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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new oil crisis: exploding trains.  Communities throughout the U.S. and Canada are waking up to the dark side of North America's energy boom:  Trains hauling crude oil are crashing, exploding and spilling in record numbers as a fast-growing industry outpaces the federal government's oversight.

The Editor says...
The article immediately above is one of those "We need more legislation" commercial for Big Government.  Big Oil is outrunning "the federal government's oversight."  Railroad companies apparently don't care if trains derail, you see, but if the government takes over, there will never be another train wreck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2017 by Andrew K. Dart

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

Poll: Plurality Of Americans Believes Media Makes Up Stories About Trump.  On the one hand, it's an amazing testament to how far public trust in the media has fallen that more Americans than not believe they're publishing false stories about the president.  On the other hand, how is this number not 100 percent?  It's not a matter of opinion.  The media does, in fact, sometimes publish honest-to-goodness fake news about Trump and his orbit.

Media Dishonesty Gives Trump Legitimate Talking Points.  If you listen to the media today, you'd be hard pressed to know that President Trump both complying with the law and with a court decision.  The media would prefer to make this all about dismantling Obamacare and ignore the fact President Obama had no constitutional authority to do what he did.  When the President blasts fake news, this is what he is talking about and this gives his supporters ample room to ignore the President's more outlandish attacks against the press.

Trump EPA to propose repealing Obama's climate regulation: document.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose repealing the Clean Power Plan — the Obama administration's centerpiece regulation to fight climate change — and plans to solicit input on a rule to replace it, according to an EPA document seen by Reuters.

The Editor says...
This article is accompanied by a photograph (left) which appears to be a photo of an industrial plant of some sort, with the dishonest caption, "Smoke is released into the sky at a refinery in Wilmington, California March 24, 2012."  The "smoke" being released is obviously water vapor, since it appears to be absorbed into the surrounding atmosphere within a few seconds of its release.  The contrast on the photo appears to have been enhanced to make the emission appear to be black as it leaves the vent, but smoke doesn't turn white and then disappear within a few seconds.  This appears to me to be a shamelessly dishonest attempt to make harmless vapor look like smoke.

Trump Fulfills Campaign Pledge on Contraception Mandate.  [Scroll down]  Today [10/6/2017], Trump made good on that pledge when his administration issued a new rule that will exempt organizations whose owners or shareholders harbor religious or moral objections to paying for certain types of birth control via health plans.  It goes without saying, of course, that this new rule is being grotesquely misrepresented by Obamacare apologists in the legacy "news" media.  The Washington Post, for example, reported the regulatory change under the following misleading headline:  "Trump administration narrows Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate."

Is Any Part Of The Russia Election Hacking Story True?  In June, Samuel Liles, the Department of Homeland Security's acting director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis Cyber Division, told Congress that "the Russian government tried to hack election-related computer systems in 21 states."  Then, earlier this month, the election hacking story made headlines again when DHS officials notified state officials in 21 states about the attempts to breach their voter registration systems.  This sparked renewed outrage from Democrats about how the election results had been "hacked" by Russia.  But then the story started to fall apart, when Wisconsin and California said DHS was wrong about their systems being targeted.  California found that Russia hadn't scanned its Secretary of State website at all.

Facebook admits it promoted fake Vegas massacre stories.  Facebook admitted Monday [10/2/2017] that its system automatically promoted stories that falsely identified the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre.  The social network said links from websites such as The Gateway Pundit and others were posted and spread across their site Sunday night.  The stories claimed the shooter was an "anti-Trump" Democrat and displayed pictures of a man who is not identified as a suspect.

Not Real News:  A look at what didn't happen this week.  A roundup of some of the most popular, but completely untrue, headlines of the week.  None of these stories are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media.  The Associated Press checked these out; here are the real facts: [...]

Don't Fall for Jimmy Kimmel's Cheap Zero-Sum Emotionalism.  In recent months, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel has taken to scaremongering his audience with well-worn Democratic Party talking points regarding health care insurance policy.  Between yuks, he occasionally accuses Republicans of being would-be baby killers, which is treated as an important political development because, well, Jimmy Kimmel is famous.  This week, the comedian was back to explain why the new Graham-Cassidy Republican "repeal" bill is bad news.  There were only two things wrong with his monologue:  Almost everything he said was either completely untrue or highly misleading, and his simplistic emotional appeal was completely disconnected from the real world.

Trump, racism, and the media's obsession.  If it weren't for their sick obsession with race, the national media would have next to nothing to talk about.  The October issue of The Atlantic magazine features a long essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates on President Trump being "The First White President," a lament about the shame Americans should feel in electing a white man after a black one.  It's been heralded by Coates' media peers as a "blockbuster" and something to "admire," since it goes on and on about racism and nothing else.  Legitimate reasons voters had for choosing Trump are legion (the suffocating politically-correct culture, immigration, Hillary Clinton's laugh) but Coates chalked up the entire 2016 outcome to white racists and Trump's whole agenda to bigotry.

Horsepucky News Courtesy of Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.  Remember, there are trillions of dollars at stake and all of the vested financial interests, writ large, have positioned themselves to do anything possible to draw down the support for President Trump's 'America-First' agenda.  Don't kid yourselves or sell your intelligence short; it ain't about Donald Trump per se, the opposition is against the policies of President Donald Trump.  Trump's 'America-First' policies are adverse to the interests of multinational corporations and the multinational financial institutions who underwrite those corporations.

European Commissioner the Wall Street Journal Cited Says Story Entirely False.  European Commission's Miguel Arias Canete denies ever telling the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. was changing the Trump administration position on Paris Climate Treaty.

MSNBC's Brian Williams Encourages Viewers to Share Storm Photos, 'Pretend' They're Their Own.  MSNBC's The 11th Hour host Brian Williams is probably regretting a flippant comment he made during the network's live coverage of Hurricane Irma on Sunday afternoon [9/10/2017], after it earned him mockery online.  While discussing a photo reporters in Tampa, Florida had taken of the intense winds, Williams instructed Florida viewers to not take similar photos of their own.  Instead, he suggested they steal this photo, share it, and "pretend you shot it."  "We'll look the other way," he helpfully added.

NBC News Incorrectly Labels Menendez a Republican Before Correcting Article Hours Later.  NBC News published an article Wednesday incorrectly labeling Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), currently in federal court on bribery charges, a Republican.  NBC styled Menendez as a Republican in the lede of the article, then confusingly labeled him a Democrat at the end of the introductory paragraph, the Daily Caller reported.  The article appears to be a wire from the Associated Press, but the original piece on the AP's website does not feature the mistake, suggesting it was added in by NBC.

If the Media Doesn't Tell the Truth, What Use Is It?  Yesterday [8/30/2017], Jim Treacher at The Daily Caller posted a story:  "Bill And Hillary Clinton Finally Sell Hamptons Mansion."  Only one problem:  Bill and Hillary didn't actually own the mansion.  Follow the link, and you get to the real story:  the Hamptons mansion that Bill and Hillary have rented in the past has been on the market and under contract for two years, and the sale finally closed.  There are lots of things that you could say about this — like observing that it's cool how people who were flat broke in 2000 can afford $150,000 a month rent for a summer place — but you can't honestly say "the Clintons finally sell their mansion."  This is why God made the passive voice:  you write a headline like the Free Beacon did — "Clinton Hamptons 'Summer Vacation Rental' Sells For $29 Million."

Left-Wing Outlets Spread False Story Claiming GOP Official Turned Down Disaster Aid.  A number of left-wing outlets spread a false story claiming Texas Republican Secretary of State Rolando Pablos turned down aid in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, and instead requested prayers.  The story appears to have spread from one sentence in an article from Canada's CBC News.  The story referenced an offer from the Canadian province of Quebec to send Texas "equipment and crews to help restore power and to provide blankets, beds, pillows and hygienic products."

Media & Politicians Admitting They Lied About Russia.  It has been nearly three weeks since The Nation pushed an explosive memo from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into mainstream consciousness with an article detailing the evidence that the DNC leaks last year could not have been the result of a Russian hack.  By continuing to ignore it, the US intelligence community and all the pundits and politicians who have advanced the Russian hacking narrative are tacitly admitting that they lied.

CNN's Republican Pundit Gave Thousands of Dollars to Dems, Including the Chairwoman of the DNC.  It turns out CNN's spokeswoman for Republicans is not as Republican as you might think.  Ana Navarro, who has been the perpetual presence as the "Republican" on many panels across the news spectrum, has donated thousands of dollars over the past two decades to some of the most controversial and partisan leaders of the Democratic Party, a new report finds.

It's time to chill the "free press".  Allowing Sarah Palin to continue her libel lawsuit against the New York Times "would chill expression by journalists who want to draw connections and inferences," Noah Feldman wrote in a column for Bloomberg News.  That is an excellent idea, because increasingly people in the press show a constant, malicious, and reckless disregard for the truth.  In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner killed a federal judge and five others, and severely wounded Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.  Democratic Party operatives spread the lie that a map targeting Giffords in the last election inspired the carnage.  However, Loughner did not vote in that election.  He is psychotic.  But the press keeps spreading this lie.

Field Report From The Left-Wing Violence in Arizona.  Today, the following morning, I open the Arizona Republic to see the headline "VIOLENCE ERUPTS!" with a picture of one sad [chump] on his knees in front of lines of police.  This apparently happened after the rally.  Wait, "VIOLENCE ERUPTS?"  No it didn't.  Nothing "erupted."  Protesters became violent.  There was no violence at all on the part of the Trump supporters.  None.  This is another example of fake news at its best, failing to even follow basic journalistic (and writing) rules of active voice in which a subject — the protesters — cause the action-eruption.  And the sad little Fake News media continues to whine about how it is treated.

Reuters deletes FALSE tweet mislabeling Antifa as 'peaceful protesters'.  Reuters had to delete a tweet that whitewashed the violence of the anti-Trump Antifa protesters when people noticed that they called them "peaceful protesters."

The media lies about the Boston rally.  The Boston rally was a watershed event.  But not in the way the mainstream media has been portraying it, as a bold stand against white supremacy in the wake of Charlottesville.  Rather, it demonstrates the power of propaganda to foment mass hysteria and mob rule.  Reality no longer matters.  For the media refuses to report this seminal truth:  There were no white supremacists or neo-Nazis.  None.  Not even one.  Instead, they engaged in a massive disinformation campaign that spurred over 40,000 "antifascists" to descend upon Boston Common.  The alt-left's goal: to counter-demonstrate against an alleged "white nationalist" rally.  Yet, what they were protesting was the very opposite.  The Free Speech rally had nothing to do with white supremacy or the Ku Klux Klan — never mind the violence in Charlottesville.

Colin Kaepernick — History's Hero?  The National Football League's preseason is underway, and national anthem-hating quarterback Colin Kaepernick still doesn't have an NFL job.  One can easily identify the liberal journalists by their anguish over this so-called injustice.  You can also identify them by their dishonest arguments.

The media couldn't be more blatant in distorting Trump's words on Charlottesville.  Has the media ever so deliberately and consistently misinterpreted what a president said?  It certainly seems as if the media finally found its proof that President Trump is a racist. [...] Does the press just think that no one will look at what Trump actually said?  For those who do look at the original interview and Trump's multiple, clear statements on the matter, the media risks losing what little credibility it still has.

'Freedom of the Press' Doesn't Mean What You Think.  Progressive propaganda, relying on misdirection, misinterpretation, and outright falsehoods, permeates American life and touches or taints every topic.  The corporations that produce mass entertainment and news, the government bureaucracies that shape and fund education, the schools from kindergarten to college, and the tech firms that control the flow of information and ideas, are all subject to a groupthink that, for all intents and purposes, brooks absolutely no dissent from Leftist dogma.

The Media Lied About The Leaked Google Memo.  If all you do is get your news from the establishment media, you'd be under the impression that former Google engineer James Damore is a dangerous bigot who hates women and minorities.  As reports of the so-called "anti-diversity" leaked memo from Google surfaced on the Internet, journalists exposed their preconceptions and bias with misleading headlines and equally biased stories.

Leftover Libels of Sebastian Gorka Served Up at Rolling Stone.  As Joel Pollak reports in Breitbart this morning [8/11/2017], Rolling Stone magazine has refried and repackaged the whole range of lies — comprehensively refuted — against White House adviser Sebastian Gorka.  The left-wing media keeps setting a new bar for chutzpah.  Central to the Stone story is an attempt to tar Dr. Gorka with guilt by association with right-wing political parties in Hungary, where he was active between 2000 and 2008.  "Gorka served as adviser to [Hungary's prime minister Viktor] Orbán," the article states, "who's been called a 'neo-fascist dictator' by Sen. John McCain."  As it happens, the left-wing Jewish news site The Forward offered this allegation in the form of a doctored tape of a 2006 Hungarian television interview with Dr. Gorka.  That brought the full interview to light — and the full interview shows Dr. Gorka denouncing Orbán for exploiting popular unrest for nefarious purposes.  Sebastian Gorka was not Orbán's "adviser," but a principled and uncompromising critic.

Rolling Stone Collects Every Lie About Sebastian Gorka in One Place.  Bob Dreyfuss's profile of White House aide Sebastian Gorka in Rolling Stone is an impressive feat of scholarship, compiling every lie about the former Breitbart News editor in one place.  It is a useful service for the ideologically addled and the functionally illiterate, who like their propaganda served straight-up, undiluted by the cold ice water of reality.  Students of cheap partisan smear jobs need look no further, for Rolling Stone has perfected the genre.  Dreyfuss does not seem to have done any original research, but recycles work done by other hacks — without, of course, bothering to provide his readers with any of the defenses that arose in their wake.

On Gorka, the crazy left declares war.  [Scroll down]  So we learn that Gorka's degree isn't good enough, as if that is the best criterion for judging whether someone is suitable for executing policy.  To support this, we learn he got into a scrap with an obnoxious little academic troll with a wounded bloated ego named Smith.  We read a real whopper of an unsubstantiated claim, from some little known associate professor, accusing Gorka of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis, with absolutely no substantiation — and substantiation would be very easy.  (The funniest part of these whinings in this pattern of argument is from an earlier article in Newsweek, which claims that since Gorka never submitted an article to some obscure academic journal called "Terrorism and Political Violence," he can't possibly be of any consequence.)  We see name-calling.  We see mangled facts and repackaged narratives.  Let's look at some of those.

Scientists call out New York Times for incorrect claim about climate report.  Scientists appear to have debunked The New York Times' claim it was leaked a secret, gloomy climate change report which it published amid fears President Trump would suppress it.  On Monday [8/7/2017], The New York Times published a story saying there are concerns that the Trump administration could suppress what's known as the National Climate Assessment, a project of the U.S. Global Change Research Program.  The story, titled "Scientists fear Trump will dismiss blunt climate report," said the draft report "has not yet been made public" but "a copy of it was obtained by The New York Times."

Fake News A US Media Speciality.  All of the lies leading to the death of millions told by the criminal Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes were transparent.  The US media could easily have exposed them and saved the lives of millions of peoples [sic] and saved seven countries from destruction in whole or part.  But the presstitutes cheered on the gratuitous and criminal destruction of countries and peoples.

The Left is Already Preparing Tomorrow's Fake News.  The American Left has relied on its mastery of the media — enthusiastically aided and abetted by the 90% of national political journalists today that are progressives of one stripe or another — for its political power for decades.  Ever since the 1950s, the left has been deliberately creating events in order to attract media attention that pushes a narrative confirming the justice of their demands.  It learned that the new medium of television was perfect for creating artificial dramas that would sway support its way. [...] It has worked on issue after issue.  And here we are today with transgender bathrooms and other ornaments of the progressive worldview imposed on the public.

Democrats, ABC, NBC Attack Christian Non-Profit as an 'Anti-LGBT Hate Group'.  Last week, Democrats and two mainstream media outlets branded Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal nonprofit which has won seven Supreme Court cases in seven years, an "anti-LGBT hate group."  Worse, this "hate" designation comes from a terror-linked organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).  ADF has demanded an apology and attacked this "media malpractice."  "Why is ABC and NBC willing to promote propaganda and cut and paste the Southern Poverty Law Center press release?" Kristen Waggoner, a senior vice president at ADF, asked Tucker Carlson on Fox News Friday night.  "Americans are losing trust in the media for this very reason."

ABC News:  Christians who defend religious liberty are 'hate group'.  Alliance Defending Freedom is demanding a retraction and apology from ABC News after reporters smeared one of the nation's most respected religious liberty law firms as a 'hate group.'  ABC News reporters Pete Madden and Erin Galloway wrote a scathing report on a speech Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered behind closed doors at the Summit on Religious Liberty at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California.

The Southern Poverty Law Center Has Become a Dangerous Joke.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, the "civil rights watchdog group" that ABC and NBC so prominently cite, has become a dangerous joke.  It's a joke because the very idea that Christians are members of a "hate group" merely because they advocate for orthodox Christian principles and the liberty to live those principles is so intellectually and ideologically bankrupt that it's barely worth addressing.

The Left Media's Extraordinary Popular Delusions.  The Clinton campaign came up with their Trump-colluded-with-Russia meme about twenty-four hours after the election results were verified.  It was nonsense then as it is today, but the left's mental distress has become so grievous that they no longer can be called rational or even sane.  After eight months of wild speculation and various investigations, absolutely nothing has been unearthed that indicates in any way that the Trump campaign, least of all Trump himself, colluded with Russia to affect the outcome of the election. [...] The last eight and a half years have proven to the American people that the Democrat left and the media are two parts of the same criminal enterprise that feed each other's addiction to power.

Stupid Hostile Media.  President Donald Trump drives people crazy.  Especially those in the media.  They hate him so much, they leap on every anti-Trump rumor.  The Federalist's Jordyn Pair points out that the press repeatedly told us that a dozen Trump administration members were about to be fired, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and strategists Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.  Months later, all still work for or with the administration.

How to manufacture a scandal.  Another piece falls into place, of a mosaic in which Democrats set out in 2016 to create a false appearance of collusion between President Trump and Russia.  It's pretty devious.

The Media Perpetuated A Clinton Lie For 9 Months.  What It Means For The Russia Narrative.  When Hillary Clinton claimed "17 intelligence agencies" agree on Russian meddling in the third presidential debate, a host of media outlets including The New York Times rated the claim as 100 percent true.  Nine months later, those same outlets say the stat is obviously false, and there's been a "simple" explanation as to why all along.  A closer look at how the claim survived and thrived over those nine months reveals a startling lack of skepticism in the press when it comes to the Russia narrative.  The truth is the great majority of the 17 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community had nothing to do with the investigation and made no judgments about the matter.

The Washington Post Offers Up A Textbook Case Of Garbage, Biased Journalism.  One might be shocked back into a coma to learn James Hodgkinson was not an angry conservative, but instead was an angry Bernie Sanders supporting, Occupy Wall Street guy who favored watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, hated Donald Trump and who shot up a Republican congressional baseball practice, shooting Republicans, including Republican Representative Steve Scalise.  If the story were only about Romanik and didn't mention Hodginkson, it would be a run-of-the-mill profile about some local AM shock-jock and a pretty good one at that.  It is interesting to see the kind of influence local talk shows have just like local newspapers and local television news.  But what editor at the Washington Post allowed Holley to link Hodgkinson to a right-wing radio talk show host without even confirming he ever listened to the show?

Washington Post article linking Scalise shooter to conservative radio host sparks online outrage.  The Washington Post struck out with many on social media over an article that appears to blame a right-wing Illinois shock jock for the Virginia shooting rampage by a Trump-hating, Bernie Sanders volunteer who targeted Republicans during a baseball practice.  The lengthy piece takes aim at the foul-mouthed Bob Romanik, who spews invective on the AM dial from a studio in Belleville, Ill., shooter James Hodgkinson's hometown.  "What's the point of this?" Buzz Feed political reporter Katherine Miller asked on Twitter.  "The shooter hated Trump and there's no indication in the story he listened to this pro-Trump host."

Death spiral TV news lies to fool advertisers.  The Wall Street Journal just accused major television networks of using deception to goose ratings that include deliberately misspelling the names of the news shows.  Sounds like fraud to me.  Unlike their cable brethren, the broadcast newsers seem to be losing customers.  I say seem because we have no way of telling as they have so gamed the ratings system that no honest person can say how many people watch them.

In TV Ratings Game, Networks Try to Dissguys Bad Newz from Nielsen.  Boosting TV ratings is easy for networks that don't mind playing dumb.  In a game largely sanctioned by TV-ratings firm Nielsen, television networks try to hide their shows' poor performances on any given night by forgetting how to spell.  That explains the appearance of "NBC Nitely News," [...]

Democracy Dies Due To Journalists' Lies.  One of CNN's reporters complained that the president had the audacity to take questions in Poland from a reporter who had applied for a job with the Trump Administration.  Please pay no attention to the actual number of reporters who went to work for Barack Obama and those who did not but chose to carry his water for him.  After the election, the media pushed out the story that Russia had stolen the election for President Trump.  One newspaper claimed Russia had hacked the American power grid.  That story had to be retracted. [...] In February, the Associated Press ran a story that President Trump intended to mobilize the National Guard to round up illegal aliens.  The story was not true, but just about every major media outlet ran with it.  In May, the media claimed the GOP had trucked in beer to congress to celebrate repealing Obamacare.  That was not true either.

Polish president knocks 'fake news' over wife's Trump handshake.  Polish President Andrzej Duda ripped "fake news" reports that his wife snubbed President Trump for a handshake during Trump's visit to Poland on Thursday [7/6/2017].  In a tweet, Duda confirmed that both he and his wife shook hands with the president and urged his followers to "fight fake news" together.

Fake Ratings:  Networks Dishonestly Inflate Evening News Numbers...by Misspelling.  Now we know that advertisers and the public are being supplied fake ratings by the same broadcasters who so often deliver fake news.  A Thursday morning [7/6/2017] Wall Street Journal dispatch by Joe Flint reports that the broadcast networks routinely inflate their reported evening news audiences.  They hide low-performing evening audiences by — get this — "forgetting how to spell."  No wonder the networks are so obsessed with "hacking."  In the ratings game, what could be described as a form of it — modifying (the results generated by) "a computer program in a skillful or clever way" — has become a routine industry practice.

Fake News:  Journalists Invent 'Super Awkward' Handshake Snub of Trump.  In the latest example of fake news, journalists on Thursday hyperventilated about a dramatic snub of Donald Trump by Poland's first lady.  Agata Kornhauser-Duda, it seemed, refused to shake the hand of the President.  Except, that's not what happened.  Mere seconds after shaking Melania Trump's hand, Kornhauser-Duda and the President shared a warm embrace.

Mainstream Media Promotes Death & Mayhem While Accusing POTUS Trump Of "Inciting Violence".  President Trump re-tweeted an amusing CNN-WWF parody video that had him pummeling the fake news network and the liberal media is now losing their minds over it claiming the president is "inciting violence."  This is the same media that assisted in the cover-up of Obama-era scandals like Fast and Furious, the secret drone bombing program, the ISIS fiasco, dealings with Iran, the atrocities in Libya, Syria, and on and on and on.  And let us not forget this was the same media that actively encouraged the violence in Ferguson, Baltimore, Dallas etc.

NBC Decries Rise of Conservative Media for Creating Polarized Country, No Mention of MSNBC.  What NBC's Willie Geist spun as a rundown of the political echo chambers in America on Sunday Today [7/2/2017], quickly devolved into a condemnation of the rise of conservative media.  "Fake news is a favorite term, as you know, of President Trump.  What you consider real and fake in many cases has become a question of where you're sitting and who you're listening to," declared Geist at the start of the segment.  He ignored the fact that the term was first used to describe stories about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

Associated Press Corrects Big Falsehood In Four Trump-Russia Reports.  The Associated Press "clarified" a false claim it's been running in stories about President Trump and Russia on Friday, conceding in a release it's not the case that 17 intelligence agencies "agreed" on the hacking narrative.  The correction to four reports on Trump and Russia comes the same day The New York Times issued a similar correction to a Maggie Haberman report.  Both TheNYT and the AP now say the claim they've been floating for months is incorrect.

If the Media Wants to Win Back Public Trust, It Can Start Reporting Truthfully on Immigration.  [Scroll down]  A large reason there is such a gulf between what happens and what journalists report is that many journalists see themselves as "protectors of the truth," as illustrated by NBC News host Chuck Todd.  The truth is their truth, stemming from an ideology that does not permit any contradictions or contrasting points of view to get a fair hearing.  While some Americans may turn to media figures for affirmation of beliefs already deeply held, I wager most Americans don't turn to Chuck Todd, or any other media figure for "the truth." Instead, they want reporters to accurately report facts, such as what the director of ICE actually said about immigration law enforcement.  Instead, what we see from too many reporters is the insertion of their own deeply held beliefs in place of facts on the ground.  When a reporter refers to an illegal alien as an "undocumented immigrant" this is an attempt to deny the criminal act of illegal immigration.

MSNBC Contributor:  Hillary Lost Because Obama Is Black.  MSNBC contributor Wendy Sherman believes that Hillary Clinton may have lost the election because it was too hard for America to elect the first female president directly after the first black president.  Sherman was on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival discussing modern political technology when she segued into the bizarre comment.

TwitterAudit Reports CNN Has 17 Million Fake Twitter Followers.  Of CNN's millions of followers on their verified Twitter account, over 17 million or 48 percent are fake, according to TwitterAudit.  According to TwitterAudit, the site determines the quality and score of real and fake followers by taking "a sample of up to 5000 (or more, if you subscribe to Pro) Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower.  This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends."

ABC/Disney Co.  Settles $1.9 Billion BPI Defamation Lawsuit — "Pink Slime" Case.  The civil trial began June 5th and ABC legal executives must have see the writing on the wall as the initial $1.9 billion in damages could have potentially tripled under South Dakota law (treble damages) to $5.7 billion if they allowed the three week trial to continue.  The actual defamation settlement is undisclosed.  However, at the point of settlement all reasonable assumptions must be that BPI was well positioned to win far more than the initially demanded settlement amount of $1.9 billion.

Levin on CNN: They're Not a News Organization Anymore.  On his nationally syndicated radio show Tuesday [6/27/2017], host Mark Levin criticized CNN, saying the network has "sold out" and is "not a news organization anymore."  "CNN, in my view right now, is in a state of complete disintegration," said Mark Levin.  "It won't show up right away on their ratings, but it will eventually show up.  They truly do run with phony stories.  They have prostituted themselves.  They have sold out.  They are not a news organization anymore."  Levin's comments came after CNN published, then redacted a story linking a Trump surrogate to a Russian investment fund, prompting the resignation of three CNN employees.

A Brief History of 'Fake News'.  Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive and cause chaos.  Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc explained in his book Disinformation that the ultimate measure of success for disinformation was when the major organs of the media coud be tricked into unknowingly propagating deliberate falsehoods.  But the Russians are far from the only ones practicing disinformation designed against political systems.  The current investigations of alleged "Russian collusion" on Capitol Hill are the result of a disinformation campaign that was begun by the Democratic Party and continued when the mainstream media were fooled into publicizing the accusations as fact. [...] Disinformation only works if people refuse to think or find it easier not to.  I ask all to please think about what is being laid in front of you and see if it makes sense.

Mediaite Tried So Hard To Make A Black Intern Look Like A White Supremacist.  The congressional intern Mediaite cast as a white supremacist Wednesday [6/21/2017] is actually black, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.  Nate Washington is a black conservative attending Western Kentucky University and is a former intern of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton.

BC Reaches Settlement in 'Pink Slime' Suit.  ABC said it reached a settlement in a closely scrutinized lawsuit filed against it by a South Dakota meat producer over ABC News reports that led to critics labeling one of the company's products "pink slime." [...] Financial terms of the settlement could not be immediately learned.

MSNBC Anchor:  Planned Parenthood 'A Critical Tool For Helping Saving Lives'.  MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi spent several minutes Tuesday heralding Planned Parenthood as "a critical tool for helping saving lives" and said "I'm not an advocate" before having Planned Parenthood's Director of Constituency Communications come on to defend the organization.

The Incomplete Media Narrative about a Murdered Muslim Girl.  "Muslim Teen Kidnapped and Brutally Murdered in Virginia:  This Is Terrorism" read a headline from Affinity magazine.  Actress and producer Mindy Kaling also decried the murder on Facebook as "another innocent Muslim person targeted for their faith."  The Atlantic then ran a profile, "'Muslims Feel Under Siege'" highlighting Islamophobia around Ramadan.  Many stories used Hassanen's murder as a lede to foray into a greater narrative about the collective crisis of violence against Muslims.  But then actual facts and details around the case emerged.  First, the Fairfax County Police Department publicly ruled out a hate crime as a motive, announcing that they were looking more closely into extreme road rage.  Then, the Daily Caller reported that the murderer, Darwin Martinez Torres, was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, with ICE confirming that it had issued a detainer request against him.  Reports subsequently emerged that Torres, who has a girlfriend and son, barely speaks English and required the use of a translator following his arrest.

Democrats are incapable of learning from Georgia Special Election loss.  As I often do on election nights when Democratic disappointment is likely to be highest, I watched MSNBC.  First I watched Rachel Maddow, then Lawrence O'Donnell.  The MSNBC coverage was nothing short of delusional.  The "a loss is really a win" approach was pervasive.  Hope sprang eternal.  Maddow in particular continued to spin Trump Russia conspiracy theories.  O'Donnell went on and on about how the Republican healthcare bill would be the doom of Republicans.  A phrase used frequently on O'Donnell's show was that this was an "ominous win" for Republicans because the margin was lower than when Tom Price won — ignoring that the Republican outperformed Trump's win.

James T. Hodgkinson:  Just Another Well-Intentioned Progressive.  Have you followed the drift of the Mainstream Media (MSM) as to what provoked James T. Hodgkinson to attempt the massacre of the Republican baseball team as it practiced in Alexandria, Virginia last week?  Not the Democratic team, not the Washington Nationals team, but the Republican team.  Well, it was not necessarily Hodgkinson's politics we are told.  After all, his politics were pretty much mainstream progressive.  According to the MSM, it was "a Volatile Home Life in Illinois."  That is the way the New York Times put it on the newspaper's front page Sunday [6/18/2017].  Strong drink was alluded to.  Anger and violence were also mentioned as features in Hodgkinson's rural Illinois home. [...] Yet as I say the MSM is soft-pedaling this lunatic's politics, and I can see why.  There was nothing particularly unusual about them.

Hardly Walt's Disney.  [Y]ou may remember a series of reports in March of 2012 that aired on ABC, "World News Tonight" about a meat company called Beef Products Inc (BPI).  The company was a vendor for restaurants such as McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King.  The story prominently featured "pink slime".  In fact, the reporter said, "pink slime" over 350 times during the reporting.  The reporter was referring to what the ground beef looked like during a cleaning process of the meat.  It is completely legal and sanitary.  As you can imagine, the story did not look good for BPI or its customers.  Because of the stories, BPI lost customers, and revenue decreased by 80 percent.  The company was also forced to close 75 percent of their processing plants.  There's only one problem.  It might not have even been true.  As a result, BPI decided to take action and sue ABC and Disney for defamation.  Disney countered with "freedom of the press" and "freedom of speech" in the First Amendment.  It doesn't appear be going the way Disney wants.  The lawsuit has moved forward and opening statements began this past Monday [6/12/2017] in South Dakota.  The case has the potential to be the largest defamation case in U.S. history, worth an estimated $5.7 billion.

Journalism is dead; whatever these guys are doing isn't journalism.  What do all of these stories have in common?  They're completely unsourced.  No names.  No real people.  Just claims that come from, in order, "two administration officials and three outside advisers familiar with the matter," an anonymous tweeter who set up a dummy Twitter account, and "a Downing Street adviser."  None of the latest stories have anyone on the record making the accusations.  Instead, the "news" sites that posted the stories — Politico, the Daily Mail and the Guardian — simply make the surprising claims and cite anonymous sources.  The subjects of the anonymous slurs have no recourse whatsoever, no right to face their accusers, no way to fight back.  The accusation streams out onto the internet, where it lives forever — whether it's true or not.

Nets Blackout the Radical Leftist History of NSA Leaker Reality Winner.  Not long after top-secret documents from the National Security Agency made their way onto the internet news site The Intercept on Monday, the Justice Department arrested NSA contractor Reality Winners.  The 25-year-old veteran worked on a military base in Georgia, but online she had a long history of being heavily Anti-Trump, an apparent social justice warrior, and a supporter of Iran over the U.S. During their evening broadcasts, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) either played down her political attitudes, or outright ignored them as they reported on what she did.  During his report on NBC Nightly News, Justice Correspondent Pete Williams passed along her family's claim that "she wasn't highly political," and Anchor Lester Holt claimed her "motive is a mystery."  But in reality, Winner was anything but silent about her political views.

From Fake News to Fake Polls.  The media blob is making much of a Washington Post/ABC News poll that finds the public by a 2 to 1 margin opposes President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord: [...] You need to click through to the actual poll questions to see what [an incompetent] poll it is.  The poll only asked five questions. [...] Conspicuously missing are any questions about whether people support appropriations for wealth transfers from the U.S to developing nations that the Paris Accord included (and into which Obama tossed $1 billion)?  No questions, also, about whether people are willing to pay higher energy costs for an agreement that will make no difference to the planet's temperature 80 years from now, according to the EPA's own models.

Examples of fake news?  How much time you got?  White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally lost it this week trying to correct the endless torrent of bogus news stories being churned out daily by the alt-left media. [...] Spicer had been lecturing the press corps about all their "anonymous sources" and the fictionalized stories "that are absolutely false ... narratives that are wrong ... fake news."  He was directing his remarks at a reporter from the Associated Press — you know, the organization that falsely reported in February that Trump was planning to use "100,000 National Guard troops" to round up "millions" of illegal aliens.  "When you see stories get perpetrated that are absolutely false," Spicer told the crack AP scribe, "that is troubling, and he (the president) is rightly concerned."  So a Democrat operative from the Clinton News Network asked Spicer for an example.

Heroin dealers deserve prison, not sympathy.  The deadly poison that is heroin made its way to your small town from Mexico, where it was grown and processed, later to be trafficked to your neighborhood where its target customers were someone's children, parents, brothers and sisters.  But right now, when you open the newspaper or turn on the television, you learn that the person that brought the drugs into your neighborhood, which ultimately made their way to your child, is considered by many in both the media and the public to be a "non-violent, low-level drug offender."

NYT's Jonathan Martin Steals Photo From Another Journalist, Lies About Where He Got It.  The New York Times has been holding up the torch for truth in the age of fake news and alternative facts — but one of its political reporters, Jonathan Martin, has no qualms in weaving a few alternative facts of his own.  After he lifted a photograph from another journalist and presented it without attribution, Martin doubled down on his lie and claimed he had no idea it was the other journalist's photo.

Guilt By Association:  Mitchell Sneers That Montana Assault Is 'Extension' of Trump.  Guilt by association.  That's what Andrea Mitchell believes.  Despite the fact that Donald Trump is on another continent, the Andrea Mitchell Reports anchor thinks that the assault against a journalist by a Montana congressional candidate is an "extension" of the President.  Talking about Greg Gianforte's attack on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, the MSNBC host connected, "There is so much hostility, frankly, to the press, a lot of it generated by the Donald Trump rallies."

NPR Bungles Sea Level Rise Story (supposed threats to coastal military installations ignore science).  National Public Radio's March 31 "Morning Edition" program carried a "news" story claiming that rising seas threaten a number of U.S. coastal military bases.  The commentary was so laden with factual errors that listeners might have thought it was an early April fool's joke.  Unfortunately, it was not.  NPR remains so wedded to its belief that humans and carbon dioxide emissions are causing a fossil fuels-driven global warming catastrophe that its reporting has been compromised, and it is unable to think critically or report honestly without resorting to activist claims and fake news events.  Real journalism would have at least included passing references to alternative views and sources.  But they were absent in this story, which in truth is a splendid example of ignorance or deception — reader's choice.

The CIA and the MSM: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know.  Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis.  CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story — indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.

How to Read the Newspaper.  The Associated Press has bias problems and some notable competency problems, and, like any organization that does any substantive reporting, it makes errors.  But it does not, for the most part, traffic in fiction. [...] Television has a somewhat worse record.  Dan Rather infamously attempted to derail the presidential campaign of George W. Bush by publishing a report, derived from fake documents, that Bush had been deficient in his military service, and that his superior officers had been pressured to cover up his shortcomings.  This was the event that really launched modern blogging as we know it, as dozens of critics ranging from politicos to typography experts showed that Rather's reporting was based on a fabrication, despite CBS News's strident defense of his work.  But it was not the first episode of its kind:  Dateline NBC had previously used incendiary devices to rig a Chevrolet truck to explode in a story purporting to demonstrate its unsafe gas-tank design.  There have been others.

