leaning."  Openly working across party lines is a fraught venture on both sides — which is why, says Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, Idaho state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, the trend is mostly underground. “Moderate Republicans may not think that left-leaning support will help their cause, and left-leaning organizations don’t want to hurt the chances of a moderate Republican by being public with their support,” she says.  In liberal-media reports, it has forever been the case that you can be somehow a "moderate Republican" who's totally pro-abortion. Being extremist in favor of abortion is popular, they say!  “People are starting to see that reproductive rights are wildly popular,” DelliCarpini-Tolman continued.  How can you be an "extremist" if you're wildly popular? Welcome to the liberal media. 
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New York Times Nudges 'Conservative' Christians Into a 'Truce in the Gender Wars'

By: Tim Graham — May 20th 2024 at 06:16
On the front page of Saturday’s New York Times came the headline “Some Christians Seek Truce in the Gender Wars.” A better headline: “Some Christians Seek Surrender in the Gender Wars.” Online, the Times headline is trying to suggest that the surrendering Christians are still “conservative” somehow as they “create space”: Some Conservative Christians Are Stepping Away From the Gender Wars Far from the shouting, Christian therapists, writers, parents and their trans children are trying to create a space within conservative circles to acknowledge differences in how people experience gender. The overwhelming theme of this Ruth Graham article is that the conservative Christians need to “Embrace the Journey” away from traditional Christianity, to cite a group that’s prominently featured. The story began with the journey of evangelicals Andrew and Debbie James and their trans “daughter” and how they had to leave the church they were in. The Times pitched the war as “vociferous opposition” versus quiet, “earnest searches for understanding.” Apparently, the Left can never be "vociferous." They are "far from the shouting." Some Christians have fought against expanding gender norms with vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments. In churches and Christian schools, transgender people have been mocked, kicked out and denied communion. Transgender young people from conservative Christian families have shared stories of being banished from homes and relationships, often with devastating effects on their mental health. In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement. But in the quieter spaces of church sanctuaries, counseling offices and living rooms, there are earnest searches for understanding. The story is almost unanimous with counselors and LGBTQ "Christians" pushing transgenderism against tradition. Mary Rice Hasson is the only nod to actual conservatism, surfacing in paragraph 26: “You can see something happening that’s shaping how we understand the nature of the human person,” said Mary Rice Hasson, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs a program whose aim is in part to help parents “counter gender ideology.” Ms. Hasson, who is Catholic, described recent cultural shifts around gender as upending fundamental assumptions about the universe: “Can you trust your senses? When you see something, can you name it, does it have an objective reality? Or is there no truth?” Before that, Graham acknowledges where the Bible is clear about God's creation of male and female, but also goes looking for wiggle room:  Christian advocates for transgender people point out that the Bible depicts a surprising range of gender diversity without apparent judgment. Jacob, a patriarch of the nation of Israel, is described as a “smooth” young man who stays in the family’s tent and is favored by God over his more traditionally masculine brother, the hunter Esau. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that some men are born eunuchs. The Times sees their mission as leading the formerly conservative Christians like Andrew and Debbie James into a compassionate sense of confusion. The story ends like this:  Their worries now are about the political climate hostile to their daughter, and the fact that both their children have walked away from Christianity. For so long, “we were good little soldiers,” Mrs. James said. Now, “we live in the gray.”
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New York Times Journo Compares GOP Backers in 'Trump Uniform' to Saddam Loyalists

By: Tim Graham — May 19th 2024 at 13:50
On Saturday's Chris Wallace Show, the CNN host couldn't help making fun of Republicans turning up at the Trump trial all wearing navy blazers, white shirts, and red ties. On screen, the mocking caption was "WHO WORE THE TRUMP UNIFORM BEST?" But New York Times reporter and podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro took it to another level comparing the Republicans to bootlickers of Iraqi madman Saddam Hussein.  “This is not the United States of America,” @lourdesgnavarro of @NYTimes opines of the “Trump uniform” red tie uniformity. “This reminds me of Saddam Hussein and the good old days when you had the big mustache.” Too much even for CNN panel, so she claimed: “It was a joke.” pic.twitter.com/z7LQ3EQQaO — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) May 18, 2024 CHRIS WALLACE: Lulu, who were the Trump uniform best? LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy said a true thing here, which is this is not the United States of America. Since when is it in the United States of America that people have to wear the Trump uniform in order to show fealty and loyalty? This reminds me of Saddam Hussein and the good old days when you had the big mustache, when they were sitting around the table. REIHAN SALAM, NATIONAL REVIEW: That's a little strong. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh, come on. Come on. Let me -- it was a joke. It was a joke. But to be clear, the idea that you are having to dress up as this man in order to show how close you are to him, how you care for him, it's embarrassing. GOP strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson made the point that this isn't far off from the normal Republican "uniform." Saddam dressed in military garb, which would give off a different vibe. The colloquy continued: WALLACE: Reihan, let me ask you this, to take Lulu's point. Is it a little demeaning that you have all these people rushing not only to go out and attack the witnesses and support Trump, but to feel they need to dress up like him? SALAM: I think that Donald Trump is a very unique, idiosyncratic figure. He really, really likes folks who are going out on a limb, traveling -- Doug Burgum has a real job. He's the governor of North Dakota. But here he is in New York City backing up the president. This clearly looks coordinated as a team effort, much like say, the Houston Astros all wearing orange ties to the White House. When all the leftist women team-dress in white as a pro-abortion sentiment, the media laud it. As for Garcia-Navarro trashing Republicans as Saddam-ites of a sort, she sounded much more like a devotee of a dictator in 2016 when she was a reporter at National Public Radio. The occasion was the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's brother Ramon, and Lourdes/Lulu described meeting him in 2004. “I walk into this lush, beautiful villa, and I am introduced to Ramon Castro,” Garcia-Navarro said on air. “And it's kind of jarring because even though he was Fidel's older brother, he looks a lot like him. As he's presented to me, he leans over and gives me a kiss on one cheek and says, this is from Raul, kisses me on the other cheek and says, this is from me, and then he kisses me on the forehead and says, this is from Fidel.” Then came the jaw-dropper: “It was kind of like getting the blessing of the Holy Trinity.” Fidel Castro is comparable to God, but the Trump-backing Republicans are painted as the autocrat-worshippers...
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You’ll laugh at who MSNBC brought to whine about Trump’s alleged affair

By: Tim Graham — May 19th 2024 at 06:00
MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' tried to find an affair expert to attack Trump about the Stormy Daniels accusations. But, instead of mockery, they delivered a hilarious self own.

