News Media Sensationalism and Dishonesty

Just reporting the news (if there is any) won't generate ratings as effectively as reporting news items with an emotional twist.  For example, shootings, fires, train derailments, and police standoffs always seem to be "dangerously close" to a school.  With schools only a quarter of a mile apart in the big cities, there's always one near enough to make that connection.

I recall an occasion a couple of years ago when there was a gang-related shooting in east Dallas just after midnight one night, right next to an elementary school, and the next morning there was a reporter on the scene fretting about how the shooting took place "dangerously close" to the school.  But logically, that was the best possible place for a shooting in the middle of the night — when nobody's at school!

Reporters often use meaningless one-dimensional statistics; for example, "Texas leads the nation in big-rig accidents."  (That's a quote from a recent story designed to drum up support for some new state law.)  That makes it sound like the truck drivers on Texas highways are more dangerous than anywhere else.  But Texas has more highway mileage than most other states, and lots of really bad drivers on the road.

But there are more subtle components of media sensationalism that the average viewer hardly notices, at least consciously.  Major market stations spend millions of dollars every year on futuristic news sets, lighting, catchy music, sound effects, visual effects, character generators and various kinds of electronic graphics.  TV newscasts are staged and choreographed as thoroughly as a small-town play.  In the old days, a middle-aged white man sat behind a plain old desk and reported the news.  That's not enough in today's TV market.  The happy news team — representing all race and gender combinations — sits behind a Star Trek desk and reads whatever comes up on the TelePrompter.  They rarely use words that are longer than three syllables.  The high-priced news readers are really good at putting on a phony "concerned" look at just the right time, if Botox permits.  And if you'll notice, they are usually just stating the obvious, and only rarely does anyone speak on a single subject for more than five or ten seconds.


Subtopics on this page:

Sensationalism

Dishonesty

ABC

CBS

The Atlantic

National Public Radio

MSNBC

NBC

Time magazine

The Washington Post

CNN

Brian Williams

Rolling Stone

Politico

Katie Couric

Buzzfeed

Rachel Maddow


Related topics on other pages:

The New York Times
National Public Radio
Specific examples of media bias
The case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin
JournoList
The CBS Memo Controversy of September 2004
Dishonest and misleading stories about firearms.
Dishonest and misleading stories about the environment.




Sensationalism

What can we expect from the Left now?  The local Washington D.C. media is already interviewing government employees that are frightened they will lose their jobs under a second Trump administration.  Once the DOGE starts with cuts, the media will be trotting people out who will claim they can't pay their bills or are about to be homeless by losing their jobs.  Government employees who felt they were secure for life in their petty little positions will, for the first time, have to face the realities that everyday Americans do in regards to work.  Inside the beltway, there will be pity, but outside, in the rest of the country, no one will shed a tear.  This will be amplified when the media starts parading those impacted by deportations.  There are already cries that this will break up families.  Be prepared to see a staggering number of news stories alleging hardship and even brutality with deportations.

About the Supposedly Devastating Impact of that Supposed Transgender Ban in the American Military.  The news media is calmly warning that Donald Trump is planning to ban transgender servicemembers from the American military, which will absolutely gut the armed forces. [...] We'll practically have no military left!  It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing:  15,000-plus transgendered service members.  You're going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead.  The New Republic, today: "Donald Trump's plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect:  At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave."  That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: "Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)."  Their best guess about a total number: 14,707.  The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.  The Palm Center... extrapolated a lot, let's say, in good part by multiplying their guess about a percentage, derived from a grossly inadequate survey of a select number of active duty troops, times the total number of servicemembers.

An Electoral Awakening Worth Celebrating.  [Scroll down]  Since Biden's 2020 (s)election, Big Tech has actively censored Americans who highlight evidence of electoral fraud.  The propaganda press has labeled us "election deniers."  The DOJ, FBI, and too many partisan judges have treated J6 defendants worse than alleged murderers.  Protests for free and fair elections have been preposterously described as an "insurrection" worse than Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the Civil War.  The mix of rhetorical overkill and political persecution have had a salubrious effect: an increasing number of Americans now recognize that the federal government conspires with social media companies to censor Americans' speech in violation of the First Amendment and that the criminal justice system is filled with corrupt and evil actors.

Trump Derangement is the Stupidest Political Phenomenon of My Lifetime.  The dismal cabal of hysterical adult children that makes up the alleged American cultural "mainstream," the responsible people you see on television and in the op-ed pages — Anne Applebaum, Tom Nichols, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Joe Scarborough and his idiot wife, Jonathan Capehart, Max Boot, Jen Rubin, David French, Bill Kristol, Ruth Marcus, Nicolle Wallace, Dana Bash, and on and on, all of them completely interchangeable, one set of asinine talking points with a series of different faces sewn on the front — has spent the last year or ten descending into a urine-soaked psychotic tantrum.  They don't know anything, they don't understand anything, they don't say anything of value, they don't contribute anything, ever, and their voices are ubiquitous.  Living in this media environment is like living in a place where the air is made of manure.  They have absorbed no lesson.

The Media Isn't Terrified That 'the End of Democracy Is Nigh' — They're Terrified of Being Wrong.  A few days ago, I wrote a story about CBS reporting that FEMA had pulled back teams in North Carolina, partly because of an email from one park ranger claiming armed gangs of good old boys were out "a-huntin'" FEMA Feds.  Of course, there was no such thing.  Gangs of Appalachians' huntin' for Feds was about as likely as Jussie Smollett being attacked by two MAGA-hat-wearing thugs who happened to have a noose and a bottle of bleach at 2 a.m. in the middle of a Chicago snowstorm.  No sane person believed that sort of nonsense.  Well, Kamala Harris did, which gives us a hint into her critical thinking skills.  Kool-Aid-drinking Democrat cultists believe those stories because the priests of their religion have told them it's true.  Cultists never have to think — they just need to believe.  That's how cultists roll.  The congregation believes that, if elected, Trump will cause the "end of democracy."

Media Suddenly Covers Trump Rallies Again Because of Potential Assassination Attempts.  Conservatives started asking why the mainstream media suddenly decided to broadcast Donald Trump rallies, even though they've been avoiding doing that for a very long time.  According to the observant Americans, it is because they were informed in advance that the third assassination attempt on Trump would happen.  On Sept. 21, 2024, Trump War Room was the first to raise the question by posting screenshots from the propaganda industry's outlets like controlled opposition Fox News and openly leftist CNN, MSNBC and News Nation.  [Tweet]

Deep State Democrats and the Continuing Attempts to Kill President Trump.  What triggers the left-wing media?  Outrage and their ego.  They're outraged by sarcastic memes about illegal migrants eating cats and geese.  They're upset at those memes from "unsubstantiated" political remarks that mock the Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for overwhelming a small town in Ohio.  What is "substantiated" is that Biden and Harris have sent an unwanted 20,000 or so impoverished migrants from violent Haiti to Springfield, OH.  Yes, this an outrage!  The Democrats will not be ridiculed, especially not with memes.  But a president murdered before an election?  That doesn't stoke media's indignation.  "Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself," said NBC's Lester Holt.  "Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance, continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in [Springfield] Ohio."  And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [...] argued the most important thing is that the news media is not doing enough to portray Trump as a threat to democracy.

Vermont becomes the second US state to issue stay-at-home orders because of deadly mosquito-borne virus.  Vermont just became the second state to postpone public events in order to curb the spread of a deadly virus in the state.  The Green Mountain state joins neighboring Massachusetts in recommending their citizens stay home at night, amid high reports of Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE).  This rare sickness is carried by horses and spread by mosquitos, and in about 30 percent of human cases, can cause brain swelling, vomiting, seizures and death.

The Editor says...
The article above is an example of baseless news media hysteria.  The article says, "This rare sickness is carried by horses," so go about your business and stay away from horses!  There is no justification for "stay-at-home orders."  Tyranny is worse than disease.  The government is (again!) testing you to see if you will comply with their orders, no matter how pointless they are.

PBS and the False Narrative of "Slowly Dying" Coral Reefs.  Coral reefs are some of creation's most strikingly beautiful places.  Clean and clear blue water, graceful whales and sea turtles, swarms of dazzling fishes, and amazing coral.  We can't get enough of coral reefs, so we adorn our walls with paintings and photos.  Saltwater aquariums abound in households, restaurants and businesses around the world.  Naturally, we want to protect all this goodness and beauty.  Stewardship is in our DNA.  Our emotions can kick in when a threat is perceived.  Unfortunately, nefarious people know this about us.  People whose agenda has more to do with global power and control than with protecting coral reefs. [...] Take for example the PBS News feature titled "Conservationists take drastic measures to save coral reefs from climate change."  Published earlier this year, the video begins by falsely claiming that coral reefs around the world are "slowly dying."

Twisted Truth:  Lies, Extreme Lies, and Climate Statistics.  [C]laims of the hottest surface temperatures ever on record are made regularly for various locations across the US.  But, as noted in meteorologist Brian Sussman's new book Climate Cult, 20 states registered record maximum temperatures of at least 109 degrees Fahrenheit, all occurring in the 1930s, a decade that also contained the infamous Dust-Bowl years.  Yet a June New York Times article on the "not normal" summer heat conveniently displayed a graph with temperature trends beginning in the 1940s.  Fortunately for much of main-stream media that pushes a climate-disaster agenda, the public can be easily duped when temperatures are extra hot and knowledge of the climate record is extra low.  Standard statistical ploys using incomplete datasets or cherry-picked values are circulated on not just temperature levels, but also severe weather frequency and intensity, sea level fluctuations, and ice cap extents.

When you have junk science, you end up with mad scientists.  If journalists were curious, instead of talking puppets pushing the Democrat agenda, they could ask a simple question like I did, and use a search engine to find the answer:  "What are the warmest summers on record?"  The following information populated:  The warmest summer on record was in 1936 during the Dust Bowl, which was before we had central air... so it was colder for more than eight decades, while the population was rising rapidly, and while our use of the natural resources (which supposedly causes warming) was exploding.  (It should be noted that there was essentially no air conditioning of any type in 1936.)  Some of the other warm summers were 1934, 1901, 1911, and 1913.  They were clearly not caused by gas-powered cars, so getting rid of them can't possibly change the temperature.

Big Media conducted polls to determine which climate terms induced the most hysteria.  As it turns out, all that hysterical language, tsk-tsk finger-wagging at we commoners to abandon our modern luxuries like personal vehicles and gas stoves, and temperature map graphics with exaggerated red shading to suggest that we're in an emergency situation didn't do anything but turn the people off of to the whole "urgency" of the narrative. [...] Now to backtrack a little bit:  According to Williams, in April 2019, a "team of advertising consultants" published another study that suggested the climate terms commonly used at the time ("climate change" and "global warming") didn't do enough to whip the average media consumer into a panic — they suggested buzzwords like "climate crisis" and "environmental collapse" as it elicited a stronger "emotional" response.  Yes, you read that correctly:  They didn't want to encourage a more rational response, or be more objective, but play to a person's emotions... and exploit them.  Without facts on your side, what else do you have?

Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions.  [Scroll down]  Today, killer heat waves are the new climate horror story.  In July President Biden claimed "extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States."  He is wrong by a factor of 25.  While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.  Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000. Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous.  That allows more people to afford air-conditioners and other technology that protects them from the heat.

Don't Buy the Media Lies About Crop Production.  One of the mainstream media's favorite pastimes in recent years has been trying to scare the pants off everyone by suggesting that climate change is decimating crop production around the world.  They are either lying intentionally, or mistaken.  However, in either case, there is some journalistic malpractice going on, as well as a notable failure of logic.  We have all seen the stories, the favorites of the media usually have to do with foods that are popular semi-luxury items, depending on where you live, like cocoa beans, coffee, and wine.  For instance, Forbes put out an article claiming that cocoa, olive oil, rice, and soybeans are all "particularly vulnerable" to the effects of "climate-induced stressors."

How the media coordinated the failed assassination of Donald Trump.  Two months ago, I predicted that the media were laying the groundwork for justifying the assassination of Donald Trump after the New Republic published an entire issue depicting the former president as Adolf Hitler.  I wish I could claim some supernatural gift of foresight, but it was not the first time I had made this prediction, and I was not alone, as several other pundits, including Tucker Carlson, had also seen the writing on the wall.  The attempted assassination of the leading presidential candidate on Saturday was shocking, but in many ways it felt inevitable.  The American media have been steadily intensifying their anti-Trump rhetoric for years, whipping their audience into a murderous frenzy.  The disgusting freaks who constitute the regime press are not concerned or outraged at the attempt to murder Trump; they are simply disappointed that the instrument of their vengeance was a bad shot.

The Press and Pundits Make Wild Claims in the Wake of the Court's Immunity Decision.  On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow warned that the Supreme Court had just unleashed death squads to roam our streets.  CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen announced that murder was now legal (at least for presidents), while others predicted that the ruling on presidential immunity would invite "tyranny."  Anyone reading the coverage would conclude that James Madison has been replaced by John Wick in a new "Baba Yaga" Republic.  President Biden fueled the sense of panic in an address that repeated widespread false claims about the decision in Trump v. United States.  Biden told the country that "for all practical purposes, today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do."  That, of course, is not true.  I have long opposed sweeping presidential privileges and powers.  I have long argued that a sitting president can be criminally charged in office.  But the portrayal of this Supreme Court opinion by the left and the media is wildly off base.

World's sleep being chipped away by hotter nights, global warming, Climate Central study says.  Climate change is not only harming the planet[,] it's also ruining our sleep.  A new report from Climate Central says rising nighttime temperatures are chipping away at human sleep across the globe.  Scientists found global mean temperatures have risen by more 34 degrees Fahrenheit since 1850, setting a new record in 2023.

Reaction and rebuttal:
World's Sleep Being Disrupted By Global Boiling.  It's amazing what a 1.7F increase (or 2.2F, depending on which climahysteric outlet you listen to) over 170+ years can do, eh?  All while the Warmists are trying to take air conditioning away from Other People, and stop those people in places like Africa from getting it[.] [...] ["]Scientists found global mean temperatures have risen by more 34 degrees Fahrenheit since 1850, setting a new record in 2023.["] [...] According to NASA the mean global temperature is 59F.  Are we seriously supposed to believe that it was 25F in 1850?

How the Met Office and BBC Try to Fool Us All.  As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on or continued using our winter duvets, there is one certainty — in a few weeks time, the good folk at Met Office and the BBC will tell us that we've just had the "warmest June on record".  After all, the Met Office and the BBC made the same claim about appalling April and miserable May.  In fact, the weather has been so wet that there is a risk of a potato shortage later this year.  So, what will be intriguing will be the mathematical contortions the Met Office and BBC will use to justify their preposterous nonsense.

The Editor says...
The article above was published on June 20, so it was a bit premature to say, "we've just had the 'warmest June on record.'"

BBC Pushes U.S. Heatwave Story But Buries 'Junuary' Winter Storm Story.  The BBC has a story today about the heatwave in May and early June the southwestern U.S. and Mexico.  Apparently, a report by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group has claimed that climate change made the heatwave 35 times more likely, though exactly what that means goes unexplained. [...] The interesting thing about that BBC story is the complete lack of any mention of the spectacular plunge in temperatures across the northwestern United States as a major winter storm crossed over the Rockies into Montana and Idaho.

Groups urge FEMA to treat extreme heat as a major disaster.  As the first significant heat wave of the season sweeps across the country, several organizations are urging the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to classify extreme heat as a major disaster.  Tens of millions of Americans face dangerously hot temperatures this week in a heat wave moving from Midwest states like Ohio to cities in the Northeast.  "It's going to feel like the upper 90s, may even feel like 100 a couple of the afternoons," said Randi Rico, a WLWT meteorologist.

The Editor says...
[#1] Sometimes the weather in June is quite warm.  That is not a crisis or a disaster or an emergency.  There is no need to beg for money from FEMA.  The government can't control the weather.  [#2] It "may even feel like 100 a couple of the afternoons," the WLWT weather lady.  So what?  Other parts of the country are way ahead of you, in that regard.  Deal with it.

Climate Propaganda Cabals Ramp Up the Heat for Summer.  [Scroll down]  They will be pumping this junk out all summer — telling us that summers are hot.  We already know that.  If you can tell the difference between a 90°F day and a 91°F day without a thermometer, or without a "climate journalist" to tell you that that "one more degree" is caused by driving your classic '55 Chevy to the summer car show, you are a better person than I.  They are collaborating, they are conspiring — both in the open and behind closed doors — and they are will say anything they think the public will swallow.

The Mirror goes mega-viral for saying UK will be "blasted" by 78°F "heatwave".  [Scroll down past several advertisements and tweets]  It's headed to 93°F today in Michigan, where I have the inexhaustible pleasure of writing this article.  We have moose that reside in our state.  They don't seem to mind the occasional hot day.  [Advertisement]  Meanwhile, Brits apparently melt if the mercury rises above room-temperature.

Top Study Confirms UN's 'Climate Crisis' Claims Are a Hoax.  A top study has confirmed that fearmongering claims made by the United Nations (UN) to support the "climate crisis" narrative are a hoax, directly contradicted by data.  Despite claims from the UN and other unelected globalists, the study has found that alleged "climate disasters" are not increasing.  In fact, eminent Italian researchers Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani found that the environment has been significantly improving in recent years, with climate-related events decreasing.  However, the researchers found that, while "climate disasters" have been decreasing, fearmongering studies and corporate media reports linking "global warming" to weather events have increased dramatically, creating the illusion of a "crisis."  The study observed trends in climate disaster reports between 1900 and 2022.

Stop Making Plane Turbulence About Climate Change.  Passengers "smashed" into the ceiling, blood stained the carpet in the aisles, luggage flew through the cabin, and there was "awful screaming": Is what happened on a Singapore Airlines jet on Monday evening going to become a regular occurrence?  The plane, which was flying from London to Singapore, reportedly encountered "severe turbulence" about 10 hours into the flight, while 37,000 feet above southern Myanmar.  Multiple passengers were injured — 20 were still in intensive care this morning — and one man died:  a 73-year-old British citizen who appears to have gone into cardiac arrest.  Within hours of reporting the incident, major news organizations were wondering:  Will this be the new normal, in the age of global warming?  "Is climate change making turbulence worse?" asked the BBC.

Now We Are Supposed to Cheer Government Surveillance?  They are wearing us down with shocking headlines and opinions.  They come daily these days, with increasingly implausible claims that leave your jaw on the floor.  The rest of the text is perfunctory.  The headline is the takeaway, and the part designed to demoralize, deconstruct, and disorient.  A few weeks ago, the New York Times told us that "As It Turns Out, the Deep State Is Pretty Awesome."  These are the same people who claim that Trump is trying to get rid of democracy.  The Deep State is the opposite of democracy, unelected and unaccountable in every way, impervious to elections and the will of the people.  Now we have the NYT celebrating this.  And the latest bears notice too:  "Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe."  The authors are classic Deep Staters associated with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush.  They assure us that having an Orwellian state is good for us.  You can trust them, promise.  The rest of the content of the article doesn't matter much.  The message is in the headline.

No, Sun Sentinel, Florida Isn't Under Future "Climate Threats".  A recent article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel (SFSS) newspaper, titled "Florida in 50 years:  Study says land conservation can buffer destructive force of climate change," makes some catastrophic claims about what Florida's climate will be like in 50 years.  The article relies heavily on climate model projections, that are undermined by real world evidence and by the fact that the climate models in question have been shown to create "implausibly hot forecasts of future warming."  As outlined in Climate at A Glance:  Climate Model Fallibility peer reviewed science has shown that climate forecasts like the one cited by the SFSS have no basis in reality because comparisons of actual measured atmospheric temperature data to model forecasts show up to a 200% discrepancy between model temperature outputs and observed temperatures.  Because the temperature forecasts are wildly implausible, the claimed disastrous impacts that are forecast to result from those unbelievably high temperatures also lack credibility.

BBC weather map row heats up over confusing colours.  The BBC has been criticised for the colour scale it uses to represent temperatures, with lows of 11C shown as yellow while 41C is depicted as dark red.  The broadcaster has triggered confusion among some viewers with its temperature contour map, which switches to orange when temperatures hit 13C.  The colour scheme was introduced in 2017, with the BBC at the time saying it was intended to help those with colour blindness.  Toby Young, the founder of website The Daily Sceptic, suggested that the BBC was "going a bit far".  "How is it going to represent temperatures above 20C?  Fireballs?" he said.  A weather forecast on Tuesday night showed most of the country yellow and orange for Wednesday when temperatures were predicted to hit as high as 20C.  One viewer wrote on social media that the system was "utterly farcical".  "I'm not a massive conspiracy theorist but I have to agree with those who castigate the utterly ludicrous use of bright yellow and orange/red on the weather maps to indicate temperatures of 18/19 degrees!" the viewer wrote.

The Editor says...
When television was received on black-and-white receivers, 50 years ago, no consideration was given to "color blind" viewers.  We were all color blind.  At the same time, much less emphasis was placed on sensational (and highly speculative) forecasting beyond the next 24 hours, hardly any TV stations had their own weather radar, nobody had any delusions about the government being able to alter the weather, and absolutely nobody considered carbon dioxide to be a threat.