NYT's Comey Memo Story Doesn't Pass Smell Test.  The New York Times reported on Tuesday that President Trump allegedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to shut down the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  The source of the allegation is a memorandum, revealed by an anonymous source, allegedly prepared by Comey regarding a meeting in the Oval Office the day after Flynn was forced to resign for misleading the Vice-President.  While the headline is sensational, The New York Times's report is self-contradictory at times, conflicts with statements made on-the-record and under oath, overhypes the substance of the memorandum, and is irreconcilable with other information in the public record.

Eight Lies the MSM Told About Comey Firing.  Over the last week or so the media has breathlessly reported on every little whisper that has escaped from Washington, D.C. and for the most part — much of what they've told us has been wrong.  Sadly, this is a common refrain from today's media who can't seem to get out of their own way and constantly seem to be tripping over their own failures and falsehoods.  It's almost as if the media has an agenda that they are trying to promote and they are willing to sacrifice their reputation if it means pushing that agenda forward.  In their attempts to use the Comey story to undermine the Trump administration they've sacrificed every iota of reputation and been unmasked as the biased hypocrites we've always suspected them to be.

The Media Finally Admit Obamacare Is Collapsing.  [Scroll down]  If Obamacare had actually been "working" for all those years, it would not have suddenly collapsed.  In reality, the implosion of the "Affordable Care Act" began when it was originally implemented.  Moreover, the partisan reporters and editors of the legacy media certainly knew it was a disaster by 2013, when more than five million Americans lost their insurance coverage and Healthcare.gov exploded on the launch pad.  They could not, however, report the truth, because there was no plausible way to blame its failure on the Republicans.

The AP Attacks Voter ID.  The Associated Press is generally a mouthpiece for Democratic Party talking points.  That is the case as to voter ID, as this rather pathetic piece shows:  "In Wisconsin, ID law proved insurmountable for many voters." [...] The obvious question is:  how many?  The reporter now tells us that the number of people who didn't vote because they lacked proper ID is "unknown."  The article identifies exactly four.

Trump Is Not Shutting Down the EPA's Data Service.  A contractor for the Environmental Protection Agency who was "devastated" by Hillary Clinton's election loss was the source for a false story stating that the agency is shutting down its climate data service.  The EPA's Open Data service, where users can look up EPA facilities in their area and view pollution graphs, will continue to operate, despite several news reports to the contrary.  Bernadette Hyland, a contractor who has access to the Open Data website, was quoted in several publications, including the Independent, which falsely claimed "Donald Trump is to completely shut down one of the government's most important data services."

Media Lies Exposed:  Antifa Thug Girl Was Using Glass Bottles as Weapons Before Punch.  As many of you readers will recall, we've been all over the antifa girl who got rocked at the Berkeley protests this past weekend.  We had her fake name (Louise Rosealma) listed in the big article, but her real name is Emily Rose Marshall.  Every since she got smacked, the media has been working overtime to make this little terrorist into some kind of martyr.  Virtue signallers like Raheem Kassam and Brandon Darby, people who this publication normally respects, have been crying about never hitting a woman, under any circumstances.  The latter camp is [mistaken] on this issue, but the media is outright malicious.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria:  Were Obama Still President, He Would Have Ordered "Similar If Not Identical" Strike In Syria.  CNN's Fareed Zakaria discusses his experience with "Trump derangement syndrome," where people's hatred and anger towards the president is so intense that it impairs their judgment.  He talks about Obama speechwriters attacking Trump for doing exactly what President Obama would have done in Syria.

Republican wins.  NYT declares victory for Democrats.  From the Washington Examiner:  "Republican Kansas State Treasurer Ron Estes defeated Democrat James Thompson and Libertarian Chris Rockhold Tuesday night [4/11/2017] to keep the state's 4th congressional district in GOP hands."  Republican Estes 52.5%, Democrat Thompson 45.7%.  A 6.8-point win.  Ho-hum.  But Nate Cohn of the New York Times — who gave Hillary an 85% chance of winning on Election Day — sees this as a victory for the Democratic Party.

Liberal Journalists Falsely Accuse Jeff Sessions of Calling Illegal Immigrants 'Filth'.  Liberal journalists on Twitter falsely accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of calling illegal immigrants "filth" in a speech he delivered on the Mexican border Tuesday [4/11/2017].  Politico reporter Josh Dawsey took a partial quote from a Wall Street Journal story on Sessions' speech out of context, tweeting that Sessions described illegal immigrants as filth.  From there, it caught the eye of Tufts professor and writer of the Washington Post's Spoiler Alerts blog Daniel Drezner, and the misinterpretation spread throughout Twitter.

Washington Post Blogger Issues Official Apology for Spreading False Jeff Sessions Story.  A Washington Post blogger responsible for launching a false story about Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday published an official apology Wednesday [4/12/2017].  Tufts professor and Washington Post blogger Daniel Drezner helped kickstart the narrative that Sessions had referred to illegal immigrants as "filth" while delivering a speech before border agents at the U.S.-Mexico border.  Drezner took a quote from Sessions' prepared remarks out of context, and released his frustrations on Twitter.

Fact Check:  Fresno Bee Lies About Professor's Call To Kill Trump.  There's a lot of talk about a post-truth society these days.  A post-truth society kicks in when there is no respect for even the most blatantly obvious facts.  Professor Lars Maischak, who teaches, among other things, Marx and Hegel, at California State University, Fresno, tweeted, calls to kill Trump and Republicans.  [Tweets]  Could the media possibly defend and whitewash this?  Do you even need to ask.  No leftist can do anything too terrible for the media to defend.

The 10 Questions Andrea Mitchell Didn't Ask Susan Rice.  Here are a few thoughts about Andrea Mitchell's interview with Susan Rice — and the key questions that were left unasked.  Rice opened the interview by saying, "The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes.  That's absolutely false."  On the contrary, the allegation is absolutely true — and demonstrating its truth is as easy as unmasking an American citizen in an NSA intercept.

The Fake News Crisis.  Within living memory, in 1968, the Democratic Party had its convention in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey was their nominee, and there were riots in the streets. [...] There is one huge difference between what is happening now, and what happened back then.  In 1968, there was a culmination of real events that actually affected America.  In 2017, there are no real events causing this, just narratives made up from nothing by a leftist media that is more divorced from reality than anyone thought possible.
  •   The Russians colluded with Trump.
  •   Trump is Hitler. Stupid. And evil.
  •   Obama was wonderful, transparent, brilliant, perfect, and fully competent.
  •   Trump's tax returns will show he is unfit.
  •   He is a racist that wants to ban all Muslims.
  •   Kellyanne Conway is a ditzy uninformed waste of a woman.
  •   Hillary Clinton is a pure and honest heroine fighting for good.
Virtually 24/7, these and other very unreal narratives are being played to the American public by our pathetic left wing media.  In 1968, the news had a reality component.  Yes, there was liberal bias in the news, but at least the events happened.

Washington Post Lies About Lawmaker's Biblical Reference, Then Refuses To Quote A Single Word He Said.  After the presidential election last November, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet gave an interview to NPR in which he admitted that his journalists simply don't understand religion.  "We don't get religion," Baquet said.  "We don't get the role of religion in people's lives."  Baquet was correct:  Acela corridor political reporters don't understand religion, especially Christianity.  Though he was specifically speaking about New York Times reporters, Baquet's comments clearly also apply to the Washington Post, which on Friday morning accused a Republican congressman from Texas of claiming that the Bible forbids the unemployed from having food to eat.

WaPo Caught Red Handed In Big Lie, Tries To Quietly Overhaul Entire Piece.  Caitlin Dewey's initial write-up in the paper (which recently adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies In Darkness") did not include a single quote from the Texas representative she basically accused of using the Bible to justify taking food from starving people.  The story also incorrectly referred to "2 Thessalonians 3-10," and wildly mischaracterized Rep. Jody Arrington's statements on the verse.  While Arrington did reference 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat) in a discussion of food stamps, he did not, as The WaPo article suggested, use it to argue unemployed people should not be allowed to eat.

The New York Times' ongoing dishonesty only helps Trump.  Six months ago, I canceled my subscription to the New York Times because I felt the paper had become ethically challenged in its coverage of the presidential election.  And, it turns out, I was right.

I Got Your Fake News Right Here.  In the interest of transparency, and to assist CBS, I have compiled the ultimate list of #FakeNews stories that have circulated over the last decade or two:
  •   They told us that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons would turn our streets into rivers of blood. #FakeNews
  •   They told us that taking trillions of dollars and giving it to those "who truly needed it" would eradicate poverty. #FakeNews
  •   They told us that giving home loans to those who couldn't afford them would make the American dream achievable for all. #FakeNews
  •   They told us that letting the federal government run our health care system — and those of our veterans — would reduce premiums and make care accessible for all. #FakeNews
  •   They told us that allowing millions of unvetted third-worlders — from gang-bangers to professional moochers — would make America safer. #FakeNews
  •   They told us that allowing teachers to unionize in public schools would help inner city students reach for the stars. #FakeNews
[...]
  •   They told us that slathering welfare payments and food stamps around in record numbers would help the economy. #FakeNews

Media Tries and Fails to Re-invent Ferguson Thug Michael Brown as Victim with Meaningless 'New' Video.  In yet another attempt to turn Ferguson thug Michael Brown into a victim, a new "documentary" filmmaker released a segment of film showing Brown inside the market he was thought to have robbed just before he was shot and killed by a local policeman back in 2014.  The filmmaker claimed that is "proved" Brown did not rob the store.  But in only a day the whole claim unsurprisingly fell apart.  A segment of film showing 18-year-old Michael Brown in the Ferguson quick-mart was released late last week by documentary film maker Jason Pollock.  The filmmaker insisted that the video "proved" that Brown could not have robbed the market on the day he was killed resisting arrest a few blocks away.  The snippet of footage appears in Pollock's new movie entitled Stranger Fruit.

The Meals On Wheels Lie Keeps Rolling Along.  Let's start with a basic fact.  Contrary to news reports last week, President Trump is not eliminating funding for Meals on Wheels.  He's not even cutting it.  How do we know this?  Meals on Wheels says so.  A statement issued by Meals on Wheels America on Thursday notes that 35% of the revenues at the 5,000 or so local Meals on Wheels programs come via the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program.  Trump's budget outline says nothing about this program whatsoever.

Outrage on Wheels.  It made for great copy — irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable.  "Trump's Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens," blared Time's headline.  "Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels," claimed The Hill, in a piece that got 26,000 shares.  But it was false.  And it wouldn't have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.

The ancient laws of unintended consequences.  Fake news now serves as a sort of linguistic canary to remind the public that it is customarily saturated with a lethal gas of media disinformation.  Thus "fake news" seemed a proper if belated summation and clarification of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth.  Were NBC anchor Brian Williams's fantasies fake news?  Were Dan Rather's "fake but accurate" Rathergate memos?  How about the party line circulated in JournoList or the Washington and New York reporters who colluded to massage the news to favor the Clinton campaign, as revealed in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove?  Was jailing a video maker part of an Obama-administration fake-news attempt to blame Benghazi deaths on a spontaneous riot?  Was the Iran Deal's "echo chamber," about which Ben Rhodes later bragged, the epitome of fake news?

Washington Post employee posed as ICE agent, police say.  A Washington Post employee was arrested last month and charged with impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent following an FBI raid, court documents show.  Itai Ozderman, 35, is accused of impersonating an ICE officer throughout Falls Church, Va., on more than one occasion, according to Montgomery County District Court documents.  Police say that he sported a bulletproof vest bearing the ICE logo and, when the FBI entered his home in Maryland bearing a search warrant, they discovered 10 weapons, including two M4-style assault rifles and a shotgun.  They also found body armor and tactical vests.

Presidential Payback For Media Hubris.  In just his first month in office, reporters have alread peddled dozens of fake news stories designed to discredit the President — to such a degree that little the now write or say can be taken at face value.
  •   No, Trump did not have an plans to invade Mexico, as Buzzfeed and the Associated Press alleged.
  •   No, Trump's father did not run for Mayor of New York by peddling racist television ads, as reported by Sidne Blumenthal.
  •   No, there were not mass resignations at the State Department in protest of its new leaders, as was reported by the Washington Post.
  •   No, Trump's attorney did not cut a deal with the Russians in Prague.  Nor did Trump indulge in sexual escapades in Moscow.  Buzzfeed again peddled those fake news stories.
  •   No, a supposedly racist Trump did not remove the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the White House, as a Time Magazine reporter claimed.
  •   No, election results in three states were not altered by hackers or computer criminals to give Trump the election, as implied by New York Magazine.
  •   No, Michael Flynn did not tweet that he was a scapegoat.  That was a media fantasy endorsed by Nanc Pelosi.
In fact, Daniel Payne of the Federalist has compiled a length list of sensational stories about Trump's supposed buffooneries, mistakes, and crudities that all proved either outright lies or were gross exaggerations and distortions.

How illegal immigrant advocates demonize Trump and terrify people.  The New York Times describes 11 million people — those who are living in the country illegally — as sleepless with anxiety, waiting for the "fists pounding on the door, the agents in black, the van ride, the cell."  Who has thrown such fear into this community?  How about the Left, aided and abetted by the liberal media, which has purposefully distorted President Trump's immigration policies, characterizing them erroneously as a radical departure from past practices?  In a feverish blast to donors sent out yesterday [2/22/2017], the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee claims that "Donald Trump plans to add thousands of immigration agents and begin deporting "almost all" undocumented immigrants."  That is, excuse the expression, fake news.  Trump is doing no such thing.

How to Tell if News Is Really News.  Wake up, America!  You're being had.  Start asking the right questions.  How did the Democrats come up with that 40,000,000 uninsured Americans to pass Obamacare?  When CNN's Don Lemon asks his panel about how much the Trump family's secret service is costing taxpayers, ask him where's his research and why didn't he question that about Michele Obama's huge entourage when she traveled?

Reporting? Liberal Media Have Much More in Mind Than That.  On Nov. 6, Daily Beast feature writer Justin Glawe pounced on news that a historically black church had been burned down with the words, "Vote Trump" spray-painted on the "charred remains."  Glawe acknowledged that he did not know who had committed the arson, writing that it was "now up to authorities to find out."  Nevertheless, he went on to tie the act into what he termed "the string of violence [by Trump supporters] against minorities this election season."  When in December it was revealed that a black church member with a criminal record had burned the church down, the Beast merely tacked on an editor's note to the original article and Glawe penned a follow-up piece in which he noted the arrested man had "liked" Donald Trump on Facebook.

Fake News:  Trump Never Said There Was A 'Terror Attack' Last Night In Sweden.  President Trump never said there was a "terror attack" last night [2/18/2017] in Sweden, but that didn't stop hundreds of fake news outlets from claiming he did.  During his rally Saturday, Trump said:  "Here's the bottom line, we've got to keep our country safe.  You look at what's happening.  We've got to keep our country safe.  You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden.  Sweden, who would believe this.  Sweden.  They took in large numbers.  They're having problems like they never thought possible.  You look at what's happening in Brussels, you look at what's happening all over the world.  Take a look at Nice, take a look at Paris."  Nowhere did he say there was a "terror attack."  He said "look at what's happening."

Rev. Graham:  Trump Says 'What We All Know ... News Media Has Been Lying' — 'Fake News'.  Rev. Franklin Graham said President Donald Trump is correct about the news media today, that they lie and create "fake news," and added that the media should do what the Bible instructs, "You shall not circulate a false report" (Exodus 23:1).  "President Donald J. Trump has been saying what we all know — that the news media has been lying," said Rev. Graham in a Feb. 19 post on Facebook.  "In today's terminology, creating fake news."

No, Trump Never Said There Was A Terrorist Attack In Sweden.  This weekend the media was awash with stories suggesting that President Donald Trump claimed that a terrorist attack had recently occurred in Sweden during his speech at Saturday's [2/18/2017] rally in Melbourne, Florida.  Left-wing outlets ran numerous headlines and reports about Trump's statement, and the story was even a top trending item on Facebook:

Is the Media Too Comfortable with Its Own Mistakes?  In November, New York magazine excitedly reported on the claims of computer scientists that "results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked."  No credible evidence of hacking was ever presented.  In December, Politico reported that the bank of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had "foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error," a claim widely repeated in publications such as Vanity Fair.  As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Ted Frank pointed out, the "widow was never foreclosed on and never lost her home, and it wasn't Mnuchin's bank that brought the suit."  Seven hate crimes widely reported after the 2016 election turned out to be hoaxes.  Do members of the media feel bad when they get facts wrong or gullibly repeat implausible claims?  Guilty?  Angry at themselves?  Do they resolve to do better next time?

Fake News Rap Sheet:  Last Week the MSM Was Caught Telling FORTY Lies.  Welcome to week three of "This Week In Fake News!" [...] You will see one change in this week's list, with respect to the count.  Rather than start the count over every week, this ongoing diary of Fake News will now use a cumulative number, an ongoing count.  Put simply, last week's list contained 24 pieces of Fake News.  The week prior was 12.  That is a total of 36, so this week we will start with number 37.  This is not meant to be a gimmick.  Rather, it is a way to more accurately understand and comprehend the breathtaking scope of the national media's rabid dishonesty.

It's Not Fake News, It's Lying, Leftist, Political Propaganda.  [I]t wasn't until the press began telling bold-faced lies intended to undermine and harm the candidacy of Donald Trump that it occurred to me that the press was telling outright lies, intentionally and with malice, in an attempt to defeat my candidate, Donald Trump, in his run for the presidency.  And after he became President the untrue stories got even more outlandish and more frequent and forceful as the leftist press attempted to destroy President Trump's administration before it could get off the ground.  At this point President Trump began putting a name to it, and it began to resonate with everyone how fabricated liberal news is.

Fake News:  Politico Scrubs Soros Ties to Anti-Trump Group Trying to Mobilize Nationwide Protests.  A Politico profile of a new anti-Trump protest movement calling itself "Indivisible" reported that "conservatives" are "spreading unfounded rumors" that the group is "being driven by wealthy donors like George Soros."  Politico, however, seemingly failed to do even the most minimal research on the Indivisible leaders cited in the news outlet's own profile.  Some of those personalities are openly associated with groups financed by Soros.

The Crisis in Journalism Is Here.  It's getting harder and harder to kick in the needed amnesia to believe anything that comes from the media.

The Media's Jihad Against the Trump White House Staff.  [Scroll down]  The elephant in the room in these stories about the Trump White House staff is not just that the liberal media can't stand the new president — it can't abide his agenda.  And watching one executive order after another pour out of the Trump White House that is at a 180-degree variance with the Obama-era and all things far Left, the media reflexively zeroes in on the Trump staff.  Thus the stories.  Steve Bannon is really the president.  Or, according to Time magazine, which has put him on the cover, he is "The Great Manipulator" of the President.  And he's a white supremacist.  Not to mention he's anti-Semitic.  Oh, and by the way, he's incompetent too.  Kellyanne Conway ignored Ethics Rules 101.  She has no integrity and she went out of her way to make the rich Ivanka even richer using her public position.  And so it goes through the list.  Does this not mean that at any given moment President Trump may in fact have a genuine problem with one of his staffers?  Of course not.

Jeffrey Toobin Catching On — President Trump's Executive Order Wins by Losing.  There are two ways you can tell when moonbats are losing, one is subtle the other is obvious.  A subtle indicator is how the entire MSM apparatus switched (literally overnight on Thursday [2/10/2017]) from calling President Trump's executive order a "Muslim ban" to calling it a "Travel Ban".

Fact Check: Obama Is Not Good at Kite Surfing, Any Sport.  A glowing report in the Washington Post claiming former President Barack Obama is "pretty much a natural on a kiteboard" is filled with factual errors, according to a Washington Free Beacon fact check.  "Obama makes rest of us look bad with his effortless kitesurfing," the headline for a piece by Kelyn Soong reads.  Soong "works in the sports department" at the Washington Post and writes about tennis and running. [...] "Turns out that was just the beginning of Obama's post-presidency adventures," Soong wrote, explaining that Branson challenged Obama to see who could stay on a kiteboard or foilboard the longest.  "It's well documented that Obama is pretty good at basketball, but the video proved that the 55-year-old former leader of the free world is pretty much a natural on a kiteboard, as well," Soong wrote.  These claims are false.  As the video reveals Obama fell multiple times off the kiteboard despite "perfect conditions" and practicing for "two days solid" before the challenge.

New York Times:  Our Readers Are Too Dumb To Understand Global Warming Numbers.  I recently wrote about the wretched reporting on the claim that 2016 was the "hottest year on record," using as my main example a New York Times article by Justin Gillis that gave his readers none of the relevant numbers they could use to evaluate that claim.  None of them.  If you search for the actual numbers, you will eventually find that the effect they are claiming, the actual amount by which this year was hotter than previous years, is smaller than the margin of error in the data.  Shortly afterward, I got a revealing response from Gillis.  I'll fill in all the details for you, because the whole thing is an important case study in why you can't trust mainstream reporting on global warming.

2 Minutes of Mainstream Media Backtracking Really Put 'Fake News' Into Perspective.  Since Trump's election, numerous mainstream outlets have propagated rumors or falsehoods before being forced to peddle them back.

Here's A List Of Stories The Media Got Wrong This Week.  It was an embarrassing week for the mainstream media.  In case after case, stories pushed by news outlets turned out to be either unsubstantiated or fell apart upon closer scrutiny.

Words matter:  The media's use of 'anti-abortion' to describe the March for Life is willful deception.  The outlets that decided to cover the march [1/27/2017] at all used phrases like "anti-abortion" and "abortion opponents" to advance the progressive pro-choice narrative that pro-life individuals are enemies of women's rights, and therefore human rights.

Liberal Media Bend Over Backwards To Avoid Describing March For Life As Pro-Life.  Liberal media outlets bent over backwards to avoid describing the March for Life as pro-life, relying exhaustively on terms like "anti-abortion" or "abortion opponents" to describe the hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers in Washington, D.C. on Friday [1/27/2017].  "Anti-Abortion Groups Hold Triumphant Rally After Obama Years" was how the Associated Press titled its coverage of the march, later referring to the pro-life marchers as a "politically ascendant anti-abortion movement."

20 'Vetted' Refugees Who Turned to Terrorism After Being Allowed Into America.  While the lying media is perpetuating the lie refugees do not pose a terrorist threat, the facts show otherwise.  Senator and soon-to-be Attorney General Jeff Sessions compiled this list of refugees-turned-jihadists in 2016 while Obama was pushing to dramatically increase the amount of so-called "refugees" allowed into the United States.

Brzezinski: Trump Won EV 'Fair and Square' — But He's Not 'Completely Elected By the People'.  On Friday's [1/28/2017] broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-anchor Mika Brzezinski argued that while President Donald Trump won the Electoral vote fairly, "this is a president who lost to Hillary Clinton... I think there's a lot of support he still needs to gain.  It's not a president completely elected by the people."

ABC's Photoshop Fail:  Creates Fake Image to Promote Trump Interview.  After being caught deceptively editing comments from former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer during a report on Monday's [1/23/2017] Nightline, on Wednesday, ABC News was again embroiled in a fake news controversy after the network used a badly photoshopped image to promote World News Tonight anchor David Muir's upcoming interview with President Trump.  The picture showed Trump looking out the window of the Oval Office in a pretty standard pose, however, outside that window there appeared to be a massive blizzard.  The only problem?  It hasn't snowed in Washington D.C. in weeks and certainly no storm that intense has hit the area so far this winter.  In fact, the weather on Wednesday was unseasonably warm — sunny and 60 degrees.

ABC Apologizes After Being Caught Deceptively Editing Quote About Sean Spicer.  ABC News apologized late Tuesday [1/24/2017] after being caught deceptively editing a quote from former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer during the Monday night edition of Nightline.  ABC edited Fleischer's words to make it look like he was being more critical of White House press secretary Sean Spicer in the taped interview than he actually was.  Nightline quoted Fleischer as saying, "[Spicer's] briefing made me uncomfortable.  It was too truculent, too tough.  It looks as if the ball was dropped on Saturday."  But that is not what Fleischer meant to convey at all.  The point he was trying to make was actually complimentary of Spicer.

Magazine Retracts Claim That Fetal Heartbeats Are 'Imaginary'.  One of Washington's most influential magazines published several updates to an error-filled article attacking ultrasound technology, without acknowledging the extent of those corrections.  The Atlantic published "How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person" on Tuesday [1/24/2017].  The 2,500-word article argued that ultrasound technology "has been used to create an imaginary 'heartbeat' and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus."  The article by Moira Weigel, a Yale doctoral candidate in comparative literature, included at least three major errors that the publication corrected.

Abortion Science:  Heartbeats Are Imaginary, Unborn Babies Aren't Alive, And Ultrasounds Are Just Tools Of The Patriarchy.  The abortion industry has a new enemy:  ultrasounds.  In a bizarre and rambling 2,600-word feature piece published on Tuesday [1/24/2017], The Atlantic writer Moira Weigel took a sledgehammer to basic science and then did her best to vacuum its brains out before anyone could figure out what just happened.  The article's headline is bad enough — "How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person" — but its subhed is the real work of art:  "The technology has been used to create an 'imaginary' heartbeat and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus."  There are numerous other gems throughout the piece, such as her implication that only male doctors are allowed to use ultrasounds.

President Trump Should Dump The Media.  Trust ratings and approval levels for the media are so far down in the toilet that it would take a plumber to find them.  If the media are the people's representatives, then the people want to elect different ones.  Those are some of the same representatives that the media is trying to ban from social media with a fake "Fake News Crusade" and by resisting any expansion of press briefings with threats and warnings.  "We'll have to consider doing things other than protesting and whining," Fournier threatened.  "We'll have to think about what we can do to bring some pain to make our point."  Do what?  Run items accusing President Trump of being a traitor, a liar, a racist, a rapist and a Batman villain?  The media has already done all of those.  What else is it going to except shout more lies even louder?  Within a brief span of time, the media's fake news operation claimed that Trump had banished the bust of MLK, lifted quotes from a Batman villain and had been cavorting with Russian prostitutes.  And that he was a compulsive liar.  That last accusation is notably hilarious considering the honesty and integrity of the media.

Three Mainstream Media Lies on Trump's First Day.  The mainstream media lost no time in attempting to undermine President Donald Trump, as opposed to actually reporting information.  After eight years of kowtowing to Obama, they have suddenly discovered a civic responsibility to hold the government accountable.  But they are focusing on minutiae, and in some cases actually telling lies, both of omission and commission.  That risks alienating the public even further — making it harder, actually, for the media to act as watchdogs.

MSM reporter falsely claimed that Trump had MLK bust removed from Oval Office.  Sure everybody makes mistakes, but making a sensational false charge against a new president at the very first opportunity he allowed reporters into his Oval Office on Day One of his presidency sure looks like one of those narrative-confirming, "too-good-to-check" stories of journalistic lore that just happens to portray Trump as a racist "white nationalist" in the eyes of progressives.  Zeke Miller of Time was allowed into the Oval Office as a pool reporter and tweeted out reports that the Churchill bust was back (true) and the MLK bust was gone (false).

Why NYT Hid The Numbers For The 'Hottest Year On Record'.  [W]hen you read an article proclaiming that, for the third year in a row, last year was the hottest year on record, you might expect that right up front you will get numbers, measurements, and a statistical margin of error. [...] I just got done combing through a New York Times report titled, "Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year."  The number of relevant numbers in this article is:  zero.  We are not told what the average global temperature was, how much higher this is than last year's record or any previous records, or what the margin of error is supposed to be on those measurements.  Instead, we get stuff like this. [...]

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Botches Crime Stats in Defending John Lewis.  On Friday, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, whose 5th District includes the City of Atlanta, said of Donald Trump that "I don't see the president-elect as a legitimate president."  Trump characteristically fired back with a two-part tweet suggesting that Lewis "... spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results."  As would be expected, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution rushed to Lewis's defense.  In its apparent haste to do so, a pair of journalists at the paper committed a colossal math blunder vastly understating the city's crime rate.  With that mistake, the paper made the city look over 13 times safer than it really is.

CBS radio report created the impression Chicago torture victim was a black man assaulted by white Trump supporters.  This may be the single most despicable act of media bias I have ever encountered.  It took a lot of effort and art for CBS Radio to put together an early report on the Chicago torture incident that was strictly factual, yet created the impression on listeners that a group of white Trump supporters had attacked a helpless mentally challenged black man.  Mediaite provides a transcript of what was reported last Thursday morning by a top-of-the hour broadcst distributed to radio stations across the country.

CBS Takes Spin to a New Level of Deception After Chicago Torture Outrage.  The media has been hyping a contrived narrative that since the election there has been a wave of hate crimes against groups beloved by liberals:  blacks, Muslims, sexual deviants, et cetera.  Until now their evidence has consisted mainly of hate hoaxes, but this time an appalling racially motivated crime really did occur.  CBS listeners would never guess that this crime was committed by four blacks against a white kid.

CBS Radio Deceptively Implies Chicago Torturers Were White Trump Supporters, Victim Was Black.  A CBS Radio News report on the video of four young Chicago people torturing a mentally disabled man falsely implied that the victim was black and his attackers were white, when in fact the opposite was true.

The Washington Post Needs To Come Clean About Its Russian Hacking Story Fiasco.  On Friday [1/6/2017], the Washington Post published an earth-shattering report that Russian hackers had infiltrated the U.S. electricity grid through a Vermont utility. [...] This was huge news, and for good reason.  If Russian hackers, or any hackers for that matter, had found their way into the U.S. electricity grid, there would be almost no end to the harm they could cause.  Not surprisingly, the Post story spread like wildfire.  But it turns out that none of it was true.

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

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

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

The Great Hacking of Vermont's Electrical Grid That Never Happened.  Prominent media critics keep insisting that inaccurate reports from prominent institutions are completely different from the made-up "fake news" found on Facebook and other social media networks.  But do news consumers see them as completely different?  The net effect is the same: something that is not true gets communicated far and wide, and the correct information is spread on a much smaller scale.  A new poll found 52 percent of Democrats believe Russia "tampered with the vote tallies" to make Trump the winner in the presidential race.  There is no evidence of this.  When the big-name media institutions and elected Democratic officials twist the news to the point of falsehood, it's not surprising that so many of the rank-and-file would believe something that isn't true.

Fake News About the Office of Congressional Ethics.  The mainstream media are abuzz with claims that House Republicans have voted to "gut" or "eviscerate" the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), or to strip it of its independence.  Perpetual House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed Republicans had "eliminated" the oversight body, and linked the move to President-elect Donald Trump, claiming that the House Republicans' move represents a violation of Trump's campaign promise to "drain the swamp" in Washington.  The story qualifies as "fake news," and the fact that it is being repeated by so many outlets does not make the it any less fake.

BBC Finally Admits Its Famous 'Women Write Better Code' Story Was Fake News.  When the issue of "fake news" came to prominence at the end of this year's election cycle, traditional media outlets were the firsts to engage in relentless finger-pointing.  Journalists everywhere deplored the spread of misleading, lazily reported and, in some cases, totally fabricated stories that had been facilitated by social media.  That'd be ignoring — of course — that in a competitive media climate where virality and accuracy go head-to-head, editors will often go for a catchier headline, at the expense of factual accuracy.  And as one writer at HEqual noted, even the respectable BBC is not immune from this kind of sensationalism.

Top Ten Most Under Reported Stories of 2016.  [#2] The wipe-out of the corporate media apparatus:  It is understandable why the media would choose not to report on their own irrelevance; yet that doesn't mean their irrelevance is any less a story.  Arguably you could make the complete collapse of the U.S. corporate and legacy media the #1 story of this entire election cycle.  Never before has any single political election so thoroughly, completely and visibly destroyed the credibility of print or broadcast journalism.  Collectively and individually they will never recover from the continual abject and transparent falsehoods they promoted in each and every hour of their coverage, and in almost every column inch of their publications.  Put a fork in them, they are all done — and they did it to themselves, repeatedly.

Fake News:  Family Didn't 'Flee Town' over Breitbart Story That Doesn't Mention Them.  If you read through the world of left-wing clickbait Thursday afternoon [12/22/2016], you may have seen a shocking story about a Jewish family chased out of town by anti-Semitic Breitbart readers because our site blamed them for shutting down a school's Christmas play.  Scary stuff — except that version of the story is 100% fake news.

ADL: 'No truth' to story about Jewish family fleeing Pa. over Christmas play.  The Anti-Defamation League said Thursday that a widely circulated story that a Pennsylvania Jewish family fled their home after being blamed for the cancellation of a school Christmas play was false.  After investigating, the ADL said, it found the family had gone on vacation.  "News reports alleging that a Jewish family has 'fled' Lancaster County are untrue and damaging," ADL Regional Director Nancy Baron-Baer said in a statement.  "We spoke with the family, who explained that they went on a previously-planned vacation for the holidays.  Stories like this can sow fear in the Jewish community and beyond, and it is important to stop the spread of misinformation."

Kurt Eichenwald Further Explains His Claim That Trump Was Institutionalized.  [Scroll down]  So:  Eichenwald was making a joke, and "signalling to a source," but he also really believes that Trump was institutionalized in 1990.  The problem is that he can't prove it — it's merely "reporting process" — so he hasn't said so publicly.  Except for when he did say so publicly, but that doesn't count because he really doesn't like Tucker Carlson.  Now we know.  If Eichenwald genuinely believes that Tucker prevented him from explaining all of this on the air, then I'm glad to help make things right.

NBC's Chuck Todd Wonders If GOP Provoked Hacking from Russia by Calling Obama 'Soft'.  On Sunday [12/18/2016], NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd displayed the ability for some on the left to blame Republicans for anything.

Can You Trust the Press?  No..  Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, explains why we cannot trust the fake news vomited forth by the leftist "mainstream" information gatekeepers:  [Video clip]

4 Reasons Russia Didn't Swing The Election To Trump.  Democrats are over the moon about the new Washington Post report that quotes CIA sources who say that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government actively attempted to aid Donald Trump in his election race against Hillary Clinton.  Many Democrats have been making the claim that if not for Putin's intervention — if not for Russian hackers accessing emails from Hillary campaign chief John Podesta and then releasing them via WikiLeaks for months — Hillary Clinton would today be the president-elect.  There's no evidence to support that.  There is plenty of evidence to support the contrary notion, actually.

Mainstream Media Claims Russia Hacked U.S. Election, Offers Absolutely No Proof.  The CIA on Friday [12/9/2016] leaked a memo to the Washington Post "concluding" that Russia meddled in the U.S. election to help President-elect Donald Trump win — but any evidence supporting that finding remains secret.

The King of Fake News.  The liberals would love to do away with free speech, as Hillary Clinton would have if she'd been elected and could have packed the Supreme Court with liberals who would have reversed the Citizens United decision and others protecting free speech.  But the best way to do away with about 99 percent of the "fake news" that is broadcast and printed is for the liberals and their media allies to stop creating it.  Fake news — propaganda — is often risible and easily recognized.  When the North Korean government described the first time Kim Jong-Il (father of Kim Jong-Loon, the current dictator) went golfing, they broadcast that he scored a hole-in-one five times in one round of golf.  These days, the liberal media don't wait for enemy governments to make stuff up.  They do it themselves.

How a free press became fake.  If one wonders why American audiences are reposting fake news rather than purchasing subscriptions to the Washington Post, look no further.  When the free press falls into disrepair, readers click elsewhere.  Just as the electorate rejected elites at the ballot box in November, so audiences are ditching the establishment news media.  They're tired of journalists accepting fluff for fact, lecturing instead of reporting, and getting the story plain wrong.

MSNBC Host Apologizes For Falsely Claiming Fox News Held Its Christmas Party at Trump Hotel.  This morning, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle accused Fox News of holding its Christmas party at President-elect Donald Trump's recently opened Washington hotel.  The comment was part of a discussion revolving around potential conflicts of interest the incoming POTUS may have when it comes to his businesses.  The only problem was that Fox News has not even held its annual party yet and the upcoming party they've scheduled will be at a different hotel that isn't affiliated with Trump.

