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A host on liberal MSNBC claimed that teaching students the Bible off-campus during school hours would make them a part of what she called the “Church of Trump” and help “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Alex Wagner’s remarks came in the most recent in a series of three reports over the past two weeks on MSNBC and/or parent company NBC on the nonprofit LifeWise Academy, whose buses pick up some 30,000 students across the country during the school week and take them to an affiliated church or other off-campus religious institution, presents them with Bible lessons, then returns them to their schools.
The three news and/or commentary pieces were critical, to varying degrees, of the nonprofit for supposedly “blurring” the lines of church and state, with one claiming that LifeWise has become a tool of the Right to turn liberal, Democrat-run cities more conservative.
In the most recent piece, Wagner even sought to link LifeWise to former President Donald Trump.
The left-leaning host said that Trump has “managed to turn his Christian followers into politically pious voters, members of the Church of Trump.”
The connection of Trump to the Bible-teaching nonprofit, Wagner claimed, lies in that LifeWise influences “the minds of public school kids in progressive cities like Columbus [in Ohio].” She went so far as to say the Bible program would “determine what happens at the ballot box.”
Neither MSNBC nor NBC responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
LifeWise’s practices might surprise some, but they’re entirely legal in the United States, says Joel Penton, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO.
The Supreme Court, in a 1952 case, Zorach v. Clauson, permitted New York City students to leave their classrooms for religious instruction. Since that case is largely unknown, Penton says, many parents are often surprised when offered the option of midday Bible lessons for their children. Parents often assume that the government has full control over their child’s school day.
“I know what people are feeling,” Penton said. “They’re feeling that the school owns that time—the state owns the time of 8 a.m. [to] 3 p.m., or whatever the school day is, and that’s just not true.”
Currently, LifeWise serves 323 schools in 12 states, totaling about 30,000+ K-12 students, Penton said in a recent phone interview.
The nonprofit founder says that LifeWise serves students in 12 states, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Some 250 of the programs serve elementary schools, a majority of the total.
There’s no charge for participation in LifeWise, Penton said, for either school systems or the student participants.
“We want to make the Bible available to all of them [students]. And that’s what we’ve been trying to build, a plug-and-play program any community can implement,” he said. Forthcoming programs are set for schools in Washington state and even California, in a Los Angeles County school.
He said he hopes to have LifeWise operating in at least 20 states and 500 schools by this fall.
The post K-12 Bible Lessons Program Akin to Proselytizing for ‘Church of Trump,’ MSNBC Host Claims appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.”
That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the “American Masters” series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS.
Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen.
This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley, nor a fair and balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’ liberal arrogance.
In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right.
Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994.
Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism.
Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues, “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.”
This would match the spirit of PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.”
Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice.
Have they watched five minutes of “The Reidout” or “The View”? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility.
But on PBS, they must locate experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right … by the end, it was clear the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here.
PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics.
Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.”
Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.
Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Firing Lies: PBS ‘Documentary’ Tars, Feathers Onetime Host William F. Buckley appeared first on The Daily Signal.
They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”
They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.
On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”
They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”
PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”
Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?
As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”
Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.
Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”
Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”
If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”
These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”
How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”
Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Ronna Romney McDaniel was with MSNBC for just four days. Sharing airwaves with the former Republican National Committee chairwoman was more than her colleagues could bear. They curled their lips, as if she had the cooties.
“It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor,” Mika Brzezinski huffed.
Rachel Maddow snarled, “I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable.”
After McDaniel’s only appearance as a contributor, Chuck Todd growled at “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation.”
MSNBC’s anchors gave their brass the bird, turned them into plucked peacocks, and tossed them into the Potomac. The emasculated executives soon took on water.
“No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” gasped NBCUniversal’s Cesar Conde, extolling groupthink rather than intellectual diversity.
“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” Conde gurgled, just before he sank into the river.
MSNBC’s mutiny was the newsroom equivalent of what too often befalls conservative speakers on college campuses.