The Price of Surrendering Speech.  Our mainstream media has been surrendering its freedom for years, not by any dictate from the top but by a seismic shift in its values and self-perceived role in society.  The process started slowly, long ago, when publishers and editors discovered a gold mine in obsessing over celebrity heroes, then accelerated when they found that a celebrity villain offered the same rewards.  They learned to favor sensation over substance, never worried that their chosen villains are not always evil, nor their heroes always virtuous.  For them an off-color remark or over-the-top boast from one of their celebrities becomes more important than any substantive dialogue about policy. [...] The celebrity fixation justified, even required, hyperbole, since their stars need to be larger than life, meaning the media accords them vastly more authority, and credibility, than they deserve.  Eventually for the legacy media everything — from the climate cycle to devolution of rights to states, passage of school choice laws and scores of invented microaggressions — became existential threats.  George Bernard Shaw once complained that the media can't distinguish between "the end of the world and a bicycle accident."  Shaw was engaged in hyperbole when he spoke those words but they are no longer exaggeration.

Why are states and counties declaring emergencies for the solar eclipse?  [Scroll down past numerous tweets]  A lot of it is tied back to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979 by President Carter.  The federal government doesn't have jurisdiction at the local level (in principle, at least), so local jurisdictions declaring emergencies is basically the first step of a formal invite for state and federal manpower to come in and help fix a particular problem.  Since we have super-short term memories, let me remind you that this happened for the 2017 eclipse too. [...] If there's a conspiracy here, it's the observation that using a process meant for true emergencies as a "Get out of Jail Free Card" for every inconvenience is really [read:  REALLY] bad for a free society that doesn't want rule by martial law.

The Editor says...
Solar eclipses happen every few years, but there has almost never been so much hype about an eclipse before.  The eclipse of August 21, 2017, was apparenly good for the news media, because they are really talking up this one, and that is what's causing "emergency" declarations all along the eclipse's path.

How is this not "hate speech?"
'The View' Co-Hosts Launch Into Lengthy Man-Hating Tirade.  "The View" co-hosts jumped into a lengthy man-hating tirade Friday, calling straight ones "useless."  The co-hosts responded to a TikTok trend asking women if they need men, agreeing with the majority who answered "no." They adamantly assured they are not including gay men in their criticism.  "Because men are useless," co-host Ana Navarro said.  "I mean — and by the way, I wanted to differentiate between straight men and gay men because I think I would die without gay men.  No one can gossip like a gay man, no one can help you accessorize like gay men, and nobody can help you from doing harm to yourself like gay men."  She said her husband would be "emaciated, starving and living in his own filth" without her.

Synthetic Controversy.  In media, including legacy/mainstream, social and other alternative media, controversy sells.  And it often seems like all media has become much more about sales than about sharing factual information.  Controversy generates clicks, re-posting, and message amplification.  The controversy can focus on either a substantial or a trivial issue.  In modern PsyWar, with its emphasis on censorship, propaganda, and psychological shaping or manipulation, facts and reality are increasingly irrelevant.  It is no longer necessary for the controversy to be fact-based.  We all know about the power of "fake news" to capture the attention of the general public, and in many ways it is far easier to drive views and clicks with unsupported statements and speculation than by doing the research necessary to comprehend a topic.  Facts can be difficult and inconvenient things, but when reality becomes defined by feelings and opinions rather than objective facts, then development and exploitation of false narratives becomes child's play.

Activist Media Outlets Run Cover for Fulton County DA Fani Willis, Claim Scrutiny Is Motivated by Racism.  It was only a matter of time before folks on the left began throwing race into the saga surrounding embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.  Activist media outlets have begun spinning the narrative that the criticism and scrutiny of the prosecutor isn't about her inappropriate romantic relationship with one of the prosecutors she hired to handle the election interference case against former President Donald Trump but about the color of her skin and her sex.  The New York Times and Associated Press have published pieces intimating that the furor over Willis' alleged corruption was due to racism and sexism and not the fact that she clearly engaged in a torrid affair with prosecutor Nathan Wade.  The only thing surprising about this is that it took them so long to begin weaving this narrative.

2023 Was Not the "Hottest Year on Record" for Over 70% of the World's Population, Data Show.  Further doubt has been cast on the widely-broadcast alarmist temperature claim that last year was the hottest since records began.  A deep dive into figures published by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that the 'hottest ever' claims did not apply to large areas of the world including Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, East N. Pacific, Hawaiian region, Arctic and Antarctic.  Investigative science writer Larry Hamlin notes in the science blog Watts Up With That that at least 58% of the Earth's land surface where 73% of the world's population lives did not experience the hyped 'highest ever recorded' average temperature anomaly.

Separating fact from fiction on 'climate change'.  Here are some legitimate scientific facts:  I was in Denver on December 23rd, 2023, and the national weather report was talking about how warm the country was; the temperature was 55°F, which was 12° above normal.  Then, the meteorologists showed that the record high in Denver for that date was 74° in 1901.  Then on December 24th and 25th, the high was around 30°, which was 13° below normal.  Here are the only truthful statements that can come from those facts.  Temperatures fluctuate, and Denver's temperature has been colder "than normal" on December 23rd for the last 122 straight years.

Hottest In 125,000 Years?  Just about all of the media have been peddling the "Hottest for 125,000 years" claim, which suggests a very concerted effort by the climate establishment in the run up to COP28.  The claim is self evident and baseless nonsense for a number of good reasons:
  •   There is no such thing as "a global average temperature"
  •   Even now we have very sparse coverage of temperature measurements.  Prior to satellites, we had virtually no data outside of the US, Europe and a few other built up areas
  •   The temperature record we do have is thoroughly corrupted by UHI, and only dates back to the late 19th C[entury]
  •   Natural variations, including ENSO, volcanic activity etc, can easily cause temperature swings of a degree Celsius from year to year, and decade to decade.  But historical proxies don't have the fine resolution to pick these up, they merely give an idea of average temperatures over decades and even centuries.  Consequently you cannot compare one year now with the general climate of, say, 2000 years ago.
But forget about all of these theoretical objections, because the climatic evidence we do have is overwhelming, and it tells us that the climate has been much warmer than now for most of the last 10000 years, since the end of the ice age.

Not the Babylon Bee.  What exactly a "climate disease" is is a mystery until you realize this term was invented to make a snappy headline.  In non-headline speak, these are diseases that are spread by more frequent interactions between people and wild animals driven out of their natural environment due to climate change.  Or they are diseases we are to believe are made more common due to climate change.  Color me skeptical.  Malaria, Dengue fever, and other diseases have been with us for millennia, and new diseases have been springing up throughout human history.

The Truth about the Jeffrey Epstein John Does.  There is a certain level of difficulty in reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell saga, much of it having to do with what the authorities haven't revealed: the web of Epstein's network (much of it still secret), the ties to intelligence (of which documentary evidence is still hidden from public view), the internal deliberations that went on at Main Justice in Washington, D.C. when Epstein got his sweetheart plea deal (again, not yet publicized).  Add to that the false media reports and blatantly inaccurate social media posts that spring up every time there's any small development in any Epstein or Maxwell case.  Like today, for example.  The Daily Mail led the way, reporting that a federal judge "has ruled to unseal documents that would name 177 Does who are Epstein's friends, recruiters and victims within the coming weeks." This was followed by a flurry of social media takes — especially on Twitter — promising there will be serious revelations from these records or claims that "177 Jeffrey Epstein high profile associates will be revealed in the new year."  There's a problem with that sensationalism: it's inaccurate.

More media drumbeating on the global warming nonsense from USA Today.  We are told that the science is settled, that the last 160 years of our using natural resources have led to record high temperatures on Earth and that the ocean is rising to unsustainable levels.  [A recent] article from USA Today says the Earth used to be much hotter, so why do they tell us constantly that the Earth has reached record high temperatures and that we don't have much time to save the planet[?] [...] Of course, they never explain how the Earth cooled from 1940 [to] 1975 when they say all these things cause warming.  Facts haven't mattered to green pushers for a long time.  And of course, the solution is big government and taking away our freedom of choice of what we drive and how we power our houses and appliances.  We are supposed to capitulate to radical green pushers which makes us poorer and them much richer.

The Editor says...
How could the ocean be "rising to unsustainable levels?"  What's easier to sustain than sea level?

Globalists Fear the Unconquerable.  State-controlled news media blare continuous warnings that citizens should fear racism, "white supremacy," misogyny, imperialism, colonialism, paternalism, Christianity, Israel, hydrocarbon energy, heterosexuality, capitalism, exercise, Karens, Chads, Western civilization, personal liberty, country music, Southern states, suburban moms, political speech, scientific debate, masculinity, democratic elections that don't elect Democrats, Donald Trump, limited government, nuclear families, gun-toting Americans, psychologically healthy adults, Christmas decorations, assimilation, accurate history, cultural appropriation, national borders, due process for conservatives, misinformation, malinformation, disinformation, and stable marriages.  On the flip-side, the atheistic priests of the "woke" church insist that opposition to either gay pseudo-marriage or the new fad of "transgenderism" represents some kind of irrational "phobia" that must be overcome immediately.  In other words, the new world order demands that Westerners fear almost everything except bearded men crushing women half their size in competitive sports.  Talk about lunacy!

USA Today article seeks to gin up class hate.  There's apparently no end to how far the mainstream operatives will go in their quest to destroy the virtues of the West, and a USA Today article published last week is a prime example.  The man behind the piece, Daniel de Visé, essentially implies that anyone not born into tremendous wealth doesn't have a chance at success, and those who are rich only got that way by mere circumstance and birthright, overtly implying that capitalism has caused this problem and that, we must work harder for equality.  There are huge problems with de Visé's article, but I will do my best to tackle a few of them to explain how the premise is entirely wrong.

Climate Change Is Not Threatening Human Health.  The mainstream media has increasingly used words like "catastrophe" and "uninhabitable" to describe the condition of the planet.  This is despite the fact that data show weather is not getting worse.  Creating climate anxiety is explicitly the goal of media climate reporting.  Bombarding their audiences with scare stories, facts to the contrary be damned, is aimed at motivating people into "taking action" and supporting severe restrictions on fossil-fuel use.  Survivors of a natural disaster may also struggle with PTSD or similar ailments, but it doesn't mean that climate change is the cause.  VOA reporting that climate anxiety is a result of climate change itself is frankly disgusting.  In the end, objective scientific data does not show that human health is being negatively impacted by climate change, and it is certainly not the biggest health threat facing humanity.

This Summer Was Not Even in America's Top 10 Hottest, Say Scientists.  The mainstream media continue to fall hook, line and sinker for the tempting alarmist bait set by urban heat corruptions.  The Guardian said a record was set this year in the U.S. city of Phoenix during a "hellishly hot summer" with the most hot days over 110°F.  The BBC's report on Phoenix took the opportunity to add that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense, "because of human-induced climate change".  It is often hellishly hot in the desert state of Arizona, and in fact last summer was the warmest in Phoenix going back to 1933.  But strip out the heat created in the ever-expanding concrete and tarmacked metropolis, and it turns out the area was only the 11th warmest on record.  If the record hot summer in Phoenix was due to global warming, as claimed in almost all media, then it would show up at weather stations surrounding the city — "right?" asks Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

ABC News:  Thanksgiving Dinner 'Could Soon Become Another Victim' of Climate Change.  Thanksgiving "could soon become another victim of climate change," a recent report by ABC News warned.  The report said rising temperatures "threaten the abundance and quality" of ingredients that make up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.  "As a result, these essential food items could become increasingly scarce and more expensive, potentially forcing families to omit or make substitutions in key recipes on their Thanksgiving menus," the report said.