Sheriff Clarke:  Liberal Media Created Fake News With 'Hands Up Don't Shoot' Lie.  Liberal journalists and activists spread far and wide the myth that Michael Brown had his hands up before being gunned down by police officer Darren Wilson.  That claim was the origin of the Black Lives Matter movement and eventually lead to violent rioting in Ferguson.  The facts of the case showed the 'Hands up don't shoot' claim to be false and that Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.

Lies, [...] and LA Times editorials.  The Left, having no value for truth, honesty, integrity, or anything else besides getting their way of course, has no problem with printing absolute falsehoods like the ones in this editorial bemoaning the prospect of national concealed carry reciprocity.  It seems the Times is aggrieved that liberty and greater ability to self-defense might soon be coming[.]

Zakaria: 'Working-Class Whites' Vote On Emotion, Not Policy.  Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign did not fail as a result of its subscription to unpopular left-wing policies, said left-wing CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday's [12/4/2016] GPS.  As is his custom, his introductory monologue was a reading of his weekly column at left-wing news outlet The Washington Post.  Despite declaring Hillary Clinton's victory as inevitable on October 16 ("Let's be clear.  Donald Trump will lose the election."), Zakaria now claims to understand President-elect Donald Trump's appeal.  He also now claims to know what Clinton could have done to win the presidency.  American voters aren't driven by policy, said Zakaria, but by emotion: [...]

NPR, Uncorked on MSNBC: 'Right Wing Media' 'Brainwashed' People to Believe Lies.  The liberal media threw a proverbial hissy fit Monday [11/28/2016] in response to President-Elect Donald Trump's dubious claim that millions of votes were cast illegally.  While seeming pretend that Trump would be the first president ever to tell a lie, public radio host Bob Garfield went on a long winded tirade, on MSNBC's All In, railing against the "Right wing media."  "The people who get it and we at the mainstream media, you know, get the straight dope but about half the electorate is getting their information from other sources, none credible," he whined.  The ranting Garfield blamed the success of "right wing media" on what he called "330 million individual echo chambers," which he claimed helped to insulate people from news they don't want to hear.  He didn't seem to realize that his belief works both ways, especially when it's evident that left does not want to consider another perspective on nearly everything.

Democrats, Not Trump, Racialize Our Politics.  The most absurd Democratic meme to emerge from the party's ballot-box defeat is the claim that it is Donald Trump, rather than Democrats, who engages in "aggressive, racialized discourse," in the words of a Los Angeles Times op-ed.  By contrast, President Barack Obama sought a "post-racial, bridge-building society," according to New York Times reporter Peter Baker.  Obama's post-racial efforts have now "given way to an angry, jeering, us-against-them nation," writes Baker, in a front-page "news" story.  Tell that valedictory for "post-racial bridge-building" to police officers, who have been living through two years of racialized hatred directed at them in the streets, to the applause of many Democratic politicians.

Boycott Frosted Flakes!  Liberal bullies are trying to pressure advertisers into boycotting Breitbart.com, one of the most popular conservative sites on the internet. [...] Most CEOs of large companies are liberals, as are nearly all PR employees of such companies.  So this kind of response comes naturally.  The AP helpfully explains:  ["]Breitbart has been condemned for featuring racist, sexist and anti-Semitic content.["]  Really?  Condemned by whom?  For what?  The AP ritually recites these allegations against the site without citing any evidence whatsoever.  The claims are false, if not ridiculous.  But readers who rely on America's daily newspapers won't know this.

The Fake Arbiters of "Fake News".  As everyone already knows, on Friday the business section of The Washington Post published an article about so-called "fake news" propagated on the Internet.  The Russian propaganda services are said to be behind this disinformation, with many American websites helping to spread it, deliberately or otherwise.  One of the WaPo's principal sources for the story was a website called "PropOrNot".  For some reason the author, Craig Timberg, failed to link the site, although he linked many others.  However, in its post on the piece, Zero Hedge provides a link to the 200 "fake news" websites listed by PropOrNot.  Gates of Vienna was not illustrious enough to make the Post's article, but PropOrNot has honored us by including us in the list of sites that retail "fake news".

'Fake news' isn't the problem — mainstream news with an agenda is.  "Fake news" has been a big news story for the past week.  Hoaxes and fabrications hatched by clickbait-hungry websites — or, some reports say, by the Kremlin propaganda machine — have been blamed for Donald Trump's election victory.  Leading journalists such as CNN's Christiane Amanpour have decried the profession's "existential crisis" caused by the onslaught of fake stories.  Google and Facebook have both moved to curb the problem by denying advertising to "fake news" sites.  Meanwhile, critics on both the left and the right argue that the outcry about "fake news" is a manufactured crisis intended to smear and ostracize dissident, non-mainstream media — especially since some of the critiques lump together publications that contain real if slanted reporting, such as Breitbart News or Antiwar.com, with sites that publish actual hoaxes (such as a story about Pope Francis endorsing Trump) or satire.  Critics also charge that the "fake news" trope obscures the fact that the mainstream media have their own problem with false or misleading stories.

Fake News.  The success of "fake news" is inextricably linked to the state of credibility of the media.  Fake news would get no purchase if the media's credibility were high.  But surveys showed it has been declining for years and the Russians could not have helped but notice.  They very cleverly exploited the fact that news organizations were increasingly used by politicians to spread lies.  Talking Points, which made the coordination of lies easier, also made them easier to detect.

32 Times Establishment Media and Pollsters Assured the People of Donald Trump's Defeat.  From the time Donald Trump announced his White House bid, there has been no shortage of establishment media outlets predicting his defeat.  Indeed, as the weeks and months marked Trump's ever-apparent political preeminence, the pundits, pollsters, and prognosticators doubted and declared his collapse inevitable.  Even as Trump, a real estate mogul-turned-reality TV star, clinched the Republican presidential nomination, the affirmations of his failure kept coming.  The very establishment media and pollsters who benefitted from Trump's celebrity before branding him leader of a deplorable political base will stand against his governance.

Chicago Tribune:  Obama has been Pro Second Amendment!  Steve Chapman is a writer for the Chicago Tribune.  He has often written about gun legislation.  He stands out at the Tribune as a voice that recognizes reality more often then most.  His writing and viewpoints have been a reasonable voice crying in the wilderness of Chicago.  Unfortunately, he lives in the fantasy bubble of current Progressivism.  It is evident in his recent column excoriating the NRA.  He buys into the leftist propaganda without introspection or examination of facts.  It is an opinion column, but opinions should have a basis in reality.

LA Times produces list of "fake new sites" that includes a bunch o' sites more accurate than it is.  Having blamed James Comey, Russia, John Podesta, Julian Assange, warmal colding, and screwed up computer algorithms for the failure of a screeching, unhealthy, and unpopular harridan to achieve the presidency, the latest culprit appears to be "fake news".

Speaking Of Fake News, The 'Muslim Registry'.  Donald Trump has never called for a "Muslim registry," and any story claiming otherwise should be relegated to the pile of "fake news" the media is so concerned about right now.  The hysterical headlines claiming Trump and his surrogates are preparing to force all Muslims in the country to register perhaps reached their climax in this Washington Post headline Friday:  "They interned my family.  Don't let them do it to Muslims."

Crying and lying:  Hysteria and repeated false claims showered upon us by the left.  Greg Gutfeld brutally calls out the left and the fake cable news shows that push out the false narratives and refuse to investigate the veracity of the claims that pass over their airwaves.  Remarkable is the stream of claims that America is now tainted by the Trump supporters and their hateful antics.  Case after case is blurted across the left leaning cable shows.  But it seems there is never a corroboration or proof of the incidents so claimed.

Drown Out the Lying MSM.  Older readers may remember an era when the media generally reported facts and left spin to the mind of the viewer, or at least wasn't so crookedly biased.  In accurately predicting President-Elect Trump's victorious path through Michigan and Pennsylvania, I indicated that the media was distorting polling numbers deliberately to keep Trump supporters from bothering to vote.  While Trump won an electoral landslide, only a relatively small chunk of votes made the difference in those two states and in Florida.  Yes, the lying, propagandizing jackals in media nearly won the election for Clinton.  They decided to hang together up until the bitter end, and are now predictably circling the wagons trying to figure out what went wrong.  Everyone knew there was a secret Trump vote, and they still lied. [...] Do you enjoy being lied to?  Or do you have to watch sports so badly that you're willing to fork over $150 per month for a cable or dish subscription that directly funds people who hate you and everything you believe in and want to mislead you, all while insulting you to your face?

Lies my Politico told me.  After feeding the story line for the last two years that Trump was not a serious candidate, Politico is now pretending that he spent eighteen months of his life and $100 million to win an office he did not want.

There Is No Violent Hate-Crimewave in 'Trump's America'.  [W]hile all sorts of horrible incidents are being reported on Twitter and Facebook... well, anyone can say anything on Twitter and Facebook.  The bulk of these stories are "friend of a friend" told me types.  But if men were really going around pulling knives on Muslim women on public buses in Trump's name, there would at least be local or campus news reports of it.  Same, too, for the alleged wave of transgender teen suicides which keep getting mentioned in media but for which no one can offer any evidence.

Really?  Do you have 'Hundreds' of pictures?
Brian Stelter: 'Hundreds' Of Swastikas, Racist Attacks After Trump Win.  In little-noticed remarks Saturday [11/12/2016], "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter Saturday [11/12/2016] parroted data from the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming that there have been "hundreds of cases of swastikas, of racist language, of harassment, of in some cases, assaults and bullying across this country" since Donald Trump was elected.

An Important Post-Election Message About Media Polling.  The media didn't get it wrong.  The pollsters did not work from the wrong data set; the media pollsters, consultants and professional political class did not work from the wrong assumptions, or use the incorrect baselines.  THEY LIED.  The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was.  They lied and manipulated their data in a concerted effort to intentionally falsify reality.  There should be no doubt, EVER, in the mind of any political observer as to what took place within the expressed and broadcasted polling which fueled over two years of broadcast news.  The media intentionally lied.  They knew the truth.  The same tools available to us, and to those who were ridiculed for truth-telling, were available to them and many more.  They did not get it wrong.  They chose to lie to you the American electorate.

The real election surprise?  The uprising of the American people.  [Scroll down]  The political class and the mainstream media have a narrative that Trump's late surge is the result of an intervention by FBI Director James Comey.  That narrative, like every one they've had over this cycle, couldn't be more wrong.  The momentum of the election was already moving toward Trump before Comey's announcement to reopen of the Clinton email investigation.  That event, like the presidential debate in 1980, tended to accelerate what was already in motion.

NBC News' Pete Williams Reports FBI 'Really Isn't' Conducting Clinton Foundation Investigation.  Appearing on MSNBC's MTP Daily today, NBC News' justice correspondent Pete Williams refuted much of the reporting from Wall Street Journal and Fox News regarding a likely indictment regarding an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.  Fox's Bret Baier later backed off slightly, saying the indictment comment was "inartfully answered."  Speaking to host Chuck Todd, Williams claimed that via his own law enforcement sources, there doesn't actually appear to be much of an investigation, let alone one that will result in indictments.

On The Upside, At Least This Election Will Destroy The Media.  Liberal journalists, by which I mean journalists, do not think you should know things that hurt their favored candidate.  This is an interesting new take on the whole idea of "news reporting," an innovative rethink that refocuses journalists less on ensuring people hear the news and instead focuses on ensuring they only hear certain news that, incidentally, supports the media's progressive political agenda.  So we get fact checking that involves neither facts nor checking.

The Media Must Be Dismantled In Order For Freedom To Survive.  News has always been biased, but the American media exists for one reason and one reason only in 2016 — to further the agenda of the corporate-government complex a.k.a. the globalists. [...] You will never get any truth from the media when it comes to politics and many other issues. [...] I have personally not watched television in over a year since leaving the news industry, and my mind is more focused than it has ever been in my life.  I will likely never own another television in my life.

How 'Convicted Criminal' James O'Keefe Came to Be 'Discredited'.  [Anderson] Cooper introduced the videos by sniffing at O'Keefe's "less than stellar reputation for accuracy."  As inevitably happens, he cited no examples of O'Keefe's inaccuracies.  Cooper then turned the task over to CNN "investigative reporter" Drew Griffin who promptly upped the libel ante by referring to O'Keefe as a "discredited conservative activist."  Again, there was no effort to prove the "discredited" label or the "conservative" one, for that matter.

Spike In Immigrants Illegally Crossing Into US Ahead Of Election.  Experts told CBS News the number of immigrants crossing the border won't drop after Election Day.

The Editor says...
In other words, the headline is misleading and deceptive.

Debunking the Vicious False Narratives against Donald Trump.  By now, every voter knows that the mainstream media is in the pocket of Hillary Clinton but many do not know the extent of the malpractice in journalism today.  The MSM has successfully embedded in the minds of the voters false narratives that need to be exposed out of just plain common decency.  The three I will address in this piece are the charges that Trump mocked a disabled reporter; that he questioned the Mexican American's legitimacy to handle his court case because of his race, and that he mocked a Gold Star family.  There are many more.

Andrea Mitchell Falsely Claims Donna Brazile Leak Story Has Been 'Completely Knocked Down' [Video].  In the face of all evidence to the contrary, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell claimed on Thursday [10/20/2016] that allegations that Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile leaked town hall questions to the Clinton campaign have been "completely knocked down."  Mitchell was discussing references Donald Trump made on Thursday to leaked debate and town hall questions.  Trump claimed on Twitter that questions from Wednesday's debate, moderated by Fox News' Christopher Wallace, were provided to the Clinton campaign.  On Thursday, he referred to the scandal involving Brazile and her apparent leaking of a CNN/TV One town hall question asked of Clinton in March.

Ex-NY Times Public Editor Aghast That Anyone Thinks Times Reporters Make Stuff Up.  GOP nominee Donald Trump is alleging the game is rigged against him from a disturbing combo of inevitable voting fraud and slanted media coverage of the campaign.  Predictably, media stalwarts blithely dismiss Trump's allegation as paranoid and delusional.  Perhaps they should not be so quick to laugh it off, given the media's track record when it comes to fiction fobbed off as journalism.

Liberty students less divided over Trump than MSM claims.  Mainstream media reports portray Liberty University students as turning against Donald Trump, but a current student says this is just an exaggeration meant to divide the student body.

Alicia Machado Is 2016's Sandra Fluke, A Democratic Public Relations Scam.  Sandra Fluke became the centerpiece of the Democrats' "War on Women" messaging that they pounded throughout the year.  The media completely ate it up, hook, line, and sinker.  Within minutes, she was put on every major network and cable outlet.  The media ran with stories about how women weren't allowed to testify at the hearing, even though two female college administrators — Dr. Allison Dabbs Garrett, the senior vice-president for academic affairs at Oklahoma Christian University, and Dr. Laura Champion, medical director of Calvin College Health Services — testified.  The facts were no barrier to the headlines, which included CBS' "Dems decry all-male House panel on WH contraception rule" and CNN's "Angry lawmakers challenge lineup at hearing:  'Where are the women?'"

MSNBC host insists Clinton created jobs.  An MSNBC news anchor insisted on Friday that Hillary Clinton has a record of job creation that's at least more than "zero," but then struggled to point to any evidence of her claim.  The anchor, Stephanie Ruhle, interviewed Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Donald Trump supporter, who said Trump created "thousands and thousands" of jobs as a businessman.  "How many jobs has Hillary Clinton created?" asked Rutledge.  "Zero is the answer.  Zero jobs for any woman.  Zero jobs for any man, for that matter.  So, she has zero credibility when it comes to job creation."

Rudy Giuliani defends Trump on 'stop and frisk' and demands apology from 'dead wrong' debate moderator Lester Holt for declaring it 'unconstitutional'.  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is demanding an apology from Lester Holt, the moderator of Monday night's presidential debate, for incorrectly declaring stop-and-frisk policing methods 'unconstitutional.'  'Donald Trump was right,' Giuliani wrote in an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal.

MSNBC Anchor Falsely Claims Trump Has Never Been on Stage With a Female Candidate.  MSNBC anchor Kate Snow falsely claimed in an interview Monday that Donald Trump has never appeared on a debate stage with a woman. [...] Snow appeared have forgotten about Carly Fiorina's presence on the Republican debate stage during the primary process.  Fiorina participated in four debates with Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP field.

Hillary's Pneumonia Hokum:  A Timeline.  [Scroll down]  Some of the dinosaur media have reported that Hillary "stumbled at the curb" and "fell into the van."  Others reported that she "fainted."  This shows the extremely low quality of "journalism" today, describing things that just didn't happen, as you can see for yourself in the video.  Hillary didn't "stumble";she buckled at the knees.  She didn't "faint" (lose consciousness and go limp).  Hillary herself says she didn't faint, and for once she might be telling the truth, because the video shows that she was apparently awake but immobile.  She was having a seizure of some kind.

Dear Media:  Please Stop Calling Violent Rioters 'Protesters'.  Watching coverage of the unrest in Charlotte, North Carolina last night, I was struck by a common trend in how the most violent acts were being covered. [...] Looting a Wal-Mart, destruction of property, attempted murder, all carried out by... "protesters." [...] I suppose you could make a convoluted argument about how the protests were against white supremacy, and capitalism and the media are agents of white supremacy, therefore attacking those institutions are acts of "protest" or whatever.  But if even violent attempted murder and destruction of property can be a "protest" so long as the motives are political, I don't see why the same can't be said of, say, a terrorist attack.

CBS lies about yet another police shooting.  On Tuesday September 20, 2016, The Talk, on CBS showed some video of a guy being shot by police near Tulsa OK.  They showed him with his hands up, and they showed him after he was shot.  They made no mention of the fact that, after the police told him to stand still, he kept walking toward his truck.  They EDITED OUT the part of the video that showed the guy reaching into his truck, which of course is why the police shot him; he looked like he was reaching for a gun.  And of course the hostesses expressed outrage about the police shooting a guy with his hands up and "not making any kind of threatening gesture in any way" and how it's yet another example of "blacks being killed by racist cops."  I rather doubt that the hostesses have ever heard the true story of that incident.

Joy Reid:  Not True That Republicans Passed Civil Rights for African-Americans That Democrats Opposed.  Saturday on MSNBC's "AM Joy," host Joy Reid disagreed with chairman of the Black Republican Caucus of Florida Sean P. Jackson when he said that if it was not for Republicans, African-Americans would still be enslaved.

CBS Misleadingly Suggests Clinton Emails Marked 'C' Not Actually 'Classified'.  On CBS This Morning on Monday [9/5/2016], at the end of a report recalling the notes the FBI released which document that Hillary Clinton claimed not to know that "(C)" markings in her emails indicated classified information at the level of "confidential," CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes misleadingly gave the impression that confidential emails are not classified as she made a point of correcting Donald Trump for mis-stating that the "(C)" stood for "classified."  A bit later, as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared as a guest and similarly suggested that "confidential" information is not classified, CBS substitute host Josh Elliott seemed to accept her claim.

MSNBC: Republicans Purging Minorities to Steal Election, Hack Results.  MSNBC's Joy Reid, who was swift to condemn Republican concerns of voter fraud, was equally as fast at accusing them of plotting to steal the election.  Reid's concern centered on a computer system called CrossCheck which was developed to find duplicate names on the voter rolls so they can be removed.  But Reid and her guest Rolling Stone writer Greg Palast, who brought the issue to her attention, accuse the system of targeting minorities.  "The system disproportionality targets voters of color who are likely to have common surnames, like Washington or Hernandez," Reid stated.

Media Invented Lie About Trump Mocking Disabled Reporter.  Just when you think the media could not possibly become more loathsome, the Fourth Estate bullies prove you wrong again.  The Washington Post's latest ugliness was to exploit the disability of a newspaper reporter in order to smear the Republican nominee for president.  Then — and this is the least surprising part of the story — the Post lied about it.

Desperate Media Declare Trump Mexico Summit a Failure in Advance.  Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had not even left yet for his visit to Mexico on Wednesday morning [8/31/2016] when the mainstream media began declaring it a failure.

National NBC Reporter Claims "Trump Rally Crowds Small" — Despite Akron Ohio Max Capacity Crowd 5,000+.  The trust in U.S. journalism is at a historic low.  Most Americans now accept the U.S. media is completely dishonest.  However, the media reporters claim such public opinions are unwarranted. [...] Any objective observer of the news media's treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election — and they don't have to be wearing a button that says "I'm with her" for this to be readily apparent.

RNC Official at Trump's Hispanic Meeting Debunks False BuzzFeed, Univision Reports that Donald Succumbed to Amnesty Activists.  A senior staffer at the Republican National Committee (RNC) told Breitbart News Saturday GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump did not say or suggest that he was open to granting any legal status — amnesty — to any illegal aliens in the United States at his campaign's National Hispanic Advisory Council meeting as reported in BuzzFeed and Univision.

Almost Everything the Media Tell You About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Is Wrong.  A major new report, published today [8/22/2016] in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.  Co-authored by two of the nation's leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.  The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that "some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence."

Media Matters fabricates quote from Robert Spencer, claims he runs "white nationalist think tank".  Did you know I was a "white nationalist think tank leader"?  Neither did I.  I didn't know I was a white nationalist, and didn't know I ran a think tank.  Just think of all the meetings I've missed. [...] Media Matters claims to correct the lies of the Right.  In fact, it is they who are the liars.

Black males murder five year old white girl in Milwaukee.  No national outrage.  Two black males in Milwaukee walked up to the home of a white family, in a majority black neighborhood, and unleashed a hail of gunfire.  A five year old white girl, Laylah Petersen, was murdered while sitting on her grandfather's lap.  Milwaukee police say there is no question the shooters were deliberating trying to kill people inside the house.  At least a dozen bullets were fired directly into the house.  There may have been a third person driving a getaway car.  The house was located in a census tract that is 77% black and 14% white.  The Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee channel 6 have actually been trying to downplay the murder.  They are falsly reporting that it was "a stray bullet."  That directly contradicts all the evidence found by police.

Megan Twohey of the New York Times Caught in a Media Hoax.  Megan Twohey of the New York Times offers you a master class in how to spot a liar.  Megan Twohey along with "journalist" Michael Barbaro recently published a hit on Donald Trump.  In their article, ["]Crossing the Line:  How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Public["], Twohey and Barbaro accused Trump of conduct varying from sexual harassment to "debasing" of women.  The problem?  The story was a hoax!

The Media Are Lying to Hide Clinton's Animosity to the Second Amendment.  This is the state of "journalism" today.  Members of the media who desperately want Hillary Clinton to be elected president are stooping to unprecedented lows, abandoning all pretenses of impartiality, forfeiting whatever remnant of credibility they might otherwise have, trying to prevent voters from realizing that Hillary Clinton fundamentally opposes the individual right to keep and bear arms.  The Washington Post, to single out one of the worst in this regard, is worried that voters agree with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that if Clinton were elected, she would "essentially abolish the Second Amendment."

The Misinformation Age.  The thing is, our mass media culture is mostly fabricated nonsense.  Most of what the news people "report" is made up.  As soon as you see the word "sources" you know what follows is invented.  Even when someone is named as a source, nine times out of ten we learn that the named source did not actually say what he was claimed to have said.  The other day, the news people were claiming Trump got in a fight with a baby at one of his events.  It turns out he made some harmless jokes about a crying baby.

The media's lies and double standards accelerate at blinding speed.  [Scroll down]  As a senator, Mrs. Clinton had voted for the Iraq war and refused to support the military surge that turned the war around, and as secretary of state, she supported President Obama's precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, which created the vacuum into which the Islamic State stepped, and failed to honor repeated requests for greater security in Benghazi, all while Mr. Trump was a private citizen.  But according to Mr. Khan, Mr. Trump is the villain:  "Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims," he said.  "He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership.  He vows to build walls and ban us from this country."  Another untruth.  Rather than "ban Muslims" from entering the country, Mr. Trump proposes a temporary hold on those coming from nations "compromised" by Islamic terrorism and once the situation is in hand, thorough background checks on all immigrants coming from those areas.  Mr. Khan also wondered if Mr. Trump had "read the Constitution."  Never mind that the Constitution does not offer religious freedom protections to non-citizens and that as a matter of law and policy, we are not obligated to let anyone into the country.  Throughout his time in the spotlight, Mr. Khan parroted the media's distortions, and they ate it up.

Media Photoshops Crowd Image For Hillary Clinton St.  Petersburg, Florida Speech.  Remember the discussions of "optics" and trying to manufacture the perception of support for Hillary Clinton?  It's all a pretense; a fraud; a corporate media ruse.  Well, a great example comes today from "The Hill", an on-line media outlet promoting the speech of candidate Clinton.

The Media vs. America.  The other night I spent some time with Donald Trump.  He had come to Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, a mere five or so miles up the road from my house.  The Trump rally was filled — completely — with thousands inside and outside thousands more waiting (in vain) to get in the door.  Here's what interested.  Never once — not once — did I hear Donald Trump mention the Khans, the now famous parents of a son killed in battle in Iraq.  Even more to the point?  In talking with many people in the audience before and after the rally, no one — say again not a single soul — mentioned the Khans.  What I did hear from Trump was talk about jobs, trade, the economy, ISIS and more.  Which was the talk from members of the audience when I spoke to many of them before and after the rally.  They volunteered directly to me, conversation after another, their thoughts about ObamaCare, a sick child, jobs, trade, pride in America, Hillary and so on.  And yet?  Mysteriously when I returned home and turned on the television or checked on-line it seemed to be all-Khan all-the-time.  As if Trump had spent the evening re-hashing the whole subject yet again.  Which he had not.

Exclusive: NBC Quietly Scrubs 'Discredited' Smear of Bill Clinton Rape Accuser.  Following the receipt of a retraction demand, NBC News has quietly edited the Internet edition of a segment that aired on the highly-rated "Today Show" in which anchor Andrea Mitchell claimed Juanita Broaddrick's rape accusation against Bill Clinton had been "discredited."  After receiving the legal letter, penned by Broaddrick's attorney and son, Kevin L. Hickey, NBC removed the word "discredited" from the network's Internet version of Mitchell's video report, Broaddrick and Hickey told this reporter.  However, NBC did not make any indication of the edit in the video or on the webpage that hosts it.

Free Beacon Catches NBC Scrubbing Old Video of Mitchell Saying Juanita Broaddrick Is 'Discredited'.  In a breaking story posted late Tuesday afternoon [8/2/2016] by our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, staff writer and former CNS News staff writer Elizabeth Harrington revealed that NBC News has stealth edited a May 19 video of Clinton campaign correspondent Andrea Mitchell on Today denouncing Juanita Broaddrick's sexual allegations against Bill Clinton as "a discredited and long-denied accusation" to merely being a "long-denied accusation."  Mitchell's original phrasing was flagged the day that it aired live on NBC by the MRC's Kyle Drennen and he chronicled the network's history concerning Broaddrick and Clinton.

Media Hoax!  Dishonest Journalists Claim Alex Jones was Arrested.  The mainstream media was at it again, this time attempting to hoax the world by claiming Alex Jones had been arrested for punching a black cop.  The truth is that SJWs assaulted him.  I know because I was there filming the entire event.  At a small gathering of discontents, Alex Jones appeared with his bull horn explaining how the protesters were globalist tools of George Soros.  As Jones approached the group, they attacked him.  Police intervened, separating the two groups.  Yet the media began spreading a hoax, claiming Jones assaulted a black police officer.

Website Gets Busted Trying to Cover Obama's Lies.  Rumor-disproving website Snopes has proven itself especially unreliable on all matters political, and it did so again this week when it tried to "bust" the myth that President Obama had paid Iran $400 million in exchange for American citizens being held in Iranian jails.  Both Snopes and the Obama administration insist that the payment was part of the Iran nuclear deal and completely unconnected to the release of the men.

Media Outlet Claims Big, Boisterous Crowd At Clinton Rally.  There's just one problem:  The crowd was not really that big.

Misleading Headline of the Month:  AP "Man who shot sleeping intruder".  The above headline must be one of the most misleading that I have seen.  It comes from AP itself.  It is aided and abbetted by the AP leading sentence.  From the washingtontimes.com:  ["]BEND, Ore. (AP) - The man who shot and killed another person asleep inside a Bend home in 2012 is asking a court to throw out a wrongful death lawsuit against him.["]  The intruder was not sleeping.  He was actively fighting the couple that found him asleep in the homeowners house.  There was an extensive investigation, and the shooting was ruled justified.  The story is all over the Internets, with the factually wrong headline and first sentence.

So Much for That 'Unprecedented' Jail Talk.  The Republican convention's rowdy chants about Hillary Clinton — "Lock her up!" — have caused liberal journalists to get extremely distressed.  In their lead editorial on July 21, The Washington Post fulminated that Team Trump's "descent from standard red-meat partisanship to unprecedented accusations of criminality displays contempt for the rule of law and a startling disinterest in fact and reason."  That's strong brew.  It's too bad for them that it's completely false.  Somehow, the Post writers are acting like they were born yesterday, or slept through the last Republican presidency.  They've chosen to overlook that their liberal friends in news and entertainment were active participants in an eight-year anti-GOP hatefest.  Take CNN commentator Jack Cafferty, who on October 17, 2005, gushed to Wolf Blitzer about the idea of Karl Rove in prison: [...]

How The Media Covers Up Muslim And #Blacklivesmatter Terrorism.  The propaganda, the artful selection and deselection of facts, have become as familiar to us as they were to any of the residents of the Soviet Union or North Korea.  Anyone who pays attention knows not only that they are being lied to, but can easily predict the lies that they will be told on the evening news even before they actually hear them being spoken out loud.  We always knew that the Muslim terrorist, even before he was identified, would turn out to be a secular loner who was depressed over his family life.  All the media had to do with Mohammed Bouhlel, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France was to replay the same exact narrative as the one that they had fed us with Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 49  people in Orlando.  Irreligious, depressed loner with family problems.  Check.  No connection to Islamic terrorism.  Suggestion of mental illness.  Check and check.  Insistence on his lack of interest in religion?  One final check.

MSNBC's 'truck crash' framing of France terror attack ignites Twitter mockery.  An MSNBC tweet on late Thursday [7/14/2016] that framed France's latest terror attack as a "truck crash" elicited a stinging response from readers.  "Follow our live blog for the latest from Nice after a truck crash leaves at least 70 dead," the network tweeted at 8:49 p.m.  EST., well after even President Obama and French President Francois Hollande called the event an act of terrorism.  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, killed at least 84 people during Bastille Day ceremonies by plowing a giant truck through crowds along the Promenade des Anglais.

Media blames truck, not terrorists or Islam, for Nice attack.  Leftist media outlets reacted to the devastating attack in Nice not by blaming Islam or even terrorists, but by suggesting that an inanimate object — the truck — was responsible for the carnage.  Instead of pointing the finger at Islamists, CNN, CBC and the New York Times all published headlines that served to hide the true nature of the attack.  CBC reported, "Children feared killed in Nice as truck attacks family event".  Presumably, the truck was somehow able to manifest artificial intelligence and plough itself through dozens of victims.

When liberal narratives override the facts.  Here we go again.  Yet another hotly reported media narrative stamps itself on the national dialogue only to find — oops! — maybe there are actually more facts to be discovered before we know, as they say, "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."  This time around the media narrative surrounds the Minnesota shooting by St. Anthony Village Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez, the shooting victim one Philando Castile.

Shocker! It Looks Like the Media May Have Bought a False Narrative in Philando Castile Shooting.  If there is one thing I've learned about media firestorms in the modern age of one-hour news cycles and 15-second attention spans, it's that whoever tells the first story which the news media likes is the "winner."  Once the narrative is set in stone (when the news media works in unison that takes about two days, tops), the truth will face a battle that is severely uphill, into the wind, on ice, and will almost never prevail.  There was no better example of this sad reality than the "Hands Up!  Don't Shoot!" myth which drove the entire Ferguson fiasco and was the origin of the entire "Black Lives Matter" movement.  Every investigation into the matter (including by the Obama administration) later concluded, against self-interest, that this catchphrase was based on an obvious and despicable lie.  However, even that did almost nothing to alter public perceptions of that event or the media's eagerness to give instant credibility to similar claims from the same groups in the future.

Update:
Woman Who Famously Live-Streamed Her Boyfriend's Police Shooting is Arrested for Hammer Attack.  Diamond Reynolds, the woman who famously live-streamed the controversial fatal police shooting of Philando Castile, has been arrested in connection with a vicious attack that left another woman with serious injuries.  Reynolds, Dyamond Richardson, and Chnika Blair were apprehended Thursday [3/23/2107] in St. Paul, Minnesota, after allegedly attacking a woman with a hammer Tuesday night [2/28/2017], and leaving the scene in a silver truck.

Media Ignore the Tsunami of Black Violence against Cops.  The shootings in Dallas did not make much of a difference.  Not to the reporters explaining the protest and the reason behind the assassination of five police officers.  The reason for the demonstration was simple and beyond pushback:  White cops shoot black people all over the country, all the time, for no reason whatsoever.  Everybody knows that.  So sad.  Some took it to the next level:  The head of a black group called Dallas Action said the killings were a wake up call to let people know how cops are picking on black people.  All the time.  For no reason whatsoever.  The local Fox reporter in Dallas took the comments in stride, quickly changing the topic to all the pretty lights on nearby police cars.  Not one reporter at any point even hinted at how black violence is wildly out of proportion.

Betrayed by an America-hating press.  The press lie constantly, and their lies are exposed every day by conservative radio and opinion sites.  Lying to the public is a basic betrayal of a vital survival function in a democratic republic, a true stab in the back. [...] In J schools in this country, "betrayal" of the basic obligations of journalism has a name.  It's called "advocacy journalism," but it means lying to every single American.

The Democrats' Self-Serving Distractions.  After the massacre at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., by an American Muslim of Afghan origin affiliated with the Islamic State, the editors of the New York Times argued that the fundamental problem was "hate" exemplified by ... opponents of same-sex marriage.  That was an interesting line of argument.  Omar Mateen was not found with a natural-law treatise in his back pocket, and he wasn't fresh from a Princeton seminar with Robert George.  He never suggested that the Supreme Court had taken too broad a view of the 14th Amendment in Obergefell v.  Hodges.  He was a Muslim fanatic whose heroes throw homosexuals off of tall buildings and crucify Christians.  The morning after that massacre, the New York Daily News reported the enormity under the headline:  "Thanks, NRA!"

Seriously? New Chris Matthews Ad Touts Liberal's 'Tough Questions'.  In case you weren't aware, the liberal Chris Matthews is the king of the "tough questions."  That's according to a new ad airing on MSNBC.  In the spot, Matthews brags, "I take it as my job not to just ask the tough questions... but to get answers to them." [...] However, in January of 2016, the Hardball host conducted a 20 minute softball interview with Hillary Clinton.  It included "questions" such as this one:  "Well, New York came and fell in love with you and said, 'We like you, come up here, live up here and be our senator.'"

Here's The Media's Latest Attempt To Downplay Radical Islam After Orlando Attack.  Ever since witnesses started coming out of the woodwork in the wake of the Orlando attack, claiming that shooter Omar Mateen had actually led a secret gay lifestyle, the liberal media has been desperately trying to portray the massacre as more of a homophobic hate crime than a radical Islamic terrorist attack.  It allows the left to view the attack as proof that hatred of the LGBT community is separate from the Muslim faith. [...] It was a coordinated attempt by the media to spin the narrative, to protect Islam at all costs, despite evidence to the contrary.  Unfortunately for them, the FBI has finally come out and said the entire narrative that Mateen was a self-hating gay man has no evidence to back it up.

Everything was accurate.  But none of it was true.  [Scroll down]  The points of this narrative:  One, the national media is not interested in accuracy or truth, but in getting the story out first.  Two, it should fit a template, e.g., the nation is racist, law enforcement is prejudiced, and they will frame their narrative accordingly (black male was shot, it was because the "white" Hispanic is racist, there is racism all over the country).  Three, the people doing the reporting have little knowledge of the facts they are discussing, such as what is the difference between an AR-15 and M-16, or "automatic fire" and "semi-automatic fire", and "define what is an assault weapon" ([indeed], so ignorant they should run for Congress).

6 Things To Know About Tying Gun Sales To A Watch List.  [#2] The Democrats are still falsely conflating the no-fly list with the terrorist watch list.  We've been over this before.  The no-fly list is not the same thing as the terrorist watch list.  The no-fly has roughly 40,000 names on it and many of them are not the names of U.S. citizens.  By contrast, the terrorist watch list has more than a million names on it (we can't know the actual number).  The legislation Democrats are pushing relies on a definition similar, but not identical, to the one used to create the terrorist watch list on a rolling basis.  It has nothing to do with the no-fly list.  That won't stop Democrats from conflating the two intentionally (as an aide to Sen.  Diane Feinstein admitted she does), nor will it stop ignorant journalists from confusing them accidentally (as several have conceded to me they have).