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Politico Media Critic: Fox News Coverage of Trump Trial's Somehow a 'Brownout'

By: Tim Graham — May 19th 2024 at 06:20
Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer argued on Saturday that Fox’s coverage of the Trump trial in Manhattan exposed a propaganda network -- while CNN and MSNBC going into gavel-to-gavel overdrive does not? The headline: Fox News Is Flipping Trump’s Trial Coverage on its Head The conservative network is curating its coverage to boost Trump. The liberal networks are curating their coverage to damage Trump – except it seems to help him instead. The liberals think of their obsession as the definition of "normal" news judgment. How could anyone dissent from their journalistic wisdom and think there are other stories to tell?  Shafer suggests this is an effort to “coddle Trump-loving viewers,” as if the others aren’t coddling Trump-hating viewers. Then he claims “the numbers don’t lie.” Which numbers? They are sketchy numbers. According to database calculations provided by Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive TV News, from April 15 through May 17, the Trump trial has been mentioned about half as often on Fox than either of its primary rivals, CNN and MSNBC. (What’s measured: Number of 15-second blocks of airtime times in which both the words “Trump” and “trial” are spoken.) Meanwhile, at the same time Fox has devoted less attention to the trial itself, it has extended near-blanket coverage to the alternative proceedings taking place in the same location — Trump’s open soliloquies to the press from the courthouse lobby where he lashes enemies inside and out of the courtroom. Fox conducted 33 live broadcasts of Trump statements to the press compared with 19 live statements aired on CNN and just three on MSNBC. The Fox “brown out” has been obvious to close watchers of the trial. Wait, wait -- if Fox is mentioning the Trump trial "about half as often" as CNN or MSNBC, how is that defined as a "brownout"? Shafer explains some Reuters reporters noted Fox was reporting on anti-Israel campus protests -- like there's other news in the world. One selected hour of The Faulkner Focus only had ten minutes on the trial. Outrageous! Shafer pleases his Politico audience by arguing Fox is "less a news station than a purveyor of conservative propaganda, after all." Naturally, to undergird his view, Shafer turns to Fox-trashing David Folkenflik: NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, a close Fox observer and biographer of Murdoch, notes in an interview that by showing Trump repeatedly outside the courtroom, the network makes it appear as if it is adequately reporting on the intricacies of the trial — even if its coverage is scant. [!] He adds that the TV airtime Fox has given to the Trump congressional surrogates lined up outside the courtroom to testify for their man provides a similar impression. “This is one of the classic modules or templates that Fox has to offer, the simulacrum of news rather than the actual coverage,” Folkenflik says. It's a "simulacrum" when you let Trump's backers speak out against this Democrat DA and Democrat judge. Point and laugh at David calling half as much trial coverage as CNN "scant." Half of complete obsession is "scant." Shafer added: "What’s significant about the lopsided Fox coverage is that it implies the real news — and the real trial — isn’t happening inside the courtroom." Shouldn't both be newsworthy? Doesn't airing both qualify you as less propagandistic? MSNBC only broadcast three of Trump's outside-the-court reactions, while Fox had 33, and Jack and David didn't identify that as "scant." 
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PBS 'News Judgment': Upside-Down Alito Flag Bigger Than Potential Kavanaugh Assassin

By: Tim Graham — May 18th 2024 at 11:57
On Friday’s PBS NewsHour, the Week in Review segment dove into the New York Times “scoop” that the flag flew upside down for a few days in January 2021 outside the home of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. This was Big News? Two years ago, when a man showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house intending to assassinate him, the NewsHour didn’t find that worthy on Friday June 10, 2022. Of course, the Big News then was slobbering over the Pelosi-picked January 6 Committee, just as this Alito story is a January 6 echo.  CAPEHART: This is outrageous. And it's outrageous because this is a Supreme Court justice who, at the time that flag was flown, was sitting in judgment of a particular case involving the — still, at that point, the sitting president. The other thing is, could you imagine what would have happened if that flag was flying like that on the property of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Ketanji Brown Jackson, someone from the liberal wing on the bench of the Supreme Court? They would have been impeached. And so the idea that we're supposed to accept Justice Alito's rationale here that, oh, my wife did it, it's unacceptable. And I think it just feeds into the erosion of the trust and the standing of the Supreme Court with the American public. Capehart and PBS and all their leftist media colleagues are actively trying to erode trust in the Supreme Court, because they’re not in charge of it right now. Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson subbed in for David Brooks, which means you get an actual conservative viewpoint for a change. JOHNSON: I don't think that the good liberal readers of The New York Times or viewers of this network would be willing to argue with a straight face that the views of a woman — and she has not come out to say that she didn't do this — are derivative of her husband's views. My husband has nothing to do with the things I say on this network, and you can't have it both ways. You cannot say that women are strong and should be out and employed and have their own views and that their husbands are responsible for everything they then go and do. Capehart then repeated his point: "And if that had happened, again, to RBG, they would be raining thunder calling for her resignation. And I wouldn't — I would have a hard time arguing with them." Earlier, Capehart made snippy points against Trump as he and the president agreed to debates: "Even though Donald Trump did agree to these two debates, I will believe it when I see it. I don't think he actually shows up." When anchor Geoff Bennett asked why Trump would lower expectations of Biden's debating skills at this point, Capehart hissed: "But we're talking about Donald Trump, who never misses an opportunity to belittle someone he's afraid of, but just to belittle anyone."
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NewsBusters Podcast: Lawrence O'Donnell's Cheesy Trump Trial Diaries