“Cancel him!”
“Boot her!”
“SHUT UP!”
The only thing missing at MSNBC was a mob of black-clad bookers breaking cameras and setting makeup rooms ablaze.
As a news organization, MSNBC botched a perfect opportunity. Several times each week, in an election year, its hosts could have put cameras in McDaniel’s face and asked her tough questions on live TV:
Why focus solely on Trump? MSNBC could have grilled McDaniel like a salmon across GOP-related topics:
MSNBC staffers could have interrogated McDaniel, and she would have had to take it. Unlike her old job, she could not say, “No comment,” and then hide in her office (which was not her style). McDaniel could have fulfilled her contract and faced on-air questions or clammed up and surrendered her reported $300,000 annual salary.
Turn the tables: Imagine that Fox News Channel hired Biden’s former climate czar John Kerry. Rather than implode on camera, my Fox News colleagues eagerly would ask Kerry such questions as:
Nothing analogous will face the ex-chief of the RNC because NBC = DNC.
John Chancellor and David Brinkley must be revolving in their graves.
Rather than crumple like aluminum foil, NBC’s brass should have sacked their insolent, insubordinate “talent.” Ambitious journalists from newsrooms across America would have leapt to replace them.
Brzezinski, Maddow, and Todd are all replaceable. Especially Todd.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post REVOLTING: Crybaby Journos Give NBC Brass the Bird appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Onion, a far-left satire site that used to be funny, is now part of a fire sale being conducted by parent company G/O Media.
The post Nolte: Far-Left Satire Site ‘The Onion’ Part of Parent Company Fire Sale appeared first on Breitbart.
The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network.
In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn’t—you wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.”
There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the Republican National Committee and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy.
Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact-checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in “Animal House” saying, “when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters.
This was the essence of Maddow’s rant:
I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn’t really work. That this last election, it wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.
Every conservative who’s ever watched Maddow lowlights knows that she was a leader in the Collusion Corps, someone who obsessed night after night over how the 2016 election was fraudulent because the Russians interfered with it. MSNBC doesn’t suggest that every election is fraudulent. It’s only when Democrats lose that they imply (for years) that it was fraudulent.
Since Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 and ran around telling people it was stolen from her, Maddow has hosted a series of fawnathons with her. They discussed why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to back Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018, Clinton even suggested the Russians may have used the National Rifle Association to funnel money into the election.
Maddow concluded by lobbying the executives who allow her on air: “Acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now.”
That may be the funniest line of all. Maddow is notorious for refusing to concede she’s wrong, especially about Trump.
In 2019, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple constructed a devastating timeline of all of Maddow’s promotions of the baseless dungpile called the Steele Dossier. He noted Maddow called it “creepy” and “unwarranted” when Michael Isikoff said she’d “given a lot of credence” to the dossier on his podcast.
Why couldn’t she acknowledge she was wrong? Instead, “Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response to the Erik Wemple Blog.”
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Hyperbolic MSNBC’s Ronna McDaniel Debacle appeared first on The Daily Signal.
NBC News podcaster Chuck Todd is falsely claiming that his McCarthyite attack on former RNC chief Ronna McDaniel is not political.
The post Nolte: Chuck Todd Falsely Claims Attack on Ronna McDaniel ‘Not Ideological’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Among black voters, 49(!) percent agree the media are “truly the enemy of the people.”
The post Nolte: Majority Say Media ‘Enemy of the People,’ Parrot Biden Talking Points appeared first on Breitbart.
When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.
But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.
Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.
Rasmussen finds that Trump’s characterization is the majority view:
60% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” as Trump said in 2019, including 30% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, including 21% who Strongly Disagree.
That is an extraordinary finding. Respondents were asked this question:
Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The media are “truly the enemy of the people”?
And a clear majority said that they agree. The press has utterly squandered whatever respect it once enjoyed.