Journalism, R. I. P.  For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, most of those who work in the media are progressives.  They believe that government must undertake to fix an array of social maladies, such as income inequality, perceived racial and gender disparities, and the general dangerous superstitions, bad habits, and cultural baggage of those of less education than reporters, investigative journalists, and Internet and television commentators.  Yet sometimes simply reporting on society's perceived ills does not offer quite a rich enough landscape in which to save humanity.  And sometimes reality offers examples that confound the progressive ideology.  Therefore, journalists often fabricate stories and justify their cons as necessary means to achieve their higher aims.

Brian Williams:  U.S. Is 'The Only Nation to Have Used' Nuclear Weapons 'In Anger'.  MSNBC breaking news host and ex-NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was allowed out on MSNBC's airwaves early Friday afternoon [5/27/2016] to discuss President Obama's visit to Hiroshima so he could resurrect a taped report that aired in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bomb's dropping on the Japanese city.  In the course of discussing the event afterward, though, Williams threw some shade in the direction of the U.S. military and then-President Harry Truman by complaining that "we're the only nation to have used them in anger" against the horrifying Axis Powers member.

Guardian admits rogue reporter fabricated interviews.  The Guardian has admitted that a rogue reporter fabricated interviews in articles for the newspaper and falsely claimed to have been present at events he wrote about.  Joseph Mayton, a freelance who has been writing for the Guardian since 2009, has been accused of making up quotes in some of his stories, even filing interviews with people who later said they had never spoken to him.

The Continually Dishonest Media.  Apparently the U.S. media has chosen this week to once again reassert itself as the epitome of broadcast propaganda; Pravda must have been giving them a run for the ruses.  One of the examples today comes from the nascent Jake Tapper of CNN who rallied the proverbial troops around a claim that Donald Trump "brought up Vince Foster" while campaigning for President.

No, The Public Doesn't Suddenly Support Socialized Medicine.  A new Gallup survey seems to suggest that majority of Americans now back government-run health care. [...] The mainstream press eagerly ran with the story.  The Washington Post, for example, headlined its piece:  "Poll:  Most Americans want to replace ObamaCare with single-payer — including many Republicans."  The ABC News headline blared "Poll Says Majority of Americans Prefer 'Medicare For All' Health Care," and the story led by saying that "A growing number of Americans now support the idea of federally funded health care."  Look more carefully at the poll itself, however, and you see that it doesn't show that at all.

Media Lies About Court's Contraception Order.  Anyone still naïve enough to rely on the legacy media for unvarnished news will have gone to bed Monday evening [5/16/2016] believing that the Supreme Court evaded its duty regarding Little Sisters of the Poor v.  Burwell.  Countless headlines had declared that the Court decided to "punt," "skirt," or otherwise dodge any meaningful action concerning the challenge to the HHS contraception mandate.  In reality, SCOTUS handed the Little Sisters and the other petitioners with whom the Court consolidated their case a major victory in their protracted battle to defend religious liberties against the depredations of the Obama administration's bureaucrats and lawyers.  In a unanimous opinion, the justices vacated all lower court rulings against the Little Sisters and the other petitioners.  The term "vacated," in this context, means that the Court has rendered those adverse decisions legally void.  And the justices didn't stop there.

Irony Alert:  New MSNBC Ad Says 'We Seek Different Perspectives'.  With no sense of irony or humor, a new MSNBC ad claims the network "seeks different perspectives."  Yes, the cable channel home to some of most liberal hosts and journalists on the planet, touted, "We seek different perspectives, connect the dots, approach the story from all the angles."  The condescending commercial started airing on Tuesday [5/3/2016].  The unidentified voice lectured, "We break news.  Yeah.  But we do more than that.  If all you want is headlines, check your Twitter feed."  The announcer smugly continued, "We go beyond the sound bites."  What's so bizarre about this latest spot is that it directly contradicts previous MSNBC ads.

Top 10 Misreported or Underreported Stories of 2015.  [#1] The Fake Iran Agreement:  In July the mainstream media celebrated a deal between Iran and the P5+1 that would provide Iran with sanctions relief along with virtually no accountability.  Today, the administration, along with their lapdogs in the press, continues to argue that this somehow adds up to a good deal for the world.  It doesn't.  In fact, there really is no deal at all.  The New York Times and other news organizations still call this a "signed" deal.  It isn't.

How The Mainstream Media Spread Another False 'Islamophobia' Story.  The journalists and publications which implied the hit and run in Molenbeek this weekend was a 'far right' anti Islam attack had no evidence to suggest that it was as they reported, but they knew what story they wanted to write.  That's why most hesitantly wrote "during" a "far right demonstration" instead of bluntly labelling the driver a "far right activist" as did the Daily Mail, the first publication to report on the story.  Instead of acknowledging the categorical error, or clearly reporting the truth as it emerged, however, the Mail quietly edited their original article, burying the factual change three quarters of the way down the page, and failing to issue a correction or clarification.

Dumping Tabloid Trash on Ted Cruz.  The National Enquirer's name in journalism is synonymous with factually unsupported drivel of the lowest kind.  It is a sacred truth that no responsible journalist would reference the kind of garbage found in this tabloid.  But somehow it's perfectly appropriate for the same responsible journalists to report the sleaze over and over, emphasizing, of course, that the source is the awful National Enquirer.

CNN Started The Carson Drop-Out Rumor; Now They're Lying About It To Bash Cruz.  [Scroll down]  Cruz's team explicitly cited CNN's reporting in its emails.  Carson himself has sent emails blaming CNN.  Cruz correctly pointed out what happened on CNN, as you can see from the transcript [in this article].  And while CNN reporters tweeted that Carson wasn't dropping out, as did Carson staffers, CNN did not report on air that Carson was staying in the race until later in the evening.

'One Long Cheap Shot' — WashPost Lines Up Canadians to Bash Ted Cruz as Extreme.  While The Washington Post would only go to Kenya looking for gushing over Barack Obama, they turn to Canada to make fun of Ted Cruz.

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

CBS Muslim Panel Accidentally Includes Professional Leftist Obama Operative.  CBS's Frank Luntz sought to gauge the attitudes of an ostensibly ordinary panel of Muslims in America towards Donald Trump.  Undeclared to the audience, however, is a professional left-wing agitator seated in the front row who is an alumnus of the Obama Administration.  Linda Sarsour, an anti-American hater of Israel, Islamic supremacist, and regular commentator on left-wing media, was not identified as such when offering her views on Trump.  Rather, she was presented as an ordinary Muslim in America.

Also posted under Media bias in favor of Islam.

Did Media Misquote NC Anti-Solar Residents To Make Them Look Stupid?  Numerous left-wing media outlets have repeatedly misquoted citizens of Woodland, N.C., after the city government voted to reject a proposed solar farm.  An article in the Huffington Post claimed local resident Bobby Mann said the proposed solar farm would "stop plants from growing and suck up all the energy from the sun," during his testimony to the Woodland Town Council, citing an article in the Roanoke-Chowan Herald-News.  However, the Herald-News only directly quotes Bobby Mann as saying "You're killing your town, [a]ll the young people are going to move out."  Other media outlets repeated the misquote.

Biggest Liar of 2015: The Washington Post and Its Pinocchios.  [Scroll down]  The [Washington] Post, of course, was an early and gleeful adopter of the narrative of the unarmed black person shot for no reason whatsoever by racist police in Ferguson who apparently did that kind of thing all the time.  This Lie infected more than just miles and miles of newsprint in the hard news sections.  It was also reported and spread in the sports, lifestyle, opinion, entertainment, and virtually every other nook and cranny of the Post — even after the attorney general grudgingly admitted the entire thing was a hoax in March of this year.  The lies are legion.  A few of the more deceitful:  The Post led the way in glorifying the hundreds of black Capitol Hill staffers who gathered for a photo op in their $1000 coats, soft leather gloves stretched into the air, proclaiming 'hands up, don't shoot.'  [...]

Thank You, Joe Scarborough, For Being So Biased And Fact Challenged.  Those tuning into Monday's [11/9/2015] "Morning Joe" on MSNBC might've wondered about the "worst record" poll that host Joe Scarborough said unfairly kicked Chris Christie off the Fox debate stage.  We wondered, too.

Carson Blows Up at Reporters During Presser: Why Don't You Care About Obama's Past?  Ben Carson faced some combative reporters during a press conference in Florida tonight about the various issues in his background that have been raised this week.  He dismissed Politico's report about him not being formally offered a West Point scholarship, simply insisting it was relayed to him that he could get one with the kind of accomplishments in his background.

Politicians, press pile on Politico.  Reporters and politicians ripped into Politico for publishing a story Friday saying Ben Carson "fabricated" a story about being offered a full scholarship to attend West Point.  But even before this criticism started, Republican front-runner Donald Trump had already declared war on the Virginia-based news outlet's editorial standards, saying last week that it is "the dumbest and most slanted" site that he has ever encountered.

Politico Admits Fabricating A Hit Piece On Ben Carson.  There were at least five major problems with the story:
  •   The headline was completely false
  •   The subhed was also completely false
  •   The opening paragraph was false false false
  •   The substance of the piece was missing key exonerating information
  •   The article demonstrated confusion about service academy admissions and benefits

The Three (Clinton) Stooges and CNBC.  [Scroll down]  Quintanella has a BA in political science.  So does Quick.  John Harwood says evasively that he studied economics and history as an undergraduate.  At least half their colleagues have degrees in journalism.  Almost none have had experience managing anyone else's money.  So it came as no surprise when Becky Quick asked Ted Cruz what he was going to do about the fact that women earn 77% of what men make.  This claim has been made for four decades; it's almost as old as Becky.  It has 999 lives.  No matter how many times it's refuted by economists, the mantra is repeated — like the similarly discredited claim that intelligence tests are culturally biased.

GOP Media Takedown: A Recipe for Victory.  Along with lawyers and politicians, the media is a group for which Americans have a fairly intense dislike.  This is largely because as with the first two groups, a big part of the modern media's business is lying, and no one likes being lied to. [...] Along with entertainment and academia, they constitute a tripartite axis of cultural evil.  They are Americans' conduit of information, and how can citizens choose the right policies and politicians if they're being fed misinformation?

How the MSM spins, example #926: Politico provides Team Hillary a talking point.  The State Department, before releasing one of the emails Hillary funneled through her homebrew server, failed to redact the name of somebody who is (or was) a CIA source.  The House Benghazi Committee later made that email public after it was cleared by State.  If you're among the left-leaning the MSM, how do you spin that?

State Department Screws Up, Politico Blames Trey Gowdy For Some Reason.  That's weird; if Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy accidentally released CIA information, why is the State Department apologizing?  The story here is that the State Department admitted they made a mistake in redacting a series of Clinton emails the Benghazi Committee planned to release.  But despite the State Department admitting that they screwed up and left in the name of a CIA source, Politico's headline is that Gowdy "accidentally released" it[,] even though he got the okay from the State Department to release the emails.

Biased coverage of Israeli-Palestinian 'violence': When terror becomes 'tensions'.  If you are seeking an example of bias in the media's coverage of what journalists are calling the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian "violence," consider the case of Ahmad Manasra.  In an angry speech on Wednesday night [10/14/2015], Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, appealed for calm but accused Israeli security forces of killing Palestinian boys "in cold blood," singling out the 13-year-old Manasra as one of the Palestinian youths Israel had "executed." [...] There are at least two major problems with Abbas' charge:  First, Ahmad Manasra was not "executed" or even shot by Israelis.

The Ahmed Mohamed Fairy Tale.  There can be no doubt that Americans are fortunate enough to be governed by a brilliantly conceived Constitution drafted by remarkable, intelligent men.  Unfortunately, too many Americans are utterly ignorant of what it contains and how it impacts on their lives.  Voter ignorance on this and so much else contributes to the ease with which the media manipulates public opinion into believing things which are not so.

Lessons in disaster for the next Katrina.  [#1] Though the press patted itself on the back afterwards, in fact, as American University Journalism Professor W. Joseph Campbell writes, "it's instructive to recall how extreme and over the top the reporting was from New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath."  Reports of wandering bands of rapists, a 10-year-old girl raped in the New Orleans Convention Center, claims that people were shooting at rescue helicopters, sharks haunting the floodwaters, bodies stacked like cordwood — all were false.  Though the extremism generated ratings, and satisfied the anti-American urges of the foreign press, it did real harm.  New Orleans, a city battered by disaster, was portrayed as, in Maureen Dowd's words, "a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning."  Dowd used this portrayal to take shots at then-President George W. Bush, and I suspect a lot of the media pile-on was similarly motivated, but it had the effect of stigmatizing victims and, by playing up anarchy and danger, may even have delayed the arrival of aid, as rescuers feared to go in without armed escort.  Overall, a horrible media performance.

An activist masquerading as a journalist is an impostor.
Activist anchor Jorge Ramos uses influence to push immigration agenda.  Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who has long been as much an activist as a newsman, managed to find himself at the center of an immigration story yet again this week as he went head-to-head with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, getting tossed from a press conference after repeatedly and insistently trying to ask questions.

Obama, Bush, Clinton: Secret Agents.  [Scroll down]  [Jorge Ramos] asserts proudly that he votes in elections in both countries.  (Translation of Ramos' world view:  He'd like to see the U.S. flooded with the dregs of his native country so he and Democrat elites could rule it without a vibrant middle class as they do Mexico.)  Ramos is employed by Univision, whose owner Haim Saban is a big Clinton contributor, Mrs. Saban is a big Hillary supporter.  Jorge's daughter works for Hillary Clinton.  He is most certainly a Clinton operative in newsman's drag.

Jorge Ramos Is an Immigration Activist Posing as a Reporter.  Jorge Ramos may be the award-winning celebrity anchor of Univision's premier news broadcast, but "the Walter Cronkite of Hispanic News" long ago revealed himself to be less a journalist than another perpetually indignant immigration activist.  His devolution into outright heckler was only a matter of time.  It would be difficult to overstate Ramos's immigration radicalism. When Central American children were pouring over the border last summer, Ramos announced as a solution, "First, we treat children like children, as if they were our own."  When, in their 2012 interview, Newt Gingrich told Ramos, "I'm not going to let you define what 'immigration reform' is," Ramos replied, "It's very simple:  to legalize 11 million undocumented immigrants."  And when, last November, President Obama lawlessly granted amnesty to some 5 million of those immigrants, Ramos touted the measure as "a triumph for the Latino community."

Jorge Ramos Has a Long History of Activist 'Reporting'.  Ramos has been called the "Walter Cronkite of Latino America," but he has a history of behaving more like an activist with a cable-news platform than a reporter.  Ramos constantly identifies with his Latino and immigrant audience, using words like "us" and "our" when reporting on any immigration-related issue.  He seems to see himself as the gatekeeper of Latino American opinion — and to think that qualifies him to be a political kingmaker.

For a 'Silenced' Journalist, Jorge Ramos Sure Is Getting a Lot of Air Time.  A couple of days ago, I had no idea who Jorge Ramos was.  I imagine many others were likewise unfamiliar with the Univision newscaster before Donald Trump made him famous by kicking him out of a press conference.  Among several media appearances since the confrontation with Trump on Tuesday, Ramos was on The Kelly File Wednesday night. [...] First of all, can we bask ever so briefly in the irony of being "silenced" on national television, then getting to rant about it ad nauseam on all the major networks?  This guy has been anything but silenced.  He should send Trump a thank you note for the exposure.

The Media Lies, AGAIN, About Donald Trump's Illegal Alien Enforcement Proposals — Completely Manufactured Claims.  Having watched an entire media cycle of punditry pontificate about Donald Trump proposing to deport "by force" 11 to 42 million illegal aliens we find ourselves shaking our heads at how little the MSM think of the viewing audience.  NO-WHERE in Donald Trump's proposal does he say, or advocate for, the mass "rounding up and subsequent deportation" of millions of illegal aliens.  He never said it, he never proposed it, and it doesn't exist in his presented Border Solution and Illegal Alien proposal.  It just doesn't exist, yet the media claim it to be so.

US carbon pollution from power plants hits 27-year low.  Carbon dioxide — from the burning of coal, oil and gas — is the chief greenhouse gas responsible for man-made global warming.

Bias alert:
The Associated Press is wrong about one aspect of this story, in the first sentence:  The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, which no law or politician can counteract.

PolitiFact and Planned Parenthood: Erroneous Fact Checks All the Way Down.  Planned Parenthood now finds itself being heavily criticized after being caught on tape brokering fetal body parts.  Fortunately for them, they have no shortage of allies in the media, including PolitiFact.  Fox Business reporter Sandra Smith recently said on air "Almost 95 percent of all (Planned Parenthood) pregnancy services were abortions."  On Tuesday, PunditFact, a division of PolitiFact, rated it false.  PolitiFact concedes the source of this statistic is Planned Parenthood's own annual report.  If you take the number of services listed in the report, exclude the ones that don't apply to women who aren't pregnant, you do indeed get a figure that showing that over 94 percent of pregnant women who go to Planned Parenthood get an abortion.

Cahoots:
Email Reveals Hillary Clinton Was Fed Questions Before Meet the Press Appearance.  One of the private Hillary Clinton emails released Friday [7/31/2015] reveals that an NBC source was leaking possible questions to the then-Secretary of State's staff ahead of an appearance on Meet the Press.  In an July 2009 email with the subject line "heads up," Clinton staffer Lissa Muscatine wrote, "You probably already know this, but I just heard from a friend who is wired at Meet the Press that David Gregory will ask you about David Maziar, the Newsweek journalist arrested in Iran."

Muhammad... Muhammad... Where Have I Heard That Name Before?  In the wake of the latest mass shooting, carried out by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, an engineer like so many Islamic terrorists, we are seeing the usual scramble to avoid stating the obvious.  On CNN, Tom Fuentes ludicrously cautioned that Muhammad is not an Islamic name: [...]

Report: Caitlyn Jenner's camp pitched ESPY award in exchange for PR plugs.  ESPN's annual ESPY Awards show generally comes and goes with little controversy.  Until this year, that is.  [Bruce "Caitlyn"] Jenner, the former Olympic champion decathlete, will be awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at Wednesday night's event which will be televised on ABC.  Abby Wambach, a member of the U.S. women's national soccer team that just won the World Cup, will present Jenner with the award.  According to a new report, Jenner's ESPY award originated as a pitch from her representatives to ESPN.  Per RadarOnline, Jenner's camp suggested to the network that she receive the award and offered public relations plugs on her upcoming reality show in return.

Revealed: Caitlyn Jenner's reps 'demanded ESPYs award in exchange for PR plugs and Diane Sawyer interview'.  Representatives of Caitlyn Jenner reportedly negotiated her ESPYs award in exchange for PR plugs in her upcoming TV series and threatened to pull out of her 20/20 interview.  Reports have emerged that Jenner's team approached ESPN with the idea that she win the Arthur Ashe Courage Award just as details were being finalized for her 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC.  ABC and ESPN are both owned by Disney, and ABC aired Wednesday's [7/15/2015] awards ceremony.

New York Times Debunked: Scott Walker's 'I'm Not Going Nativist' Conversation Never Happened.  A conversation about immigration between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and the Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore, reported on by the New York Times this week, never happened.  "We have spoken with Stephen Moore and the conversation that was reported did not happen and he will tell you that.  I would recommend you reach out to him," Walker spokeswoman AshLee Strong told Breitbart News on Thursday [7/2/2015] in response to an article by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman.

AP Calls Crippled Economy 'Healthy' Amid Mass Immigration.  In a grim report detailing America's severe economic decline, the Associated Press brushes off two crucial factors:  Mass immigration and Obamacare's grip on employers. [...] A record 93,626,000 Americans have stopped looking for work in an economy that managed to create only one job for every two immigrants the government let in from 2000 to 2014.  When all U.S. job growth goes to foreigners at the expense of Americans, while everyone in the labor force sees their wages suppressed year after year, it makes sense that some would throw in the towel — and other would tolerate less-than-ideal jobs to make ends meet.

Fanning the Flames of Another Black-Church-Arson Hoax.  On Monday [6/29/2015], a Baltimore Sun lead editorial decried "a series of mysterious fires at African-American churches across the South" in the wake of the Charleston murders.  The newspaper cited a "pattern" of attacks, including what it claimed was an "uptick in attacks on 37 black churches in the South" in the 1990s that "prompted President Bill Clinton to set up a church-arson investigative task force."  The Sun neglected to mention that Clinton had falsely claimed at the time that he had "vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child" — an assertion immediately debunked by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Gallup Poll: Confidence in Police Rates Twice That of Mainstream Media.  "None of this should surprise anyone," [John] Nolte stated, because "certain members of the police force have been caught doing some truly terrible things, no question.  But these are individual incidents in individual precincts.  "On the other hand, time and again and again as an institution," he indicated, "the mainstream media has been caught red-handed lying, fabricating evidence and engaging in the kind of corruption that would put any other institution (the National Football League, police, the Koch brothers) out of business."

An NBC Affiliate Manufactures a Story to Attack Conservatives.  "Months before the conference, my family booked a hotel room at the same resort as ALEC," reported Brendan Keefe of WXIA TV, also known as 11 Alive.  It's the NBC affiliate in Atlanta.  "We found the fabled back room where the laws are made," he told their audience.  It was sweeps week and NBC had a scoop.  What he failed to mention is that the event held by the right-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council was open to the press, he did not register for the event, he registered at the hotel under an assumed name, and the hotel was not a resort, just a hotel in Savannah.  More particularly, it was the Hyatt in Savannah.

Our Biggest Problem Is A Lying, Stinking Media.  [Scroll down]  But the truth is that the lies of the press are nothing new.  It can be traced back to the 1930's with Stalin apologist Walter Durant's lies about the Soviet Union that won him a Pulitzer Prize.  Yes, he was a New York Times correspondent, of course.  It has taken over seventy years for the Pulitzer Prize committee to review Durant's denial about the desperate condition of the Russian people under Stalin and to consider revoking that prize but why bother since that prize has been a joke for many years?  The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the Times-Picayune newspaper for totally fraudulent reporting of the Katrina disaster.

Researcher Behind Fabricated Gay Marriage Study LIED About Funding.  Michael LaCour, the University of California-Los Angeles graduate student responsible for a now-widely discredited study on attitudes towards gay marriage, apparently lied about the funding grants given for his fraudulent research.  In fact, according to The New Yorker, LaCour received no funding at all for the study — which was published last December in Science magazine and discredited earlier this week — into whether views on same-sex marriage change due to interaction with gay individuals.

What's Behind Big Science Frauds?  In December, Science published a paper claiming that people could change their minds about same-sex marriage after talking for just 20 minutes with a gay person.  It seemed too good to be true — and it was.  On Wednesday [5/20/2015], the journal distanced itself from the study, after its accuracy was disputed, and one of the authors could not back up the findings.  News organizations, which had reported on the study, scrambled to correct the record.

Weasel words from a weasel.  When [George] Stephanopoulos's contributions to the Clinton Foundation were discovered by the Free Beacon's Andrew Stiles and leaked by Stephanopoulos, or on his behalf by ABC public relations, to Politico, Stephanopoulos prepared a statement that amounted to old-fashioned damage control. [...] Stephanopoulos wraps his statement in a profession of his great generosity, of which the Clinton Foundation was coincidentally an additional beneficiary.  He made the donations over the past three years only to support worthy causes:  to heal the sick, protect the weak and feed the starving.  Make room for the apostle George.

Did Stephanopoulos go wrong? Of course he did.  "[W]hen those donors give that money," ABC host and commentator George Stephanopoulos said to Jon Stewart last month, "there's a hope that that's going to lead to something."  Stephanopoulos was impugning (or perhaps more accurately, describing) the motives of many people who had given money to the now-very-controversial Clinton Foundation.  He failed to mention that he himself had given $75,000 — a fact he was forced to admit last week after Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon began asking questions about it.

What Stephanopoulos Still Hasn't Disclosed.  The common denominator in what Stephanopoulos still hasn't disclosed is the fact that Stephanopoulos didn't just give the Clinton Foundation money, he gave it his time.  Schweizer notes that time is the one thing news media personalities have very little of.  In Stephanopoulos' case there's a second thing:  integrity.

George Stephanopoulos has forfeited all trust as a newsman.  Dan Rather of CBS was toppled by a phony document scam.  Lyin' Brian Williams at NBC casually mixed fact with self-aggrandizing fiction.  Now George Stephanopoulos is caught in a Clinton web of deceit at ABC.  The hat trick of arrogant anchor scandals helps explain why Americans don't trust network news.  With apologies to Walter Cronkite, that's the way it is, and the way it is stinks.  Stephanopoulos shares with Rather and Williams the rotten distinction of fessing up only after being exposed by real journalists.

AP perpetuates tale that Benghazi attack caused by anti-Islam film.  In a report about a Supreme Court ruling, the Associated Press on Monday [5/18/2015] continued with the ruse that an anti-Muslim film posted on YouTube caused violence in the Middle East, culminating in the murder of a U.S. ambassador on Sept. 11, 2012.  "In a victory for free speech advocates, a federal appeals court says YouTube should not have been forced to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in the Middle East and death threats to actors," the AP wrote.

MSNBC: America killing Muslims 'in the streets for decades" explains Garland shootings.  If there's an attack on American's anywhere, I think there's a law that there has to be someone on MSNBC to defend the attackers.  They always seems to get TV time.

Interracial Crime: Media-driven versus Statistical Realities.  The much-hyped "black killed by whites" stories sold to us over the past several years by the media and Race Industry have been either outright lies or grossly misreported.

Never Trust Liberal "Fact Checkers".  The Democratic Party controls almost all of the news media.  Some years ago, the Democrats came up with a great idea:  they established "fact checkers" within Democratic Party newspapers to spin unfortunate facts in the Democrats' favor.  Today, several such "fact checkers" are well known.  Are they reliable?  Of course not.

Apparently, no one at MSNBC pays taxes.  Democrats are fond of accusing Republicans of being hypocrites on a variety of issues, but particularly when it comes to tax policy.  The liberal comedian Bill Maher recently claimed that Republicans expose themselves to this critique when they champion the value of hard work and perseverance while simultaneously opposing the inheritance tax.

Liberal Hypocrites At MSNBC Don't Pay Their Taxes.  For typical Americans who paid all their taxes upfront, Friday [4/24/2015] is Tax Freedom Day.  But for several hosts at MSNBC, Tax Freedom Day came much sooner.

MSNBC's Touré Has the Taxman on His Case.  Touré Neblett, co-host of MSNBC's The Cycle, owes more than $59,000 in taxes, according to public records reviewed by National Review.  In September 2013, New York issued a state tax warrant to Neblett and his wife, Rita Nakouzi, for $46,862.68.  Six months later, the state issued an additional warrant to the couple for $12,849.87.

Four MSNBC Stars Do Not Pay Their Taxes.  National Review's Jillian Kay Melchior reported Wednesday [4/22/2015] that, along with Al Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry, two more MSNBC stars are not paying their fair share of taxes.  Touré Neblett, co-host of "The Cycle" owes the IRS a cool $59,000.  Joy-Ann Reid, a former anchor and now a regular contributor to the "Lien" Forward network, owes New York almost $5,000 in back taxes.  As we reported last week, Melissa Harris-Perry owes the IRS $70,000.  Al Sharpton's tax bill is upwards of $3-$4 million.

MSNBC fails to address tax problems of hosts.  National Review reported today that MSNBC's Touré, who co-hosts the network's afternoon program "The Cycle," owes nearly $60,000 in taxes to New York State, according to a pair of tax warrants that the magazine found.  And as the story fully noted, there's a trend afoot here: [...]

MSNBC's Tax Delinquents Lecture Audience on Taxes.  MSNBC, the liberal network that advocates at every turn for a progressive revenue system, is home to four tax delinquents who have all lectured their audience about tax fairness over the years.

CBS employee goes silent after making baseless fraud charge about embattled Indiana pizzeria.  An employee of a Virginia-based CBS News affiliate has gone silent following revelations Friday [4/3/2015] she made a baseless fraud charge against an attempt to raise funds for an Indiana family at the center of a political battle over religious freedom.

Math Is Hard For Obamacarians.  If you are masochistic enough to read the "reporting" of the legacy media on Obamacare, you will have noticed a spate of recent stories with titles like the following from CNBC:  "Health spending post-Obamacare seen $2.5 trillion lower."  This headline is not only awkwardly worded.  It is, like the article over which it appears, misleading.  It misrepresents a new study from the left-leaning Urban Institute concerning projected health care spending in a way that suggests the nation has saved enormous amounts of money thanks to the "Affordable Care Act."  This is absurd, of course, but it highlights an underappreciated element of the health care reform debate — the adversarial relationship that exists between Obamacare's partisans in the press and basic statistics.

Another Great Moment in Mainstream Journalism.  This story, like the now-completely discredited Rolling Stone "campus rape" article, shows the dangers of an increasingly biased mainstream news media.  Stories that fits reporters' and editors' ideological predispositions get rushed through into print with little skepticism or careful review, and apparently with no actual fact checking.

Libel Is Obama's Latest Weapon In His War On Israel.  Behold what's buried in Tuesday's [3/24/2015] Wall Street Journal — a claim of Israeli spying, which was obviously planted by one or more nameless administration officials seeking to make the Israelis' newly re-elected leader look like a U.S. enemy:  "While U.S. intelligence officials believe secured U.S. communications are relatively safe from the Israelis, they say European communications are vulnerable."  The Israelis, it turns out, almost certainly got their information from eavesdropping not on U.S., but on European and Iranian diplomatic communications — which virtually every U.S. embassy in the world does.

NYTs Caught Manipulating Story That Didn't Fit Their Narrative.  In a story published Monday [3/16/2015], The New York Times reported online that family members of Jeffrey Williams, the 20 year-old man suspected of shooting and wounding two Ferguson police officers, confirmed that Williams had been one of the Ferguson protesters.  This morning, at the same url, that crucial piece of news disappeared from the story.  No update or editor's note explained the removal (that has now been returned).

The Biggest Lie of Our Generation: Ferguson Was All About Traffic Tickets. 
Hands up, don't shoot?  Lie.
Gentle giant?  Lie.
Minding his own business?  Lie.
Shot in the back?  Lie.
Did not attack the police officer?  Lie.
'Didn't do nothing' to the Asian shopkeeper?  Lie.
Relatives did not try to start a riot?  Lie.
Protests were "largely peaceful?"  Lie.
National Guard would protect the business owners from looting...
This is a very long list of of the bodyguard of lies that reporters and activists (sorry for the redundancy) hoped would protect anyone from challenging the core truth of the racial grievance industry, which is the biggest lie of this generation:  Black people are relentless victims of relentless white racism.  All the time.  Everywhere.  That explains everything.  And it is not just Ferguson.  Lying about race and racial violence is now the default position for American reporters.

DOJ Report States "Hands Up — Don't Shoot" Narrative Was Completely False — We Again Explain Its Origin.  Today [3/4/2015] the DOJ released their comprehensive finding report on the Mike Brown shooting.  The DOJ Report states unequivocally the "Hands Up - Don't Shoot" narrative was a completely false construct, but yet the media ran with it for months.  Why?

Petraeus Set To Plead Guilty — Remove Himself From The Clutches Of Obama/Clinton Blackmail.  CNN is reporting, through Evan Perez again, that General David Petraeus is expected to plead guilty to a federal probe that he gave classified pillow-talk intelligence to Paula Broadwell during their affair in 2011/2012.  It should be noted, however, that Evan Perez was recently the CNN reporter who presented an entirely false story about a DHS report on Soverign Citizens where he portrayed the report as DHS worried about right-wing extremist groups.  Nothing in his interpretation of the report was even remotely accurate [...]

JW Exposes Another NBC Scandal Days Before Brian Williams Debacle.  The mainstream media's credibility continues to deteriorate at a breakneck rate and now a major network television station — with recent transgressions exposed by Judicial Watch and a U.S. military newspaper — is serving as the poster child of this shameful movement.  It involves two popular and "respected" journalists at NBC, disgraced "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams and "Meet the Press" anchor David Gregory, two of the highest paid and most coveted personalities in the network's history.

AP: Islam Fundamentally a Religion of Peace, 'Brazen' Critics Probably Racist.  AP writer Lee Keath published an article on Monday dealing with the "debate among Muslims over interpreting faith" — without mentioning that thousands of deaths are meted out every year in the name of Islam across the globe.  Keath instead describes those who question the link between Islam and jihadist violence as "increasingly brazen."  Rather than focusing on the "brazenness" of the murderers in Islam's name, the author instead points towards those who dare critique the Religion of Peace.

Newsweek hit piece smears Bible, Christians.  Newsweek's 16-page diatribe portrays Evangelical Christians as homophobic, right-wing fundamentalist hypocrites who believe an unbelievable Bible.  And just in case the reader misses the writer's subtle nuance, the essay was illustrated with images of snake handlers, Pat Robertson and the Westboro Baptist Church.  That's because in the minds of Newsweek's esteemed editors, most evangelical Christians spend their weekends dancing with snakes and picketing gay nightclubs.

In LA, CBS Station Pretends There Was a Real Kwanzaa Parade Yesterday.  A Kwanzaa "parade" was held in Los Angeles yesterday [12/26/2014].  In reporting on the event, CBS Los Angeles published a work of fiction which absolutely belongs on any 2014 list of most embarrassing moments in journalism. [...] A procession of a few vehicles lasting 10 minutes is not a "parade."  It isn't even a motorcade.

Time: Right-Wing Militias Are The Real Threat To Cops.  Time Magazine warned of a growing threat to cops nationwide in September 2010.  The nationally renowned publication argued that sinister individuals would launch targeted attacks against police officers and even ambush them in their patrol cars.  Time alerted readers that these groups and individuals have a disturbing hatred of cops and that there was a real threat of "lone-wolf" attacks.  Who are these groups that present such a threat to police? Right-wing militias, according to Time.

CBS News Fabricates Story That Michigan Bill Would Allow Doctors/EMTs to Deny Treatment to Gay Patients.  CBS News published a story on December 11 under the headline:  "Bill would let Michigan doctors, EMTs refuse to treat gay patients."  CBS News reports: [...] According to Michael W. McConnell, a professor at Stanford University Law School and former federal appeals court judge, the CBS story is false.  "The exact same law has been on the books at the federal level and in many states for almost twenty years, and no such claim has ever been made.  And if it were made, it would lose in court, probably unanimously," McConnell tells The Weekly Standard in an email.

Obama's Endless Lies and His Media Accomplices.  It was appropriate that the Democratic Senate report on "torture" was released on the same day that Jonathan Gruber was testifying about lying to the American people regarding the benefits of Obamacare.  The Senate report was another form of deception, designed to confuse and mislead about what Obama has used in place of interrogation techniques of terrorists.  Obama doesn't interrogate terrorists, he kills them.  Yet, we are led to believe Obama believes in American values and practices them.  The American people would see through the lies if only they could depend on a media that would lead them out of all the deliberate obfuscation.

Why The Media's Fact Problems Are Way Bigger Than Rolling Stone.  It's absolutely true that we don't have a wave of outright fabrication-out-of-whole-cloth.  But what we have is much worse.  We have a tsunami of inaccuracy that is generally tolerated, embraced and even celebrated so long as it serves the right political and cultural goals.

NBC's Snyderman faces credibility issues.  NBC must now decide whether Snyderman's credibility is too damaged for her to continue reporting on Ebola or other medical issues and, if so, for how long.

The Mike Brown PBS "Lie Chart" — The False PBS Claims Deconstructed Visually.  A Treeper has been reviewing every piece of testimony in the case and comparing it with the chart that PBS published.  Turns out they misrepresented almost all of the statements.

Ex-Obama Aide Destroys Media Narrative, Admits Gruber Was an 'Important Figure'.  A former adviser to Barack Obama on Tuesday [11/18/2014] overturned the media narrative, promoted by the President, that Jonathan Gruber was an unimportant, minor figure.  The New York Times on Tuesday insisted in an editorial, "Republicans are crowing over Mr. Gruber's remarks because he has been portrayed as a major architect of the health reform law.  In truth, his role was limited."  The health care operative has repeatedly bragged about fooling "stupid" Americans.  The paper's editors lectured, "His comments should not be taken as evidence that the reform law was hatched in secrecy and foisted on the public by trickery."  Yet, Steven Rattner, a former Obama administration adviser, countered this narrative on Morning Joe.