By: Tim Graham — May 17th 2024 at 22:37
Part of the endless Trump trial coverage on MSNBC was The Last Word host Lawrence O'Donnell reading what sounded like bad diary entries on courtroom happenings. Porn star Stormy Daniels dressed loosely in black, which "suggested the modesty of a nun." How bizarre.  Days later, O'Donnell mocked Trump's appearance in court. He "leaves his face, with his eyes closed, in tortured elderly shapes when he drifts off into his closed-eye space, his mouth shifts from its preferred scowl to the look of a collapsing old building." Ever have that feeling of "collapsing building mouth"? On MSNBC, Brian Stelter told Ari Melber the GOP's in terrible shape, with all these Trump bootlickers showing up at his trial in Manhattan. "I’m just trying to imagine if any Democrats are going to show up at the trial of Bob Menendez, the senator, or or the trial of Joe Biden's son Hunter -- both of which are gonna happen in the next few weeks! And we’re not gonna see any of this, and that tells you everything you need to know about the differences between these two parties in 2024." To which there is an obvious rejoinder: We’re just trying to imagine if any Democrat-servant networks are going to show up at the trials of Senator Menendez or Hunter Biden. No one expects they will be doing gavel-to-gavel coverage for those trials, and that tells you everything you need to know about the Democrat-servant networks. Speaking of MSNBC, The New York Times devoted nearly 3,000 words by Jim Rutenberg and Michael Grynbaum to explain “How MSNBC’s Leftward Tilt Delivers Ratings, and Complications.” What's complicated? The unintentionally funny part is when NBC News suggested MSNBC was ruining its branding as "straight news." Who believes that any more? Lester Holt made it clear "fairness is overrated." We were a little stunned at how angry the networks became over Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker's commencement address at Benedictine College. It wasn't surprising: a Catholic speaker talked about Catholic issues to Catholic graduates. But the Butker critics who aren’t Catholics pulled out little snippets they could not abide. First, they hated that Butker paid tribute to his wife Isabelle for making him successful, for assuming “one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” That is like a curse word to the feminists. They can’t allow the notion that children might benefit from having a parent in the home. Lester Holt's NBC Nightly News featured a student who inaccurately summarized it: "Getting married and having kids is not my ideal situation right now. It definitely made graduation feel a little less special, knowing I had to sit through that and get told I'm nothing but a homemaker.' Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 
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Column: Boos and Hisses for the Kansas City Chiefs Kicker

By: Tim Graham — May 17th 2024 at 06:08
On May 14, Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker gave the commencement address at Benedictine College, a Catholic school in Kansas. Within 48 hours, the media elites were ablaze with outrage. There’s a “growing uproar,” warned NBC’s Hoda Kotb. A Catholic speaker talked about Catholic issues to Catholic graduates. But the Butker critics who aren’t Catholics pulled out little snippets they could not abide. First, they hated that Butker paid tribute to his wife Isabelle for making him successful, for assuming “one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” That is like a curse word to the feminists. They can’t allow the notion that children might benefit from having a parent in the home. He said to the female graduates that “some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” He didn’t say they shouldn’t have careers. He did suggest that many women – especially Catholic women – put motherhood first. Butker also inflamed the Left with a brief allusion to “the deadly-sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.” None of us should have pride in our sins, but the libertine left is allergic to the entire concept of sorrow for sin. Personally, this was my favorite political passage: “Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally. He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I'm sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice.” Lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics have no grasp of how the Catholic Church defines “scandal.” Catholics like Joe Biden, who aggressively support the exact opposite of church teachings, confuse both religious and non-religious people about what Catholics are called to believe -- like abortion is by its nature a deadly sin. But simplistic reporters don’t want anyone calling Biden a phony, any more than they want you to proclaim he's a divider, not a uniter. Jonathan Beane, the chief “diversity” officer of the NFL, put out a statement that “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger." It never stops being comical to tout “inclusion” when you’re telling a conservative Catholic to shut up about “Pride Month.” One can never dissent from the “diversity and inclusion” cops, who blatantly imply only the leftist side of the cultural debate defines their most precious words. Bobby Burack at Outkick pointed out that the NFL had no public statement of objection for Butker’s Kansas City teammate Rashee Rice, who was recently arrested on eight felony charges concerning a hit-and-run accident “while drag-racing his Lamborghini at 119 mph on a Dallas highway.” Reckless Rice is also under investigation for allegedly punching a photographer at a nightclub in Dallas, “leaving the accuser with noticeable swelling in his face.” The NFL has no comment.   Butker’s speech predictably prompted a Change.org petition calling for him to be fired by the Chiefs. Once again, it’s the Left that claims conservatives will “end democracy” and crush freedom of speech, while they demonstrate their absolute intolerance of an opposing point of view.  They can't achieve true "progress" until dissenters are heckled and banned.
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Brian Stelter: So SAD the Trump Trial Shows the GOP Is a Cult That Repeats Fox Talking Points

By: Tim Graham — May 16th 2024 at 14:34
As part of MSNBC’s never-ending Trump trial coverage, former CNN host Brian Stelter arrived on The Beat with Ari Melber on Tuesday to mock all the politicians and Fox News hosts showing up at the courtroom. Brian tweeted out his proudest soundbite. I'm just trying to imagine if any Democratic lawmakers are going to show up at the trial of Senator Bob Menendez – or the trial of Joe Biden's son Hunter. pic.twitter.com/zGjqRajjDv — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 16, 2024 STELTER: I’m just trying to imagine if any Democrats are going to show up at the trial of Bob Menendez, the senator, or or the trial of Joe Biden's son Hunter -- both of which are gonna happen in the next few weeks! And we’re not gonna see any of this, and that tells you everything you need to know about the differences between these two parties in 2024. To which there is an obvious rejoinder: We’re just trying to imagine if any Democrat-servant networks are going to show up at the trials of Senator Menendez or Hunter Biden. No one expects they will be doing gavel-to-gavel coverage for those trials, and that tells you everything you need to know about the Democrat-servant networks.  Stelter is trying to argue that Trump has a "cult" of celebrity, but it's also true that the leftist media's obsessive coverage makes it a more high-profile event for Trump supporters to show up and be seen. No Democrats will want to add any sliver of news-worthiness to the Democrat trials.  Trump has tried to turn these partisan prosecutions around, as he did with endless scandal probes while he was president. He doesn't have the luxury of a broad media establishment that will bury embarrassing stories.  Stelter can’t wait for Showtime or HBO to do a Trump-trial movie: “I can't wait to see the actual real-life movie that's going to be made of this trial. Because today was the stuff of actual drama! And people should see it. It's a shame we don't have cameras!” Once again, Showtime and the rest aren’t making a Biden docudrama. He continued: STELTER: But I do think the Republicans suddenly belatedly showing up to support Trump is in some ways the most interesting thing that happened today. Where were they for the last three weeks? Where were Trump’s friends? People are focused on why isn't his family coming? None of his friends showed up until this week. Now all of a sudden, they're all popping up, whether it's for the veepstakes or because he's pressuring them to be there. But it is so revealing and so sad about the state of the Republican party that they're all belatedly showing up. Did you see what Lisa Murkowski said today? One of these establishment Republican senators? She was asked why aren't you going to New York City to be at the trial. She said, don't we have something better to do around here than to watch stupid boring trials? And the reality is, Ari, no. The GOP lawmakers have nothing better to do, right? Than to sit around, and take their talking points from Fox. Stelter added that "far right" networks like Fox News tried to ignore the trial, but the "big story" coverage of networks like MSNBC have forced them to acknowledge this is big. Once again, just like with the Pelosi-Picked Panel on January 6, Fox is going to carry some of the same "big stories" as the leftist press with a different spin. It's a little harder to skip stories that 37 national media outlets are obsessing over. PS:  MSNBC's Ari Melber really HATES anyone (accurately) saying the judge's daughter Loren Merchan is a Democrat fundraiser. He thinks Trump is Geppetto and all his GOP minions are Pinocchios. He wants the Gag Rule to extend to all Republicans for their "scurrilous" attacks on Loren. pic.twitter.com/kockYAYL30 — Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) May 16, 2024
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Column: Hillary Clinton’s Conspiracy Privilege