The Rasmussen survey also asked about the Democrats’ “bloodbath” hoax:
Former President Donald Trump recently said that it would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win in November. Which is more likely, that he was talking about auto workers losing jobs or that he was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters?
The result:
Forty-nine percent (49%) of voters believe Trump was talking about auto workers losing jobs when he warned of a “bloodbath,” while 40% think Trump was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.
Basically, Democrats follow the Democratic Party press and swallow the Democrats’ talking points:
Among voters who Strongly Approve of Biden’s job performance as president, 78% believe Trump’s “bloodbath” comment was about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. By contrast, among voters who Strongly Disapprove of Biden’s performance, 84% think Trump was referring to auto workers losing jobs.
But again, returning to good news, most voters believe that the media’s coverage is driven by the Biden administration’s talking points:
Among all Likely Voters, 63% believe it is likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign, including 42% who say it’s Very Likely. Twenty-nine percent (29%) don’t think it’s likely media coverage is dictated by the Biden campaign, including 11% who say it’s Not At All Likely.
Majorities of every political category – 78% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats and 61% of unaffiliated voters – believe it’s at least somewhat likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign.
So even half of Democrats admit that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are servants of the Democratic Party. The bottom line is that the liberal press serves certain functions on behalf of the Democratic Party: it reinforces Democrats’ talking points and keeps Democratic voters riled up. Those are valuable contributions, to be sure. But the days when the liberal media could actually drive public opinion are long gone.
For the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the partisan Democrats of our “legacy media” treated the “Pelosi-Picked Panel” on Jan. 6 as a dominant story, worthy of hundreds of hours of television, both live coverage of the hearings and breathless cycles of previews and reviews.
Once Republicans took over the House, would we have predicted this kind of committee oversight coverage would go from “hero” to “zero”?
On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held public hearings that were supposed to feature live testimony by Hunter Biden. The GOP-led committee titled the hearing “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office,” which was already a turnoff for Biden-voter reporters.
That night, NBC offered two minutes. ABC and CBS did nothing. In January, Hunter Biden pulled a stunt by showing up and demanding a public hearing, and the networks covered that. On Feb. 28, Hunter showed up for a hearing behind closed doors, and the networks covered that. But when he skipped the public hearing he allegedly wanted, they skipped the story?
Even those prestigious national newspapers—with the slogans about “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—offered a big fat zero in their print editions. Nothing on Joe Biden’s abuse of office was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal.
Then consider “public” broadcasting—the ones who have automatic and undeserved prestige because of their “for the people” branding. The “PBS NewsHour” offered nothing, not 10 hot seconds. It offered eight minutes on a potential government shutdown, so its journalists were working on Capitol Hill.
The taxpayer-funded hour also carried five minutes on the “controversial” Texas border-enforcement law, five minutes on the Biden administration setting a timeline for ending the gasoline-powered automobile, and almost seven minutes on a Mississippi police “goon squad” that brutalized some black men. “Systemic racism” is always a staple.
National “Public” Radio was a bad joke, as in its show “All Things Considered” never considered a story on the Biden abuses hearing. NPR’s homepage was topped the next morning by its hot story: new details on Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-hacking scandal of 2011. Its media reporter, David Folkenflik, files a hostile story on Murdoch or Fox News on a regular basis, like he was an operative being paid by MSNBC and CNN.
NPR had a Biden mention on its homepage. Its young White House reporter, Deepa Shivaram, had a TikTok-like video shoot on Joe Biden grabbing a trendy boba tea in Las Vegas under the headline “Food stops can tell you a lot about a campaign.” Shilling Shivaram cheerfully explained, “Asian Americans make up a critical voting bloc in Nevada,” and, “Experts on food and politics say that Biden ordering this could also send a message to people who think he’s too old for the job.”
I scrolled all the way down the homepage looking for a Biden-hearing story, to no avail. At the very bottom, there was this news from the insect world: “Scientists studied how cicadas pee. Their insights could shed light on fluid dynamics.”