ABC and NBC Ignore Gruber's Numerous W.H. Visits, CBS Barely Covers.  On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of ObamaCare, made more than a dozen visits to visit the White House since "Democrats began drafting the law in 2009."  Despite the latest developments in the Gruber controversy, which contradicts President Obama's line that Gruber was "some advisor who never worked on our staff," CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to mention the report, giving it a mere 24 seconds during its Tuesday morning [11/18/2014] broadcast.  ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today ignored the Journal's report altogether.

More about the Jonathan Gruber ObamaCare scandal.

Chuck Todd: Eric Holder is a 'Very Non-Political Person'.  [Meet the Press host Chuck] Todd says this of the man who openly talked about serving "my people" as attorney general.  He made that comment in connection with the New Black Panther case — a racially-tinged case that Holder's DOJ dropped even after the government had won it.  Eric Holder desperately wants to treat al Qaeda terrorists as criminals rather than non-state illegal combatants.  That's a political choice, and one for which he has been roundly criticized.  When Holder attempted to move trials of al Qaeda terrorists from military tribunals to civilian court — in New York — he lost.  Big.  Being obtuse to the viewpoints of others, and being unable to comprehend that the things that you say and do offend and anger others, is not the same thing as being "non-political."

Best of facts-free reporting hands-down... I mean up.  I began to lose interest in Ferguson, Mo., when it was first reported that the late Michael Brown was an "aspiring rapper."  Hadn't heard that one yet?  It was in the LA Times, under the headline:  "Michael Brown's raps: Money, sex, drugs — and a vulnerable side."  Of course he had to have a vulnerable side.  That's why he was known as "the Gentle Giant."  He didn't look terribly gentle in that closed-circuit video, shoving the owner of the Ferguson Market when he was stealing the box of Swisher Sweets just before he got shot.  But the demonstrators could see right through that — "the man" had photoshopped the video, or so they said live on national TV.

The Media Are Buying Hillary's Foreign Policy [Prevarication] — And Selling It To You.  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the most senior foreign policy official in the United States, aside from President Barack Obama himself, for four years — is now attempting to differentiate herself from her old boss, now that his hapless leadership has become a liability to her presidential ambitions.  And the media are buying it, then re-selling it to the public as if it represents an authentic split instead of opportunism and lies.

5 Reasons Not to Trust the 'What Me Worry' Media About Ebola.  [#5] The mainstream media lies.  It lies all the time.  The mainstream media is a degenerate, habitual, serial liar that exists only to serve the government and the noxious little career-climbing bubble it exists in.  I always assume the media is lying — that way I'm right more than I'm wrong.  The mainstream media is a wretched institution populated with wretched people and only a handful of exceptions.  If you're foolish enough to believe the mainstream media will put what's morally good, right, and true above The Club Rules, you obviously haven't watched CNN's coverage of the war in Gaza.

The Self-Inflicted Hamas 'Massacre' Blamed By the Media on Israel.  According to the Hamas version of events — widely promulgated in the media by ITN, the Telegraph and the Belfast Telegraph — an Israeli airstrike on a crowded market place during a partial ceasefire in the Shijaiyah neighbourhood of Gaza City on July 30th, 2014 was responsible for the deaths of 17 people, including blue-helmeted photojournalist Rani Rayan.  However as Thomas Wictor has incontrovertibly demonstrated using close analysis of film footage of the incident, the deaths were not caused by Israeli shrapnel but by secondary explosions from a vast cache of Hamas rockets.  Oh, and the market wasn't 'crowded' either:  it had been closed for the day.  And this particular area wasn't included in the ceasefire zone, either, because Hamas was continuing to fire rockets from it.

Gallup: Public Confidence in TV News at All-Time Low.  Public confidence in television news is at an all-time low, according to a survey released today [6/19/2014] by Gallup. [...] In the latest survey, conducted June 5-8, only 10 percent said they had "a great deal" of confidence in T.V. news, and 8 percent said they had "quite a lot" of confidence.

Gallup: Public Confidence in TV News at All-Time Low.  Public confidence in television news is at an all-time low, according to a survey released today by Gallup.  Only 18 percent of the Americans surveyed expressed either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in that news medium.

Dana Milbank's Heritage disaster.  Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank set off a flurry of outraged tweets on Monday night [6/16/2014] after posting a highly critical recap of a panel event at The Heritage Foundation that, he says, "deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering."  Video of that panel has since surfaced and — in my view — Milbank grossly misrepresented the nature of that exchange.

Friends Don't Let Friends Read Dana Milbank.  Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post who serially exaggerates or distorts what he writes about.  It's just what he does.  This has been established so many times by so many people that it's disappointing to see he is still given prominent perch in his paper and that people who made it past their sophomore year in high school take him seriously.

What Dana Milbank Does Not Tell You.  [Scroll down]  But what's more, Milbank relies on the account of "Saba Ahmed, an American University law student," who is the aggrieved victim of his piece.  She's a moderate, caring Muslim girl targeted by the group because she is Muslim.  What Milbank does not tell you is that Saba Ahmed is a family friend of Mohammed Osman Mohamud, the convicted Islamic bomber who tried to blow up Portland, OR in the name of jihad.  Milbank also does not tell you Saba Ahmed has been arrested for stalking and her family claims she was diagnosed with a mental disorder.  She's also been active at Occupy rallies denouncing American war efforts.  She has made opposition to the American war against terrorism a key part of what she does.  And she took to Heritage to hijack a conversation on Benghazi, turning it to her issue, which had not even been a topic of conversation.

Washington Post Lets Columnist Dana Milbank Lie About Heritage Foundation.  Writing for a Washington Post that apparently decided his column was too good to check, columnist Dana Milbank attacked the conservative Heritage Foundation for bullying a female Muslim woman who expressed concern about Muslim stereotyping during a panel Monday night.  The only problem with Milbank's charge is that it's a smear — it never happened.  And of all places, it is video from the left-wing Media Matters that debunks Milbank's entire column.

MSNBC.com Deceptively Edits Dave Brat to Suggest He Was 'Dodging' Questions.  Editors at MSNBC.com trimmed down Republican congressional nominee Dave Brat's June 11 phone interview with MSNBC's Chuck Todd in order to paint him as dodging questions from the Daily Rundown host.  But a review of the full interview shows that Brat had already and seemingly quite gladly answered a few policy questions on such hot issues as the minimum wage, immigration reform, and his stance on Wall Street's influence on the business wing of the GOP.

ABC Apologizes for Story That Connected Mozilla CEO to Hateful Westboro Baptist.  ABC News Vice President Jeffrey Schneider has apologized for a story on his network that connected a CEO who supports traditional marriage to the Westboro Baptist Church and their offensive [...] signs.  Mr. Schneider contacted the Media Research Center on Thursday after our social media department requested members call and complain about the comparison.

CBS dubs sound for quiet electric car.  CBS News says an editor made an "audio error" in dubbing the sound of a loud traditional car engine over footage of the much quieter Tesla electric car in a story that aired Sunday [3/30/2014].

Six Lies The Leftist Media Tells About The Contraception Mandate Cases.  This week, the Supreme Court will consider whether businesses and their owners must choose between paying millions of dollars in fines and violating their religious beliefs.  [...] The leftist papers do not mention the substantial monetary burden put on religious business owners to violate their consciences.  The papers do not mention that contraception was both inexpensive and widely available before the contraception mandate, and still is.  The papers omit to mention that it isn't the businesses who have radically changed, but the mandates from government.  Quite simply, if you read a newspaper to find out about the contraception mandate cases, you will read lies.

Jacksonville Channel 4 falsely portrays black on white hate crime attacks as having a white perpetrator.  For years we have talked about how the media censors black crime.  Many major media outlets now openly admit to having a policy of censoring black crime perpetrators.  However, an even more sinister form of censorship is rising.  This is what we call Stage 2 censorship of black crime.  Where the media purposely leads you to believe that a black crime perpetrator was actually a white guy.

Appalling: NY Times editorial distorts, misleads, and lies to readers on HHS Mandate.  With many political debates, I try to give opponents the benefit of the doubt on intentions.  Sure, raising taxes is a bad thing, but some politicians and pundits believe higher taxes will benefit society.  Some people think we need to spend more, and others really fear climate change.  When it comes to the HHS abortifacient/contraception/sterilization mandate, however, I've almost stopped being that generous with the left's media and thought leaders.  [A recent] New York Times Magazine editorial is a prime example as to why.  Almost from start to finish, the piece misleads and misdirects readers about the mandate, its opponents, and religious freedom.

Yet Another Journalist Says Lying Is A-OK.  It's a relatively new development for journalists to admit that lying to the public isn't a bad thing, but it's a rapidly growing phenomenon, as sophistry becomes an increasingly accepted practice in the MSM, to the point where it's openly talked about by those who employ it.

Radio DJs spark outrage after admitting they made up story about a homophobic RSVP to a party.  Two radio DJs in Long Island who caused an uproar last week by posting the homophobic RSVP to a birthday party for a 'little girl with two gay dads' admitted on Saturday that the whole thing was a hoax.

Cybersecurity Expert Accuses NBC of '100% Fraudulent' Hacking Story, NBC Fires Back.  Earlier this week, NBC's Richard Engel filed a report warning travelers to Sochi about the danger of getting hacked, but one cybersecurity expert took serious issue with the story, which he described on his blog as "100% fraudulent."  In the report, Engel brought some brand-new laptops and a new phone just to test how secure people's devices would be in Sochi, and he concluded that he was hacked "almost immediately."  But Robert Graham pointed out a few reasons why all is not as it seems.

CBS's Mellody Hobson, Whose Husband George Lucas Is Worth $7 Billion, Slams Rich CEOs.  CBS analyst Mellody Hobson, whose husband George Lucas is worth $7.3 billion, appeared on This Morning to slam excessive salaries for corporate bosses.

NBC News Fails to Disclose Soros Connection In Shriver Report on Women.  The Media Research Center reports that a report promoted heavily by NBC News Special Anchor Maria Shriver was funded by a ultra-left political group funded by George Soros.  Earlier this week Shriver was all over NBC News and MSNBC to talk about a study titled "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back From the Brink."  The promotion of the report also allowed Shriver and NBC News to portray President Obama as "sympathetic to working mothers."  This push focusing on women we see throughout the media, not just on NBC, is nothing more than the media prepping the battlefield to elect Hillary Clinton.

Five Years of Falsehoods at NBC News.  Everyone acted surprised when we learned yesterday that after a couple of disastrous months, MSNBC is defiantly refusing to change their editorial process.  But why would they?  For years now, MSNBC and NBC News have both become a culture of left-wing hate and fraudulent editing.  The only thing new, as you will see [in this article], is that the frequency of the fraud and hate is increasing.  What I've assembled here isn't anything close to comprehensive, but it is a revealing top ten: [...]

Ripping Off the "Progressive" Mask.  It is a sad fact that telling a lie these days has become more convenient than telling the truth.  This is a terrible commentary on those with access to our major media.  Consider the coverage of the inauguration of Bill de Blasio as New York City's mayor.  The term "progressive" is used in most accounts to describe him and his backers.  De Blasio accepts that term.  Yet, by any objective measure, he is a dedicated Marxist, and has been for most of his life.  For example, he never disavowed his support for the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  He claims to have honeymooned in communist Cuba, when such a trip was illegal.  His wife was a member of a Marxist collective.

NBC News' Happy Obamacare Customer is a Dem Candidate, Operative.  NBC News senior health reporter JoNel Aleccia told the story of a woman described as "Joyce Moore, a Pennsylvania financial planner" who "runs her own retirement and estate planning business."  NBC said Moore was actually happy her existing insurance was canceled due to Obamacare. [...] What NBC News Senior Health Reporter JoNel Aleccia failed to mention is that Joyce Moore is a longstanding Democratic activist who, in November 2013, ran as a Democratic candidate for Upper Milford Township Supervisor in Pennsylvania.

10 Forms of 2013 Media Malpractice.  [#1] Pretend that "no one" is saying something, when they really are.  Carol Costello of CNN claimed in January that "no one is talking about overturning the Second Amendment or confiscating guns in America."  In the three preceding weeks, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had said that "confiscation could be an option"; an Iowa state representative had "said governments should start confiscating semi-automatic rifles and other firearms"; and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California had suggested a gun-buyback program which "could be compulsory."  In early December, New York City's police department sent out "letters telling gun owners to turn over their rifles and shotguns — or else face the consequences," i.e., confiscation.

Journalistic malpractice over Benghazi.  The Times' report misconstrues known facts and simply sweeps under the table mountains of evidence of al Qaeda's ties to Libyan jihadi groups.  In June 2012, for example, more than a dozen different jihadi groups put the black flag of al Qaeda on parade in Benghazi in what they hoped would be a three-day show of force.  Thousands of jihadi fighters, many of them in Pakistani and Afghan dress, paraded through the streets of Benghazi with hundreds of gun trucks.  For The New York Times, though, the black flags were merely "the black flags of militant Islam" and apparently bore no relation to al Qaeda.  "Benghazi was not infiltrated by al Qaeda," The Times flatly asserted.

House Intel Chairman on NYT's Benghazi Report: 'That Story Is Just Not Accurate'.  The New York Times on Sunday [12/29/2013] published a highly controversial report claiming the September 2012 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, did not involve al Qaeda, and was as the Administration originally stated a spontaneous demonstration in response to an American-made anti-Islamic video.  Appearing on Fox News Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) completely refuted the article saying, "[T]hat story is just not accurate".

Denver Post Stealth Edits Out 'Socialist' from Profile of Arapahoe School Shooter.  In a profile on the shooter in the Denver Post which focused on his "strong political beliefs," several of Pierson's classmates offered their impressions of the shooter.  One of the shooter's classmates described him as a "very opinionated socialist."  Shortly after that post was published, however, that description was edited out.  The current copy simply describes him as "very opinionated."

Mika Suggests Obama 'Too Smart' For The Job.  Too smart to be President.  Is that really Barack Obama's problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so.  On today's [11/4/2013] Morning Joe, as Mike Barnicle and John Heilemann kicked around the notion, as others have before, that President Obama doesn't much like politics and the people in it, Brzezinski piped up with a different explanation for his aloofness:  he's "too smart for the job," she suggested.

The Editor says...
I can provide copious evidence that Barack H. Obama is not all that bright.

WashPost's Milbank: 'Couldn't Be the Case' That Some Lost Insurance Because of ObamaCare.  On Monday's PoliticsNation, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claimed that it "couldn't be the case at this time" that ObamaCare is already causing people to lose their current health insurance plans, in spite of all the documented cases insurance companies canceling plans as they struggle to comply with ObamaCare regulations.

The Shutdown that Ruined Christmas?  [Scroll down]  On the very first night, Oct. 1, NBC already sounded like a DNC campaign commercial.  Reporter John Yang highlighted an EPA worker in Chicago, Elizabeth Lytle, who had already filed for unemployment benefits. [...] Despite her $52,000-a-year salary, Lytle is an experienced "victim."  Back in March, the eco-news site Greenwire also focused on her suffering from sequestration. [...] Here, too, was ethical fraud:  NBC and other outlets didn't say so, but Lytle had been previously featured in the media by her union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

The AP Misreports the Debt Ceiling.  I wrote here that no matter what happens with the debt limit, the federal government will not default on its debt obligations.  I also noted here that Moody's — which certainly ought to know — agrees that there is zero chance of default on Treasury bonds.  In recent days, many more commentators have made the same point.  The government is legally obligated to recognize its debt obligations, and the existing $17 trillion debt can be serviced on less than ten percent of federal revenue.  So there simply can't be a default.

The Planned Destruction of America.  One world is where the television and radio pundits sanctimoniously scold us into believing that all is normal, and everything we see taking place today is merely the result of a growing acrimonious relationship between two political parties.  They sit behind the microphones, in front of the TV cameras, write the newsprint, and dominate the internet with their matrix of mendacity.  They are well-paid for keeping the public in the dark, and by confining public discourse to the limitations of mere political theater.  Regardless of their political bent, they bully and mock those who disagree, and sneer at those who dare threaten the illusion of normalcy.  The other world is what is really taking place behind the scenes.

Limbaugh Bashes 'Journalistic Malpractice' Attacking GOP Over Gov't Shutdown.  Rush Limbaugh took the media to task Monday [9/30/2013] for foisting all the blame of a potential government shutdown on Republicans.  Limbaugh predicted in the next few days the media would write piece after piece about all the programs getting shut down during the shutdown and blaming Republican intransigence on the whole thing.  He referred to the AP article above as "basically a press release from the Democrat party" that accuses Republicans of hating Obama so much they're willing to let millions of people go without health care.

CBS's Bob Schieffer Falsely Claims 'Polls Say That Most People Favor' ObamaCare.  In defiance of reality illustrated in numerous polls, on Sunday's Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer scolded Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn when she correctly asserted "there is only partisan support" for ObamaCare.  Schieffer cut her off:  "Well now Congresswoman, that's not entirely true.  The polls don't suggest that.  Polls say that most people favor it."

Little Media Lies About ObamaCare.  [Scroll down]  Obama signed House bills to kill a costly ObamaCare reporting rule, terminate its long-term care insurance program and repeal the "free choice voucher" program.  He also signed bills cutting funds for the so-called CO-OP program, a public health slush fund and other ObamaCare programs.  Two other House-passed bills — one to end the Independent Payment Advisory Board and another terminating the medical device tax — have strong bipartisan support.  Another simply codified the employer mandate delay Obama himself had already ordered.  Yet the media pretend these things never happened.

BBC claims Tamerlan Tsarnaev motivated by "right-wing" literature, not radical Islam.  With all the efforts to tie the Tea Party and "right wing" to violence committed by others, it wouldn't be long before the Islamic radical Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was tied to "right-wing" causes.  With the slenderest of proof, The BBC goes there.

Politico: Media Didn't Ignore Benghazi.  Politico's Dylan Byers, in a piece for his buddies in the MSM, declares that conservative criticism of the mainstream media is overblown. [...] Let us enlighten Byers to the scope of the MSM's betrayal of the public trust, with some added help from the Media Research Council.

How the Media Has Distorted a Tragedy.  [Scroll down]  This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman's history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia.  Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that "Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men."  Actually, only six calls — two of them about Trayvon Martin — had to do with African-American men.

Defending American Principles Is Now a Revolutionary Act.  The [George Zimmerman] case was a joke, but you wouldn't know that if you only listened to the mainstream media.  The media's rank speculation, mischaracterization of the evidence and outright lies were designed to replace the strict adherence to law and the rules of evidence that for a thousand years have protected the accused from the mindless fury of the mob.

Key Witness for Zimmerman Grand Jury Changes Story.  We wrote yesterday [10/31/2014] about the "October Surprise/Get Out the Vote" announcement by a flailing Obama administration that the Department of Justice will be holding a Grand Jury hearing next Wednesday regarding possible federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman.  The only named witness for Wednesday's hearing is Frank Taaffe, a self-declared "friend" for George Zimmerman.  Earlier this year Taaffe suddenly announced that he believed Zimmerman had a racial, not merely self-defense, motive in killing Trayvon Martin.  This would be more than two years after the shooting occurred.

More lies from the main stream media about the Zimmerman case.  The claim that Zimmerman was at fault because he pursued Martin after being told not to has absolutely no basis in fact.  It is a made up assumption that has been repeated so many times by the media that people actually believe that is what happened.  The 911 call that was placed by Zimmerman is on the web in both audio and written transcript form.  It was played numerous times at the trial.  There is no excuse for continuing to lie about the evidence.  The Chicago Tribune should know better than to continue to perpetuate lies that have fueled so much anger over this case.

Just report the news, don't generate it.
TX Lt. Gov: Reporters Tried To Inflame Pro-Abortion Protesters.  Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst told HotAir's Ed Morrissey that his office received reports that reporters were actively encouraging and rallying pro-abortion protesters during State Sen. Wendy Davis' fillibuster last week.

Media misreporting rampant in Trayvon Martin case.  A combination of pressure through social media and poor journalism led to the trial of George Zimmerman, who is accused of second-degree murder in last year's shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.  Immediately after the shooting in Sanford, Fla., which is 20 miles northeast of Orlando, the media described Mr. Zimmerman as white, setting up the racially divisive meme of a white man killing a black teenager — a characterization that proved to be wrong.

Number Seven: NBC News Again Caught Selectively Editing Video.  Deceptive journalistic practices at NBC News show no sign of slowing down.  This latest attempt to selectively edit audio/video in order to benefit Barack Obama represents the seventh such act of willful, intentional journalistic malpractice.  NBC News is already being sued over one instance involving George Zimmerman.

WaPo Quietly Changes Key Details in NSA Story.  The gist is that the Washington Post has quietly made major edits to its initial story about the NSA's PRISM program, without acknowledging that any changes have been made at all.  Many of the changes are stylistic, but many are factual.

Update:
Busted Again: Washington Post Stealth Edits Obama/Africa Story.  For the second time in a week, The Washington Post has been caught editing a major story without noting publicly that the story has been changed.

CNN Launches Dishonest Attack On Clarence Thomas — To Protect Voter Fraud.  CNN published an article by John Blake entitled "Three questions for Clarence Thomas" that allows them to not only distort the black conservative judge's opinions, but also to tip-toe on the edge of racism, referring to Justice Thomas as a "sellout" and "Uncle Thomas" while hiding behind the cowardly journalistic trick of "Hey, we're just reporting what other people say!"

Propaganda: NPR Incorrectly Claims IRS Has Nothing to do With Obamacare.  During the May 22 broadcast of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," host Neil Conan repeatedly contradicted a guest by claiming that the IRS has nothing at all to do with Obamacare.  NPR's Conan is, of course, completely incorrect.  The IRS is up to its Tea Party harassing neck in Obamacare.  The guest Conan contradicted was Kellyanne Conway, a Republican strategist and pollster.  Conway was on to discuss the various scandals in which Obama is mired and close to the end of her segment she questioned how the American people can trust the IRS to implement Obamacare.  Conan initially pressed her on the claim saying that she must have "misspoken."

Politico Quietly Edits Story Claiming Tea Party Supports Immigration Bill.  Politico deceptively edited its lead story from Tuesday, "Immigration's new ally: Tea partiers" that originally erroneously argued the Tea Party was an "ally" of the "Gang of Eight" immigration bill.  The changes came after Breitbart News caught the site red-handed in a number of factual errors.  Politico made several substantive changes to its piece and the only notification it gave to readers of those corrections was an updated time stamp next to the authors' bylines.

NBC News Again Caught Selectively Editing Video.  I had hoped this nonsense would end with the reign of Steve Capus, but once again we have NBC News forced to apologize for yet-another dishonest edit meant to push the left's agenda.

News Media Keep Peddling Their Bush Vs. Gore Lie.  When Sandra Day O'Connor said she regretted her decision in Bush v. Gore, the press threw another fit about the "stolen" election.  They seem to forget their own studies proved the court's ruling didn't matter.

Newspaper caught photoshopping injuries out of Boston Marathon photograph.  A US newspaper has admitted that it digitally altered a front-page photograph of a Boston Marathon bombing victim so that the woman's pants covered her horrific leg wounds.  The woman's gory wounds had vanished on the large image that wrapped around the New York Daily News on Tuesday [4/16/2013], despite the photograph appearing unedited online and in other publications in the US.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#12]  Fake Exploding GM Trucks:  In 1993 on its Dateline NBC program, NBC News was determined to smear trucks made by General Motors.  The TV newsers wanted to show America that the gas tanks in GM trucks were prone to exploding.  Dateline aired footage of just that causing a PR nightmare for GM.  Ultimately, NBC had viewers convinced that GM's "sidesaddle" gas tank was a hazard.  But in its zeal to destroy GM, NBC forgot to mention one little thing to the viewing public.  Its video of an exploding gas tank was little else but Hollywood special effects.

False Media Narrative: Hagel Filibuster 'Unprecedented'.  You'll hear it all over cable news and the networks and in every lede paragraph from the Washington Post to the LA Times:  Republicans are conducting an unprecedented filibuster of Chuck Hagel.  Where did the media get this buzz word that's repeated breathlessly by the obedient servants of the White House?  From the White House, of course.

Steve Capus Oversaw 'Erosion of Journalistic Values'.  You would think five documented instances of outright journalistic fraud from a single news division would result in a little more outrage from our journalistic overlords.  You would also think that those who believe in the ethics of their profession would speak out, or that those with competitive instincts would leap at the opportunity to ding a competitor.  But media has its own version of a the Blue Code of Silence.

AP Gives False and Conflicting Information on Potential Voter Fraud Case.  In a move that serves to discount the severity of voter fraud in the US, the Associated Press' Gary Fineout posted two conflicting reports regarding a voter fraud investigation.  Strangely, after posting inaccurate information in an article, the heavily left-leaning AP staff writer then posted an update — one that conflicted with the first false posting, yet was still false in itself.

Cape Cod Times says reporter fabricated sources in dozens of stories.  A Massachusetts daily newspaper apologized to its readers after an internal investigation concluded that a veteran reporter wrote dozens of stories that included people who don't exist.

$1.2 billion examples of ABC News' bias.  The slimiest news coverage of 2012 has nothing to do with the presidential election.  It concerns a massive ABC News campaign against an American beef company.  Led by national correspondent Jim Avila, the network bombarded a South Dakota firm with a seemingly endless barrage of stories claiming that its lean beef was — it doesn't get uglier than this — "pink slime."  According to that company, ABC's reports cost it hundreds of millions of dollars, and cost more than 700 people their jobs.  Now that company is suing ABC — for $1.2 billion.

Cutter: Yeah, we've been lying about the $5 trillion we said Romney's lying about.  As soon as Team Obama realized its excuse-making was getting embarrassing after the president's debate performance, they pivoted to a replay of the response to Rep. Paul Ryan's convention speech in Tampa.  They can't call either of them dumb, so they have to call them liars.  In the service of that narrative, they either present mere philosophical disagreements as "lies" or they dishonestly represent parts of Mitt Romney's plan to make him into a "liar."

Chris Matthews Says 'Unemployment Was Well Past 10%' When Obama Took Office — It Was Only 7.8%.  "When your guy left town, Dubya — who nobody asked him to come back by the way at the Republican convention — unemployment was well past ten percent and skyrocketing."  So falsely said MSNBC's Chris Matthews to conservative talk radio host Roger Hedgecock on HBO's Real Time Friday [9/21/2012].

Are the Media Telling the Truth About Romney's "Lies"?  [Scroll down]  Many reports have documented examples of stimulus money wasted on dubious projects or that benefited well-connected firms.  And [Paul] Ryan's overall complaint was that the money was "borrowed, spent, and wasted."  That may be hyperbole, but by Obama's own standards, the stimulus was hardly a success.  Just before he signed the stimulus, Obama promised it would "ignite spending by businesses and consumers," unleash "a new wave of innovation, activity and construction," and produce 4% economic growth this year.  None of which happened.

Report: Journalists Using Fake Names to Buy Obama Merchandise.  Several journalists have reportedly used fake names to buy Obama campaign merchandise inside media-only areas of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

Were journalists using fake names to make Obama donations at the convention?  [Scroll down]  So the next time you hear a "journalist" pitching in with the sort of in-kind campaign contribution that Democrats love, even though they are very upset by the idea of other types of corporation participating in political speech, remember that he or she might be driving home in a car with a "Democrats Are Hot" bumper sticker, purchased under a fake name at the Democratic National Convention.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews claims to live in 'black majority' DC, but actually lives in Md. suburbs.  MSNBC host Chris Matthews might have exaggerated his abilities to hear dog-whistle racism at this week's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Newsbusters' Jack Coleman noted.  During Tuesday night's [8/28/2012] coverage, Matthews made the case that he is well-positioned to judge racial issues because of where he lives, after having repeatedly insinuated that Republican figures are racist.

Isaac Shows Media Bias Of Hurricane Proportions.  As Isaac bore down on New Orleans, the administration's media toadies preferred to talk not about substantive issues, but on how the "shadow of Bush and Katrina" hung over the delayed GOP convention in Tampa.

WaPo's Glenn Kessler Has Fact-Checking Tantrum Over 'You Didn't Build That'.  Glenn Kessler is The Washington Post's laughably biased fact checker, and when you think of Kessler, remember this — remember the "fact" checker who called Romney a liar for saying a president who didn't go to Israel didn't go to Israel.  This guy is utterly shameless, and this morning he's having a full-blown tantrum.

Mark Brown Declares Obama is not a Chicago Politician.  In a curious column the Sun-Time [sic] Mark Brown denies that President Obama has much to do with Chicago Politics.  Curious because the preponderance of evidence that Brown offers is that President Obama is a typical Chicago politician, working in league with donors and other politicians to fleece their consituents and taxpayers. [...] If being Emil Jones point man in Springfield, married to the daughter of a Precinct Committeman/water department employee, and having David Axelrod as a constant flack for many years doesn't qualify you as a Chicago politician, just what does?

Cutter: I'm Just Going to Make [Stuff] Up about Jobs.  Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for Obama's reelection effort, seems more a character out of fiction than a real person.  A high-octane spokesman, she is willing to say anything to win the 30-second sound byte cycle.  She will lie, contradict herself and make up stats on the fly to get through any single cable news appearance.  Its something real people, with a credibility gene, wouldn't do.  Fortunately, she's a Democrat, so the media will never really hold her statements to account.

Hey, Fareed, You've Got a Paragraph; You Didn't Write That.  In penning his recent piece "The Case for Gun Control," Time editor and CNN host Fareed Zakaria actually made the case that he needs to focus on pen control.  Because he plagiarized part of his work from a New Yorker article written by one Jill Lepore.  Zakaria was busted by NewsBusters, a feat that probably wasn't too difficult since Lepore's piece was published less than four months ago.

Will Yale Fire Fareed Zakaria?  There is now little question that Fareed Zakaria is guilty of plagiarism.  He has admitted copying a portion of a New Yorker essay and apologized.  Time, where Zakaria works as a columnist, has suspended Zakaria for a month, and CNN — owned by the same parent company — has suspended him pending an investigation.  This represents a mere slap on the wrist for someone whose standard speaking fee is $75,000.

A few days later...
Fareed Zakaria's suspension lifted by CNN and Time.  All is forgiven for Time magazine writer and CNN host Fareed Zakaria, who last week was suspended by both outlets for apparent plagiarism.  CNN said on Thursday [8/16/2012] that Zakaria's weekly "GPS" public affairs program will return to the air on 26 August.

NBC accused of deliberately editing footage of the women's team gymnastics.  Controversy over the coverage of the Olympics on American television deepened today when NBC was accused of deliberately editing footage of the women's team gymnastics in order to create what critics called "fake suspense."  Russian world champion Ksenia Afanasyeva's unexpected fall during the floor exercises, which effectively handed a gold medal to Team USA during an early stage of the contest, was inexplicably removed from the time-delayed version of events that NBC presented to its prime-time television viewers.

Faking and enhancing the sounds of the Olympics.  Ah, there's nothing quite like the serene "swoosh-swooshing" of oars in the water, as Olympic rowers glide along the water.  There really isn't, because those sounds spectators are hearing on their TVs are not live from the event, The Atlantic reported.  In order to keep sight of the boats, broadcasters must follow them with chase boats and a helicopter.  The result is that the sound of the rowing is drowned out by that noise.  So, NBC elected to replace the live audio with a recorded soundtrack of rowing practices to deliver more accurate depiction of what the sport sounds like in its pure form.

Media Invents Story That Chick-fil-A President Condemned Gay Marriage.  Last week, reports emerged that Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy had condemned gay marriage.  It's no secret that the company is run by devout Christians, but this still caused an uproar.  Boston's mayor threatened to deny the company business permits, celebrities condemned the company, and the Muppets announced fast food chain wouldn't be able to license any new toys for their kids meals.  One small problem:  The president of Chick-fil-A never actually said anything condemning gay marriage.

TV Station Fires Anchor After He Fails to Disclose Connection to Atheist Group He Was Covering.  Jason Volentine, a former anchor for WXMI, a television station in Michigan, found himself without employment after failing to tell his employers about a relationship he had with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).  FFRF, an atheist activist group, is a non-profit that advocates for the separation of church and state, while fighting faith in the public square.  It wasn't Volentine's relationship, in itself, that was problematic — it was the fact that he had covered the non-profit group, but had purportedly failed to tell his employers and viewers about the relationship beforehand.

Nuts to Nutting: Under Obama, Real Spending Has Exploded.  On Tuesday, Rex Nutting of MarketWatch, who per his Linkedin profile is the site's Washington bureau chief, published a column titled "Obama spending binge never happened."  This column will show that it did, but that clever accounting has largely concealed its existence.

The Decline of The Washington Post.  [Scroll down]  The [Washington] Post is running paid ads from the Russian and Chinese governments that are made to look like news sections of the paper.  The ads, some of them six pages long, even carry a facsimile of The Washington Post masthead.  In relatively small print it says they are paid supplements and have nothing to do with the paper's news or editorial departments.  But The Washington Post masthead or logo is more prominently featured. [...] Readers are thus given the impression that the propaganda has the approval of the Post.

Boston Globe Takes Credit for Breitbart Scoop.  Today the Boston Globe has a front-page, below-the-fold story titled "Filings raise more questions on Warren's ethnic claims."  It's a well-written take on documents and information first brought to light here at Breitbart News two weeks ago.  Unfortunately, it's presented as a scoop with no link or reference to the fact that the information has appeared previously in another publication.

Washington Post Admits to Bogus Quote.  Veteran Washington Post reporter Daryl Fears, part of a two-person writer team, unmistakably wrote that filmmaker John O'Keefe had "said" he "targeted" ACORN, the advocacy group, for his candid-camera expose, because it registered voters to defeat Republicans.  O'Keefe said no such thing.  It was a non-quote made out of whole cloth by reporter Fears, and published as fact on Sept. 17.  Making the falsehood exponentially worse, the Post story then was retailed worldwide by the Associated Press.

Fox News Has a Van Jones Problem.  In the same way that Van Jones was exposed originally by New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon by using Internet search engines to look into his controversial background and writings, over the course of just a few days Accuracy in Media has been able to determine the following about [Marc Lamont] Hill from public sources.

This is what passes for journalism these days:
ABC Fakes Muslim Prejudice, Unsurprisingly Finds 'Islamophobia' in America.  Apparently to prove that the US is filled with Muslim hating yahoos, ABC went on the hunt to find "Islamophobia" in America and the result is "Witness to Discrimination:  What Would You Do?"  Since they didn't really know where to find any, ABC News decided to create their own prejudice against Muslims by hiring an actress to put on Muslim dress and get "confronted" by a Muslim hating coffee store server — also an actor hired by ABC.

It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp.  Scott Beauchamp was the last straw.  I realized that I need a scorecard to keep track of all the fallen journalists, journalistic mistakes and major and minor screw-ups in the media. … Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias.  Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier.  Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV.  Some are more serious.

It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp — Part Two.  Without too much extra effort, it was fairly easy to add 21 more names to the "Media Hall of Shame" list, bringing the total to 83.  With more effort, I'm sure the total list could easily double.

In part three, the list grows to 101.
Media Dishonesty Matters.  Did you know that Time magazine and other news organizations had a Vietnamese communist on full-time staff in Vietnam during that war?  Do you remember that ABC, CBS and NBC have all rigged cars or trucks with explosives or other devices to make them look dangerous on TV, or that Consumer Reports lied about the Suzuki Samurai enough to put it out of business?

Is 'Journalistic Ethics' an Oxymoron?  The Founding Fathers thought a free and skeptical press was essential to the preservation of our political and economic liberties.  The First Amendment is first for just that reason.  What would they think of today's generation of reporters who hide from the truth, parrot the slogans of left-wing advocacy groups, fail to do their own research, and routinely give politicians a free ride?  My guess is they would be stunned.

Is news just the facts?  Not anymore.  When I entered the field the ideal was to "... tell it like it is."  Not what I would like it to be, but simply lay out the facts.  If one fact strongly supports a point of view we were obligated to seek other facts that would dispute it.  Unfortunately, many of today's instructors teach what is called, "advocacy journalism."

Fake News from CBS.  In 2002 the Guerilla News Network published a piece written by staffers from a group called PR Watch.  They said that "For years CBS (and all the other networks) have run fake news stories in the form of video news releases."  What's more, the article, "CBS sells fake news," went on to announce that CBS also had gone into the business of creating, producing and distributing so-called "fake news."

'48 Hours' apologizes for altered image.  The executive producer of CBS's "48 Hours Mystery" has apologized for airing an altered image of the front page of the Tribune in an episode about the murder trial of Ryan Ferguson that aired Saturday night [2/18/2006].