Joe Biden supporters had an especially paranoid couple of days.  It's amazing that this man was once a congressman, because he clearly has zero understanding of both political philosophies and the American political system — for the umpteenth time, fascism is a leftist ideology and America was never supposed to be a democracy — and on a recently-broadcast televised MSNBC segment, Joe Scarborough issued an ominous warning: if President Trump secures a second term, he will "imprison" and "execute" any and all political opponents that he can.  Projection much?  Who's really been imprisoning and executing political opponents?  Does the name Ashli Babbitt ring a bell?  What about Craig Robertson?  Owen Shroyer?  Or how about the J6ers?  Or, is this a signal of guilt?  Has he done something criminal and he's starting to sweat?  Talk about paranoia!  But it wasn't just Scarborough because Scary Larry, a prominent Twitter Democrat, announced that another Trump presidency meant an official Brownshirt squad, and Trump already had his gang ready to go:  [Tweet]

Another Long, Hot Summer.  [Scroll down]  Every year, it's "the sky is falling," until it's not.  Then, with egg on their faces, the forecasters crawl back into their studios and begin whining about another potential catastrophe, almost as if they're wishing one would happen.  I am genuinely happy that Idalia did so little damage and that casualties were so low.  I'm not sure the mainstream liberal networks were happy about it. [...] There was no flooding in my community despite our proximity to [Hurricane] Idalia's cone.  I sat comfortably in my house, reading and working, hardly aware that a hurricane was passing by.  We did not lose power, no trees were down, and there was no wind damage.  The reporters were getting wet, the signage around them was bending a bit, and their voices were full of manufactured urgency.  But there was no urgency where I sat.

Weather Channel map
The Weather Channel's Absurd 'Hot' Propaganda.  The Weather Channel is absolutely ridiculous.  The channel's "Weather Across the Country" map on their homepage for September 19 had red colors EVERYWHERE!  Because it's HOT HOT HOT!  No area of the country is experiencing normal weather for mid September, apparently.  Chicago, for instance, was displayed as red to deep orange.  Warm, right?  I can tell you from personal experience:  It was "freezing" on Tuesday, September 19 in Northern Illinois for a day that is still technically summer.  It rained all day and barely got over 60 all afternoon.  I regretted not wearing a jacket to the office.  On this map, Seattle is in "yellow/green" denoting cooler weather, but I can assure you that today in Chicago felt like Seattle ... and it probably felt a lot warmer in Seattle where The Weather Channel said, and showed with color, that it was significantly "cooler." [...] Minot, North Dakota was allegedly 86 degrees today and is in "cool" yellow.  Jacksonville, Florida is one degree higher at 87 and is in "deep red hot."

Ignoring History Means Choosing Windmills Over Whales.  What we do know is that the media will hysterically opine about climate change records.  Except that they'll be wrong (as always).  There's nothing exceptional about the current heat we're experiencing:
  •   Death Valley, California, holds the world-record temperature high:  A whopping 134 F measured on July 10, 1913.
  •   North Dakota hit its historic high of 121 F in 1936.
  •   Montana experienced its highest temperature of 117F in 1937.
  •   Despite being the USA's warmest state, Florida's record high is only 108 F, and that occurred in 1931.

Control Versus Choice.  COVID cases are up.  Hospitalizations climbed 24% last week.  But the media make everything seem scarier than it is.  The headline "Up 24%!" comes after dramatic lows.  Hospitalizations are still less than half what they were when President Joe Biden said, "The pandemic is over." [...] This month, several school districts in Kentucky and Texas closed.  "The safety and wellbeing of our students, staff, and community is a top priority," said the school superintendent in Texas.  But kids rarely get very sick from COVID, and schools aren't COVID hotspots.  Studies on tens of thousands of people found "no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of the coronavirus."  A Lancet study found Florida had the 12th-fewest excess COVID deaths in the country, even though Florida students went back to school without masks relatively soon.

Independent Journalists, the Frontline Workers in the War on Truth.  Truthful and comprehensive journalism is at the heart of whether we will continue to devolve, or whether we regain our national footing.  By their nature, journalists have a platform with the public, and a tremendous ability to influence it; people believing in and then acting on erroneous information yields destructive consequences.  In this way, journalists as a whole advertently support the interests of the Democrat Destroyers; think of the "every man for himself" hysteria stories or the suppression of the efficacy of certain medicinal drugs when COVID first appeared.

In California This Weekend, We Saw, Again, How Easy It Is to Panic Americans.  I am writing this column on a beautiful sunny day in Southern California.  It is a Monday in mid-August, so it is not a national holiday, yet in Los Angeles County, where I live, all the schools and all government offices are closed.  Why?  Because, for the past week, the National Weather Service, state and local authorities, and national and local media have been ceaselessly warning that a tropical storm would hit Southern California on Sunday night and Monday with a "life-threatening" intensity not seen since the last tropical storm hit California in 1939, 84 years ago. [...] Unlike the invisible COVID-19 virus, the reason for panic this time was completely visible.  All these people needed to do was walk outside of their home or hotel — or just look out the window.  Had they done so, they would have seen that steady but moderate rain was falling.  Just rain.  No high winds, no downpour, no storm, not even thunder or lightning.

'Global Warming' Morphs Into 'Global Boiling' as the Global Climate Hoax Turns Up the Heat.  On July 27, 2023, the United Nations turned up the heat on the global climate hoax by declaring "the era of global warming" has now morphed into "the era of global boiling." With typically hysterical rhetoric, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that, "short of a mini-Ice Age" in the coming days, July 2023 would likely "shatter records across the board." [...] This all-too-obvious coordinated drumroll of frightening climate change warnings has become the propaganda technique of choice for international organizations who presume responsibility for controlling Earth's climate.  The only problem with the current theme of the month — namely, that July 2023 was the "hottest" month on record — is that it is NOT true.  But truthfulness is apparently a less worthy goal to the UN, the WMO, and the European Commission than making sure we stop using hydrocarbon fuels, the energy that has allowed modern industrial states to prosper during our good fortune to be experiencing an interglacial warming period.  The whole point of these announcements is to scare people.  "Climate change is here," the UN chief said.  "It is terrifying.  And it's just beginning."

The Editor says...
It's only terrifying if you watch TV, and believe everything you're told.  If you turn off the TV, it's just a hot summer.  Winter will be here soon enough.

Warming-obsessed media wrong again.  There is not much new about media hyperbole in weather reporting, but July's climate alarmism may be more breathless than usual.  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media were inundated with posts containing flaming red maps of Southern Europe and Northern Africa.  [Several tweets]  "July 2023 will probably be the world's hottest month in hundreds, if not thousands, of years," said top NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt.  One Twitter user (with 22,000 followers) claimed, "After the hottest day and week, we are now experiencing the hottest month ever (in about 120,000 years, based on paleoclimatology).  As we keep warming the planet, we will soon experience global temperatures not seen in the past million years!"  When questioned about the justification for his claims, the tweeter responded that scientists had "discovered there was a glacial period, which many people know about from a movie called Ice Age."  Imagine substantiating scientific claims by referencing a Hollywood movie!  Such is the sorry state of critical thought.

The press is trying to scare us about heat deaths to promote its global warming agenda.  We are supposed to be scared because 13 people, mostly older, died from heat in the current hot weather, and we are told that heat deaths are becoming more common. [...] Good journalists who care about informing the public, instead of indoctrinating them to push an agenda, would do some research to put the heat related deaths in perspective.  Sadly, the current crop of journalists seems much more interested in getting the public to capitulate to the radical green agenda to remake or destroy America, instead of informing them.  According to the CDC, the most recent data show an average of 702 people die from heat related illness each year.  To put that number in perspective, around 3 million people die each year from all causes, so less than three-hundredths of one percent of deaths each year are caused by heat.  How many of the 702 would have died from other causes that year?  My guess is, just like with COVID, they had other significant health problems?

'115 Degrees Fahrenheit' screams the New York Times headline.  But in point of fact, instead of seeking to scare people with high temperatures, most of the reporting lately talks about the heat index.  The purpose is to make people think it is warmer than it is. [...] If you Google the question: What is the highest heat index ever recorded, you actually get the highest actual temperature ever recorded which was 134 F. which occurred in Death Valley California in 1913.  A lot of other heat records occurred during the 1930's, so why do they keep telling the public that these are the hottest years on record and then claim that humans, cars, CO2, Coal, methane etc. have caused the high temperatures?

All Of A Sudden, Outbreaks Of Malaria, H5N1, Swine Flu And Monkeypox Are All In The News.  After a bit of a lull, it appears that pestilences are going to start making headline news once again.  Of course that is the last thing that many of us want to hear.  Many Americans are finally getting their lives back to normal after the last pandemic, and a lot of people are hoping that we won't have to go through another for a long time to come.  Unfortunately, the truth is that we have entered a period of history when major outbreaks will be quite common.  In secret labs all over the planet, mad scientists are monkeying around with some of the deadliest bugs ever known to humanity, and as we have seen, it is way too easy for an "accident" to happen.  One of the diseases that our scientists have been playing around with is Malaria, and now there are four confirmed cases in Florida and one in Texas.

Human groundwater usage causing earth to wobble?  According to the pajama boys over at thehill.com, a new study has found that humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the earth that the planet has begun to detectably wobble on its axis.  They admit the "magnitude of the new wobble is slight — a matter of millimeters, which puts it in the same approximate speed category as Earth's slowly drifting continents."  So, perhaps the wobble is actually related to the Earth's slowly drifting continents?  The Hill says the findings, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, purport to "show the extent to which human action — in the form of dam construction, groundwater drilling, and the burning of fossil fuels — are impacting the very position of the Earth." [...] The "scientists" conducting the study allegedly found that, between 1993 and 2010, human society, largely due to agriculture, had depleted 2,510 gigatons of groundwater, the equivalent of half the volume of Lake Huron.  Half the volume of one lake?  Is that really that calamitous?

The Editor says...
The migration of the poles did not begin in 1993, and there is no reason to believe that human activity caused it.  More comments below.

Earth's tilt has changed by 31 inches thanks to humans — and it could make climate change even WORSE, study warns.  Our insatiable need for water may be keeping us alive, but it's shifting the tilt of the Earth, a new study shows.  Researchers in Korea say the removal of groundwater around the world for drinking and irrigation is altering the Earth's mass and in turn making its axis 'wobble'.  According to the team, we've shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted 31 inches (78.5 cm) east between 1993 and 2010 alone.