That makes it easy to describe the quality of NPR’s coverage of the Biden family scandals. It’s a warm bucket of cicada urine.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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The post NO SURPRISE: Liberal Media Ignore House Panel’s Hunter Biden Hearing appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The legacy media is clipping and spinning Donald Trump’s comments where he stated that if he doesn’t get elected, the country’s going to experience a bloodbath, saying it’s a call to violence.
Trump spoke at a campaign rally Saturday for Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, in Vandalia, Ohio. At the event, he said:
Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.
Taken out of context, this line from the former president sounds like a call to violence to some.
However, in the previous line, he said, “We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line [into the U.S.], and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars.” He was criticizing the importation of foreign-made vehicles, specifically, those made by Chinese manufacturers.
See the full clip:
The media has jumped on the issue, saying Trump’s comments are hearkening back to Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters protested at the U.S. Capitol Building during the certification of the 2020 election results after Trump asked them to “peacefully and patriotically” protest outside the Capitol.
Numerous media outlets called out Trump for what they considered his call to violent action.
CNN analyst Maria Cardona said Trump has a history of “dark, violent, dangerous, rhetoric.” Cardona also said that Trump’s “cult MAGA supporters and followers totally know exactly what he was telling them. They demonstrated that on January 6.”
MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, brought Biden campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler onto her show, who said, “This is who Donald Trump is: A loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.”
On ABC’s “Face the Nation,” former Vice President Mike Pence fought back against allegations that the former president was calling for violence, saying, “The president was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was visibly angry after he was criticized for promoting the idea that Trump was calling for violence and for saying “democracy was on the line” in connection with Trump’s comments. Scarborough said those who claimed Trump was not calling for violence are “idiots” and that their comments were “bull—-.”
The “Morning Joe” host said, “He [Trump] knew what he was doing. We’re not stupid. Americans aren’t stupid. He was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath.”
Joe Scarborough is having an UNHINGED Meltdown because he got called out for amplifying the fake “Bloodbath” Hoax ?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 18, 2024
pic.twitter.com/IRkQGPo3nB
Trump responded to the media’s reaction with a Truth Social post, saying, “The fake news media, and their Democrat partners in the destruction of our nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The post Egregious Examples of the Media Spinning Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Comment as Call for Violence appeared first on The Daily Signal.
“Both sides furious” was one reporter’s summary when special counsel Robert Hur testified in a House hearing to explain his decision not to prosecute President Joe Biden for willfully retaining classified documents, not just from his vice-presidential years but from his Senate career.
The network TV stories that night were the closest thing to “fair and balanced” we’ve seen in a long time. The Republicans decried the double standard, that Donald Trump is being prosecuted and Biden is not. The Democrats complained Hur’s report made Biden look feeble-minded (like nobody’s drawn that conclusion).
But let’s take a look at the bigger picture. While Hur was conducting his investigation, we joked that you should put his face on a milk carton. He was missing from the press.
Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in January 2023. Bill D’Agostino reported at NewsBusters that over about nine months of morning and evening news coverage—from Feb. 1, 2023, through Nov. 20, 2023—ABC, CBS, and NBC spent just four minutes and 52 seconds on Hur’s inquiry.
But then there’s the breakdown. ABC aired 204 of those 292 seconds, or 70% of that airtime. NBC barely offered a minute (64 seconds), and CBS offered one paltry, 24-second news brief.
That’s not the way the network news covered Russian collusion and Robert Mueller, is it? They obsessed almost daily over that probe. From Jan. 20, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2018, NewsBusters reported the Big Three evening newscasts alone aired 2,092 minutes on investigations of Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russian government. It should not be surprising that this was the single most covered topic in their coverage of Trump in that time frame.
Here’s some rough math: Trump was punished with 858 overwhelmingly negative minutes on Russiagate in 2018, while Biden drew less than five Hur minutes over most of 2023. Very roughly, that’s about 170 to 1. But remember, the 858-minute number is only for the evening newscasts.