Playing with the numbers:  A UPI story a few months back reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.  If so, as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total number of the homeless.

Opinion masquerading as journalism:
The Liberal media are living in cocoons.  Whenever you read the headline, "some say," you know you are reading the opinions of the reporter.  Some say the moon is made of green cheese, but what's the difference?  The story is only worth telling when "some say" what the reporter wants them to say.

Paper Uses Global Warming Activist's Press Release as News Story.  The Palm Beach Post was caught in a bit of deception by one of its readers over the weekend. ... Unfortunately for the reputation of Dara Kam and that of the paper, this "article" was merely a rewording of the press release of an environmentalist group calling themselves, Environment Florida.  An alert reader who wrote in calling them on it also exposed several other papers across the country that did the very same thing.

A Phony Tale Of Woe.  The story currently making the rounds about the guy who robbed a bank for $1 to get free jailhouse health care is supposed to expose how terrible our medical system is.  It actually exposes something worse.  It's a story tailor made for the news media. ... The fact that not one reporter trafficking this story bothered to point these facts out is an example of gross dereliction of duty or extreme bias — or both.

WaPo Author who Tied Romney to KKK Resigns over Plagiarism Scandal.  When Washington Post journalist Elizabeth Flock wrote a post last year falsely accusing Mitt Romney of using a Ku Klux Klan slogan in his campaign speech, she was not fired or disciplined.  But when Flock stole from the work of another mainstream organization and did not properly attribute, she abruptly "resigned" from the Washington Post conveniently and coincidentally before another editor's note went up on her post that described it as having "serious factual errors" and "a significant ethical lapse."

The Truth About One-Sided DACA Reporting.  Over at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, reporter Tracy Jan has a piece entitled, "White House claims 'dreamers' take jobs away from blacks and Hispanics.  Here's the truth."  The truth, according to the immigration advocates interviewed for the article, is that DACA has no undesirable effects whatsoever on the U.S. labor market.  Ms. Jan apparently did not reach out to any immigration skeptics for comment.  Had she done so, they would have told her several things.  First, DACA recipients are not a high-skill group.  The 15 percent of DACA recipients over the age of 21 who have a four-year degree is far from the 34 percent among natives in the same age range.  Furthermore, as Alan Tonelson points out, the occupations held by DACA recipients seem to be primarily working-class.  The idea that they are not competing with less-educated natives, as the advocates in the Wonkblog article claim, is unlikely.  Second, although there is certainly not a fixed number of jobs in our economy, immigration can still negatively affect American workers.

WaPo Fact Checker Misleads on Huma Abedin & the Muslim Brotherhood:  What's the Truth?  It is an undisputed fact that Huma Abedin was an employee of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA) for 12 years, and appeared on the masthead of the organization's journal, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) right up until the time she began to work at the State Department for Secretary Clinton. [...] Whether one finds it plausible that an individual might be listed as an "associate editor" for a period of 12 years, yet never be called upon to perform the task which their position suggests (i.e. editing) is not a question of fact.  The readers, (Kessler's and ours) will need to determine for themselves whether such an excuse holds water, but a reasonable person might look upon their own life's experience and wonder whether they ever approached a decade or longer in a position without even having seen the work ostensibly produced there during their tenure.

Graham: Comey Didn't Tell Congress the DNC Email That Drove Him to Intervene in Clinton Investigation Was Fake.  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Sunday [6/11/2017] that former FBI Director James Comey did not tell lawmakers the email that played a role in his decision to publicly intervene in the Hillary Clinton email investigation was fake, as the FBI reportedly believed.  The Washington Post reported May 24 on a Russian intelligence document the FBI obtained that purported to show a "tacit understanding between the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department" over the investigation into Clinton's email server use.  The FBI, according to the report, believed the document was unreliable and possibly fake.

Trump Maintains Momentum Despite Malicious Media.  I was at a conference in Chicago last week when a friend mentioned that it had just been reported that [Rod] Rosenstein was furious that Trump deployed his memo as the reason to fire Comey and that he was threatening to quit.  Yikes!  Except that Rosenstein did not threaten to quit.  So why did The Washington Post report that he did?  They just made it up.  And they did so out of malice, in an effort to delegitimize Trump.

The Obama-Bezos-CIA-WaPo Link Coincidentally Lurking Behind Those Intel Community Leaks.  [Scroll down]  The rogue officials behind the leaks are from the Obama administration.  You can certainly buy the deduction that they'd know reporters at WaPo, and would, in their unhappiness, "leak scoop" to them.  (Even though it never turns out to actually be anything, other than innuendo.)  But it's really been noticeable that whatever the most sensational claim is, every couple of days or so, it's that claim that ends up being leaked through the Washington Post.

Tips For Reading Washington Post Stories About Trump Based On Anonymous Leaks.  Previous Washington Post stories sourced to anonymous "officials" have fallen apart, including Josh Rogin's January 26 report claiming that "the State Department's entire senior management team just resigned" as "part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don't want to stick around for the Trump era."  The story went viral before the truth caught up.  As per procedure, the Obama administration had, in coordination with the incoming Trump administration, asked for the resignations of all political appointees.  While it would have been traditional to let them stay for a few months, the Trump team let them know that their services wouldn't be necessary.  The entire story was wrong.

Analyzing the Trump/Russia Intelligence Story.  [Scroll down]  So, let's have a little analytical look at the story.  First of all, every U.S. person in the room denies it, specifically saying no "sources and methods" were disclosed.  Remember that, it's important.  Apparently, the Trump people did report to the NSA and CIA what they talked about with the Russians, and that some of it was highly classified.  Following that, the story was leaked by "current and former U.S. officials," speaking anonymously, of course.  One thing we know — since we know exactly who was in the meeting — is that these "current and former officials" were not in the meeting.

Washington Post Creates Fake News Timed-Release Story Intended to Capture Evening News Lede.  Always remember the basic rule that has been proven accurate 100% of the time:
  •   When the CIA wants to leak a damaging story they coordinate with the Washington Post and ABC.  (and vice-versa).
  •   When the State Dept. or FBI/DOJ wants to leak a damaging story they coordinate with CNN and the New York Times.  (and vice-versa)
This consistent pattern has NEVER been broken.

Three More Trump/Russia 'Bombshells' Turn Out To Be Duds.  Over the weekend, CNN offered up a shocking revelation:  Russia had enlisted Pikachu and his Pokemon pals in its effort to get Donald Trump elected president.  Well, not really.  It was just the latest nonstory whipped up by the Trump-hating press.

CNN Continues to Solidify Its Place Atop the Fake News Dung Heap.  In the ongoing battle between President Trump and the always hostile mainstream media, CNN has taken center stage as either the fight's biggest victim or its most egregious offender, depending on one's perspective.  I vote the latter. [...] This isn't journalism, it's a slander party.

CNN throws in the towel on fake Russian news.  CNN has dismantled its vaunted Trump-colluded-with-the-Russians investigative unit in a wretched concession to reality.  The only thing the unit found was an empty well for stories, surrounded by a crust of fake news.  The whole caper damaged the network's credibility, and the public just wasn't buying it anymore.  So the whole unit had to go.  What a shabby end to what the network had put so much stock in in the heady days of trying to oust President Trump just as he had taken office.

CNN Pulled Investigative Team Off Trump-Russia Coverage.  CNN executives explicitly told their investigative team to stop looking into potential ties between the Trump administration and Russia following a series of high profile reporting errors led that to the resignation of three journalists in June.  Executives transferred all reporting duties associated with the Trump-Russia narrative to CNN's Washington, D.C. team in the wake of a retracted June report, members of the CNN staff told The New York Times.  The report in question was removed from CNN's website after the network admitted it could not stand by information that tied then Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment bank under Senate sanctions.

Something Very Odd In That "CNN Crew Rescuing Man in Truck" Video.  Perhaps you might have seen the story of Drew Griffin from CNN and a spontaneous, and serendipitous, CNN crew's rescue of a Texas man who drove his truck into a canal.  Kudos for CNN being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing etc.  CNN has been playing up the video all day as an act of spontaneous CNN bravery in a moment of emergency and crisis.  High-fives and back-pats all around.  [Video clip]  Except someone noticed something weird about it.  Either there's another guy in the video and the footage makes it seem weird and conflated, or Drew Griffin had time to change clothes between the moment the man drove into the canal and the moment Griffin "rescued" him.

CNN: From Fake News to Fudging Ratings?  CNN has reacted very badly to the political rise of President Trump, promulgating fake news and presenting an echo chamber of negative commentary.  Now, the struggling news channel appears to be trying to manipulate the ratings.  Even if it's not the originator of the Fake News model that now largely defines the MSM, CNN has certainly perfected it.

CNN: 'Ordinary People Are 'White Supremacists by Default'.  On Thursday [8/24/2017], CNN's John Blake published a story blaming "ordinary people" for making Charlottesville possible, and quoting a history professor who called such people "white supremacists by default."  "We are a country with a few million passionate white supremacists — and tens of millions of white supremacists by default," Mark Naison, a political activist and history professor at Fordham University in New York City, told CNN.  "You have to have millions of people who are willing to be bystanders, who push aside evidence of racism, Islamophobia, or sexism.  You can't have one without the other."  Blake, the CNN reporter, paraphrased activists like Naison saying "the tragedy that took place in Charlottesville this month could not have occurred without the tacit acceptance of millions of ordinary, law-abiding Americans who helped create such a radically explosive climate."

The Editor says...
No, all it takes is a few inflammatory cable TV  news  propaganda channels to "create such a radically explosive climate."

Provocateur Journalism.  When a news organization reports an impending weather event based on forecasts from the National Weather Service, or warns of potential seismic activity anticipated by the U.S. Geological Survey, or alerts the public concerning an infectious-disease outbreak being tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no one questions the news organization's motives, because the underlying information is factual and derived from a reliable, nonpartisan, and authoritative source.  CNN presents itself as a news organization, yet today [8/17/2017] it posted a dubious story titled "Here are all the active hate groups where you live," based entirely on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The SPLC is not the equivalent of the National Weather Service, the USGS, or CDC, to put it mildly.  It is risible for CNN to recite SPLC data uncritically, with no additional validation, as a credible list of "domestic hate groups," let alone to describe SPLC's data as "widely accepted."

Charlottesville, Barcelona, and the Left's Nostalgia for Nazism.  Within minutes of the announcement of the vehicular terror attack in Barcelona, Jim Sciutto and Wolf Blitzer of CNN were opining that the horrifying events in Spain may have been inspired by (i.e. were a copycat of) Charlottesville.  The implications of this comparison are not only wrong-headed, they are reactionary and dangerous to the American public and the world. [...] It isn't because of neo-Nazis or the KKK that it's been decades since any of us has walked onto an airplane or entered a concert or museum without being examined or x-rayed, that our daily lives have not been the same.

Jim Acosta is exactly why cameras were kept out of WH briefings.  When the White House stopped allowing cameras in the press briefings, no one was more vociferous against the move than CNN's Jim Acosta.  He went on an unceasing tirade against the practice.  This week he proved why he ranted against it — and why the White House may have been smart to institute the practice.  It wasn't really about transparency.  It was about Jim Acosta being able to make the briefings about himself and not the president.  An exchange this week between Acosta and presidential adviser Stephen Miller proved why then-press secretary Sean Spicer was right to make the move.

CNN's Jim Acosta Read The Statue Of Liberty Poem, Had A Meltdown When Someone Suggested Immigrants Be Able To Read It, Too.  Jim Acosta took a rhetorical beating today [8/2/2017].  Over the past couple of months he's been one of the loudest voices grousing about the Trump administration's policy of conducting off-camera press briefings.  Listening to him, a person might have been under the impression that the First Amendment features a clause granting senior White House correspondents from CNN the right to grandstand on national TV every day.  Acosta happens to be one of the strongest arguments for keeping daily briefings off camera.  Most often these exchanges are excruciatingly uninformative, pitting dishonest administration officials against crusading journalists who offer ideological statements in the form of pretend questions.

Acosta Pulls the Media's Mask Off.  It is impossible to overstate the partisan jackassery of CNN, which is at once a product of the cynical, ratings-driven scumbaggery of its head Jeff Zucker and the pretentious liberalism of its "reporters," almost all of whom come from Democratic circles.  What an astonishing collection of frauds.  With their anchormanish baritones, they try to hoodwink viewers into thinking they are "serious" journalists.  But they are all just liberal activists playing reporters on TV.  Jake Tapper was a Dem staffer.  So was Jim Sciutto.  Christiane Amanpour, last heard lecturing journalists on the need to drop "neutrality" in its coverage of Trump, is married to former Clinton staffer James Rubin.  And the list goes on and on.  Out of this ethos came Jim Acosta, who, thanks to Trump, has justly become the face of fake news.

CNN's Jake Tapper Claims 'Every Intelligence Expert' Under Trump, Obama Affirms Russia Interference.  During yesterday's [7/23/2017] State of the Union program on CNN, host Jake Tapper wildly asserted that "every intelligence expert, both under the Obama administration and under the Trump administration" agrees with the assessment that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.  Tapper did not explain how he concluded that "every intelligence expert, both under the Obama administration and under the Trump administration" made such an assessment.

CNN's Jake Tapper Caught Misstating His Background on Live Television.  Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, has been caught misstating his background on live television on Sunday [7/23/2017].  During an interview with President Donald J. Trump's new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, Tapper inflated his background to make it seem as though he was more in touch with people with working- and middle-class beginnings than he really is.

Americans Protest 'Very Fake News' CNN Outside of Atlanta Headquarters.  More than 150 protesters charged the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia to share their disgust with the network's peddling of "fake news" against President Trump's administration.

How CNN took on President Trump and lost.  [Scroll down]  [Jeff] Zucker was not a journalism guy, but he understood numbers.  He lived and died by them.  His philosophy at CNN was to stay on anything that its viewers were watching whether it was a missing Malaysian plane or Trump.  CNN's old strategy of "flooding the zone" with meaningless non-coverage of a breaking event was merged with Zucker's own preference for reality television to create a constant coverage circus.  Hiring a ton of reporters from across the spectrum, from a New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner to the BuzzFeed trolls, would flood the zone with Trump scandals.  CNN would have the most Trump scandals and the most viewers.  It was a great strategy for manufacturing a whole bunch of fake news scandals.  And things that don't even qualify as fake news.  Like wondering whether Trump is afraid of stairs.

Legal Experts:  CNN Committed Multiple Felonies.  So arrogant and self-righteous have liberal news outlets become, that they now take it upon themselves to hunt down and blackmail private citizens who dare to mock theor pomposity or make fun of the elf-appointed hall monitors of news.  Blackmail is a harsh term, but it applies to what CNN did to the Reddit user who made the now infamous wrestling GIF showing Trump pummeling an opponent with a CNN logo for a head.

Thanks CNN! Worst media moments of the week.  Being biased is one thing.  Threatening online anonymity another.  That led to even The New York Times trying to explain how such online battles evolve.  "Remarkably, the CNN episode has managed to unite the notoriously fractious right-wing meme community under a common cause."  Posters have revealed home addresses and more from several CNN staffers in response and have claimed they will keep fighting.  The network probably wishes the whole thing would just go away.  The online community isn't likely to let that happen.

The Long List of Lies.  Would it be possible to list all the lies CNN tells?  The network fed questions to Hillary Clinton prior to debates.  And that was when Clinton was fighting Bernie "I'm a Loser" Sanders.  She still couldn't get by that imbecile without cheating.  Next, CNN twisted polls to make the Clinton camp believe Hillary Clinton was a rock star.  That didn't end well.  More recently, CNN buried the truth of terror attacks, hiding their Muslim connection.  In one such incident, the attacker was Muslim, shouted, "Allahu akbar," yet CNN called the guy a Canadian and buried the story under a piece about The Bachelor.

CNN Admits in 30th Paragraph that Trump was Right about Intel Agencies' Assessment on Russia.  CNN, far from a neutral news source, wrote a very long piece on President Trump's relationship with the country's intelligence agencies.  However, they buried the truth that the liberal media overestimated how many intelligence agencies believed the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election.  Where did they admit the truth?  In the 3oth and 31st paragraphs.

CNN's Zucker doesn't know his Dumpster's on fire.  CNN is a Dumpster on fire, but its boss is clueless.  Jeff Zucker's background is broadcast TV, a world of sitcoms, dramas, and reality shows.  He fails to realize that what he saw as small mistakes — the Russian dossier story, the false preview of Comey's testimony, and the retracted story about Scaramucci being investigated — were major problems.  None of CNN's competitors on TV had even one Fake News scandal that large.  CNN had three.

CNNBlackmail Is the Best Thing Since Trump Got Elected.  [T]he left isn't interested in logic and facts — and hasn't been for quite some time.  That was what James O'Keefe recently uncovered — not that we couldn't have guessed anyway — with his recent sting on CNN.  Here is an organization which affects the demeanor of a responsible, politically-neutral, internationally-respected news outlet with reporters and newscasters who look exactly like real ones on grown up TV channels.  But underneath, its entire raison d'etre and business model is churning out leftist fake news propaganda.  If conservative media outlets like Breitbart took the same liberties with the truth as leftist media outlets like CNN (and Vox and Slate and Salon and Huffpost and the rest...) they would be crucified.

A Weeks Worth of CNN's Russian Narrative Destroyed in a Minute.  For an entire week CNN has been running an ongoing story, based on a single source, about President Trump not going to confront Vladimir Putin about interference in the 2016 election.

CNN's Jim Acosta Busted for Fake News in Failed Attempt to Slam Trump.  NN's Jim Acosta accused President Donald Trump of "fake news" on Thursday for claiming that "three of four" intelligence agencies had identified Russia as the culprit in hacking during the 2016 presidential election — but the president was right, and Acosta was wrong.  Last week, the New York Times was forced to issue a correction, admitting that "17 intelligence agencies" had not, in fact, accused Russia, as Hillary Clinton had once claimed.

CNN sees its TV viewers in June collapse after having its "fake news" propaganda exposed.  The media giant saw its viewership numbers take a big hit in June after having its "fake news" reporting exposed in a variety of scandals, from Project Veritas videos, to made up Russia-collusion news, and even Trump body slamming the network via twitter.

CNN Threatens To Expose Non Compliant Citizen for Thinking Wrong Thoughts.  In an article identifying the originating source of the wrestling gif tweeted last week by President Donald Trump, CNN says they'll keep his name private so long as the person remains compliant to the media thought police.  The direct threat is:  "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change." [...] Got that comrades?  Failure to remain a compliant citizen may render you subject to targeting by CNN corporate media.  Worth remembering.  CNN has instituted a multi-level corporate approval process for all media articles.  That means everyone within the media organization from top tier executives through legal departments and editors approved of this statement.

Media errors give Trump fresh ammunition.  A string of high-profile corrections and retractions by major news organizations on stories about President Trump or his allies have fueled more allegations of bias in the mainstream press.  The relationship between Trump and the news media regularly hits new lows, with insults flying between the two camps and reporters warning that the president is inciting violence against journalists.  But Trump's allies on the right believe the president's claims that the mainstream media is "fake news" have been bolstered by recent missteps.  They point to recent admissions from top news outlets — including CNN, the New York Times and the Associated Press — that bombshell stories were either overcooked or included incorrect details.

CNN's Fake News Machine.  In April, media types were crowing that CNN had brought in Eric Lichtblau who had been, in the Washington Post's words, at "the forefront of the New York Times's reporting on the relationship between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia."  It was "an investment in investigative reporting and the sprawling Russia story".  It didn't take long for the investigative investment to sprawl badly.  Lichtblau has resigned from CNN in a growing scandal over a Fake News story about a Trump associate.  "Eric will guide our coverage and thinking," Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates, had boasted.  "And when he's onto a investigation, he'll still be reporting and writing too."  Not for long.  And Haris has joined Lichtblau on the unemployment line after the Fake News scandal.

Associated Press Engulfed in CNN-Level Scandal as It Covers Up Invention of Imaginary Pruitt Meeting.  A Breitbart News investigation has led to the correction by the Associated Press — which originally resisted — of the fake news it printed as deeper questions of responsibility, accountability, and journalistic ethics consume the AP heading into Fourth of July weekend.  This time, the Associated Press invented an imaginary meeting between EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, and then alleged that some kind of impropriety happened as a result.

CNN screws up — again.  We're told CNN flew into a panic on Friday [6/30/2017] after it accidentally aired a fake National Enquirer cover during Jake Tapper's broadcast.  Tapper did a segment on his "The Lead" show about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski's claim that Donald Trump tried to blackmail them with a hit piece in the National Enquirer.  During the piece, it showed a cover from the tabloid, which seemed to be about a scandal involving GOP senator Ted Cruz and his wife, Heidi Cruz.  Unfortunately, the cover is — literally — fake news.  The cover — which has the headline "Heidi Cruz:  Betrayed by Cheating Husband!" and promised details on a "sordid threesome, sleazy love letters and sensational photo proof — has never appeared on the National Enquirer, according to sources at the magazine.

Seniors Group Files FCC Complaint Against Very Fake News CNN.  The Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC), the leading conservative seniors' organization in the country, filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Thursday [6/29/2017] over CNN's reporting on Russian hacking.  In the light of hidden camera videos from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas showing a CNN producer calling the narrative "bulls***," and CNN Contributor Van Jones's characterization of the Russia "collusion" story as a "nothing burger," AMAC has brought a complaint under FCC regulations against the knowing broadcast of false information.

CNN's Latest Retraction Is Just the Tip of the Fake News Iceberg.  Even the best reporters make serious mistakes.  When that happens, as it will, it's best to take responsibility and move on, as CNN did in this case.  Certainly this decisive action taken in response to a serious problem is a great start.  But taking responsibility for just one of the many flawed stories CNN has been pushing is nowhere near sufficient a response to the institutional problems plaguing the media outlet.  The serious problems with CNN's approach to the Russia-Trump collusion conspiracy are much deeper than just one story, go back many months, and involve several stories and larger themes that no one at CNN has bothered to sufficiently explain.  Let's look at a few of those stories.

The coming crash of the lawless media.  Sniping and rock-throwing at Donald Trump, a game that any number can play and nearly everybody does, has become a game with no rules and no referees, and worse, no editors to restrain obstreperous children breaking up the furniture.  CNN, once a fairly reliable source of news, with a weakness for trivia and given to peddling old news as the new thing, is now an inviting target for imaginative libel lawyers.  Three of its most prominent editors and "producers" were sacked this week after the network was forced to retract and apologize for a story it made up about a condant of President Trump, that he and his hedge fund was being investigated by the U.S. Senate for colluding with the Russians for nefarious purpose.

Joe Scarborough Calls President Trump 'Greatest Liar That's Ever Sat In The White House'.  MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski bashed President Donald Trump Wednesday, calling him worse than former President Richard Nixon and the "greatest liar that's ever sat in the white house."  Scarborough played a clip of Brian Karem, executive editor of The Sentinel Newspapers, at Tuesday's [6/27/2017] White House briefing challenging Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, saying her criticism of the media was inflaming the American people.  Sanders responded at the briefing by citing a debunked Washington Post story stating reporters were not being thorough enough in their critiques of the president.

The Editor says...
Mr. Scarborough should spend some time reading my partial catalog of Obama's lies.

CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story.  The specter of a $100 million libel suit scared CNN into retracting a poorly reported story that slimed an ally of President Trump's — and forcing out the staffers responsible for it, The [New York] Post has learned.  The cable network's coverage of Trump transition-team member Anthony Scaramucci came amid federal scrutiny of corporate parent Time Warner's pending purchase by AT&T — and the widespread belief among media execs that CNN President Jeff Zucker can't survive a merger.  CNN immediately caved after Scaramucci, a financier and frequent network guest, cried foul and threatened to take legal action, sources said Tuesday.

CNN Just Got Hit by a Massive Truth Bomb — The Facts of Life Are Conservative.  As a fellow human being I feel sorry for the poor guy caught on camera by Project Veritas admitting this stuff — because he's probably going to lose his job.  But [...] It just seems to me that one of the most basic, entry-level precepts that any serious news organization ought to be observe — and that CNN most patently never has observed, or not for a very, very long time — is this:  Facts are sacred.  The truth always makes the best story.

CNN Producer Admits Witch Hunt Against Trump.  CNN producer John Bonifield made the brazen admission of the network's absence of journalistic bona fides to an undercover reporter from ACORN-slayer James O'Keefe's investigative nonprofit, Project Veritas.  "He not only gave us a tour of CNN's main newsroom, he gave us a window into the editorial bias and anti-Trump agenda of the organization," O'Keefe says as he narrates the video.  Project Veritas is touting the video as the first installment in a multi-part investigation the group calls "American Pravda."

Three journalists quit CNN in fallout from retracted Russia story.  Three CNN journalists who worked on a now-retracted story about Russia and a top Trump adviser are leaving the network.  CNN is casting their departure as resignations in the wake of the fiasco, but the network has come under substantial criticism since apologizing for the story.  The move would also help CNN’s legal position in case of a lawsuit.  Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump adviser who is the target of the story, told me that he has no plans to sue.  He said he has accepted CNN’s apology and wants to move on.  But Scaramucci also told me in an earlier interview, “I was disappointed the story was published.  It was a lie.”

White House:  CNN 'a Disgrace to All of Media, to All of Journalism'.  Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the White House Press Corps on Tuesday [6/27/2017] that CNN was "a disgrace to journalism."  Sanders's remarks came after CNN retracted a "fake news" story over the weekend alleging links between a member of President Donald Trump's transition team and a Russian firm, and after an exposé on Monday [6/26/2017] by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas showed a CNN producer admitting the Russia story was [false].

How CNN's Fake News Machine Ran.  The men behind the disaster were no lightweights.  Thomas Frank had been nominated for a Pulitzer.  Eric Lichtblau had shared a Pulitzer for bashing the Bush administration over, of all things, surveillance.  Their names were all over CNN hit pieces tying to tie Trump to an impeachable Russian scandal.  That was what they had been hired for.  CNN claimed that Lichtblau had been "reporting on Comey for more than a decade."  And Frank was busy rolling out fresh grist for the Trump-Russia mill.  One Frank article on CNN breathlessly claimed, "One week, three more Trump-Russia connections."  CNN was riding the impeachment train to Moscow.  And yet Lichtblau's tenure at CNN quickly became troubled.

CNN Exposed:  Producer Admits Anti-Trump Obsession Without 'Any Giant Proof'.  The secret-taping squad at Project Veritas are making sure CNN has a bad public-relations week.  On the heels of three journalists resigning over an unsubstantiated online report on Russia and Trump, CNN Health producer John Bonifield is caught on tape admitting that CNN is producing news for liberals, and that talking about "cutesy little ethics" is "adorable" when cable news is a "business."  PV says the conversations were taped in June.  Liberal journalists usually respond to PV videos in two ways.  First, they charge the videos are "deceptively edited," so somehow what the target says doesn't mean anything; and second, they absolutely fail to ask their own questions and follow up.  See last year's tapes on Democratic activists admitting they were stoking violence at Trump rallies and so on.

Heads Are Bouncing On The Floor At CNN Headquarters.  Yesterday [6/25/2017], CNN pulled what was promoted as a major story from the its website, disabled all leaks to the story, and issued an apology to the subject, Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci.  The ostensible reason was that the story failed to meet CNN's editorial standards... which tells you all you need to know about how bad the story was.  BuzzFeed reported that CNN honcho Jeff Zucker was personally leading the investigation, an act that can only be interpreted as desperately trying to head off a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

American Pravda:  CNN.  Project Veritas has released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield who was caught on hidden-camera admitting that there is no proof to CNN's Russia narrative. [...] According to the CNN Producer, business is booming.  "Trump is good for business right now," he concluded.  Bonifield further goes on to explain that the instructions come straight from the top, citing the CEO, Jeff Zucker: [...]

CNN Producer Spills All on Russia Fake News.  A veteran CNN producer has spilled the beans, on camera, about the fake news network's intentional obsession with the "Trump-Russia" narrative.  James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, has released a video in which CNN producer John Bonifield describes the network's orders to relentlessly push the "Trump-Russia" story, [...] The American people have had enough of the fake news media lying about our president, and now CNN has some explaining to do.

Undercover Video:  CNN Producer Admits Russia Story was Manufactured For Ratings.  Project Veritas and James O'Keefe has produced another explosive undercover story showcasing CNN producers who admit the Trump-Russia story is manufactured and promoted for ratings by the network.

Three CNN Employees Resign Over Retracted Story on Russia Ties.  Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday [6/26/2017].  Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN.  "In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story's publication," a network spokesperson said in a statement Monday [6/26/2017].

Three Employees Resign from CNN Amid Very Fake News Scandal.  Three CNN employees have resigned amid the network’s very fake news scandal in which it was forced to retract a hit piece on President Donald Trump and his associates.  "CNN said Monday [6/26/2017] that three journalists, including the executive editor in charge of a new investigative unit, have resigned after the publication of a Russia-related article that was retracted," CNN's Brian Stelter reported late Monday.  "Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN."

Very Fake News Scandal Consumes CNN as Jeff Zucker, Network Flack Refuse to Comment on Russia Retraction to Own Network.  The scandal surrounding CNN's mishandling of a very fake news hit piece on President Donald Trump and his associates grows bigger on Sunday night [6/25/2017] as the network's president Jeff Zucker and public relations team are refusing to comment to anyone — even to CNN media reporter Brian Stelter — about what happened.  Stelter, in his Sunday evening [6/25/2017] newsletter named for the television program he hosts[,] Reliable Sources, credited a Breitbart News investigation with forcing what he admitted is an embarrassing retraction for his employer CNN.

CNN Has to Completely Retract a Major Anti-Trump Story.  CNN, you will recall, ran a major story about James Comey claiming that Comey would contradict the President on whether the President is being investigated.  They went wall to wall with the coverage of that story.  Then James Comey did not contradict the President.  CNN had to walk it all back.  Now they have done it again.  On June 22, CNN ran a story claiming that Anthony Scaramucci had dealings with a Russian investment group.

CNN Journalist Angrily Tweets Trump Saying There's No Fake News — Gets FLOODED With Examples.  Chris Cillizza used to write for the Washington Post, now he works for CNN.  Yesterday [6/13/2017] while responding to a Trump tweet, he defiantly claimed there is no fake news.  He probably wasn't prepared for the response he got.

Trump Supporters Plan Protest at CNN Headquarters in Atlanta to Decry Fake News.  Debbie Dooley of Main Street Patriots is hoping hundreds will gather at the headquarters of CNN in Atlanta on Saturday to protest what its members consider fake news being produced by the giant media corporation.  Specifically, Dooley told Breitbart News that they object to the fake news being put out about President Donald Trump.  "We're encouraging people to come out and support our president," said Dooley, one of 22 national co-founders of the Tea Party and co-founder of Main Street Patriots.  "And to condemn the extreme biased coverage at CNN."

CNN Caught Staging Fake News Scene.  CNN was caught staging news in a video captured by citizen journalist, who posted the footage to his Twitter account @markantro.  Becky Anderson of CNN is seen in London handing props to a "peace group."  This footage was then passed off as real news by CNN.

Watch as fake news created by CNN to confirm narrative of 'good Muslims'.  Whenever Muslims act out the violence against infidels that Islamic scripture requires, the left-wing media swing into action to create and reinforce a contrasting narrative:  that most Muslims condemn and fight such attacks. [...] Because the actual facts on the ground do not support the benign view of Muslims as overwhelmingly hostile to terrorists and committed to peaceful coexistence, it is necessary to create (not simply report) events that confirm the media narrative.  CNN has just been caught creating a fake news event to support its narrative, and its efforts were rewarded with pick-ups by the BBC and the AP, among others.  In this two-minute video, CNN puts together a handful of people, carrying pre-printed signs (no spontaneity involved), and arranges them before the camera to look like a substantial crowd.  The elevated stage is a nice touch, confirming the professional expertise brought to bear in prepping this scene for the cameras.

Fake News — CNN's Marc Lamont Hill:  Conservatives Start Violent Campus Riots, Too.  CNN's Marc Lamont Hill, who is also a professor at Morehouse College, claimed that right-wing students incite riots on college campuses while discussing the Berkeley riots left-wing students over the appearance of Breitbart News' MILO.

CNN Reporter Compares Trump To Hitler While Her Boss Buys Obama Photos.  In the weeks after Donald Trump won the election, CNN chief Jeff Zucker watched as one of his employees compared the new president to Adolf Hitler.  At a White House press conference Thursday [2/16/2017], Trump declared that he was changing his moniker for the network from "fake news" to "very fake news."  There's been a ton of well-publicized drama between the two camps. [...] You may think Trump is too harsh on CNN.  But take a look at how the network treated Trump back in November.

Hospital CEO Wins Major Court Victory After Accusing CNN of False Reporting.  Those who accuse CNN and other mainstream media outlets of "fake news" will probably revel in a recent decision by a federal judge in Atlanta, Georgia.  While Judge Orinda Evans didn't all out declare that CNN was peddling in falsehoods, she did take aim at the network in an initial judgment in favor of a former hospital CEO who sued CNN accusing them of purposely skewing statistics to reflect poorly on a West Palm Beach hospital.  Judge Evans didn't mince words in her 18-page order allowing the case to move forward, and dismissing CNN's attempt to get it thrown out of court.

Yes, CNN IS Fake News.  The problem is this:  CNN — like the New York Times, like the network news departments at NBC and ABC and CBS — is virtually the definition of Fake News, a phrase made up by the left to attack Trump but which blew up in their faces like a trick cigar when it turned out everyone knows what liars they've been for the past sixteen years at least.  This is not even a question of the almost ceaseless series of mistakes, distortions and obfuscations that our leftist news media, in their hysterical rage against political reality, have committed since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.  These errors and lies — which include cover-ups of Islamic extremism, lies about right-wing websites, and suspiciously incendiary "mistakes" about the White House — are being ably catalogued by the mighty and terrible John Nolte over at the Daily Wire.

Stunning Fake News — CNN Promotes Conspiracy Theory That Milo Organized Berkeley Protests Against Himself.  CNN has continued to lead the way in manufactured news cycles through the past two years.  However, last night on Don Lemon's show they took fake news broadcasting to new levels of ridiculousness.  During a segment with Robert Reich, Don Lemon and Reich promoted a conspiracy theory that Milo Yiannopoulous actually manufactured the Berkeley protests in an effort to shut down his own speech:  [Video clip]

CNN Is Now Least Trusted News Network Among Viewers.  A recent poll of cable news network viewers found that CNN's regular audience is far more skeptical of the political news they receive than Fox News fans.

Study: CNN least trusted among likely voters.  CNN is less trusted by likely voters than its competitors at MSNBC and Fox News, according to a new study.  The study, conducted by Rasmussen Reports, said that 75 percent of likely voters tend to watch at least some cable news per week to keep up with politics.  Among that group, 42 percent watch Fox News, 35 percent watch CNN, and 19 percent watch MSNBC.  However, the poll said a larger portion of Fox News and MSNBC viewers trust those networks.

CNN still pushing fake story about Muslim attacked by Trumpsters.  CNN is the poster child for media bias and once again they don't disappoint. [...] This woman claimed that the men drove up, got out and attacked her.  That one was wearing a Trump 'Make America Great Again' cap and they beat her and robbed her, stealing her belongings and hijab.  She also said they hurled racial slurs at her.  She didn't realize there were cameras there and that they prove it never happened.  There were no other witnesses and it was labeled the hoax that it was.

Lemon: CNN 'Sets the Standard for Integrity'.  Last Tuesday, CNN's Don Lemon described his employer as the pinnacle of journalistic integrity during a news segment ostensibly examining pervasive left-wing political bias in the news media.  "I have to say that, I work for this news organization and I think that it sets the standard for integrity," said Lemon of his employer. [...] Lemon also denied that his former CNN colleague and current Democratic National Committee Interim Chair Donna Brazile had provided questions to Clinton's campaign in advance of CNN-hosted presidential debates.

CNN Caught Red-Handed Telling [a] Blatant Lie About Trump.  CNN was caught lying about comments GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump made at a campaign rally in Colorado over the weekend.  The original CNN article was titled, "Trump, skeptical of mail-in balloting, encourages voting more than once if necessary."

Mediaite Catches CNN Falsely Claiming Trump Told Audience to Vote Multiple Times.  Upon reviewing CNN's on-air coverage of Trump's Colorado rally at the center of these false claims, the network actually aired live the entirety of Trump's comments on Sunday [10/30/2016] about voting in the Centennial State.  Somehow, the CNN Politics team still published the butchered and erroneous Trump quote.  I've provided video below of Trump's full comments that CNN's reporters didn't appear initially interested in following.  The headline has also been changed to include the acknowledgement that this blog has been updated.