By: Tim Graham — May 15th 2024 at 07:02
It’s hard to watch the incessant gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Donald Trump trial in Manhattan without feeling like you’re traveling in a time warp back to 2016. We’re back reliving the “Access Hollywood” tape and talk of how Trump would have never been elected except porn star Stormy Daniels accepted a six-figure check to keep quiet. The richest vein of hypocrisy on this adultery-mangles-electability question flows through the Clintons. Hillary Clinton appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to denounce Trump for squashing the bimbo stories. It was typically shameless. She said: “I think the defendant, the former president, knew exactly what he was doing when he went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people, because he understood the electoral significance of them.” The cast of “Morning Joe” treated Hillary Clinton as a therapist for their Trump angst, and no one interrupted and asked about all the squashing, burying, and killing of stories that Hillary Clinton engaged in when they first sought the White House in 1992. On the cusp of the Gennifer Flowers allegations breaking in January of that year, Hillary Clinton was telling Margaret Carlson of Time magazine “My marriage is solid, full of love and friendship, but it’s too profound to talk about glibly.” But after Flowers asserted she had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, they appeared on “60 Minutes,” and Hillary Clinton claimed women being questioned about their relationship with Bill were her friends. “We reached out to them. I met with two of them to reassure them they knew they were friends of ours. I felt terrible about what was happening to them.” In retrospect, one can smell what Hillary was cooking. She was pressuring potential accusers to stay quiet, but pitching it on national TV as just chatting things over with friends. One can only imagine how Melania Trump processed the Stormy Daniels tale, but paying a non-disclosure agreement isn't exactly maintaining your innocence. That's why the Democratic prosecutors in New York are pumping this out on CNN and MSNBC, hour on the hour. The Left thinks those religious conservatives are bothered by this, and it should cause them to vote for someone else, preferably that "devout Catholic" Joe Biden. But Hillary has always waged war on anyone who would seek to damage her and Bill's future in politics, and the media have always gushed over her warfare. At the end of the Year of Our Intern in 1998, Time magazine was aglow. Reporters Nancy Gibbs and Karen Tumulty oozed that "as she pursued the private rescue of a marriage and the public rescue of a presidency, she was the one person who seemed to see the larger story and shaped its telling." The "larger story" was the "vast right-wing conspiracy." In this election cycle, Democratic prosecutors lobbed 91 felony charges at Trump, and the networks largely refuse to even describe them as Democrats, let alone a vast left-wing conspiracy. Time managing editor Walter Isaacson even wrote that they wanted to name her "Person of the Year" in 1998 for her, um, "dignity." That's how they describe Hillary lying for months that Bill didn't have sexual relations with That Woman. "Her strength and her almost surreal ability to assert her dignity were remarkable to some and mystifying to others." This kind of copy is why most Americans don't trust the "mainstream media." They don't report stories as much as they "shape" them for the benefit of their political allies.
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Guess Which Huge Biden Lie CNN Refused To Fact-Check

By: Tim Graham, FOX News — May 15th 2024 at 10:14
CNN's big interview with Joe Biden had questions but no fact-checker. So, when the president lied, they didn't say a thing. That's certainly not the treatment Trump gets.

Guess Which Huge Biden Lie CNN Refused To Fact-Check

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Guess which huge Biden lie CNN refused to fact-check

By: Tim Graham — May 14th 2024 at 07:00
CNN's big interview with Joe Biden had questions but no fact-checker. So, when the president lied, they didn't say a thing. That's certainly not the treatment Trump gets.

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NewsBusters Podcast: Reagan-Hating Networks Cite Reagan to Help Biden

By: Tim Graham — May 13th 2024 at 21:06
Ronald Reagan is suddenly a topic in the liberal media, but only as a lame defense of President Biden’s betrayal of our ally Israel. ABC, CBS, and NBC all offered this talking point. The most energetic rebuttal of this pro-Biden theme came from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on CBS’s Face the Nation. Jorge Bonilla explains the Sunday spin, including that CNN State of the Union host Dana Bash did. She didn't throw Reagan spin at Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), but she suggested Donald Trump was an anti-Semite -- in part for his suggestion that Jews voting against him “should be ashamed.” That's an interesting spin, since Democrats routinely suggest that blacks and Hispanics that vote for Republicans are "race traitors," or aren't demonstrating a tribal loyalty. They don't expect that shaming with Jews. CBS's Sunday Morning aired a puffball interview with comedian Bill Maher, letting him claim he speaks for the "normies" and he's not ideological. On his Friday night program on HBO, Maher lamented that the Democrats "blew it" in all their legal warfare on Trump.  What was amazing in this profile was CBS reporter Robert Costa imploring Maher to lay off mockery of the Left, just shine the spotlight on the right-wingers! He asked: "What do you say to your [leftist] critics, though, who say that you should just focus on them, Bill, if they’re more alarming to you than the Left. And why not shine the spotlight on them only?" It's like he wants Maher to be exactly like CBS's own Stephen Colbert.  We conclude with questions Jorge knows from his places of residence: why would Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) claim black kids in the Bronx don't know the word "computer"? And why would the press ignore it? Then there is the very short-lived attempt by "Queers for Palestine" to block an exit to Disney World in Orlando. Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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CBS's Robert Costa Begs Bill Maher to Stop Mocking Lefties, Just Mock Republicans