If Trump was “scandal-plagued,” the newscasters were the plague. If they made the political weather, it was a daily hurricane for Trump, while Biden was rewarded with “mostly sunny.”
That doesn’t mean Trump was damaged. In 2018, Trump’s approval rating actually improved, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. But that’s not how the anti-Trump media designed it.
These numbers underline the fraudulence of former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron’s slogan when he claimed, “We’re not at war. We’re at work.” Metaphorically, they were at war under Trump as the Scandal Police, and now they spend most days at the doughnut shop.
This is why the media has a major trust problem with anyone who’s not a Democrat. Trump gets Scandal Police brutality. Biden scandals are avoided until they cannot be avoided, and then reporters often repeat the taunting mantra of “no evidence, no evidence.” As if it’s not their job to look for evidence.
This bifurcated media approach to scandal presents each and every Democrat prosecutor of Trump—whether elected or appointed by Biden—as nonpartisan and apolitical. Well, unless someone like Hur spurs a bad news cycle for Biden; then he’s a “Trump appointee”—ahem, before he became a Biden administration appointee.
The Biden Justice Department is also treated like it’s as pure as newly fallen snow.
People see through this. But journalists keep thinking that people are stupid when they don’t accept their preaching. Their eternally smug self-righteousness ensures they will never be trusted again.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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The post Special Counsel’s Testimony Again Reveals Media Bias in Political Scandals appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Some things even the Babylon Bee can’t make up:
Bed bugs found at MSNBC’s Manhattan headquarters caused staffers to scatter ahead of the left-leaning network’s Super Tuesday coverage, The Post has learned.
According to a memo obtained by The Post, an “unidentified insect” was spotted Sunday in the recently revamped studio 3A — home to special election coverage and “The Rachel Maddow Show” — at 30 Rock in Midtown.
Additional studios on the third floor were also shuttered “out of an abundance of caution.”
Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you tell the difference between a bed bug and an MSNBC news person? They are both repellant parasites. You’d think professional courtesy would make MSNBC welcome bed bugs.
When you watch Walter Cronkite, my recent piece should have read, “you not only CBS but hear it too.” That was certainly true, particularly of Cronkite’s Vietnam coverage, but as Douglas Brinkley explained in the 819-page Cronkite, there’s more that people should know.
Cronkite had worked with Sidney Lumet to adapt the radio show “You Are There” for television. Lumet directed Network, which Cronkite saw in a private screening. As Brinkley notes, the film “hit close to home,” as “much about TV newsgathering was a sham.” As anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) explained:
Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth. Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF!
Network also cast Walter Cronkite’s daughter Cathy as Mary Ann Gifford, an heiress kidnapped by the Ecumenical Liberation Army. In the style of Patricia Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Gifford joins the Ecumenicals in bank robberies, which they record on film. When the Communist Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield) uses the footage in her “Mao Tse-Tung Hour” show, Gifford calls her out.
“You f—— fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?” Hobbs tells Gifford to “blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass!”
Network bagged four Oscars, and for cinéma vérité about television it’s hard to beat. On March 10, if anybody watched Network instead of the Academy Awards it would be hard to blame them.
As in Christian Nationalism Nonsense, and the always insightful Mark Tapson explains it for you:
The label “Christian nationalism” is the new Progressive dog-whistle for “scary American patriots.” It signals to Progressives that Americans who love God and country – which used to be the norm before our descent into a post-Christian, post-patriotism culture – are a subversive danger to democracy. Christianity, after all, imposes a moral code that chafes Progressive libertines, and nationalism, with its emphasis on state sovereignty and secure borders, frustrates their globalist ambitions.