The Editor says...
Socialists think you're really stupid.  Does anyone believe that anything we do could make the earth wobble?  Does anyone at the Daily Mail understand how big the Earth is, and how little 31 inches is by comparison?  Is anyone harmed by the migration of the poles?  Apparently the article above is sounding an alarm about a 31 inch peak-to-peak excursion over a period of 17 years.  What happened before 1993?  Is there any historical data showing that the poles did not migrate before the industrial revolution?  Even if everything in the article above is true, and it isn't, what would it take to stop the wobble a planet that has a mass of 5.9722 x 1024 kg?  The only reason to write an alarming newspaper article about a non-problem (that can't be fixed even if it is a problem) is deception:  If the writers can convince you that driving your car is destabilizing the whole world, they might talk you into giving up the freedom that your car represents, along with other freedoms.  I suspect the Earth has been wobbling since about 4,000 years ago, a couple of weeks after Noah got aboard the ark.  Note:  ["]The International Latitude Service was created by the International Geodetic Association in 1899 to study variations in latitude caused by polar motion, precession, or 'wobble' of the Earth's axis.["]  How many cars were on the road in 1899?  How many electric power plants were on line back then?

NBC's Chuck Todd Discovers That Black Teenagers Are Shooting Each Other.  Delivering statistics on gun deaths among teenagers, NBC News Chuck Todd discovers that black teenagers are killing each other at a much higher rate than white and asian kids.  Todd is shocked, shocked, at the outcome.  [Video clip]

The media's role in mass shootings.  The past few years have seen long stretches of calm, despite the propaganda from the biased and suspect "Gun Violence Archive," which seeks to label almost every petty crime incident as a "mass shooting" in the mind of the public.  On occasion, the peace is interrupted, with mass shootings taking place at predictable intervals after each miscreant from the previous shooting is elevated in the media to anti-hero status.  This is the well known and well studied phenomenon of media contagion, with each subsequent attack being predictable as clockwork.  So why aren't the nation's socialist media taking responsibility for its actions in causing these tragedies?  Why does it appear that they would rather exploit other people's pain for their political gain than save lives?

What's the Real Reason Political Anxiety Is So High?  [#1] Governmental power and control.  The only reason we have anxiety, stress, and worry about what happens in government is because the government is ridiculously, uncomfortably powerful.  If our political enemies (whoever they happen to be) take power, they could exert tremendous control over our lives.  So on some level, a bit of anxiety is reasonable.  [#2] It doesn't help that we're in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.  Media companies come in all shapes and sizes, from corporate juggernauts to independent journalists, and everyone is racing to publish news stories for the public to consume on a constant basis.  There is no more reading the morning paper; we are constantly bombarded with information.  Even if some of this information is positive, it's easy to become overwhelmed and feel anxious as a result.  [#3] Bad media incentives.  It's ironic that the very news organizations publishing stories about high rates of political anxiety are the same ones (perhaps) intentionally stoking those anxieties.  Media companies aren't necessarily incentivized to tell the truth or commit to quality journalism; instead, they're incentivized to get clicks and attention.

Perpetual pessimism:
Huge Rain Finally Comes to Drought-Stricken California, Media Predictably Moans.  It should be good news:  large rainstorms have been dumping huge amounts of rain and snow on the drought-plagued Golden State, and much more is expected.  After draconian water restrictions were placed on many residents last summer — with many forced to watch their lawns disintegrate into a crispy death — one would think all this water would be welcome.  But if you read a lot of the media out there, you'd think storms were a bad thing; we should get rain and snow — just on our terms, not the weather's.

Don't Let Police, Media Mislead You About Fentanyl Exposure Overdoses.  Once again, media outlets are rushing to sow panic by blindly accepting a police department's claims that an officer may have accidentally overdosed by being in close physical proximity to fentanyl, reinforcing the false message that you can potentially overdose on the drug even if you don't intentionally consume it.  This time we head to Tavares, Florida, where the Tavares Police Department distributed to the local press body camera footage of Officer Courtney Bannick appearing to collapse and pass out after encountering what turned out to be fentanyl and meth in a rolled-up dollar bill she found in a routine traffic stop.  Local news outlets lapped it up (the story, not the fentanyl) and the video footage ran on WESH (the local NBC affiliate), FOX 35, and elsewhere.  In none of the initial stories does anybody so much as question whether what they're seeing is actually being caused by exposure to fentanyl.

"Some of the Worst" News Media.  About 15 years ago I co-authored a book about air pollution and the Clean Air Act.  I know — you'll just have to contain your excitement.  One of the things we found was an example of what might be called the reverse Lake Wobegone Effect, i.e., according to local media every local area had "some of the worst" air pollution in the whole country!  Every metro area was below average!  Of course, if every place has "some of the worst" of anything, then no place really does (as the government's air quality data bear out*). [...] Actual EPA data shreds these claims, but environmental advocacy groups (especially the American Lung Association's annual "state of the air" report) produce cookie-cutter press releases claiming that each local area suffers "some of the worst" pollution in America, and the media dutifully repeats these claims.  This is why most environmental "reporters" are really just stenographers for environmentalists.  This ought to be embarrassing for any serious editor or publisher, but there aren't many serious editors or publishers any more.

11 Years Ago, Democrats Got Everything Wrong.  They Are Doing It Again.  On January 8, 2011, shortly after 10:00 AM, Democrat Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 other people were shot.  Six died.  Within minutes, every form of media was set ablaze with speculation. [...] By early afternoon, Jared Loughner a white male, had been identified as the shooter.  Loughner was instantly linked to neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  He was linked to the Tea Party and then to the "right wing" generally. [...] By mid-afternoon, a graphic with crosshairs "targeting" Democrat districts was shown on CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post DailyKos, and dozens of other shows and internet sites about every 30 seconds.  The map, they loudly claimed, was definitive proof that Sarah Palin's PAC map had incited Loughner.  Palin was to blame.  The right was to blame.  All Republicans were to blame.  By nightfall, the torches were lit and the pitchforks were out. [...] Almost nothing media initially reported was accurate.  Palin had nothing to do with Loughner's personal grudge against Giffords.  Within weeks, America knew conclusively that Loughner never saw Palin's target map, and that "target maps" have been used for decades.

Hurricane Hysteria, Hype, and Histrionics.  Hurricane season is upon Southeastern America and that means hair-on-fire hysteria from the media and the political left.  After Hurricane Ian ravaged southwest coastal Florida, we have heard nothing but hype from the corporate media, eager to connect every hurricane to catastrophic global warming, climate change, or whatever excuse they are currently using to usher in the Green New Deal and tyrannical top-down control of all aspects of our lives.  Hurricanes are not new and are a staple of southern coastal regions since long [ago].  Yet judging from media histrionics, severe hurricanes are only a recent phenomenon, ignoring hundreds or thousands of years ago when Florida was nothing but a swamp.  Hurricane harpies in the media, practicing one of the Democrats' favorite strategies of never letting a crisis go to waste, were quick to pounce on tragedy for political gain.  Look at some of the headlines, all singing in perfect harmony. [...]

While Reporters Crowded Around Biden's Airport, 12 Suspected Terrorists Were Caught At The Actual Border.  Think America's legacy media can't get any worse at their job?  Think again.  Following reports that Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., would be sending a plane full of illegal immigrants to a local airport in Georgetown, Delaware, near the residence of President Joe Biden, reporters and self-proclaimed journalists flocked to the location of the supposed drop-off on Tuesday, waiting with bated breath for an event they could spin to fit their anti-GOP agenda.  The only problem for the press, however, was that the plane in question wasn't carrying migrants and didn't even land in Delaware.  As reported by left-wing NBC News, "by late Tuesday, no plane had arrived [in Delaware]" and instead "landed in Teterboro, New Jersey," with no migrants "aboard the plane."  "Earlier in the day, DeSantis stoked the coals of speculation by declining to confirm or deny whether the plane would even take off — his administration later refused to say if the plane that landed in New Jersey was part of his program to relocate migrants — in an intentional effort to keep the issue alive," the NBC report claimed, citing an unnamed, anonymous source as evidence of its assertions.

MSNBC Praises 'War Hero' Biden Who Was 'Chopping Wood' in the Mountains 'Til His Country Called.  Do you envision Joe Biden as a war hero?  Do you see him shirtless and sweaty, axing oak for the fire he's busting at the biceps to build?  From the sound of things on MSNBC, it wouldn't be wrong.  Last week on Deadline: White House, host Nicolle Wallace welcomed network contributor and Morgan State University journalism Professor Dr. Jason Johnson.  Discussion turned to the Charlottesville conflict of August 2017, during which a man drove his car into a crowd.  Horrifically, he killed one person and injured several others. [...] Did Joe Biden — who previously held no interest in ascending to the land's highest office — see the shock of Charlottesville as a sign he had to suit up and save America?  It seems Dr. Jason believes so.

Is Extreme Weather Causing the World's Rivers to Dry Up?  A recent CNN article entitled "The World's Rivers are Drying Up from Extreme Weather.  See How 6 Look from Space" purports to argue that rivers such as the Colorado, Yangtze, Rhine, Po, Loire, and Danube are dwindling due to "a painful lack of rain and relentless heat waves." [...] Let's start close to home.  The Colorado River is cited as the first example, and, although CNN attributes its drying to the "historic drought in the US West," they do not suggest that this drought is human induced.  They do mention, however, that "around 40 million people in seven states and Mexico rely on the river's water for drinking, agriculture and electricity."  But an evaluation of the current conditions from the USGS National Water Dashboard indicates, as shown below, that many stream gauge stations in western Colorado and Utah are near normal, and in New Mexico and Arizona, they are above and much above normal.

The vast majority of pharmacology, psychiatry, vaccine science and published research is a complete fraud.  [Scroll down]  As a hilarious example of the junk science lunacy of the climate cult, look no further than the corporate-controlled media which now claims that every country in the world is heating up faster than every other country in the world.  Such a claim is mathematically impossible, yet it has become the default lunatic claim of the climate cult media, regardless of its incomprehensible nature.

CNN'S 'Climate Correspondent' Predicts All Life on Earth Is About to End.  Nearly all media cooperate in disseminating climate change fear-porn.  When hot months come because the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun, temperatures go up.  Changes in temperatures are reported in media with alarm and always denoted on graphics in blood red.  A few days ago, I saw this graphic of July temperatures in Europe.  The split screen shows different colors, although the temperatures are just about the same.  The replies were swift to point out that other stations reported hot weather temperatures as a red graphic in 2017.  In any event, the effect of coloring land in red is to cause people to feel the emotional burn.  Feel the fear.  [Tweet]

NBC Panics Over Climate Change, Blames Manchin for Blocking Biden.  On Monday's NBC Nightly News, after spending the first five minutes of the broadcast panicking over a heat wave in the middle of July, anchor Lester Holt and correspondent Anne Thompson chalked the warm weather up to "climate change" and sought to blame Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) for blocking the Biden administration's radical climate change agenda which would drive inflation up further by pumping more money into the economy.  "This severe weather certainly underscoring the increasing role of climate change and the challenges America faces in trying to combat it," Holt whined before turning to Thompson to give her report.