By: Tim Graham — May 12th 2024 at 14:20
CBS reporter Robert Costa put together a puffball interview for HBO Real Time host Bill Maher on their show Sunday Morning. They let him claim he's not ideological and didn't laugh when he said  “I speak for the normies. I speak for that vast middle that is tired of the partisanship. I don’t want to hate half the country, and I don’t hate half the country.” Bill Maher represents the "vast middle," the "normies"? Conservatives across America would make a face at that. At bottom, Maher is a bit of shock jock, so that when Democrats are in power he's going to mock them as well, just as he suggested on Friday night that the Democrats "blew it" in all their legal warfare on Trump.  What was amazing in this profile was Costa imploring Maher to lay off mockery of the Left, just shine the spotlight on the right-wingers!  Robert @costareports pressed @BillMaher on @CBSSunday: If “left irritates you,” but “the right often alarms you,” then “what do you say to critics who say you should just focus on them if they’re more alarming to you than the left, then why not shine the spotlight on them only?” pic.twitter.com/5glVpJQsFQ — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) May 12, 2024 COSTA: You write a lot of throughout this book that the left irritates you, frustrates you at times, but the right often alarms you. MAHER: Yes. They’re very alarming. They’re extremely alarming. More alarming. COSTA: What do you say to your critics, though, who say that you should just focus on them, Bill, if they’re more alarming to you than the Left. And why not shine the spotlight on them only? MAHER: The truth isn’t one-sided like that. The Democrats constantly are,running against Trump with the idea ‘You people out there couldn’t possibly vote for this guy.’ And people are saying, ‘Watch me. Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again.’ Earth to Bill: Your "news" people at CBS and ABC and NBC and PBS do believe the "truth is one-sided like that." Maher then insisted Trump is a massive liar and literally crazy with malignant narcissism. CBS ran a clip of Maher citing the Glenn Kessler "lie counter" at The Washington Post: "Trump made over 8,000 false or misleading statements as president. Nothing like this has ever happened before." What has never happened before (or since) was the Post doing a database of "false or misleading statements" by one politician. They refused to follow through with Biden. Maher could have asked Costa when he and Bob Woodward were going to do one of those investigative books on President Biden. Woodward did four on Trump. They're just like Kessler: "why shine the spotlight" on Biden?  Speaking of false statements, Maher talked about how he was willing (despite leftist protest) to interview former Trump Attorney General William Barr, in part because he found it very important that Barr was willing to say Trump lost the election. Then Maher also took after ”Bill Barr's, I thought, horrible behavior when the Mueller Report came out and he basically lied about it.” Costa didn't ask: What's the lie? It was more about spin as the collusion case fizzled. At the time, Democrats were furious because Barr announced Mueller would not indict Trump, but they wanted wiggle room. Mueller then offered verbal flatulence to Congress, "We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime." But the scandal was over.
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Ex-NPR Editor Uri Berliner Mocks New NPR CEO Katherine Maher for Skipping House Hearing

By: Tim Graham — May 12th 2024 at 06:06
NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner, who penned a bombshell expose on the woke one-sidedness of the "public" radio network's news product, knocked new NPR CEO Katherine Maher for failing to show for Wednesday's House hearing on the leftist bias of her new employer. She claimed she had a Board of Directors meeting all day. Instead, Maher submitted written testimony NPR is “bringing trusted, reliable, independent news and information of the highest editorial standards” to tens of millions of listeners. Eli Lake at The Free Press, which ran Berliner's piece, talked to Berliner about the no-show. “Why isn’t she there? Is she the right person for the job at this time?” he asked, adding that her written statement “sounds like a pledge drive.” This question could be turned around on Berliner, who surely was invited to testify by the House Republicans. Berliner also called BS on Maher’s claim that she doesn’t interfere in NPR’s editorial content. “She said she was on the other side of the firewall that separates the newsroom from the CEO,” he told The Free Press in a phone interview. “However, when my story came out, after I had already been suspended for five days without pay, she told editorial staffers in a public statement on the NPR website they had been hurt, demeaned, and disrespected by what I wrote. That’s knocking down the firewall right there.” He added, “She doesn’t address how NPR’s audience has shifted dramatically over time, from roughly reflecting America to a much narrower progressive slice of the country.” He insisted “NPR needs real leadership now...The board will need to decide whether Katherine Maher is the right person for the job.” Clearly, they decided Katherine Maher matched NPR's wokeness nicely, with the donations to election-denying Stacey Abrams and the tweets in defense of looting, which perfectly matched NPR's vibe. Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn reported on Berliner's comments last weekend at the Dissident Dialogues festival in New York [photo credit: Fox News]. Berliner revealed that one of the "big factors" that motivated him to go public about NPR's groupthink was Maher's arrival in March. He hoped the new CEO could "turn a new leaf" for the outlet. "As I said in my essay, we're welcoming a CEO, I'll be rooting for her because I thought, okay, maybe this is the time to bring this up. We've got new leadership. Maybe this is the time we could really tackle these things," Berliner said. Berliner then pivoted to the memo Maher penned to staff publicly rebuking him:  "Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning." "Supposedly there's what's called a firewall in the newsroom," Berliner said. "There's the newsroom, the editorial team, and there are people who run the business, the CEO. And I think basically in one of her first acts, if not her first act, she crossed over that firewall to criticize me as a journalist. And that I found especially troubling given her views on the First Amendment, free expression."  Meanwhile, this is the kind of contempt NPR reporters show for their critics: Brian Mann is the guy who I testified failed to cover Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020 in favor of a story titled “Experts Say Attack On Hunter Biden's Addiction Deepens Stigma For Millions.” NPR is facing a ton of criticism rn from people who either aren't actually listening to our reporting or who are just making #%#@ up. Which makes it harder to focus on real questions and critical feedback about our journalism. https://t.co/EOVKMb4ugk — Brian Mann (@BrianMannADK) May 7, 2024
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NPR Hearing: Our NewsBusters Opening Statement for the Congressional Record