Whenever Christians wave the Stars and Stripes, wear a MAGA hat, or pray that God blesses our country, the Left hyperventilates over the specter of a fundamentalist theocracy on the rise. They envision America becoming a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia in which white male Christian mullahs hang homosexuals and imprison women for seeking abortions. The Left’s vision of the separation of church and state, therefore, is one in which Christian patriots and their values are best excluded from the halls of government power entirely.
And so on, with Heidi Przybyla of Politico terrified that these Christian nationalists, “believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.” So much for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” from the Declaration of Independence. The woke leftists, in effect, now issue a declaration of war.
Add Christian nationalist to “white supremacists,” “MAGA Republicans,” “semi-fascists,” and those 2016 loser Hillary Clinton smeared as “deplorables.” These all signify that the speaker doesn’t like you, but there’s more to it. Pronouncing people enemies of the state is to justify violence against them. This comes at a time when the Biden Junta (“Our Democracy”) has a domestic Nazi-Soviet Pact working, and sees the greatest threat from those citizens who want the nation to be great. So all those deplorable Christian nationalist and MAGA types could wind up excluded from more than the halls of government. Don’t say it can’t happen here.
CBS has fired Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter who was “pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal, and the Hunter Biden laptop.” After dumping Herridge, “CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources.” These files, “likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS” and are now “presumptively the property of CBS News.”
Joseph Klein traces these issues to Dan Rather, but they really go back to CBS “anchorman” Walter Cronkite, once billed as the most trusted man in America. As Douglas Brinkley showed in Cronkite, many of Cronkite’s dispatches during WWII “were propagandistic.” Cronkite coached John F. Kennedy about “getting across” on television, and long before Watergate, Cronkite “orchestrated the secret tape recording of the Republicans’ credentials committee meeting.” This was conducted, “under the shady rationale that the covert act was good for democracy.” According to Brinkley, “it was a real black eye to Cronkite,” who said of Jimmy Carter, “He’s got one of the best brains of anybody I’ve known.”
Cronkite wrapped his regular broadcast with “that’s the way it is,” but as one wag put it, when you watched Walter Cronkite you not only saw CBS, you heard it too. That was also true of Dan Rather, who in 1986 made news his own self. A man confronted Rather demanding “Kenneth what’s the frequency?” and duly beat the fertilizer out of the CBS anchorman. The network put it off to mistaken identity, which could be true in one sense.
Government and establishment media are Siamese twins, joined at the mouth. As Catherine Herridge confirms, cross the government and you’re a goner, with your documents confiscated. Consider also former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, author of Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, published in 2014.
Readers learn that CBS News president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, advisor to Obama and up to his eyeballs in the Benghazi scandal. Joel Molinoff came to CBS after serving the Obama White House as director of the Intelligence Advisory Board, and before that worked for the NSA. CBS also hired Mike Morell, formerly a deputy director of the CIA. So as Attkisson explained, CBS stories on Benghazi, Obamacare and so forth might as well have been written by the White House.
Attkisson’s computer was infiltrated with spyware proprietary to government agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The intruders planted classified information, adding “the possible threat of criminal prosecution.” Ten years later, those who expose the scandals of the Biden Junta can be sure that Big Brother is watching.
One of the big stories in the New York Times today is another Clarence Thomas smear, but with a twist: “Justice Thomas Hires Law Clerk Accused of Sending Racist Text Messages.”
The story is about Crystal Clanton, who graduated from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in 2022. She is coming off a clerkship with Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit, who calls her “an outstanding law clerk.” Justice Thomas has now hired her to clerk on the Supreme Court.
For the last seven years, Crystal Clanton has been dogged by reports of an email that she allegedly wrote, in which she supposedly said, “I hate black people.” The Times story admits that they have not seen any such message, and are relying on reporting by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, perhaps the least trustworthy source in America.
In 2017, Clanton was running field operations for Turning Point USA. Mayer did a hit piece on Turning Point that included a variety of allegations, including the one against Clanton. Mayer claimed to have seen a screen shot of the text. The story has dogged Clanton ever since. When she was offered a clerkship on the 11th Circuit by Judge Pryor, seven left-wing members of Congress lodged an ethics complaint against Pryor, based on Clanton’s alleged text. That complaint was investigated by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the complaint to be without merit and dismissed it.