Weather map colors
Weather forecasts now use a deep, dark red to represent glorious sunshine.  Why?  People are starting to notice some, uh, less-than-subtle psychological conditioning rearing its head in modern weather forecasting.  What was once the smiley, happy face of the sun letting us know we could strip off and run through the neighborhood sprinklers [...] has been replaced with the deepest, darkest red that corporate media graphics departments can create, designed to summon forth notions of hell on Earth.  Observe, back in 1995 — when "John Kettley was the weatherman, [...] — a temperature of 30 degrees celsius was reflected with a gentle orange.  That's 86 degrees to you Americans.  Or "sweater weather" if you're in Arizona.  It wasn't a deep orange.  It wasn't an offensive orange.  It wasn't even as orange as a former President freshly emerging from his tanning bed.  No, by July 2022, the same temperatures (30 degrees), at the same time of year, are reflected with the most sinister red you could imagine.


Can a Crisis Happen If No One Pays Attention?  It's hard to pay attention to fake crises when there's a real economic crises.  Politics as entertainment is most appealing to those who are basically comfortable and aren't worried about basic bread and butter issues.  That's now a smaller demographic than it used to be.  There's also a shortage of actual crises.  People are worried about crime, the actual everyday kind that they might experience, as opposed to the abstract "we need gun control because of occasional mass shootings" agitprop.  The number of actual people whose lives have changed or will change because of the Dobbs decision is tiny.  On the other hand, people are canceling summer plans, moving and scrimping because of crime and the economy.  The pandemic actually affected a lot of people, the current wave of political crises does not.

L.A. Times' 8 'Bombshells' from Hutchinson Testimony Are All Duds.  The establishment media treated the testimony Tuesday of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson at the January 6 Committee as if it were damning for Trump — before her claims began to fall apart.  The fact that Hutchinson was seen actually hugging members of the January 6 Committee, as if they were partners in some joint enterprise rather than investigators seeking the truth, ought to have raised red flags — but did not, until it was too late.  The Los Angeles Times, among others — including Fox News — set aside the basic rules of journalism, accepting as fact the sudden claims made by a witness whose testimony was based entirely on hearsay and who was never subject to cross-examination.  The Times published a list of what it called eight "bombshells" — some of which were soon debunked, some of which remain dubious, and some of which were just a repetition of things that were already common knowledge or that other witnesses had already told the investigation.

Just 5% call abortion [their] top concern.  Abortion, the No. 1 concern in today's media and politics, ranks nearly dead last among areas voters care about as they struggle with paying daily bills, soaring inflation, and interest rate hikes, according to a just-released survey.  While the Supreme Court's decision overruling the 1973 Roe v Wade right to abortion has dominated today's network and cable coverage, the latest McLaughlin & Associates poll said just 5% of voters call it a top concern.  Just below abortion, at 1%, is reviewing the 2020 election, over which the media are also obsessing.

The Hysterical Media Reactions Flow Immediately After Overturning of Roe v. Wade.  As Redstate reported, in one of the biggest and most impactful stories of the last 50 years, Roe v Wade has been overturned by the US Supreme Court.  The leaked draft decision that pushed conversation and outrage for the last several months was real, and it has now been made official.  States now have the right to regulate the brutal practice of abortion as they see fit, a move toward respect for human life and basic morality we haven't seen in this country since slavery was abolished.  It's hard to overstate how big of a day this is for those who have fought so diligently to protect the lives of unborn babies.  No, this doesn't provide a federal ban on abortion, but it does ensure that the federal government can no longer dictate to Americans and their state representatives that they must legalize and support such barbarism.

January 6 committee has hired a former ABC News executive to produce Thursday's 8pm hearing as if it is a blockbuster documentary, report claims.  A former news executive has been recruited by the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol to produce the Democrat-led panel's upcoming primetime hearing, a Monday [6/6/2022] report claims.  James Goldston is a former president of ABC News.  Before that he ran the mammoth-sized operations at Good Morning America and Nightline as executive producer.  And he's now an adviser to the group of lawmakers who are set to present their case that Donald Trump's efforts to undermine democracy culminated in the deadly events of January 6, according to Axios.

Journalist Tries to Crash Uvalde Victim's Funeral, Bikers Have a Different Idea.  The funerals for those killed in the tragic school shooting that occurred in Uvalde, TX, have started to take place.  That comes amidst the relentless politicization of the event by the left and the media — despite the fact that in such a moment, there's typically nothing a family wants more than privacy.  Yet, a "health reporter" from The Houston Chronicle (again, trying to politicize what happened), attempted to crash one memorial in order to take pictures.  Fortunately, a group of bikers, who were there providing security, had other ideas.

The media's role in creating mass shooters gets less attention than it deservesPolitico published an interview last Friday with two criminologists who have studied mass shootings.  Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminology at Hamline University and James Densley is a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University.  Together, they've created a database of mass shootings since 1966 along with a detailed life history of 180 shooters.  Their research points to a number of commonalities among them.  Right away, they highlighted the role of the media and social contagion in these events, suggesting a connection between the Buffalo shooting and the one in Uvalde.

Mass Shootings: The Media Misinformation Campaign.  If there is any maxim religiously observed by the corporate news media, it is this:  "If it bleeds, it leads."  Moreover, if the blood in question gushes from gunshot wounds inflicted by a deranged mass murderer, the major news outlets uniformly portray the crime as evidence of an ever-increasing wave of violence caused not by criminals but by their weapons.  This narrative is a textbook example of misinformation whereby news organizations studiously ignore data and definitions on mass shootings developed by Congress, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement sources.

Was Canada's orgy of self-recrimination over...nothing?  Last year, Canada began an orgy of self-recrimination when researchers claimed to have found a mass grave at a residential school in British Columbia with the remains of more than 200 indigenous children.  The problem is that the ground-penetrating radar used to make this "find" yielded highly suspect results and not a single grave has been confirmed through an archaeological dig.  Now, a group of dissident scholars is calling foul on this entire narrative.

Time Mag is Wrong, Climate Change Will Not Make Food Scarce.  A Time Magazine article ascribes the potential for a major food crisis to two sources:  the war in Ukraine and climate change.  Concerning the latter claim, Time is simply wrong.  While the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russian exports have had an impact on food prices, there is no evidence climate warming has or will harm food production worldwide.  The Time piece, titled "The Food Crisis Can't Handle Ukraine War and Climate Change," says the current high grocery prices are merely a sample of an even worse crisis to come.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Health Journalist Revealed the Real Purpose of Masks in 2018: Fear.  Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award winning journalist Laurie Garrett gave a refreshingly honest and clear-eyed assessment of the usefulness of masks in fighting coronavirus pandemics.  Unfortunately, her assessment, given as the Keynote Address at the National Academy of Medicine in December 2018, was given prior to the Covid-19 outbreak.  Garrett, a Council of Foreign Relations member, spilled the beans in a presentation called "From the 1918 Influenza Pandemic to 2009 H1N1 Pandemic to Now:  Is the World Ready to Respond to the Next Outbreak?"  After her presentation, which periodically cast doubt on the historical utility of general public masking around the world, she fielded a question from a member of the audience on such measures.  This was her candid response.  [Video clip]

CNN Claims Pro-Life Supporters Will Turn Violent with SCOTUS Victory, Amish Extremists now Threatening ANTIFA Peacekeepers.  This example is just another example of how the Ministry of Truth operates.  Political violence is speech, unless actual speech is heard from their opposition; then, it becomes violence.  War is peace.  Water is dry, etc.  George Orwell sighs.  Knowing there is an increased likelihood of violence incited by far-left democrat activists and the White House, CNN moves their advance narrative engineering team into place to lay the blame for violence at the feet of their political opposition.  With Roe v Wade potentially being overturned, Amish extremists are now going to lay siege to the peaceful assembly of ANTIFA in DC, or something equally stupid.  [Video clip]

Was the Alito Opinion Leak a Distraction?  This Conservative Radio Host Thinks So.  According to Wayne Allan Root, a conservative radio host who is also a brilliant writer, it was the result of something more sinister:  it's meant to be a distraction from the bombshell that Dinesh D'Souza dropped in "2000 Mules," his documentary about the voter fraud that he contends took place in 2020. [...] While a good point, Root isn't the only one claiming that this is a coverup, with others saying that the leak was actually an attempt to cover up the recently released Pfizer vaccine data, another sacred cow for the mainstream media, social media censors, and leftist Fauci-enthusiasts.

NBC Host Suggests Republicans Are Nazis.  Elon Musk slammed NBC News on Monday [5/2/2022] in response to a rant from a far-Left MSNBC host who claimed that Musk bought Twitter and turned it over to "the far-right."  MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who has compared non-Muslims to "cattle," tried to downplay America's far-Left by claiming that they only want to "give us free health care and free childcare" while claiming that the far-right "wants to give us white supremacy and no democracy."

CNN Analyst Melts Down Over Musk's Purchase of Twitter.  The same leftists who claimed social media isn't censoring conservatives are melting down over Elon Musk's decision to buy Twitter.  Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion dollars last week and the left is not taking it well.  Musk has stated that he believes 'free speech' on social media should match the law of the country.  "I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law," Musk said.  The Biden Regime is so frightened over Musk's decision to buy Twitter that they responded by creating an Orwellian, unconstitutional "Ministry of Truth."  Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election so Joe Biden is working overtime to make sure he has full control over the internet.

The Media's Latest Attempt at Creating Another COVID Panic Is Beyond Pathetic.  Unlike liberal America, everyone has learned to live with COVID.  It's endemic.  It's going to be here forever.  Haven't had COVID, you're lucky.  You might get it; you have the rest of your life to catch 'rona.  Others who've had it should be prepared to get it again.  It is what it is, folks.  It's the latest edition to cold and flu season; COVID will just be the third person at the party.  It's seasonal.  Get over it.  Take your stupid mask off.  We have therapeutics and vaccines.  The era of lockdowns is over.  Philadelphia idiotically reinstated their indoor mask mandate.  NO ONE followed suit which shows you where everyone is now.  The upcoming 2022 elections have also played a part. [...] And these clowns wonder why everyone is sick of this circus.  It's damaged kids psychologically beyond repair.  The mental health crisis for adolescents is going to be a nationwide epidemic, but at least they wore masks, right?  Liberals' abuse of children in schools over COVID shouldn't shock anyone.

It was Watergate until it wasn't.  During the Trump presidency, I observed the following rule about breaking news, especially negative ones about President Trump.  I would hear the news and wait a day or two.  Why?  Because there was a good chance that the news would turn out to be fake news.  The latest example was the famous "phone time gap."  Where was President Trump during those hours?  Was he hiding in the basement planning the attack on the Capitol?  The media went crazy, from another round of experts to outrageous speculation.  Some even brought up the tired line about this being "worse than Watergate."  How did it turn out?