Trump's Right:  The Media Is Rigged.  On Oct. 16 on his CNN show "Reliable Sources," host Brian Stelter took the denial of liberal media bias to a new level.  In the wake of hundreds of emails underlining media-Democrat collusion, he insisted that every American should deny the evidence:  "In Trump's world, journalists are really just (Hillary) Clinton campaign workers in disguise, collaborating with her in an attempt to rig the election.  This is not just false.  It's ludicrous, and it's damaging."  On what planet does this man live?  Even by Clinton News Network standards, this is ridiculous.

CNN anchor warns: 'Illegal' for you to look at WikiLeaks.  WikiLeaks on Sunday called attention to remarks made by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo in which he appeared to warn viewers that it was "illegal" for those outside of the media to look at emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.

Special note to regular readers of akdart.com:
It is illegal for you to watch CNN or MSNBC.

CNN needs to stop deceptively editing videos.  Creating a narrative through deception won't help victims or change the minds of skeptics.  When people see the media lying to them, it makes it difficult to believe the narrative being crafted.  Take the recent examples of CNN.  The network has now twice edited videos to create alternate narratives in regards to the recent shootings of two different black men by cops.  Just this week, the pro-police group Blue Lives Matter charged that the network deceptively edited video of the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott.  The full video, taken by his wife Rakeyia, featured officers repeatedly telling Scott to "drop the gun."  In the video aired on CNN, no such demands were shown.

CNN falsely adds 'racial' to Trump vetting comments.  CNN added the word "racial" to Donald Trump's Monday [9/19/2016] comments on terrorism and immigration and is running headlines reporting that the GOP presidential nominee spoke of using "racial profiling" to stop terrorism.  But a review of the transcript of Trump's comments to Fox News that CNN quoted shows that Trump never used the word "racial" in his comments to the network and only spoke of "profiling."

Update:
CNN's Burnett Admits Her Show Was Wrong to Add 'Racial' to Trump Profiling Comments.  In the midst of a heated but civil debate on CNN Tuesday night, host Erin Burnett admitted on her eponymous show to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway that her program should not have aired a chyron on Monday's show suggesting that Donald Trump was in favor of "racial" profiling.  Burnett was twice pressed by Conway on why her show made such an editorial error and so Burnett paused the debate to offer an explanation of regret.

CNN anti-Trump lie BUSTED on air!  If you imagine all the situations when the media reported on domestic and international matters of great importance where the you-got-the-story-backwards truth would apply, you would likely be occupied for the rest of your life and still not have identified every situation.

Trump: "We Are Going To Punch Through The Media".  Donald Trump hits the media, particularly CNN, 'the Clinton News Network,' at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Penn.  Monday night [8/1/2016].  "We have a media that is so dishonest," Trump said.  "These are among the most dishonest people you will ever, ever meet."

CNN's Tom Foreman Caught Lying in Trump-Refugees 'Fact Check'.  In a segment that was billed as CNN's "fact check" of Donald Trump's anti-Hillary speech, CNN gave a demonstrably false presentation of U.S. immigration policy in an effort to undermine Trump's factually correct statements.  The segment was remarkable in that it not only revealed CNN's profound ignorance of federal immigration policy, but an examination of the segment's transcript also reveals that CNN ignored and blatantly distorted what Trump had actually said.  CNN's Tom Foreman accused Trump making a "false" statement about Hillary Clinton's refugee policy when Trump statement was, in fact, true.

CNN's Clinton Cash 'Fact-Check' Ends in Embarrassment for Cristina Alesci and Laurie Frankel.  CNN Money's "fact-checkers" Cristina Alesci and Laurie Frankel ended up with egg on their faces on Wednesday [6/22/2016] after they rated as "false" a well-established and proven Clinton Cash fact involving Hillary Clinton's State Dept. approving the transfer of 20 percent of U.S. uranium to the Russian government, as nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.  Under the guise of "fact-checking" Donald Trump's Wednesday speech, Alesci and Frankel purported to verify whether "Clinton's State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America's uranium holdings to Russia while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation."

CNN Caught Lying About Trump - Obama Does Back Gun Confiscation.  For the last two days CNN has been lying about Donald Trump in order to put itself in its favorite gear:  the Trifecta Gear that allows the left-wing network to, all at once, push gun control, protect Barack Obama, and attack a high-profile Republican as dishonest — in this case frontrunner Donald Trump.

CNN Photoshops Oregon Jihadist Shooter to "Fundamentally Transform" Him into a Caucasian Male.  Remember the Trayvon Martin case?  You know, the dude involved in burglary, PCP-like drug cocktails, and/or drug dealing who assaulted George Zimmerman and got capped for his trouble?  Remember how the media claimed there was a new race called "White Hispanics", a term invented "by The New York Times to describe Zimmerman, apparently in some kind of push for a white vs. Black narrative"?  Good times.  Well, the media is at it again, this time photoshopping the Black Jihadist Oregon shooter [...] to make him appear white.

The Curious Case of Oregon Shooter Chris Harper-Mercer — A Social Media Profile Shaped, Modified and Deleted.  On the left is the selfie Christopher Mercer uploaded to his social media.  On the right is how CNN presented the same selfie in broadcast stories about him.  Why did CNN need to change the complexion (color) of their broadcast?  Why is no one showing pictures of mom, Laurel Margaret Harper[?]

Trump Reduces CNN To Outright Lying: Sanctuary Cities Don't Exist.  Because he's a left-wing propagandist working for a left-wing propaganda outlet, CNN New Day anchor Chris Cuomo told the world today that sanctuary cities don't exist.  The description is a "misnomer," Cuomo said.  "They are not safe havens," Cuomo added, "It's about how they follow the [immigration law] process."  With a straight face, Cuomo dropped this nuclear lie while doing what he never does to Democrats:  interrogating Michael Cohen, an advisor to Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump: [...]

CNN Correspondent Sanjay Gupta Allegedly Makes False Brain Surgery Claim.  CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who served as a White House fellow before embarking on a career in journalism, has been accused of falsely claiming that he helped perform brain surgery on an eight-year-old while covering the April earthquake in Nepal.  The Global Press Journal reported Tuesday [7/7/2015] that the girl identified in the CNN report as having undergone a craniotomy at the hands of Gupta never actually received surgery.

CNN still running dubious right-wing vs. Muslim extremists statistic.  CNN aired a statistic Friday morning [6/19/2015] alleging that "right-wing extremism" is responsible for more deaths since Sept. 11, 2001, than "Muslim extremism."  The thing is:  The statistic is dubious.

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo: The First Amendment doesn't protect hate speech, you know.  This guy is a professional journalist.  And a Yale grad.  And a law-school grad.  But let's be fair.  If you polled the media, how many of them would agree?  Don't stomp Cuomo just because he's bold enough to say what the rest are thinking.

CNN, DHS and SPLC's Blame-Righty Hit Job.  The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release a report on "right-wing" terrorism that somehow found its way into CNN's hands last week during the farcical White House summit on Don't Say Islamic Extremism. [...] CNN splashed the big scoop on its website:  "DHS intelligence report warns of domestic right-wing terror threat."  The fear-mongering piece featured a huge map of 24 alleged acts of "violence by sovereign citizen extremists since 2010." [...] But a closer look at the rigging of that phony factoid simply confirms the malevolent intention of so-called objective journalists and "hate watch" groups to marginalize conservative political speech and dissent.  The CNN/MSNBC/SPLC smear job involved both the dishonest deflating of left-wing and jihadist incidents, and the dishonest inflating of "right-wing" incidents.

Political, Scientific Chicanery Underlies Global Warming Alarmism.  In her December 28 CNN article, "How Germany Banishes Climate Myths," German environment minister Barbara Hendricks argues that the climate policies enabled by her country and the EU as a whole have been an economic success.  This is nothing more than East German-style disinformation.  The reality is that Germany's so-called "Solar Valley" has become a mothballed industrial rust belt.  Nearly all solar energy manufacturers have closed their doors. [...] Hendricks' CNN article is just another example of the use of fraudulent PR spin to promote a desired political message while ignoring the realities of science and economics.

CNN Anchor: 'Our Rights Do Not Come From God'.  During a heated discussion over gay marriage, CNN morning Anchor Chris Cuomo opined that the unalienable rights endowed to all Americans do not come from God.  Cuomo was debating Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage.  Near the end of the back-and-forth and after Moore argued that rights cannot be handed down by men, Cuomo blurted out:  "Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that.  They come from man... That's your faith, that's my faith, but that's not our country.  Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise."  [Video clip]

CNN's Crowley Admits Obama Didn't Call Benghazi a Terror Attack.  On the May 19 broadcast of CNN's State of the Union, host Candy Crowley said that Obama was late in identifying the attacks in Benghazi as terrorism quite contrary to what she said during the Presidential debates late last year.

CNN Anchors Fake a Satellite Interview in the Same Parking Lot.  "Sorry, we're experiencing a delay in the broadcast while we both wait for this bus to go by."  Yes, those are all the same cars.  Apparently they thought we wouldn't notice because Nancy is on the right side of the screen, when in reality she is to Ashleigh Banfield's left.

Truth-Challenged Brian Williams Skeptical of Someone Else's Claims.  Disgraced anchor Brian Williams, who has a history of not telling the truth, on Wednesday [3/22/2017] offered a skeptical take on the claim by a Republican Congressman that Donald Trump's aides were surveilled during the presidential transition.  Regarding the assertions made by Representative Devin Nunes, Williams explained in a doubting tone:  "[Nunes] says he is now in receipt of information.  It's intelligence information that he found alarming enough to go down to the White House and brief the President.  [This is] not traditionally the role of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee."

Watch Brian Williams Lecture Us About Fake News With A Straight Face.  Does this man even realize that the sheer amount of irony he's putting out here is the mainstream media equivalent to smacking everyone who watches this clip in the face with a bag of rabid weasels?

Brian Williams complains about fake news — just 21 months after he lost his job on NBC Nightly News for telling made up stories.  Brian Williams has called out Donald Trump's transition team for spreading fake news stories.  Williams, who was suspended for six months and lost his spot as NBC Nightly News anchor for exaggerating stories about his time in Iraq and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, blasted the President-elect's team on MSNBC on Tuesday night [12/6/2016].  'Fake news played a role in this election and continues to find a wide audience,' the 57-year-old said.

12 Fake News Stories from the Mainstream Media.  [For example,] The adventures of Brian Williams:  Brian Williams' anchorman career at NBC News came to an end in 2015 after he was accused of lying about taking enemy fire while helicoptering into Iraq in 2003.  The accusation came from soldiers who were aboard the helicopter.  Williams told the story repeatedly, over a span of years, before he was called out.  NBC executives recalled having a great deal of difficulty getting Williams to admit he lied, and offer an unqualified apology.  Amazingly, Williams still has a career in broadcast journalism.

Brian Williams Will Receive Evening Show on MSNBC.  Despite his fall from prominence due to serial lying and removal from the anchor desk of NBC Nightly News, current MSNBC breaking news anchor Brian Williams will be given another chance to rein over a daily news program when, according to CNN's Brian Stelter, MSNBC awards him a half-hour show at 11:00 p.m. at a date to be determined.

Disgraced Brian Williams Seeks 'Redemption' at MSNBC: 'Bad Precedent for Journalism'.  Brian Williams, who spent 10 years as the anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News weekday program, and MSNBC, a cable affiliate known for its liberal slant and perpetually low ratings, are combining their forces in an effort to improve their standing in the cable news battle during the 2016 presidential contest.

Seriously? Brian Williams Proclaims to Be the 'Purveyor of Truth and Justice'.  A totally clueless Brian Williams on Monday night [2/1/2016] warned MSNBC viewers to not fall for false information as Iowa caucus results rolled in.  The man who became known for spinning vast numbers of falsehoods while anchor at NBC News ominously began, "There's going to be some data floating around, especially the internet tonight."  He continued, "The first wave of that data is notoriously suspect.  So, don't believe everything you see and hear tonight."  With no self-awareness, Williams proclaimed, "We hopefully will be the purveyors of truth and justice here."

The Editor says...
The internet is gradually replacing television as the primary national news medium in America, and the broadcast networks are very aware of it.  (The evidence of this trend is abundant:  Internet news and opinion sites are replete with advertising.  If nobody looked for local and national news on the internet, there would be few advertisers.)  Over the next few years, unless the internet is strangled by Big Government, the trend will continue.  The over-the-air broadcasters (and networks) are somewhat jealous of their internet competitors, which is why every TV station has a web site.  Even so, it isn't realistic to claim that the viewers can't believe anything they hear about an election except what they hear on television.

MSNBC cuts back Katrina anniversary coverage to avoid awkward references.  MSNBC has cut back its coverage of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina to avert awkward references to outlandish claims Brian Williams made about his time in New Orleans, it is reported.  Williams, 56, asserted in a 2006 interview that he had seen a 'face-down' dead body float past his hotel window in the Louisiana city's French Quarter in the aftermath of Katrina in September 2005.

Brian Williams Scandal Shows Power of Social Media.  The soldiers who prompted Brian Williams's fall from one of the most powerful jobs in the media had first tried to blow the whistle on him in 2003.  But that was before the Internet became ubiquitous.  And so, like most people who had a problem with the news, the soldiers had few options.

Why NBC cut Brian Williams loose as anchor — and really had no choice.  In the end, NBC simply could not bring Brian Williams back to the anchor chair.  It wasn't just that he had irreparably tarnished his own credibility, and that of his network, by fabricating a tale of Iraq War bravery.  It was that the rank and file of his own news division was vehemently opposed to Williams returning to "NBC Nightly News."

Quotes of the day.  The scandals that derailed the career of NBC News anchor Brian Williams are of the pathetic and pathological kind.  Obviously, Williams is not to be trusted.  Nevertheless, other than the Katrina fairytales that were obviously meant to damage President Bush, all of his lies were self-aggrandizing resume-enhancers.

When elites lie without much consequence, the public follows their examples.  [Scroll down]  Few question network anchor newsreaders.  In Williams's case his "aw shucks" mellifluous shtick and understated dramatics were his versions of hexameters and type scenes, and so made his lying a bit easier to swallow.  After his brief suspension, Williams might even return to his multimillion-dollar per year perch, with the understanding that he can restore NBC ratings and profitability, and do that with occasional exaggeration rather than outright making up stuff.  And why not lie, when NBC itself doctors 911 tapes to confirm that George Zimmerman was a racist?

Brian Williams Wants His Job Back Now, but NBC Isn't So Sure.  The trial of Brian Williams is not quite over, and the question of whether he'll be banished or welcomed back is far from settled.  Despite rumors that NBC News has completed its reportedly damning internal review of the suspended Nightly News anchor's tall tales about his adventures in journalism, the probe isn't finished and its conclusions are not fully baked.

Brian Williams Knows He's Dead.  For a brief moment earlier this week, it looked as though Williams might have found a champion in Andrew Lack, the newly returned chief of NBC News.  According to a blind-sourced story in the [New York] Daily News, Lack was hoping to reseat his old friend Williams in the network's anchor chair.  But whoever launched that trial balloon — presumably a Williams loyalist — must have been ducking for cover the next day when the Hollywood Reporter and the New York Post sent high-velocity rounds through the Daily News item with a blind-sourced story of its own.  "They want Brian to resign," an anonymous source told the Post.  "If they have to fire him, they can't control him."

NBC News chief wants Brian Williams back on the air.  This ship's captain doesn't want to throw the anchor overboard.  NBC News chief Andrew Lack is looking for a way to put Brian Williams back behind the "Nightly News" desk, sources tell the Daily News — and Williams has told confidants he won't leave the network unless he's fired.  "Andy believes viewers want him (Williams) back," the source said.  "The feeling is that (Williams') problem seems to be more with the media and other reporters than his viewers — if Andy can figure out a way to get him back on the air he will do it."

Hillary and Brian slide down the ladder.  Who do you trust?  A. Brian Williams   B. Hillary Clinton   Both are important public figures.  Both have been accused of deception.  Both admit they made mistakes.  Both now ask for your forgiveness and your trust.  But does either one deserve it?

Brian Williams Inquiry Is Said to Expand.  An NBC News internal investigation into Brian Williams has examined a half-dozen instances in which he is thought to have fabricated, misrepresented or embellished his accounts, two people with inside knowledge of the investigation said.  The investigation includes at least one episode that was previously unreported, these people said, involving statements by Mr. Williams about events from Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring.

NBC execs leaked new details of Brian Williams 'lying' to shame him into resigning.  Leaks from the investigation into shamed newsman Brian Williams were given to the press to pressure him into resignation, a report claims.  News broke this weekend that the committee investigating the NBC star found he lied in his reporting to make himself look good at least 11 times.

So far, NBC News finds Brian Williams embellished at least 11 times.  A months-long internal investigation of Brian Williams by NBC News has turned up 11 instances in which the anchorman publicly embellished details of his reporting exploits, according to a person familiar with details of the probe.

Brian Williams 'started lying because he felt insecure following Tom Brokaw and then blamed it on a possible brain tumor'.  Brian Williams started embellishing his stories because he felt insecure following in Tom Brokaw's very large footsteps at NBC, according to a new report.  The network handed Williams a six-month suspension in February after he acknowledged he had lied about being on board a helicopter that came under fire while reporting from Iraq in 2003.  But according to a report in Vanity Fair, Williams started exaggerating his stories because he felt insecure about Brokaw, whom he succeeded at Nightly News in 2004.

Brian Williams the Canary.  The story of the Brian Williams saga wherein recorded video descriptions by Williams morphed from having only heard about things that happened to those same things actually having happened to or witnessed personally by him is simply an example of life in today's world of the highly visible Left.  Williams is a political iceberg that holds a whole lot more below the surface.  All of it needs to be exposed if this nation expects to survive in the real world of facts, "truth, justice and the American Way".  Clark Kent is needed just as Clark Kent.  We don't need Superman.

When Network Lies Kill.  Since I haven't watched network news in decades, the saga about Brian Williams' Major Hoople persona is more about drama than anything substantive to my interest.  Whether Williams is a fabulist, an incestuous voyeur who bragged about his daughter's soft porn role on HBO's 'Girls' or simply your average liberal is less compelling to me than wondering if a more dangerous anchor will ever be exposed for his lies.  Unfortunately, Walter Cronkite is still revered as the most trusted man in America even though his lies about the Vietnam War caused countless military deaths by prolonging the conflict.

The List: 32 Lies and Disputed Stories NBC News Let Brian Williams Tell For a Decade.  Numerous accounts now verify that NBC News not only wanted Brian Williams out there building his brand with the likes of Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live, but that the NBC brass knew their star was a serial liar. [...] Apparently, as long as Brian Williams' lies helped build the NBC News brand and the "Nightly News" ratings, nobody in charge chose to say anything.

In Big Sunday Story, WashPost Finds More Brian Williams Myths.  A team of Washington Post reporters did more myth-busting in the claims of Brian Williams in a Sunday front-page story that continued to two whole pages inside the paper.  The headline was "Williams undone by his gift of storytelling:  Anchor's love of a good yarn played a role in his downfall."  Wild exaggerations?  "That's Brian being Brian" was the "newsroom shorthand."

NBC investigating Brian Williams' claims that he witnessed fall of Berlin Wall and met Pope John Paul II.  NBC is expanding its inquiry into the alleged tall tales of suspended "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, CNN reported Thursday [2/12/2015].  The network's internal fact-checking is "nowhere near done," a senior NBC source told the cable news channel.  The look into Williams' exaggerated exploits has expanded beyond the anchor's claims about being in a helicopter that was struck by an RPG during the 2003 Iraq War.  The new focus will examine Williams' claims that he, not his predecessor Tom Brokaw, was in Germany the day the Berlin Wall fell and a story about meeting Pope John Paul II while a college student at Catholic University in 1979.

Journalists, Lawyers, and Brian Williams's 'Misremembering'.  In most instances, even in the smallest of markets, a reporter might be able to get away with a single instance of "misremembering," or as it might be more appropriately called in Williams' case, exaggeration.  But any more than that and he or she would, or should, be fired.  The odds of that happening, however, are diametrically opposed to the amount of money a particular reporter could generate for a newspaper or television station.  The cub reporter on the newspaper, in other words, is more likely to be fired than the lead anchor on a television station.

Another Tall Tale From Brian Williams? Seal Team Six Claim Disputed.  New details are emerging about about what appears to be another tall tale of wartime heroics from recently suspended NBC News anchor Brian Williams. [...] The chronology of Williams's account does not match up with what we know about where he was and what he was reporting.

Despite 'Long Period' of Concerns at NBC, Williams Given $50 Million Contract in Dec..  The unraveling of Nightly News anchor Brian Williams's accounts of his reporting in Iraq and Katrina-ravaged New Orleans has become a black mark on NBC News's reputation.  A detailed account in Thursday's Washington Post of the decision to suspend Williams for six months without pay appears to demonstrate how seriously the Peacock Network has taken the newsman's transgression — NBC Universal's CEO Steve Burke even considered firing Williams outright.

Within NBC, an intense debate over whether to fire Brian Williams.  Senior NBC officials seriously considered firing anchor Brian Williams because he lied to his viewers about riding in a military helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade during the Iraq war, according to a top network official.  The ultimate decision to suspend Williams for six months was made after an internal investigation unearthed other "instances of exaggeration," according to a person familiar with intense behind-the-scenes discussions between network officials and Williams.

Credibility of TV news in doubt long before Williams' gaffe.  It's not a big deal if Brian Williams eventually is fired, quits, or otherwise stops reading the news to viewers once his six-month suspension is over.  I'm not even sure it's a medium-sized deal.  That may sound harsh, and it's not personal.  As a reader of the day's events, Williams is superb.  His looks, delivery and style helped NBC Nightly News to the top of the ratings heap.  From updates about the war on terror to the latest ice storm, he made viewers believe he is in the living room and speaking only with them.  That takes talent, but he messed up.  There are consequences for a gaffe on the level that Williams committed.

Media Elites Defend Brian Williams from 'Bile Brigade'.  If you don't already despise the elite media, the next few paragraphs should put the final pieces into place.  No joke, some high-profile members of the elite media are now on their high horse (if you'll pardon the expression) over the frenzied coverage of serial stolen valor liar Brian Williams.  In short, members of the elite media don't think members of the elite media should be treated like members of the elite media treat everyone else.

But Will He Lose His Smug? NBC Suspends Brian Williams For 6 Months.  Without pay.  Now that would affect people like us, but for a guy making $10M + a year, I don't think he'll notice.  As I noted on the show, I'm not sure how they bring him back after this.

More Brian Williams Exploits: Hezbollah Rockets, Mugged At Gunpoint!.  Well, maybe Brian Williams is not lying.  Maybe he is just confused.  Maybe he was held up at gunpoint on Christmas, in Israel, after being attacked by a Hezbollah rocket, right after being almost killed in Iraq by an RPG.

Does Brian Williams's incestuous voyeurism trump lying?  What parent would cozy up with his daughter to watch her in a graphic sex scene?  Brian Williams did.  As the mainstream media erupts over Williams' fish tales about downed helicopters, dead bodies floating in flood-swamped streets of New Orleans and burning puppies, another one of news anchor's bizarre behaviors is going unnoticed.  If NBC is embarrassed by its managing editor's fibs, what about Williams's kinky voyeurism when it comes to his actress-daughter's explicit sex-capades on HBO?

Flashback: Fawning Brian Williams Bows To POTUS At White House.  Although I rarely watch any MSM news shows, I do remember catching a segment on NBC, in June, '09, that I had found troubling:  Brian Williams, over a period of several days, had aired a two-hour special about the new president and his life in the White House.  At the end of the last segment, I was shocked when Williams, saying goodbye, bowed to Obama.

Brian Williams is just the latest symptom of a diseased legacy media.  Are we seeing a trend here? Dan Rather at CBS and now Brian Williams at NBC?  Well, two news anchors are not a trend, but biased and bad reporting is.  It's not new, but it does seem to be gathering momentum and nowhere has it been more apparent than the millions of words written and spoken about "global warming" and now "climate change."

Bozell: 'Brian Williams has to go'.  Add conservative media watchdog L. Brent Bozell III to the list of those calling on NBC to dump nightly news anchor Brian Williams for claiming he was on a military copter under attack.  Bozell, of the Media Research Center, said in a tweet today:  "Brian Williams has to go.  NBC's credibility is completely shot."

Brian Williams suspended without pay for 6 months by NBC.  Brian Williams has been suspended from "NBC Nightly News" without pay for six months, the network announced Tuesday [2/10/2015].  The announcement comes amid an ongoing internal investigation into whether Williams exaggerated stories during his public appearances as managing editor of the top-rated evening news program, both on NBC and elsewhere.

Why NBC's suspension is Brian Williams' last hope for remaining anchor.  NBC Universal tried to save Brian Williams' job last night — and that's why he was suspended for six months.  The company finally had to stop the bleeding, to halt the hemorrhaging of its own credibility along with that of its franchise player.  The brass slowly came to realize that Williams had to be punished, and significantly, for the sin of fabricating a story about his 2003 trip to Iraq.

NBC in Disarray Over Brian Williams.  The embattled anchor goes into self-imposed exile and lawyers up.  Meanwhile, NBC investigates, successors line up, and Tom Brokaw watches from above.

Brian Williams: puffed up anchor, puffed up tales.  If even only some of the reports are true, Brian Williams is a serial embellisher, a self-aggrandizing fabulist.  No doubt everyone knows somebody like this, and if you don't it's probably because you're that guy.  But Williams' case is special.  This isn't some sad Willy Loman who needs to invent impressive stories about himself.  If anything, he needed to not tell such stories, given that he reportedly makes more than $10 million a year to be a trusted name in news.

Brian Williams and the God Complex.  Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor, is taking himself off the air for, what he says will be, "several days." He presumably hopes that the media firestorm surrounding claims he made about his reporting experience in Iraq will subside. [...] However, there are some scenarios in which he does not survive as an NBC anchor.  One:  if more fabrications surface from the work of hundreds, probably thousands, of amateur detectives online — eager to prove that Williams was not telling the truth when he claimed, for instance, that he saw a body floating beneath his hotel window in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Under Fire, Brian Williams Loses Lofty Spot on a Trustworthiness Scale.  If Brian Williams's future as the anchor of "NBC Nightly News" rests on his trustworthiness and ratings, new research delivered some sobering news on Monday [2/9/2015].  Before Mr. Williams apologized for exaggerating an account of a forced helicopter landing during the Iraq war, he ranked as the 23rd-most-trusted person in the country — on par with Denzel Washington, Warren E. Buffett and Robin Roberts.  On Monday, he ranked as No. 835.

Multiple Witnesses Contradict Williams' Katrina Stories.  Now that everything he has ever said about anything will be under scrutiny for a very long time, there is a lot out there.  As of now, though, it is Brian Williams' Tales from Katrina that are receiving an extra level of scrutiny.  And they are not holding up very well.  Witnesses are calling Williams' Katrina stories of close calls at the five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel "crazy."

Pilot Says He Told NBC News of Williams' False Story in 2003.  Don Helus, who piloted the chopper that sustained an RPG attack in the story that has embroiled NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in controversy, told CNN's Brian Stelter he contacted NBC News 10 years ago to inform them of what he called Williams' inaccurate account of the attack — and received no response.  Williams is currently on a voluntary leave of absence after admitting a story he has been telling for years about taking rocket fire in Iraq was untrue.  Helus' chopper was attacked, but Williams was nowhere near it.

Brian Williams forced to admit he was NOT shot down in the Iraq War: NBC anchor apologizes.  NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been forced to admit that he wasn't aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by enemy fire during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  The Nightly News anchor has often repeated the war story over the past 12 years about how the aircraft he was on was forced down by enemy fire.

NBC's Brian Williams recants Iraq story after soldiers protest.  NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday [2/4/2015] he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Why NBC will stand by its $200M man Brian Williams.  NBC News chief Deborah Turness has millions of reasons to save Brian Williams.  Without its chief anchor to keep it at the front of the news pack, "NBC Nightly News" is at risk of losing the multimillion dollar ad premium it has over rivals.  "Nightly News" raked in an estimated $200 million in annual ad revenue for NBC News in 2013.

Now doubts arise over Brian Williams' story about being mugged at gunpoint in his quiet childhood suburb.  An old story often repeated by Brian Williams about his bravery growing up in a quiet New Jersey suburb is being questioned by local residents in the light of his admission that he lied about taking enemy fire in Iraq.  Williams announced on Saturday [2/7/2015] that he is temporarily stepping down from the NBC Nightly News amid questions about his false memories of war coverage in 2003, calling it 'painfully apparent' that he has become a distracting news story.

We shouldn't believe Williams' lie was an innocent mistake.  [Brian] Williams originally told the truth about what happened in 2003 Iraq: He was on a Chinook helicopter.  Another helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG).  His helo was nowhere near the one that was struck and landed some 30 or more minutes later.  That isn't a near-miss; that's just rubbernecking at something you didn't even know happened until you came along later.

Anchors Aweigh.  This was a bomb that had been ticking for a while.  NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography.  They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division.  But the caustic media big shots who once roamed the land were gone, and "there was no one around to pull his chain when he got too over-the-top," as one NBC News reporter put it.

Maureen Dowd: NBC News Knew Brian Williams was 'Pathological'.  According to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, NBC News executives knew Brian Williams had a problem with the truth but the infrastructure wasn't in place to do anything about it.  Per Dowd, things were so bad with Williams that his "flourishes to puff himself up" became "a joke in the news division."

Brian Williams' unmitigated disaster.  It's an unmitigated disaster for Brian Williams and NBC News.  The revelation that the NBC anchor had lied on air about being in a helicopter that was forced down after it was hit by enemy fire during the Iraq War is devastating.  It's hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News.  An anchor's No. 1 requirement is that he or she has credibility.  If we don't believe what an anchor tells us, what's the point?

Stolen Valor Writ Large.  While [Brian ] Williams will no doubt have most of the liberal media and the Democrat party circling their wagons around him, there are some of his media colleagues who are calling for his resignation, noting that as an anchorman, his perceived honesty is his most essential qualification for the job.

Variety's buried lede: "Senior" NBC News execs "counseled" Williams to stop telling helicopter story.  [Scroll down]  That puts a whole new spin on the story, and NBC News' part in it.  [Brian] Steinberg has three sources that state that news execs barred Williams from telling his story on air, at least during their broadcasts.  If true, then that means that NBC News brass must have known something was suspect about Williams' tale of courage under fire — otherwise, why not tell the story that would reflect so well on their anchor?

Brian Williams' heroic stories include Princess Di and Hurricane Katrina.  He lives in a vivid fantasy world that would make Walter Mitty blush — never missing a chance to shamelessly play the hero or embellish a news story.  Reality-challenged NBC anchor Brian Williams once boasted about abandoning a dying buddy to cover the death of Princess Diana — but said it was worth it because it won him worldwide fame.

The Brian Williams Fiasco Is Worsening — More Possible "Fake Stories" Surface.  Things are going from bad to worse for NBC Anchor Brian Williams.  Yesterday a report surfaced which claimed a pilot remembered taking small arms fire while Williams was on board, this report was used by those who defended Williams.  However, that pilot has now walked back his story saying his memory was wrong and he probably didn't have Williams on the flight.

NBC News standing by Brian Williams in Iraq war-embellishment issue.  NBC News is standing by Brian Williams after the anchor's admission that he embellished his role in a military incident during the Iraq war.  The network has not commented publicly, but an executive familiar with the matter says Williams will face no disciplinary action.  His apology, delivered during the Wednesday [2/4/2015] edition of "NBC Nightly News," was accepted internally.

Did Brian Williams also exaggerate his Hurricane Katrina reports?  On Wednesday [2/45/2015] [NBC News anchor Brian] Williams blamed his mistake on the 'fog of memory over 12 years', but evidence has emerged since that Williams has repeatedly mis-told the story including to late night host David Letterman in 2013.  The anchor's previous credibility as a highly regarded journalist is based partly on his reporting from inside the New Orleans Superdome in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.

Brian Williams and the Tyranny of Ego.  Like so many others, I find it impossible to believe Brian Williams simply "made a mistake."  At the risk of indulging in armchair pop psychology, I'd say it's far more likely that a titanic ego collided with reality, and reality lost.

Did Brian Williams lie about his Katrina experience, too?  NBC News anchor Brian Williams is in quite a bit of trouble over his admission that his decade-long claim to have endured heavy fire while flying in a military helicopter over Baghdad in 2003 was a fabrication.  Accordingly, journalists are beginning to review other extraordinary claims Williams made over the course of his career, and they are not short on material to parse.

Veterans Livid Over Brian Williams' Lies.  Veterans in all branches of the military who have sacrificed to keep America safe are livid at NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who was forced to admit this week that he had, for 12 years, lied about taking fire in a helicopter over Iraq.

Baltimore Sun: Brian Williams Needs To Be Gone By Friday.  Writing for the Baltimore Sun, media journalist David Zurawik called for Brian Williams to resign or to be fired by Friday.  "If credibility means anything to NBC News, Brian Williams will no longer be managing editor and anchor of the evening newscast by the end of the day Friday [2/6/2015]," Zurawik writes.

Brian Williams faces internal investigation at NBC for lying about helicopter attack in Iraq: sources.  The head of NBC's investigative unit is breathing down Brian Williams' neck.  Richard Esposito has been assigned to investigate the embattled "NBC Nightly News" anchor for lying about dodging danger while reporting in Iraq, sources told The [New York] Daily News on Friday [2/6/2015].  And the reporters and producers who work for Williams are "shocked, furious and sad" about the scandal that that has wrecked the reputation of an anchor many considered "the most trusted name in news," the sources said.

From Rathergate to Rolling Stone: Fake But Accurate.  Rathergate has many similarities to the Rolling Stone rape hoax.  Both ignored the basic rules of journalism to pursue a narrative.  The narrative was so full of holes that bloggers and even casual readers realized that something was wrong and stepped in where the professional journalists had failed.  The difference is that Rolling Stone has even less investment in its journalistic credibility than CBS did.  The principals will not be forced out.  Their work may have been fake, but it was still accurate.

Did someone mention Rathergate?

How Deep Is This Education Official's Involvement In The Rolling Stone Hoax?  A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone's false article, "A Rape on Campus."  Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department's civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.  Groves' letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans' report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article's publication.

Has the Rolling Stone gang-rape author EVER corroborated a story?  In the wake of Rolling Stone's refusal to fire the author behind its now-retracted and now infamous University of Virginia gang-rape story, one has to wonder if this is a rare mistake or a pattern of behavior.  There are some big hints that it is the latter.  Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author in question, actually has a history of writing articles based solely on one person's account, with no indication that she even tried to corroborate the story or hear any other potential side.

'Rolling Stone' didn't let facts block story.  The best thing you can say about this fiasco is that there was little deliberate lying involved.  According to an exhaustive report by the Columbia Journalism School, the article's author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and her editors didn't purposefully publish falsehoods.  Of course, this is faint praise. The field of journalistic ethics can get ridiculously Talmudic.  But it's all based on a very simple rule:  Tell the truth.

Why the Left Lies.  There was only one problem with Erdely's story:  It was false.  Jackie had lied.  And Rolling Stone had no evidence to back up Jackie's story in the first place.  This week, Rolling Stone apologized for the story but did not fire Erdely or any of its editors; Erdely apologized not to the fraternity or its members but to virtually everyone else.  She added, "In writing each of these stories I must weigh my compassion against my journalistic duty to find the truth."  Herein lies the problem.  Journalism does not require sympathy for human beings.  It requires sympathy for readers, who deserve truth.  But for the left, truth represents a secondary value.  It is far more important to forward a particular political narrative than it is to simply state the facts.  And that narrative can only be forwarded if there is controversy over the facts.

Fighting Against 'Rape Culture' Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry.  The extensive post mortem that Rolling Stone commissioned in the wake of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's now infamous "Rape on Campus" disaster rests upon — and confirms — two salient facts.  The first: that Erdely did not receive her story from a source and then contrive to write it up, but instead went looking for a tale that would help her to advance a political narrative.  The second:  that Rolling Stone's editorial process broke down almost entirely, thereby permitting her shoddy workmanship to reach the international stage.