By: Tim Graham — May 11th 2024 at 18:26
It was an honor and a privilege to testify before Congress on the bias at National Public Radio. It was my second turn. In 1999, I testified about the bias at PBS. Nothing has changed much in the overall tilt of public broadcasting, even if it's grown more intense with social media and the Trump phenomenon. I collated examples of NPR bias by using the NPR topic tag on NewsBusters -- remember you can isolate individual networks or journalists or politicians to evaluate the media's performance. After preparing an opening statement for several days, your time is limited to five minutes, but your remarks as submitted to the committee are placed in the Congressional Record. I knew not every sentence could make the televised hearing, but the statement is often read by members and staffers before the hearing begins. So in case people wanted to get the entire statement as submitted, it is posted below:  ---    Good morning, I represent the Media Research Center, America’s preeminent conservative media watchdog organization. It was founded in 1987, and I joined the center in 1989. We monitor national media outlets on a daily basis and provide daily coverage of the media’s tilt at NewsBusters.org.  We are eager to testify with many examples on this hearing’s intention to examine accusations of bias on National Public Radio. NPR and PBS have for their entire existence made a mockery of language in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that mandated “objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”     On its website, NPR has a statement of principles, including this: “We know that truth is not possible without the active pursuit of a diversity of voices, especially those most at risk of being left out.” I would say after decades of listening, the voices most at risk of being left out are the conservatives. They are talked about, but they don’t get to do much talking. We would make the same argument about PBS, from the NewsHour to the Frontline documentaries. Roughly half the taxpayers of America donate to a public-broadcasting system that considers them unworthy of inclusion. NPR never lives up to their evening newscast title, All Things Considered.     After senior editor Uri Berliner recently testified about NPR’s bias on the internet, NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin proclaimed, "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world." The obvious rebuttal to that is: So why did Berliner write his expose? And why did he resign after NPR employees refused to work with him?     Berliner suggested this bias became more pronounced when Donald Trump ran for president. We can tell you NPR has demonstrated a leftist bent much longer than that. NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg destroyed the Douglas Ginsburg nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, then tried again with Clarence Thomas in 1991. They energetically channeled the accusers of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and when a man arrived in an Uber on Kavanaugh’s street two years ago with weapons and plans to assassinate Kavanaugh, NPR failed to file a single feature story on it. Nina Totenberg could not be found. NPR, a supposed source of civility, didn’t demonstrate that she cared one bit about this potential political violence. But in March, between Morning Edition and Fresh Air, Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford was granted an hour of taxpayer-funded air time to reproduce her unproven charges of teenaged sexual assault.     This kind of pattern underlines Berliner’s recent statement on NewsNation: ”NPR has a lot of soul searching to do about representing the country at large. Being a publicly funded news organization and really trying to represent this country in all its great diversity and viewpoints.”     NPR isn’t soul searching. NPR isn’t seriously trying to achieve a diversity of sources or an independent news agenda. Instead they are serving their own left-leaning donors, major and minor. As Berliner reported, by 2023, 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. Apparently, you don’t want to upset them with an opposing view. This network lives in an airless bubble, or a silo, pick your metaphor.      Both PBS and NPR repeat the leftist media’s resistance to an opposing side on contentious issues like climate change and transgender ideology. Our study of seven months of PBS NewsHour found they gave over 90 percent of the air time to the Left on gender ideology stories. NPR displayed its take in 2022 by interviewing transgender Biden HHS appointee Adm. Rachel Levine to argue “There is no argument about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care. There is no argument.” NPR reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin underlined: “Gender-affirming care is not harmful. It's lifesaving, she explains.” No dissent was allowed.     NPR clearly doesn’t fear congressional oversight of its aggressive biases, on air and online. They had a fit when Elon Musk defined them on Twitter as “state-affiliated,” like somehow taxpayer funding doesn’t affiliate you with the state. They know Congress isn’t going to want to police their content. It doesn’t just upset the public broadcasters. It infuriates the so-called “mainstream media.” But the only thing that seems to concentrate the attention of public broadcasters on this subject is the threat of defunding. Even then, it might cause a “course correction” for a few weeks or months, before returning to the mean-spirited mean against Republicans. I would suggest NPR should have to come to Congress and defend its content choices at least once a year.     Their choices can be very questionable.  A glaring Exhibit A is the New York Post series on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October of 2020. Most of the so-called “mainstream media” tried to dismiss this story – falsely – as Russian disinformation. But NPR stood out.     NPR’s Public Editor Kelly McBride quoted Terence Samuel, NPR's Managing Editor for News. “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” He dismissed the Post stories as a “politically driven event.” That’s interesting, since you could argue Nina Totenberg’s hostile reporting on Supreme Court nominees created “politically driven events.”     Instead of seeking to investigate the Biden family’s influence-peddling, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story titled “Experts Say Attack On Hunter Biden's Addiction Deepens Stigma For Millions.” There wasn’t one word in it about Hunter Biden’s business practices involving his father, which was the point of the Post stories.     The pattern continues today. When the House Oversight Committee had a hearing in March where Hunter Biden was supposed to appear, NPR’s All Things Considered wouldn’t consider a feature story on it. NPR covered the Pelosi-picked House January 6 Committee live for every minute, and then ignored the Biden impeachment inquiry.     Instead, NPR’s homepage was topped the next morning by their hot story: new details on Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-hacking scandal of 2011. NPR had a Biden mention on their homepage. White House reporter Deepa Shivaram had a TikTok-like video shoot on President Biden grabbing a trendy boba tea in Las Vegas under the headline “Food stops can tell you a lot about a campaign.”     There are other egregious examples of imbalance that encourage chaos and disorder in society:     On August 27, 2020, NPR's blog "Code Switch," with the slogan "Race In Your Face," posted an interview promoting a new book titled In Defense of Looting. Natalie Escobar promoted author Emily Osterweil's view that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”     On The NPR Politics Podcast on July 17, 2021, NPR reporter Danielle Kurtzleben brought on Yale law professor Elizabeth Hinton to promote her book on the acceptability of violence as a protest tactic against police. Kurtzleben called this book “excellent” and explained: “You talk about these clashes as rebellions -- and quite pointedly, not as riots. It's a very meaningful choice.”     On NPR’s Fresh Air on April 15, 2023, their movie critic John Powers praised the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, hailing it as “hugely timely” when “people are frustrated by society's inability, indeed unwillingness to even slow down ecological disasters like climate change.”     Notice no one is presented in these segments to object to these advocates of criminality and violence. So when people think NPR is that place for civility on the radio, they would be wrong. They can devote their resources to getting behind looting, rioting, and blowing up pipelines.     But NPR presents the Republicans as uniquely extreme. They were quite the welcome wagon in this Congress. On January 18, 2023, the NPR interview show Fresh Air headlined their show, “How will the hard-right Republicans in Congress wield their newfound power?” Gross began: “Now that Kevin McCarthy has assumed his new role as speaker of the House, a position he won after making concessions to the far right of his party, what can we expect?” Between host Terry Gross and her guest, New York Times reporter Catie Edmondson, they labeled the House Republicans as “far right” or “hard right” 32 times. Democrats apparently don’t have an extreme.     Nine days later, on Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep laid out the red carpet for House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries to announce on the debt-ceiling debate, “We are not going to pay a ransom note to extremists in the other party." Republicans were suicidal in their opposition, Inskeep suggested: “You'd say to Republicans, "Drive the car off the cliff. We are not going to grab the wheel." Jeffries replied: "We're not going to let the car go off the cliff even though there are people who are willing to do it."      On the PBS NewsHour, NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith said last October “what's happening in the House is a reflection of a broader divide in the Republican Party, where there's maybe like 20 percent or 30 percent of Republicans who don't want to burn it all down.”     To NPR, the only “election deniers” are Republicans, and they won’t remind anyone that Hakeem Jeffries and the star Democrats on the January 6 Committee argued Trump wasn’t actually elected, that maybe he was installed with the help of the Russian government. Berliner pointed out how Congressman Adam Schiff was on 25 times to push the Democrat line. Fox News found the number of segments was actually 32.     NPR offered live coverage of every minute of the House January 6 Committee, in daytime and in prime time, a committee where Speaker Pelosi would not allow the opposing party to choose their own committee members. This year, hearings of the Biden impeachment inquiry or the Mayorkas impeachment received zero live coverage, despite Democrats being allowed to choose their own committee members.  It suggests Democratic-run hearings are “historic” and “newsworthy” and even nonpartisan, while Republican-organized hearings should be buried as serving no public purpose whatsoever.     NPR is a hub of the leftist argument that the current election is all about the survival of democracy, and that electing Republicans is the end of democracy. This leads to a serious tilt in the media. On the NPR-distributed weekly talk show Left Right & Center, the alleged “Center” of the show, former NPR anchorman David Greene, proclaimed: I think the bind that a lot of journalists are in is, how can we be passionate believers in democracy and not be biased in a presidential election?” Greene said he knows “voters get to decide,” but “Can you believe in democracy without being pro-Biden?”     At least in this case, Republican voice Sarah Isgur answered Yes. I would also answer yes, that in a democracy, conservatives and Republicans deserve to be half a debate, and the so-called defenders of democracy sound like the squashers of debate and democracy. They silence opposition by claiming every one of us conspires to end democracy.     The people who are opposed to independent, fact-based journalism in this debate are not the conservatives. It is NPR itself that refuses to operate in a nonpartisan manner that allows both sides to speak and is willing to cover stories and hearings that the Democratic Party would rather avoid. They take our money, and use it to smear us without rebuttal.
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Bill Maher Has Video: Stormy Daniels Was a 'Bad Witness,' Flip-Flopped to Victim