Oops! Another 'walls closing in' narrative about Trump hiding phone records with a 7-hour 'gap' falls apart.  A couple days ago, the press was wildly celebrating the demise of Donald Trump over Jan. 6 matters.  They breathlesslyclaimed there was a seven-hour stretch of congressionally subpoenaed phone records that was missing from the White House transcripts on Jan. 6. It had to have been removed.  There had to be a coverup!  It's the coverup that'll getcha.  The walls were once again closing in on Trump.  Gotcha. [...] Worse than Watergate, they hollered.  Except that ... oops, they actually found all of the tapes.  There was no gap.

What the Forever Crises Are Really About.  Thomas Hobbes wrote that people are willing to surrender their liberties to government out of fear.  Fear is what compels us to flee to the foot "of the mortal god" that is the state for the promises of protection and security.  Free us from the danger of harm is the impetus of the slow growth of authoritarian government that becomes totalitarian government over the course of time: government's totalizing control over all aspects of our lives.  And what has the century of perpetual crisis revealed?  Precisely this.  If we consent to the government solution in all these crises, we will be free from the danger and harm that threatens our lives.  So we are inundated by the media and the rhetoric of our politicians with the constant threats which rely on a sense of fear to surrender our liberties.  If we do not, then they employ the fear of social and moral shaming:  how dare you not have compassion for your neighbor or grandma!

Another 'Walls Are Closing on Trump' Story Has Collapsed.  How many of these stories do we have to endure from the liberal media before they understand that Donald Trump is not going to be indicted on anything.  The "walls are closing in" stories are too many, but each one has the same ending:  Trump wins.

Former News Executive Reveals the Government 'Warning' Given to Networks to Air Covid Propaganda.  The Covid pandemic response beginning in 2020 was one of the most sweeping cases of media propaganda in world history.  Governments not only lied to the masses ("15 days to slow the spread," e.g.) and made dubious claims based on poor evidence ("mask up" to end the pandemic), but it censored even civilians for doubting the mainstream narrative.  Now, a former news executive at international network Sky News, as well as a veteran of ITV, has come forward to reveal what news audiences have only previously been able to surmise:  Some news networks must have been ordered to adhere to the government's pandemic narratives or risk serious consequences (such as losing broadcasting licenses and other reprisals).  Mark Sharman revealed his disturbing insights into the astoundingly coordinated media coverage of the Covid pandemic in a sit-down interview on British channel GBN's "The Lockdown Inquiry" with host Dan Wootton.

Anyone Else Starting to Get a Bad Feeling About All This Ukraine Worship?  Two things can be true at the same time:  Ukraine is being mauled by vicious invaders, and globalists are laying the foundation to leverage this crisis that they've been building up for months.  The alacrity with which the establishment has thrown its full weight behind the plucky Ukrainian rebels is setting off all my alarm bells. [...] I know a stampede when I see one.  We're still in the death throes of the last one, COVID-19.  Before that, it was Black Lives Matter.  There was also the dreaded Jan. 6 "Insurrection" and Russian Collusion in there somewhere.  The ruined lives, fraud, wealth transfers, and costly infrastructure from those pushes are still stacked up all around us, but Big Global has such an effective machine in operation at this point that they can keep hitting us with ginned-up crises before we have a chance to clean up the mess from the last ones.

The Truth About Biden's Fake War With Russia.  Biden tried to be FDR and failed at that.  Now he's settling for playing a senile elderly JFK.  If you watch 5 minutes of CNN or any cable news network, you might believe that we're on the verge of war with Russia.  That's what the same people who claimed that President Trump was working for Putin want you to believe.  Their new war with Russia is as real as Russiagate.  Democrats want to fight Russia to the last Republican.  They aren't about to fight a real war.  Their fake wars with Russia are an attack on Republicans.  Russiagate came after Democrats spent eight years giving Putin everything he wanted as Hillary toted a Reset Button from a swimming pool and Psaki posed in a sickle and hammer hat.  And that was just what we knew about.

The Unbearable Racism of COVID.  The media like to say that "COVID has struck minorities harder than other races" or, as the Washington Post has it, COVID "ravages" minorities rather than other races.  This is a loaded and utterly dishonest statement, and one with racist undertones to boot.  First of all, COVID is not an agent that decides to "ravage" one race rather than another.  Actually, COVID does not "ravage" anyone.  One contracts COVID, as one would any other disease, and one does so in a number of ways and situations.  Second, there's that word "minorities."  By this the media do not mean minorities in the sense of those who constitute a minority of the population, as do all races, depending upon how and where they are counted.  What they mean are blacks and Hispanics, but primarily blacks.  And among blacks, they do not mean IBM executives or sports billionaires — they mean poor blacks.  The media goes out of its way to find individuals of partially African descent who are unsuccessful, and it then claims they are the victims of "systemic racism."  In truth, they are no more "victims" than is any one of us.  Every person alive has faced challenges.  Some have faced them and surmounted them; others have not.

"The View" Panel Accuses Clarence Thomas of Being a Race Traitor, Says 'He Doesn't Represent the Black Community.  What is Clarence Thomas?  An amazingly thoughtful and intelligent Supreme Court justice?  A hero of sorts that overcame the disadvantages of his upbringing, the prejudices of his time, and the damage done to his career by affirmative action and ended up at the very top of the legal system?  Well, yes, those are both correct answers.  But the jabbering parrots on "the View" didn't arrive at that answer.  No, according to those bitter, cackling hens, Clarence Thomas is a "race traitor."  Yes, they really said that.  Oh, and they implied that Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor to women.  Those comments, indicative of the hate-filled nonsense that suffused the entire segment, are both truly reprehensive and are quickly becoming mainstream thought on the left, which is firmly committed to the radical ideology of CRT and remains stuck on other grievance studies.

Danish Newspaper Apologizes For Publishing Official COVID Narratives Without Questioning Them.  In August, Germany's top newspaper, Bild, apologized for the outlet's fear-driven Covid coverage — with special message to children, who were told "that they were going to murder their grandma."  Now, a newspaper in Denmark has publicly apologized for reporting government narratives surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic without questioning them.  "We failed," reads the article's headline from tabloid Ekstra Bladet, which goes on to admit that "For almost two years, we — the press and the population — have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities' daily coronavirus figures."

Dr. Nicole Saphier throws cold water on media's 'flurona' fear mongering: 'It's no surprise'.  Fox News medical contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier appeared on the network's "Fox and Friends" Thursday to shed light on what some are calling "Flurona," a medical condition so named for those who have been diagnosed as having COVID-19 and the flu simultaneously.  Host Ainsley Earhardt laid out examples of the condition, noting that the CDC has reported only 79 cases of the double infection so far in the entire nation.  Dr. Saphier said, "I love the way that the media loves to sensationalize something, and I guess this will be our new headline for the next month."  She explained that the "Flurona" is not a new mutagenic or variant of the COVID virus, rather it's simply part of getting sick.

German Paper Apologizes for Scaring Kids With Panic-Driven Coverage of Covid.  In a shocking example of media honesty, the editor-in-chief of Germany's top newspaper, Bild, has apologized for the news outlet's panic-driven coverage of the China flu.  He specifically singled out children who were told "that they were going to murder their grandma."  Editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt videotaped his apology and told the children of Germany he was sorry for Bild's coverage, which was "like poison" and "made you feel like you were a mortal danger to society." [...] You won't see this in most news reports, but the Delta variant of COVID is less dangerous than the variant that China released in 2019.  It has caused far fewer deaths and hospitalizations.

Brilliant Video Shows How Media, Joe Biden and Govt Health Officials Drove the Omicron Fear Narrative.  The Omicron doom and fear narrative became a parody of itself.  One brilliant videographer has put together a mashup showing what took place in the past ten days.  It all started with ultra-progressive Harris County, Texas, Judge Lina Hidalgo holding a dramatic press conference to report that an unvaccinated man in Houston, who was in his 50s, had died from the omicron variant.  However, only one journalist actually called the hospital to check the claim and discovered what progressive Judge Lina Hildago claimed was actually false.  There was no unvaccinated 50-year-old man who died from Omicron in the hospital.  It was all made up by the judicial version of AOC.  Unfortunately, once the media, medical establishment and politicians had that press conference soundbite, from a judge — not a doctor, they were off to the races.  This video brilliantly shows what happened next.  [Video clip]

Inside the Omicron fear factory.  The official response to the Omicron variant provides a case study in the deliberate manufacture of fear. [...] We hear constantly that 1,300 people are dying a day from Covid.  By comparison, about 2,000 people die each day from cancer, and 1,600 from heart disease.  Their deaths get no coverage.  Covid was the leading cause of death in the US only in January 2021, even among those eighty-five and older.  Since then, it has ranked as the third most frequent cause of death both in the overall population and in the elderly.  To read the press coverage, however, you would think that nothing approaches Covid in fierce lethality and that all public resources should be directed to stopping its spread, no matter the costs to the education and socialization of children, to physical and psychological health, and to economic opportunity.

The Corporate Media Freakout Over The Omicron Variant Isn't Normal, It's Psychotic.  Omicron is here, and with it comes death and destruction — unless, that is, you cancel Christmas, hide in your homes, get all the boosters, double mask, and demand to see negative Covid tests and proof of vaccination for anyone who darkens your doorstep.  Any precautions, no matter how seemingly outlandish, are seen as justifiable to protect yourself from this new and terrifying variant.  So it is, anyway, with a disturbingly large number of reporters and commentators in the corporate press, whose coverage and individual responses to Covid have become increasingly divorced from that of the rest of America.  To watch CNN or read The New York Times, you'd think omicron was the most deadly strain of the virus to date, poised to overwhelm hospitals and leave a trail of death behind it.  The reality, which most Americans have readily grasped, is just the opposite:  Omicron appears to be the least dangerous strain of the virus yet.  After five weeks of omicron's spread in South Africa, where the variant first appeared, the news is encouraging: mild to nonexistent symptoms, hospitalization rates nine times lower than previous surges, and extremely low rates of severe illness and death even though only about a quarter of the population is vaccinated.  Here in the United States, only one person has died from the omicron variant thus far, even though omicron cases accounted for nearly three-quarters of new infections nationwide last week.

Professional sports again prove the folly of vaccines and 'COVID protocols'.  Some of the healthiest people on the planet are being managed by some of the dumbest people on earth.  According to Vice, the NFL is now a "COVID superspreader."  With the playoffs beginning in almost exactly one month, there are — as of this writing (the list has been growing daily) — nearly 100 (out of approximately 1700) players on the NFL's COVID-19 list.  Tellingly, Vice notes that "Sixty-five players have tested positive in the last two days, including a single-day record on Monday of 37 new cases."  So again we have an "outbreak" among those who've merely "tested positive" for the Wuhan Virus.  The Vice article goes on to mention how the NBA and the NHL are dealing with "outbreaks" of positive Wuhan Virus tests.  Without one mention of a player who's actually sick, seven times the Vice piece uses the phrase "tested positive" or a close derivative.  Several more times Wuhan Virus "test" or "testing" is mentioned.  No mention of hospitalizations, no mention of deaths, just "tests."  What's more, over 94% of NFL players are "vaccinated" (that definition keeps changing).