Rolling Stone, media bias, and how the left uses fake victims to create real ones.  Hey, remember that Rolling Stone article about the brutal gang on the campus of the University of Virginia that never happened?  Well, Rolling Stone is officially retracting the story. [...] But here's the thing:  This is mission accomplished for progressives.  When it comes to something like this, Rolling Stone (and others) is much less concerned about honesty in journalism than it is activism through journalism.  It's all about the narrative.  I don't mean to suggest that the writer of this piece wanted the humiliation associated with writing an inaccurate piece.  I'm saying that she didn't bother to even question Jackie's story because it fit her progressive, victim/oppressor worldview perfectly.

Rolling Stone's Fake Rape Piece Shows Media's Culture Of Corruption.  What does a magazine caught in a scandal too awful to defend do? Why, go to Columbia's journalism school for absolution.  That's what Rolling Stone did after its false campus rape story.  It won't work this time.

'Hitler Made a Difference': The Liberal Gang Rape of Journalism.  What percentage of the news reporting staff at NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN voted for Mitt Romney in 2012?  What percentage of the editors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press have ever voted for any Republican?  For most members of the modern media, the news business has ceased to be a business and is no longer about news.  Instead, journalism has become a sort of missionary field for political zealots engaged in an evangelical crusade for what Ann Coulter called "The Church of Liberalism."  Young liberals become journalists for the same reason others go to work for UNICEF or the Peace Corps, because they want to "make a difference."  Liberal journalists conceive of their careers as a sacred calling, to assist the forces of "progress" in creating a world of "social justice."

'Hitler Made a Difference': The Liberal Gang Rape of Journalism.  Rolling Stone magazine perpetrated a hoax against the University of Virginia, doing "journalism" about an alleged gang rape that evidently never happened.  The source of the dramatic tale Rolling Stone published last November, "A Rape on Campus," was a UVA student named Jackie who has been proven to be a liar. [...] What better way to exploit the political "gender gap" than to claim that college girls are being raped en masse, and then to suggest that the solution to this problem could be summarized in two words:  "VOTE DEMOCRAT!"

Police Conclusion: Rolling Stone UVA Rape Story a Work of Fiction.  Four months after the publication of an infamous Rolling Stone piece depicting a violent gang rape at one of the University of Virginia's fraternities, and the magazine's subsequent retraction due to numerous inconsistencies and gross journalistic malpractice, the Charlottesville police department announced their investigation's findings this afternoon [3/23/2015].  From the Associated Press:  ["']All I can tell you is that there is no substantive basis to conclude that what was reported in that article happened,['] Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo said.["]

UVA Frat Has Powerful Legal Case Against Rolling Stone.  On Monday [4/6/2015], the University of Virginia's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity announced it would investigate a lawsuit against Rolling Stone after the magazine's massive "Rape on Campus" expose turned out to have been based completely on a fraudulent story.

What Columbia Missed In Its Review of Rolling Stone.  In November, Rolling Stone magazine ran a story detailing the horrific account of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity on the University of Virginia campus.  The story quickly proved to be rubbish, and Rolling Stone reached out to the Columbia University School of Journalism to discover how the magazine could have blundered so badly. [...] As I document in my forthcoming book, Scarlet Letters, cases like the Rolling Stone's have become so common because those perpetrating a given fraud almost inevitably advance causes that the cultural establishment, the Columbia faculty included, wants to see advanced.

Here Are Eight Campus Rape Hoaxes Eerily Like The UVA Rape Story.  In a now-infamous Nov. 19 story in Rolling Stone, disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely asserted that at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity gang-raped a freshman named Jackie at a frat house party, then left her in a bloodstained dress to exit via a conveniently vacant side staircase.  The Washington Post's reporting now suggests that Jackie fabricated huge swathes of her gory rape tale, and that Erdely abrogated her duty to properly investigate it.  Erdely's career is rapidly disintegrating with each freshly revealed fabrication, as it becomes more and more evident that no rape occurred.

Katie Couric Beats Defamation Lawsuit Over Gun Documentary.  A Virginia judge has just shot down a $13 million lawsuit against Katie Couric, Stephanie Soechtig, Epix and others associated with the documentary Under the Gun.  The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, provoked controversy because of one scene in particular.  In it, Couric asks gun rights advocates, "If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?"  Under the Gun shows those being interviewed in nine seconds of silence.

The Three Abortion Amigas:  Couric, Richards, Adichie Make Utter Fools of Themselves.  Former morning host, failed news anchor, and now self-styled independent journalist Katie Couric has always been a fierce supporter of legalized child killing in the United States.  According to colleagues, she even hung a picture of Planned Parenthood's notorious racist and eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger in her CBS News office.  So it should have been altogether unsurprising to see Couric take advantage of some event called Women in the World Summit to promote and endorse radical author Chimamanda Adichie and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards.

Scandal Plagued News Anchor Katie Couric Will Return to 'Today' Show.  Katie Couric, the scandal-plagued Yahoo News correspondent and former celebrity news anchor, will return to NBC's "Today" show in January.  Couric will guest-host alongside Matt Lauer, also a figure of some controversy, for one week beginning January 2.

Desperate Katie Couric Files to Dismiss $12M Defamation Case.  Director Stephanie Soechtig and Producer Katie Couric were caught red-handed fabricating gun owner responses in their anti-gun propaganda film, Under the Gun, leading member of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VDCL) to file a $12 million dollar defamation lawsuit.  Couric's lawyers are now desperately attempting to have the case thrown out.

Katie Couric, Stephanie Soechtig sued for $12M for deceptive edits in anti-gun documentary.  A Virginia gun-rights group is suing Katie Couric and the producers of the documentary "Under the Gun" for $12 million in defamation over an interview that was revealed to have been deceptively edited.  The Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) and two gun-rights activists featured in the film, Daniel Hawes and Patricia Webb, are suing Ms. Couric, who produced the documentary and led the interview in question, as well as director Stephanie Soechtig, Atlas Films and Epix, the film's distributor.  The suit filed in federal court Tuesday, obtained by BearingArms.com, claimed the producers of the film "intentionally manipulated" footage to make it look like members of the VCDL were stumped when asked about gun background checks.

Politics, Porn and Gun Nuts.  Katie Couric was the anchor for a while on "CBS Evening News" and was a correspondent on the investigation program "60 Minutes."  She was a star.  She's fallen far.  But she fell gradually, and there were signs along the way. [...] Couric's recent spectacle suggests that the sleaze hasn't bottomed out yet.  Couric's purported story was an interview with several Second Amendment advocates.  You know, gun owners.  Or as people who don't own guns call them, "gun nuts."  Whether or not you agree with them, these gun owners/nuts in Couric's interview come across as rational and well-spoken.  Too much so, Couric evidently decided.  So she fixed that.

Forget Manipulative Editing — Katie Couric's Team Likely Violated Federal Law.  The plot thickens.  A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that Stephanie Soechtig, the director of a Katie Couric-fronted gun-control infomercial titled Under the Gun, had selectively edited her interviewees' testimony in order to make them look dumb.  Now, it seems that Soechtig and her team may have bigger problems than having been caught in a lie:  One or more among them may be heading toward a felony charge.  During a recent television interview, Soechtig claimed indignantly that she had sent a co-producer from Colorado into the state of Arizona, where he made contact with a private gun seller and purchased three handguns and a "Bushmaster" rifle.  According to Soechtig, that these transactions were "perfectly legal" demonstrates that the laws need changing.

Katie Couric Accused of Deceptive Editing in Second Documentary.  Katie Couric's 2014 documentary Fed Up includes instances of deceptive editing similar to 2016's Under the Gun, according to several people familiar with the making of the film.  Fed Up, which focuses on obesity and the food industry, was directed by Stephanie Soechtig and produced by Couric.  The film includes two interviews with figures who hold viewpoints counter to the narrative of the film, and sources say both interviews include at least one misleading or deceptive edit intended to embarrass the interviewee.  Dr. David Allison, an interview subject in the film and the director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center, says he was a victim of shoddy journalism.  "What she did to me is antithetical to not only just human decency and civility but it is antithetical to the spirit of science and democratic dialogue," he told the Washington Free Beacon.

Yahoo caught off guard by Katie Couric documentary scandal.  News industry veterans are sniping that Yahoo was caught seriously off guard by Katie Couric's dodgy editing scandal.  Company insiders reveal that an emergency meeting of senior executives was rapidly convened after it emerged that eight seconds of silence had been added to an interview in her documentary "Under the Gun" — which she made outside of her Yahoo role — making it seem as if anti-gun-control activists were stumped by a question.  But Yahoo didn't launch a formal investigation into why their "global anchor" ended up having to publicly apologize for the misleading footage.  Couric said in a statement that she had asked director Stephanie Soechtig about why she had inserted the silence, and added, "I regret that those eight seconds were misleading and that I did not raise my initial concerns more vigorously."

Putting the media 'under the gun'.  [Scroll down]  It's hard to know what is worse: "clueless reporters" being manipulated by government officials to spread propaganda, or deceptive reporters manipulating video to spread their own propaganda?  In the latter category, we have the aforementioned Katie Couric documentary which infamously tried to make gun-rights advocates look like they were totally stumped by Couric's "hard-line" questioning.

Harrington, Reliable Sources Panel Slam Couric for Misleading Gun Documentary.  CNN media show Reliable Sources covered Katie Couric's deceptively edited gun documentary Sunday [6/5/2016], with Washington Free Beacon reporter Elizabeth Harrington and the rest of the panel unanimously condemning Couric and the movie's director for their conduct.  Couric has come under fire after the Washington Free Beacon revealed the documentary she narrated and produced, Under The Gun, contains a falsely edited scene where Couric appears to stump gun rights activists with a question about background checks.  Reporter Stephen Gutowski broke the story last month, showing with audio that the gun rights activists actually immediately responded to Couric's question, rather than staring in silence as the movie falsely shows.  "Eight seconds of silence, making the activists look ignorant, like they didn't have an answer, but the truth is they responded to her question right away," Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter said.

Gun Group Calls for Investigation Into Producers of 'Under the Gun'.  The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a prominent gun rights group, is calling for an investigation into whether the producers of Under the Gun violated laws governing interstate firearm sales.  According to Under the Gun director Stephanie Soechtig in a February interview first unearthed by the website Ammoland, a producer who resided in Colorado was sent to Arizona to purchase a rifle and three handguns from private sellers in the state.

Katie Couric's Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws.  Katie, get your gun lawyer.  By now you've probably heard about Katie Couric's new anti-gun documentary "Under The Gun," and how her producer doctored video of interviews with gun owners in order to make them look stupid and heartless.  Couric's producer and director, Stephanie Soechtig, admitted to doctoring the video, and Couric herself kinda sorta apologized for it.  But that's not the worst thing that happened with the making of this documentary.  It turns out that Couric's production team deliberately conspired to violate federal gun laws.  According to video obtained by Ammoland, a shooting sports news website, one of Couric's producers deliberately committed at least four separate felonies by purchasing four separate firearms across state lines without a background check.

Gun group won't accept Katie Couric 'apology'.  Katie Couric may have claimed responsibility for a doctored interview with a pro-Second Amendment group, but the gun rights activists targeted in her documentary are angry her mea culpa included only a partial transcript of their discussion on background checks.

Katie Couric slammed for 'deceptive' documentary about gun rights.  The Independent Women's Forum issued a statement on Wednesday calling for Couric to be fired.  "Katie Couric should be ashamed of herself for her dishonest and distorted reporting on this issue," said Culture of Alarmism Director Julie Gunlock.  "She has gone from respected journalist to propagandist for gun control groups...  Like serial fabricator Brian Williams, Couric should be fired.  Her tactics have been exposed and Americans should never again trust her to report on these important issues."

Katie Couric takes blame for 'misleading' gap edited into gun documentary.  Katie Couric has reversed course and taken responsibility for an edit that misrepresents the response of gun rights activists to a question she poses in a new documentary.  The segment in "Under the Gun" shows nearly 10 seconds of silence after Couric asks the activists how felons or terrorists could be prevented from purchasing a gun without background checks.  Audio of the exchange leaked last week reveals an almost immediate response to the question.

First Couric, Now Gumbel Accused of Deceptive Edits in Anti-Gun Segment.  They once shared co-hosting duties on NBC's Today show and now it looks like Bryant Gumbel has joined Katie Couric in being accused of using deceptive editing techniques to attack gun rights.  The inventor of the AR-15 rifle, Jim Sullivan, has attacked HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel for misrepresenting "much of what I had said" in his interview for their anti-gun segment aired on the May 24 program.  Sullivan, in a May 31 article for The Federalist, charged that the anti-gun segment (by Real Sports correspondent David Scott and producers Chapman Downes and Katie Melone) tried "to make the AR-15 civilian model seem too dangerous for civilian sales.  They didn't lie about what I said, they just omitted key parts, which changed the meaning."

Couric Apologizes: 'I Take Responsibility' for 'Misleading' Documentary Edit.  In a statement issued Sunday [5/29/2016], Yahoo News anchor and executive producer of the documentary Under the Gun Katie Couric apologized for a "misleading" edit that appeared in that film.  Couric asked a pro-gun rights Virginia group how guns could be kept out of the hands of felons and terrorists without background checks.  In the edited version seen in the film, the group does not answer for several seconds and stares at their knees.  But when the gun group in question released their own recording, they showed that they were not dumbstruck and immediately gave lucid answers.

The Editor says...
The lesson here is very clear:  When you are interviewed by a television reporter, make your own recording of the interview, preferably with a time code track to validate your counter-claims, weeks or months later.

Epix Removes Katie Couric Documentary From Its Website.  The cable network behind the Katie Couric-produced documentary Under the Gun has pulled the film from its website a day after Couric apologized and admitted it contained a misleading edit of gun proponents' remarks.  Pro-gun blog BearingArms.com first noticed that attempting to watch the film now brings up a message saying "This movie is not currently playing on Epix."

Gun-documentary director shows no remorse for deceptive, demeaning edit.  Katie Couric, the executive producer and narrator of the Epix-distributed documentary "Under the Gun," has apologized for a deliberate and deceptive edit that makes a group of gun rights advocates look like dumbfounded dolts.  In a statement posted over Memorial Day weekend, Couric acknowledged that the edit was "misleading" and that she had failed to forcefully press her initial concerns about it.  For the record, the edit in question misportrayed an exchange between Couric and members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.  In response to a question about background checks, VCDL members are depicted in stunned silence for about eight seconds.  An audiotape recorded by VCDL President Philip Van Cleave showed that Couric's inquiry fetched an immediate and quite reasonable response.

Katie Couric Finally Apologizes For Her Fraudulent Anti-Gun Documentary.  Katie Couric apologized and accepted responsibility for misrepresenting gun rights activists in her upcoming documentary "Under the Gun," Monday [5/30/2016].  "I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League," Couric said in a statement.  The Global News anchor for Yahoo has been under fire ever since the Washington Free Beacon revealed Couric's documentary was intentionally edited to make pro-gun Americans appear incapable of justifying their views.

Katie Couric's GunGate Implosion is a Sign of Things to Come.  While it is not yet complete, it appears that Katie Couric's career is over, at least as a "respectable" journalist.  Couric has been a reliably "progressive" advocate for decades.  In this, she simply followed the career progression that has been common in the dominant media for 50 years.  Control of the media by one ideology, a "progressive" groupthink, has been a near fatal flaw in our system.  It is finally coming to a close.

Newsrooms dance around selective editing of Couric's gun documentary.  Some newsrooms are still reluctant to report outright that Katie Couric's gun documentary was selectively edited, despite the existence of audio evidence and an admission from the film's director.  Instead, several reports have been couched in careful language suggesting the Yahoo news anchor and documentary director Stephanie Soechtig have only been accused of doctoring interviews with pro-Second Amendment activists.

Sometimes, Heads Should Roll.  Of course Yahoo News should fire Katie Couric.  She committed an act of gross intellectual dishonesty — and if you don't fire a journalist for dishonesty, what [...] do you fire one for?  Bad manners? [...] Journalists are not supposed to tell lies to their audiences.  Couric did.  Case closed.

Katie Couric cooks the facts, burns her reputation.  [Scroll down]  To make her case for more gun regulation she decided to transition from journalism to falsification and propaganda.  Instead of showing the interview question and answer as they actually happened, she edited in an eight-second clip of the group sitting silently and slightly uncomfortably waiting to be interviewed.  Couric clearly wanted to present her question as though she were Perry Mason at the climax of a courtroom drama coming up with a killer debating point that confounded all opposition witnesses.  She wanted it to seem as though no reasonable person could disagree and to present the gun rights group as tacitly acknowledging it by staying silent and looking at their feet.  Oh, Katie, you're so clever, you foxed those foolish gun nuts!

Katie Couric is mad she was caught deceptive edit anti-gun video.  As is typical for progressive hypocrites, they never take responsibility when they are caught doing things like Katie Couric.  She was exposing for deceptively editing her anti-gun bs video for Yahoo:  Under the Gun.  News about this came out about a week ago, and Couric had been silent about being exposed, until now.  She is blaming someone named Stephanie Soechtig for deceptively editing the video.  Yahoo now has their own personal version of Brian Williams.

As Silence, Defiance Goes On Over Dishonest Edit, Katie Couric's Proud Legacy Taking Serious Hit.  [Scroll down]  But after leaving CBS (due to Evening News ratings struggles), Couric completed the Big-3 triad by joining ABC in 2011.  That tenure was hardly memorable as Couric simply couldn't establish herself among a sea of (younger) talent.  Her gravitas in the industry was still there but her overall relevance fading.  Enter Yahoo News, which made her the face of its growing online news division two years ago.  If that reads like a career obituary, it's because it may very well be.

Dear Yahoo, Fire Katie Couric.  The case is clear.  Katie Couric, a person Yahoo employs to be the face of its news division, was caught in a grotesque deception.  Then, when she was publicly exposed, rather than apologizing, she doubled down — defending the choice to cast innocent Americans as ignorant rubes rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.  She has lost her credibility.  Any news organization that continues to employ her loses its credibility as well.

Couric Regrets 'Unnecessary Mistake' of Deceptive Edit in Gun Documentary.  Katie Couric reportedly regrets the "unnecessary mistake" of editing her documentary Under the Gun in a way that appeared to smear gun rights advocates.  In one scene of the documentary released last week, Couric is speaking to the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) and asks, "If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?"  In the documentary, her question is followed by several seconds of silence, suggesting that her question had rendered them dumb.  In fact, the interviewees offered lucid responses to her question almost immediately, a fact that was revealed when the VCDL released their own audio recording of the interview.  The VCDL called the edit "unbelievable and extremely unprofessional."  "I never intended to make anyone look bad and I apologize if anyone felt that way," the documentary's director Stephanie Soechtig said after the news broke last Wednesday [5/25/2016].

The Editor says...
Of course they intended to make gun owners look bad.  That was apparently the whole purpose of the film.

Katie Couric Is A Liberal Hack, Site Claims.  Stephen Gutowski of The Washington Free Beacon had a great story Wednesday [5/25/2016].  You can read it [elsew]here.  He obtained audio that proves the filmmaker of Katie Couric's latest politicized documentary, Under the Gun, deceptively edited an interview with gun rights activists to make them look ignorant and ashamed.  The evidence he found is clear, it is direct, it is stunning, and it is embarrassing.  But it is not nearly as embarrassing as the way in which the filmmaker, Couric, and the New York Times reacted to the Free Beacon's reporting.  They all need to spend some time alone in the corner and think about what they've done.

Audio Shows Katie Couric Documentary Deceptively Edited Interview with Pro-Gun Activists.  Under the Gun bills itself as a documentary that "examines the events and people who have kept the gun debate fierce and the progress slow, even as gun deaths and mass shootings continue to increase."  It follows a number of gun violence victims and those who have lost family members to gun violence as they advocate for stricter gun control laws.  The 1 hour and 45 minute film was executive produced and narrated by Katie Couric.  Under the Gun has been labeled "dishonest politicking in the guise of media coverage," "loose with the facts," and "a full-length assault on guns and the Second Amendment" by those in the gun community since its debut on May 15.

The Fraud In "Gungate" Is Real, And Should End Katie Couric's Career.  As we noted yesterday, a gun rights group, Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), agreed to sit down with a member of Couric's film team for more than two hours of interviews.  Most of the footage ended up on the cutting room floor, but the real scandal was when Couric's team was caught red-handed swapping out the actual answer for one of the questions they asked VCDL with footage of them staring at the floor, making it appear that they didn't have an answer to her question.  That is not what happened.  Stephen Gutowski and his team at the Free Beacon isolated the actual uncut audio footage as part of their coverage of the story, and it proves without a doubt that the VCDL members did have an immediate and detailed response to question.

Katie Couric defends documentary that selectively edited gun advocates.  Yahoo news anchor Katie Couric is standing by her gun documentary, even after the discovery that it was selectively edited to make it appear as if she stumped gun advocates with a simple question about background checks.  In a statement to the Washington Examiner's media desk, Couric said she is "very proud of the film."  The documentary's director, Stephanie Soechtig, told the Examiner, "There are a wide range of views expressed in the film.  My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans' opinions on background checks."

The Editor says...
Ri-i-i-ight.  If you believe that, you probably won't learn much from the rest of this web page.

The Media's Endless Anti-Trump Show Trial.  What was the “Steele dossier” fiasco but a Dem/media attempt to collude with Brits to stop Trump?  Had BuzzFeed not released the contents of that transparently ridiculous and bogus dossier, the self-appointed ruling class would still be talking about it.  Lightweights in the press, straining to sound deep, will recite such quotes as “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed,” even as their coverage rests upon the biggest lie of all:  the assertion of imaginary Trump-Russia criminal collusion based on nothing more than false, fragmentary leads that came from their own collusion with foreign powers.

D.C. firm behind the Trump 'dirty dossier' refusing to cooperate with Congress.  The Washington firm that commissioned the dirty dossier on President Trump is stonewalling congressional investigators.  In a piece for the New York Post, conservative author Paul Sperry writes that the firm, Fusion GPS, which was started by three former Wall Street Journal reporters, is not cooperating with Congress in order to cover up an allegiance to the Democratic party.  Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is spearheading an investigation into the dossier, and wants to know the identities of the people who paid Fusion to dig up dirt on Trump.

Sketchy Firm behind Trump dossier is stalling investigation.  A secretive Washington firm that commissioned the dubious intelligence dossier on Donald Trump is stonewalling congressional investigators trying to learn more about its connections to the Democratic Party.  The Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month threatened to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after it refused to answer questions and provide records to the panel identifying who financed the error-ridden dossier, which was circulated during the election and has sparked much of the Russia scandal now engulfing the White House.

BuzzFeed Loses Pair of Motions in 'Trump Dossier' Lawsuit.  A lawsuit against BuzzFeed over the publication of the so-called "Trump Dossier" will go forward, and not in New York City as the left-wing media outlet's lawyers had hoped.  U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro ruled against a motion filed by BuzzFeed, which asked to move the case to New York, where BuzzFeed is headquartered.  BuzzFeed also unsuccessfully filed to have the case dismissed.

Melania's first court win is a warning shot to journalists with dodgy info.  Recently, there's been an argument among top-flight journalists like BuzzFeed's Ben Smith about whether it's a good idea to publish potentially defamatory information that is unverified and which even you yourself doubt in part or in whole.  The only correct answer is:  never do this.  And if you have to do it ... still don't do it.  Because there's an excellent chance that, if you are sued, a court will interpret your willingness to publish that which you acknowledge might be false as "reckless disregard" for the truth.

BuzzFeed sued over its publication of uncorroborated Trump dossier.  A Russian-tied tech firm named in a controversial dossier containing uncorroborated allegations about President Donald Trump and the hacking of Democratic National Committee email accounts announced late Friday that it has filed defamation suits against the online news site BuzzFeed, its editor in chief and a former British intelligence agent.  The lawsuits were brought by XBT Holdings, a Cyprus-based company owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev.  Lawyers for his firm filed complaints Friday in London against the former spy and his company, and against BuzzFeed and its editor in chief, Ben Smith, in Broward County Circuit Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where XBT's subsidiary Webzilla is headquartered.

Buzzfeed Sued for Naming Tech CEO in Story About Trump's Alleged Russian Ties.  A Cyprus-based tech CEO is suing BuzzFeed for defamation, after he and his company were named in an unverified document that was attached to a story about President Donald Trump's alleged deep ties to Russia.

Tucker Carlson Grills Buzzfeed's Editor-in-Chief on Decision To Publish Dossier.  Ben Smith, editor of "failing pile of garbage" Buzzfeed, appeared on Fox News tonight to talk to Tucker Carlson about his site's decision to publish that dossier.  He's explained the decision multiple times, been raked over the coals on all manner of networks, and even had his choice questioned by Carlson before, but Smith was back for what felt like Round 282 tonight.  He pointed out that his decision to publish a dossier that was being spoken about among high-ranking government officials and alluded to by some was really no different than what Matt Drudge did by breaking the Monica Lewinsky story.

Bourbons of the Press, Believed by But 15%, Straggle on in Defeat.  [Scroll down]  Then came the Russian connection.  Just as FBI director James Comey had been unable to control an internal revolt against the whitewash of Mrs. Clinton's illegal handling of her e-mails and was forced to acknowledge a problem, some element of the intelligence apparatus released the fatuous Golden Shower dossier, which no press outlet would touch until BuzzFeed, a barrel-scraping, muck-raking left-wing blog, put it out and CNN took it up with tremendous fanfare, claiming Herculean journalistic enterprise to have unearthed it.  Mr. Trump called it "fake news [from] a pile of garbage," and it died.

How BuzzFeed crossed the line in publishing salacious 'dossier' on Trump.  Where does transparency meet irresponsibility?  Right at the line that BuzzFeed's editor Ben Smith approached Tuesday and decided to step over in the name of serving citizens' best interests.  With caveats and explanations aplenty, Smith published a 35-page "dossier" — actually just a bunch of scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump.  Smith said he did so because his, and BuzzFeed's, preference and philosophy is, essentially, "When in doubt, publish."  But at many other news organizations, the rule is caution:  "When in doubt, leave it out."

Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Says Publishing Unverified Trump Dossier 'Not an Easy or Simple Call'.  After his publication released a dossier that is reportedly the basis of the two-page synopsis that CNN is reporting the intelligence chiefs presented to President-elect Donald Trump, Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted out an explanatory letter he sent to his staff.

Oppo Researcher Behind Trump Dossier Is Linked To Pro-Kremlin Lobbying Effort.  The head of the opposition research firm that is behind the Trump dossier is linked to a secret campaign aimed at undermining the Magnitsky Act, a law that places sanctions on Russian criminals and is vehemently opposed by the Kremlin, The Daily Caller can report.  The main proponent of that law, a British-American businessman named Bill Browder, tells TheDC that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the company behind the Trump dossier, is a "professional smear campaigner."  According to Browder, Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is working with a former Russian counterintelligence officer named Rinat Akhmetshin to destroy the Magnitsky Act, which is named after Browder's late lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, and was signed into law in Dec. 2012.

Bob Woodward calls Trump dossier 'garbage'.  Legendary journalist Bob Woodward on Sunday clashed with his former Watergate reporting partner over the intelligence briefing of President-elect Donald Trump on the salacious allegations contained in an unverified dossier of opposition research.  "I've lived in this world for 45 years where you get things and people make allegations," Woodward told "Fox News Sunday."  "That is a garbage document.  It never should have been presented in — as part of an intelligence briefing."

Oppo Firm Behind Trump Dossier Is Also A Hired Gun For Planned Parenthood.  The opposition research firm that hired a former British spy to dig up dirt on Donald Trump is the same shady outfit that was hired by Planned Parenthood to put a positive spin on videos showing the sale of baby parts.  The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Washington D.C.-based Fusion GPS is the firm that hired Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the salacious but unsubstantiated 35-page Trump dossier that was published by BuzzFeed on Tuesday.  Earlier on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal identified Steele, who runs a U.K.-based business intelligence firm called Orbis Business, as the author of the memo.

Wow! Look who's attacking Buzzfeed for publishing 'fake news'.  A major network anchor, a person previously personally ridiculed by Donald Trump with an insulting nickname, jumped on board the "fake news" bandwagon, attacking the editor of Buzzfeed who decided to publish a scurrilous opposition research memo that was peddled to the media for months.  Is this what Osama bin Laden meant when he said that people are naturally attracted to a "strong horse"? Nothing could better symbolize the triumph of Donald Trump's stance toward the media than this appearance on the daily version of Meet the Press by Ben Smith, editor of Buzzfeed, and the tough remarks he received from "sleepy Chuck Todd," of NBC News, widely regarded as the most anti-Trump network of all.

Peak 'Fake News': BuzzFeed, CNN Target Trump with Admittedly Unverifiable Russia 'Memos'.  On Tuesday, CNN reported that President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama had been briefed by the intelligence community on memos alleging there was communication between Trump's campaign and Russian officials.  CNN suggested the existence of highly-compromising material targeting Trump which was compiled by a former British intelligence officer.

The Buzzfeed Standard.  So last night, BuzzFeed decided to publish a "dossier" filled with allegations — one of them absolutely disgusting — against Donald Trump whose veracity it openly said it could not verify.  All BuzzFeed knew was that the dossier had been circulating in political circles, that it had been generated by "political opponents of Trump," and had been produced by a former British intelligence agent. [...] But I want to take my argument a little further and explain why — even if every allegation in the dossier is true — what happened here may be a point of no return for whatever is left of fact-based American journalism.

CNN Media Heads and Political DC Operatives Construct More Russian Madness.  If they didn't continually use the same playbook (reference Trump's pre-election manufactured sex assault accusers), these insufferable political media constructs would not be so transparent.  There are trillions of dollars at stake.  The framework for the latest narrative begins with a CNN report, constructed by a familiar set of characters (Jake Tapper, Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez and Carl Bernstein), all referencing a vague and intensely obtuse claim about Russians attempting to gain some form of opposition research leverage against President-elect Trump.

Buzzfeed's Trump report takes 'fake news' to a new level.  So the website BuzzFeed decided to publish a series of memos that have been floating around for months alleging all kinds of terrible things about Donald Trump.  Some of those terrible allegations have to do with efforts to influence the American elections and Trump.  Some of them have to do with Trump's personal sexual conduct.  Readers of this newspaper know well not to include me among Trump's supporters.  But the scurrilousness of what BuzzFeed has done here is so beyond the bounds of what is even remotely acceptable it should compel even those most outraged by Trump's political excesses to come to his defense and to the defense of a few other people mentioned in these papers whose names are also dragged through the mud.

Why You Should Doubt that Salacious Trump Espionage Memo.  Two explosive but implausible claims on page 7.  First, "PUTIN motivated by fear and hatred of Hillary CLINTON."  Hatred, I guess I can see, but fear?  Really?  You think he was afraid of what a Clinton administration would do to Russia?  After Hillary's State Department signed off on a deal that gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States?  Secondly, the memo claims the Russian government was getting "intel from TRUMP's team on Russian oligarchs and their families in US."  If true, this would be the most devastating allegation in the memo; Trump would be acting as an agent of Russian intelligence.  But think about this for a moment.  Yes, Trump has had some dealings with Russian oligarchs over the years.  But how much relevant information about those oligarchs would Trump have access to?  How much would he know that Russian intelligence wouldn't already know?

Left-wing media stunned that Trump hits back.  [Scroll down]  But here's what the corrupt media will not tell you:  BuzzFeed is nothing more than a political propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.  In June, the website terminated an advertising deal with the Republican National Committee because, as their CEO said, "The Trump campaign is directly opposed to the freedoms of our employees in the United States and the world."  Two days later, BuzzFeed's chairman, Kenneth Lerer, hosted a $33,000-a-ticket Democratic National Committee fundraiser in New York City that President Obama attended.  Lerer already had a long history of donating to Democrats — since 2004, he's contributed almost a half a million dollars to Democrats, including $2,700 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.  It should be no surprise that, even after being exposed by President-elect Trump, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith is standing by the decision to publish what amounts to fake news in a desperate attempt to smear the next commander-in-chief.

It was me:  Sworn Trump enemy John McCain admits HE handed smear dossier to FBI.  Sworn Donald Trump enemy John McCain admitted Wednesday that he passed the dossier of claims of a Russian blackmail plot against the president-elect — calling it 'what any citizen should do'.  McCain — a longstanding anti-Trump Republican who had disassociated himself from the candidate's campaign weeks before the election — cast himself as an innocent and concerned member of the public as he justified his move.  He claimed he had no idea whether it was accurate or not — but that he believed the FBI should have it because it was 'sensitive'.

BuzzFeed Could Be In Legal Trouble For Publishing Trump Doc.  While BuzzFeed weathers criticism for publishing a document cache containing unsubstantiated and scandalous allegations about President-elect Donald Trump and his confidantes, they also could face legal consequences.  The organization elected to publish a 35-page dossier claiming Russian operatives had compromising personal and financial information about the president-elect and others in his orbit.  The documents were compiled by a former British intelligence officer working for a private intelligence firm in London at the behest of Trump's political opponents.  They were later shared with Democratic political operatives and members of Congress.

Rand Paul:  Anyone Who Leaked Trump Intel Report to the Press Should Be Jailed.  Wednesday on Fox News Channel's "Your World," Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told host Neil Cavuto it was his view that if it were a U.S. intelligence agency that leaked an unsubstantiated dossier on President-elect Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia to the press, there should be repercussions, including prosecution and possible jail time.  "What I would say is that if there is private information that someone is blackmailing a public figure and the public figure or someone takes it to the intelligence agencies, you would think it would be private.  And really, this is so important that I think whoever leaked it should be prosecuted.  Someone should go to jail if this was an intelligence agency head talked to the media, they should go to jail.  If it was the Obama administration, they should go to jail."  Paul offered his reason, saying such blackmail efforts may go unreported in the future.

Rachel Maddow's Viewership Plummets After Trump Tax Reveal.  MSNBC host Rachel Maddow saw a steep drop in ratings the day after she released one of President Trump's tax forms.  Maddow and her preceding host Chris Hayes heavily promoted Tuesday's broadcast as a "breaking" revelation, and Maddow devoted most of her program to Trump's two-page 1040 form from 2005.

What's Wrong With Rachel Maddow's Trump Income Tax 'Scoop'?  The mainstream press turned on Rachel Maddow after her disastrous attempt to drum up ratings by hyping a humdrum Donald Trump tax return.  Why are they upset?  She just did what they've been doing since Trump got elected.  After teasing a "huge scoop" on Twitter — that she had Trump's tax returns — Maddow got scooped by the White House, which announced a half-hour before her show started that Trump paid $38 million in taxes in 2005, which was all Maddow had.  That's a huge amount of taxes by any standard, and represented 24% of Trump's income that year.  It didn't take long for others to point out this effective rate was higher President Obama's (19%) or Socialist Bernie Sanders (13%), or even the average paid by MSNBC's parent company, Comcast, between 2008 and 2012 (24%).

The Greatest Fake News Reveal Of All Time:  Trump's 2005 Tax Returns.  It was real news, but there was nothing in it.  That didn't stop Rachel Maddow of MSNBC from playing up her big reveal of two pages from Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns like she had just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Rachel Maddow Turned a Scoop on Donald Trump's Taxes Into a Cynical, Self-Defeating Spectacle.  At 7:36 p.m.  Tuesday, Rachel Maddow tweeted, "BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns.  Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously)," sending the internet into a frenzy of theorizing.  Did Maddow have Donald Trump's tax returns or just one of the Trumps' tax returns?  Could this be it, the tax return that would bring down the Donald?  If this was it, why wasn't MSNBC cutting into its programming, instead of running a countdown clock to Maddow's show?

Twitter Just Shredded Rachel Maddow Over Trump Tax Return 'Story'.  MSNBC's unapologetic liberal "journalist" Rachel Maddow lit the internet on fire Tuesday night when she teased via Twitter that she'd gotten her hands on President Donald Trump's tax returns — a scoop that would have been pretty juicy, considering Trump never released his tax returns during the presidential campaign as all other modern-era presidents have done.  If only it'd been true.  What Maddow and the fine folks over at MSNBC actually managed to do was get part of a copy of Trump's 2005 tax return.  Which was already 12 years old.  And which the White House had already released.

Backup theory:  Trump leaked his own tax returns?  It didn't take long for MSNBC and Rachel Maddow to go from hero to goat last night.  Now some want to move them from goat to ... victim?  After spending all day hyping an exclusive on Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns but delivering a prime-time "total nothingburger," as Chris Cillizza put it at the Washington Post, some are speculating that Trump set up Maddow by leaking the tax returns himself.