By: Tim Graham — May 11th 2024 at 14:02
On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host complained about how the Democrats from Merrick Garland on down "blew it at every turn" on creating legal problems for Trump, so now before the election, "it's Stormy or bust." Even there, Maher argued porn star Stormy Daniels is a "bad witness" because she has changed her story in front of this jury, from empowered porn actress to victim. On HBO @BillMaher frets Dems had multiple chances “to put Trump on trial...but blew it at every turn,” then points out it’s “Stormy or bust” but she’s “a bad witness” because what she claimed this week at the trial is “quite in variance with what she said to me in 2018” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/C5WdqErsaV — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) May 11, 2024 Maher said: "Let me show you a little video. This is when I had Stormy on in 2018 and first I asked her about why she had sex with trump. Listen to that, and then listen to what she says after that and we’re going to talk about the trial because it's quite at variance with what she said to me in 2018." First she said “I have no idea” why she allegedly had sex with Trump. Maher said “you said this is not a #MeToo case,” and she agreed: “I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced of blackmailed… they tried to shove me in the #MeToo box to further their own agenda. First of all, I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth and I'm not a victim in that regard.” Maher said “That’s not what she’s saying now. She's talking about he was bigger and blocking the way. It's all the #MeToo buzzwords. She said there was a power, an imbalance of power for sure. My hands were shaking so hard. Said she blacked out. Blacked out? She's a porn star!" New York Times columnist Frank Bruni tried to joke he might black out with Trump, too. Maher crudely said she has sex with strangers routinely. New York Post columnist Douglas Murray agreed with Maher: “Everyone who is hanging on the hope of Stormy Daniels being the way to get Trump in prison is going to have another disappointment coming.” Later, Maher applauded New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn’s comments about not being Pravda for Team Biden. Bruni agreed that reporters shouldn’t "sugar coat” Biden’s flaws or just feed voters “baby bird style.” But Murray said everyone can see through the media, that in 2020 they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story "because they wanted to get their guy in."  In the end, Bruni came around to the real Times viewpoint, you can't fail to present Trump as a threat to democracy:  But here’s thing we can’t do. We need to be honest about them both, we do not ignore and sugarcoat Biden's shortcomings. But we also can’t do this ‘Here's one that story about Trump, here's one bad story about Biden.' We can't enforce this mathematical equivalence, right?  You’ve got one candidate who has delusions or aspirations to a quasi-fascist state. You have another who's going to mix up the names of world leaders and need a midday nap. It’s not eenie-meanie-miney-mo.
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NewsBusters Podcast: Hillary's Hot Talk of Hitler and Bimbo Eruptions

By: Tim Graham — May 10th 2024 at 23:00
Hillary Clinton was the big guest Thursday on MSNBC's Morning Joe. MSNBC’s headline on their YouTube video was "Joe Biden is the only choice for women who value freedom. Isn’t that just perfect for that network and that show? Abortion = freedom.  Hillary pleased the MSNBC crowd by saying there’s no choice for voters between Biden and Trump: "One is yes, old and effective, has passed legislation that I think is going to put America on such a strong footing for the future....The other is old and dangerous. I mean, why is that a hard choice for people?" Hillary also thought she should have been way ahead in 2016. Now we're reliving 2016 in a Manhattan courtroom, and Stormy Daniels was the star witness this week. The richest vein of hypocrisy was Hillary accusing Trump on hush money. He "went to such great lengths to try to squash, bury, kill stories, pay off people, because he understood the electoral significance of them." As if the Clintons never tried to squash and kill stories by female accusers!  Then Joe Scarborough descended into his Nazi parallels with Trump again, goading Hillary to unload all the "Trump is Hitler" talk. She said he's a dictator who will end democracy, and Republicans are "people who care more about a future tax cut than the sanctity of the Constitution." Together, they've spending almost eight years spreading this bizarre notion that eventually everyone will listen to them and agree with them, as long as the media keeps hammering away at the "fascist." They’re going to keep being disappointed. The press is constantly failing unless and until Trump is ruined. They're quite a fun bunch to watch. At the end, we notice Kamala Harris cackling over saying the word "Ovaries!" at a group of male reporters while she's visiting an abortion clinic as a campaign stop. It sounds sexist, like men don't know women's body parts. And The NPR Politics Podcast underlines why NPR obsessed this week over Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her failed attempt to boot Speaker Mike Johnson. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 
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CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview

By: Tim Graham — May 10th 2024 at 12:54

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 post CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Column: CNN Deploys a 'Fact Checker' for Trump, Not for Biden

By: Tim Graham — May 10th 2024 at 06:02
On May 8, President Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not a Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record – and Donald Trump’s. CNN's 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 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 – the global Covid pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached new records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 165.6 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. Non-farm 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 nine percent when I came to office, nine percent.”  That’s ridiculous! It’s a bald-faced lie. Inflation was 1.4 percent, 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.” 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 DA 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 lame spin. On May 7, 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 Soros is “a frequent target of anti-Semitic 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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NewsBusters Podcast: A Fun Day on Capitol Hill Truth-Telling About NPR

By: Tim Graham — May 8th 2024 at 21:39
The House Republicans on the Energy & Commerce Committee invited me to testify on Wednesday about allegations of bias at National Public Radio. The expose by former NPR business editor Uri Berliner galvanized the Republicans to introduce several bills about defunding NPR after more than 50 years of taxpayer support. Is there any hope that NPR will change its biased ways? Don't be wildly optimistic. However, I told them they should hold more hearings and press new NPR CEO Katharine Maher to explain how their content serves all the public, and not just the Democrat fraction. Maher declined this invitation, insisting she had an previously schedule all-day board meeting. We'll hope this committee can find a date to ask her to justify all the tilt we've been exposing.  I reminded Congress that supposedly civil NPR has in the last few years endorsed the book In Defense of Looting, called a book "excellent" that claimed anti-police riots should be called "rebellions," and hailed a movie called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Then there is their attack on Republicans.  On January 18, 2023, the NPR interview show Fresh Air headlined their show, “How will the hard-right Republicans in Congress wield their newfound power?” Gross began: “Now that Kevin McCarthy has assumed his new role as speaker of the House, a position he won after making concessions to the far right of his party, what can we expect?” Between host Terry Gross and her guest, New York Times reporter Catie Edmondson, they labeled the House Republicans as “far right” or “hard right” 32 times. Democrats apparently don’t have an extreme. Nine days later, on Morning Edition, host Steve Inskeep laid out the red carpet for House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries to announce on the debt-ceiling debate, “We are not going to pay a ransom note to extremists in the other party." Republicans were suicidal in their opposition, Inskeep suggested: “You'd say to Republicans, "Drive the car off the cliff. We are not going to grab the wheel." Jeffries replied: "We're not going to let the car go off the cliff even though there are people who are willing to do it." On the PBS NewsHour, NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith said last October “what's happening in the House is a reflection of a broader divide in the Republican Party, where there's maybe like 20 percent or 30 percent of Republicans who don't want to burn it all down.” Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 
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Column: PolitiFact Shames Talk of 'Outside Agitators' at College Protests

By: Tim Graham — May 8th 2024 at 05:30
You can tell when the PolitiFact website is going to negotiate around the facts. On May 7, their top headline on the home page asked: “Are ‘outside agitators’ co-opting campus protests?” This isn’t quite the right question. The media have presented these events as “student” protests, so if half the participants aren’t college students, how would they describe the non-students? PolitiFact writers Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu and Loreben Turquero offered this summary: 1. Police, city and university officials nationwide have blamed “outside agitators” for campus protests but have provided little evidence for their claims. 2. Law enforcement experts say police often consider “outside agitators” to be people who move from city to city and are paid to be agitators. 3.  Historians say government and law officials commonly use the “outside agitator” narrative to delegitimize protesters and their demands. First, the “little evidence” is a weird claim, when PolitiFact’s article acknowledges facts like the New York Police Department reported that 32 out of 112 people arrested at Columbia’s private campus were unaffiliated with the university. At nearby City College, 102 out of 170 people arrested were not students. Add it up, and 134 out of 282 protesters were not students. So when Mayor Eric Adams complains about “outside agitators,” he’s not in need of a “fact check.” They even scolded leftist Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) over their “agitator” concerns. They did not mention the recent story of an outside agitator named James Carlson, who was part of the army who briefly occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. He’s a 40-year-old trust fund heir who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $3.4 million. PolitiFact typically seeks out “experts” to match the narratives it wants to underline. They don’t like people suggesting these protesters aren’t local and they might be paid to protest. They found William & Mary law professor Timothy Zick to define the outside agitator spin: "It was used as sort of a phrase that would link protesters, no matter how peaceful they were, to Communists and other infiltrators who were causing disruption." The term is used to cast doubt on protester “sincerity.” Angus Johnson, "historian of student activism" at Hostos Community College in New York, explained, "The idea behind the concept of the outside agitator is that dissent can never be coming from the people who are expressing that dissent.”  They also turned to Johnston to underline, “Some experts have been quick to note the main goal of a protest is to get others to join in.”    This spin is nothing like how the media spun the Tea Party protests against ObamaCare legislation. They sought to discredit them as donor-funded “Astroturf” (not grass-roots). They went looking for the most racist or ignorant-sounding sign they could find, to present protesters as a kooky “fringe” movement.  NBC’s Chuck Todd decried “town hall madness.” The front page of The Boston Globe lamented the “quarrelsome masses hollering questions downloaded from activist websites." MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ranted, “The truth is out about the societal sabotage dressed up as phony protests against health care reform...When Hamas does it or Hezbollah does it, it is called terrorism.” That looks pretty funny right now, since these protesters are a much better match for that Hamas spin. All of this was about "delegitimizing protesters and their demands." Protests are covered in wildly divergent ways, depending on whether the activists are on the Left or the Right. This is just as true for liberal “fact checking” organizations as it is for liberal media outlets. 
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