This January 2022 story has the details. Clanton left Turning Point after the claim against her was first made, but the Second Circuit found it to be false:
The Turning Point executive “had determined that the source of the allegations against (Clanton) was a group of former employees,” [Second Circuit Chief Judge Debra] Livingston wrote. “One of these employees was fired after the organization learned that this person had created fake text messages to be used against co-workers, to make it appear that those co-workers had engaged in misconduct when they had not.”
Pryor and Maze knew about the allegations against Clanton when they interviewed and hired her. And both determined the allegations of racist behavior by Clanton were untrue and found she was highly qualified to serve as a clerk for them, Livingston wrote.
“There is nothing in the record to dispute any of this,” she noted.
Charlie Kirk is also quoted in that story:
“The media has alleged that Crystal said and did things that are simply untrue,” Kirk wrote. “I have first-hand knowledge of the situations reported on and I can assure that the media has made serious errors and omissions. The sources of these reports are a group of former employees that have a well-documented desire to malign Crystal’s reputation.”
The employee who was fired had “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” Kirk wrote.
Crystal Clanton got to know Ginny Thomas when she worked at Turning Point, and she was evidently so distraught about her departure from that group that she lived with the Thomases for nearly a year. So Thomas knows her well. He wrote a letter in connection with the Second Circuit investigation:
“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.”
Clanton didn’t respond to the Times’s request for comment in the story they published today, but back in 2017 she told The New Yorker that “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am, and the same was true when I was a teenager.”
So there the matter rests. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that the Left never forgets. No matter that she was cleared by an investigation by one of the nation’s courts of appeals; once the Left gets its hands on a smear it never lets go. It will never stop trying to destroy your life. And of course, The New Yorker and the New York Times are two of the worst offenders.
Also, what makes this old story worthy of the Times’s A section? Only the fact that Justice Thomas is involved. The Times doesn’t care about a law clerk of whom few people have heard, but it cares deeply about smearing the country’s top conservative African-American. But what, exactly, are we supposed to infer from the Times story? That Clarence Thomas is weirdly favorable to those who hate black people?
A final irony: Supreme Court justices have no doubt hired any number of clerks who have written and spoken favorably about DEI, which actually is racist. But there is no controversy there: on the contrary, endorsing that form of racism is a badge of honor.
Dan Senor’s most recent Call Me Back podcast features Matti Friedman. Among many other things, Friedman is a former AP Jerusalem bureau staffer. It is his AP experience that prompted him to think through the wide world of sickness that we see in the reaction of the outside world to Israel’s current life-and-death struggle with Hamas. Senor asks good questions and lets the incredibly articulate Friedman speak.
Senor has posted the podcast with this introduction:
Every day we see news accounts “reported” by reputable journalists. There is typically one frame in the post-10/07 War: “Gazan Palestinians are the victims of Israel.” How does this happen? How do journalists actually operate in Gaza and around the world? And is this a window into what had Hamas figured out long before 10/07 — that the forces of barbarism could manipulate the intentional press reaction to their massacre of 10/07? That is why we wanted to sit down with Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism.
He writes regularly for The Free Press and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Before that he published Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, and before that Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.
Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hamas’s takeover of Gaza that led him to study with great detail how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs and the international community, and how they are working from the same playbook right now, perhaps quite masterfully.
I urge interested readers to check out the podcast below.
Here are the show notes citing Friedman’s work discussed in the podcast (I especially commend Friedman’s 2014 Tablet column linked below):
“The Wisdom of Hamas” — The Free Press.
“What if the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?” — The Free Press.
“There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'” — The New York Times.
“An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth” — Tablet Magazine.
“What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel” — The Atlantic.
Vaunce News 