MSNBC's Heilemann Claims '30 Million People Right Now' Ready to Take Up Arms for Trump.  MSNBC network national affairs analyst John Heilemann said Sunday [12/12/2021] on NBC's "Meet the Press" that there were "30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms" for former President Donald Trump.

Actor Denzel Washington Infuriates the Leftist Media Because he Tells the Truth About Race in America.  Hollywood has avoided discussing racial issues with several black Hollywood actors for a long time, when they slip up and ask someone like Denzel Washington their race-baiting questions they quickly get destroyed.  Listen as time and time again the legend himself, Denzel, doesn't fall for the race-baiting and instead flips it back to people being individuals, not a collective as the commies and socialists in the USA are hoping for.  [Video clip]

PBS: Kids Are Justified in Feeling Panic Over Climate Change.  On Wednesday's show PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff relayed results from a poll commissioned by PBS NewsHour and Generation Lab, finding that substantial percentages of children believe climate change will effect important life issues for them later on like having children or where they live.  The show then devoted eight minutes to the issue by showing a pre-recorded piece by correspondent William Brangham.  One high school student featured in the piece, Sofia Palau, recalled suffering from panic attacks, and having difficulty studying for the ACT because she kept thinking of the "impending doom."

The Editor says...
The main reason kids have any concern about the climate is that they've been soaking in alarmist propaganda dispensed by the public schools and outlets like PBS.  Today's world-wide average temperature is indistinguishable from 75 years ago.  There is no impending doom.  There is no crisis.  There is no emergency.  There is no reason to be afraid of carbon dioxide.  Many other things should be of greater concern than next year's weather.  Wasting taxpayer money on PBS, for example.

Chicago Tribune Throws Gas on 'Racism' Fire.  [Scroll down]  [The] "World's Greatest Newspaper" slogan later disappeared from the front page [of the Chicago Tribune] on December 31, 1976.  Had it not, this week would have prompted its immediate removal, as the 2021 lame version of the Tribune foisted an incendiary and poorly-sourced news item on readers with the headline "Study shows any contact with police may be detrimental to health, well-being of Black youth."  Call me crazy, but it seems to me that in a city that is already the undisputed Murder Capital Of America (thanks, Lori Lightfoot) and which this week actually saw demonstrators picketing and demanding the removal of the CEO of McDonald's for the "microaggression" of implying gangbangers may not make good parents... a newspaper throwing gasoline on the "racism" fire is probably the last thing any responsible publication would do. [...] The entire basis of this article is a "study" printed in September in the Journal Of The American Medical Association's Pediatrics Review... not exactly a voice of reason.

A Flood Of Superficial Climate Reports.  This past week, the Biden administration doubled down in its campaign against climate change with the release of a suite of four reports, on national defense, financial risk, homeland security, and migration.  These reports all start with the common premise that the climate crisis is now upon us in full fury.  Moreover, they also all insist that the issues at hand are nonpolitical, and that the objective at all times is "to be guided by the best available science and data."  To say the least, however, the claim looks hollow, given that none of these reports offers any data whatsoever to support its major contentions. [...] Sadly, instead of asking any hard questions, these reports just take the worst-case scenario for granted and move on.

The crafty language of climate alarmism.  When really bad, damaging weather hits it is normal to declare a federal disaster.  This which allows Federal agencies to take certain actions, including loans and tax relief.  This is done at the county scale.  So [The Washington Post] looked at all of the disaster declarations in the last three months and determined the cumulative fraction of the US population that lived in those counties. [...] The stretching begins when they report their study.  First we get the headline, which is all that most people will read.  Here is the main headline:  "Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer"  This assumes that somehow every person living in every county "experienced" the local disaster.  The number of people that physically experienced these disasters is actually quite small.  In some cases, like flash floods, most of the county never knew it had happened until they heard the news.  In the hurricane cases a lot of people were not there, while others simply watched it rain really hard.  Losing electricity, while unpleasant, is hardly experiencing a disaster.

Media Test Positive For Corrupt COVID Coverage.  Policymakers and public health officials need to be held accountable for their miserable pandemic failures.  So should the media, which have no interest in objective news, and are following an agenda that is both repulsive and poisonous.  Among the media's favorite stories of the past 18 months are the deaths of the unvaccinated and those who expressed skepticism about the lethality of the Wuhan coronavirus.  A recent example is the death of a 40-year-old California woman, who, according to the British Daily Mail, "regularly posted anti-vax, anti-mask content, proclaiming herself a 'free thinker' who 'questions everything.'"  The mother of four — who also considered herself "unmuzzled" — "had been battling COVID-19 and resulting pneumonia ahead of her passing."  Tragic as her death was, it would not have been covered by the media had she been vaccinated and cheerfully compliant with lockdown and mask rules.  But in the twisted minds of most of today's journalists, it's a story that has to be told to boost their vanity.  They are our moral superiors.

ABC Takes Victory Lap After Smeared BP Agents Are Put on Desk Duty.  Border Patrol was already stretched dangerously thin but on Wednesday [9/22/2021], ABC's World News Tonight celebrated their job getting harder as multiple mounted agents were ordered to "administrative duties" after the rabid left and liberal media smeared them with lies about using "whips" on Haitian migrants.  As NewsBusters had documented all week, ABC anchor David Muir and correspondent Kenneth Moton were committed to parroting the ignorant White House talking point about how the images were "horrific."  "This scene along the southern border tonight.  Texas Governor Greg Abbott using state-owned vehicles to create what he's calling a 'steel barrier,' with the migrant crisis on the border.  And there is news tonight involving some of those Border Patrol agents seen on horseback, confronting migrants," Muir announced in his opening tease.

There Are No Bathrooms at the Border, and Other Shocking Revelations.  Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles  State Media  Times was literally shook to discover just how "dismal" things have become in migrant camps along the border.  I don't mean to make light of the harrowing conditions at the border.  Regardless of the cause, it's not nice to witness humans in peril, even of their own making.  What I am making light of is the L.A. Times and their ilk finding a "story" in the obvious and calling it news.  The very obvious truth is and has always been the same:  there aren't restrooms at the border.  It's not because the United States hates desperate immigrants or even desperate Haitian immigrants or the despotic coyotes who exploit them.  There are no bathrooms at the border because bathrooms don't belong in the middle of nowhere. [...] It obviously comes as a shock to people like Molly Hennessy-Fiske, who clearly have not spent much time in the middle of nowhere and thus do not understand that bathrooms don't grow in the wild.

Nicolle Wallace Tells Brian Williams Current Deadly Covid Surge is Like a 9/11 'Every Two Days'.  Anchoring coverage of 9/11 memorials on Saturday, MSNBC's Brian Williams and Nicolle Wallace discussed the historic significance of masks at the events and covid overall in comparison to the terror attacks of that terrible day.  Williams brought up the subject by way of mentioning the ever-present covid masks.  "Are you ever struck by the thought that on the 40th, 50th anniversary we will look back, perhaps, at some of these pictures and be reminded, oh, yeah, that's when we were all wearing masks?" he said to Wallace.  "That's when even our presidents and former presidents had to wear masks in public because of our uncontrolled pandemic in 2021?"  "Well, I think there are so many parallels to how much more difficult it is to do any of the things that anyone who has spoken today has done, to call the country to a higher purpose," Wallace replied.  "You've got politicians and prominent folks in the media outraged by steps that a president, not too many presidents after the one we heard from today, would try to save his country from an unthinkable death toll."

The Editor says...
[#1] There is no "uncontrolled pandemic."  If you turn off your television, you won't see sick people anywhere, and your life will return to pre-2020 normal in no time.  [#2] I'll take my chances with the relatively small "death toll."  Tyranny is worse than disease.  Diseases eventually go away.  Tyranny does not.

CNN Host, PBS Star Agree 1/6 Is As Big as the Civil War, World War 2.  As we have all learned from Joe Biden's presidency, the phoniest/baloney-est claim from liberals is that they have a deep desire for national unity.  There is no unity in compromise, only in surrender to the Left.  At the end of Sunday's [9/5/2021] Reliable Sources, fill-in host John Avlon interviewed the PBS gasbag Ken Burns, asking him about national unity, and he's as phony as Biden.  This is CNN, so Avlon demands unity in exaggerating the January 6 riot:  [Video clip] [...] How does anyone compare the January 6 riot to World War II or the Civil War?  It's like comparing Hiroshima to the Portland riots.  Liberals love to pose that they are against "partisan echo chambers."  They actually say this with a straight face on CNN... and on PBS.

It's the old "phony struggling against the wind" act.
Weather Channel Busted In Their Coverage Of Hurricane Ida:  Utility Worker Trolls Fake News Reporter.  On the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some forecasters said Hurricane Ida would be as intense as last year's Laura and the Last Island Hurricane of 1856.  Both were among the strongest storms on record to make landfall in Louisana.  According to CNN, about half a million people were without power in the region. [...] The situation is already serious and there is no need for the media to make things [appear] even more serious.  A quick clip caught a man doing a cartwheel during Weather Channel reporter Jim Cantore's live shot on Sunday amid Hurricane Ida. [...] In another video, Jim is looking like he is on his last legs but the situation at the moment is probably not that serious as a utility worker trolls him.  [Video clip]

Chicken little is real.  A recent front-page headline in my local paper read as follows:  "County bordering on high virus transmission rate."  A doctor with a large regional health system was concerned that the COVID-19 transmission rate had increased by 37% in one week and stated, "A transmission rate above 5% from the prior week is very scary."  It seems useful to provide some context regarding numbers such as these, considering all the numbers being thrown around regarding COVID-19, the apparent push to create a panic over the Delta variant of COVID-19, the obvious push for everyone to get vaccinated, and the fact that the United States is ranked so poorly in math and science.  The first number to be considered is the 37% increase.  It certainly looked pretty bad, but percentages do not always provide an accurate picture.  The county-wide cases went from 11 to 15 during the week in question, an increase of four cases.  So, a 37% increase does not seem to be all that concerning given a population of over 91,000 people.

MSNBC Contributor Spews HATE: Fox News Is Al Jazeera, Trump Is Bin Laden.  Jonathan Capehart's Sunday show on MSNBC devoted a segment today [8/1/2021] to slamming Fox News for its coverage of the January 6th Capitol breach.  And NBC contributor Dean Obeidallah slimed Fox News as Al Jazeera and analogized Donald Trump to the greatest mass-murdering terrorist in US history.  When columnist Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts asked what people would sacrifice, Capehart responded by claiming that Fox News and Republicans on Capitol Hill "have sacrificed their soul."  A bit later, Capehart, somewhat out of left field, blurted out that "whiteness is a [...] drug."  But capping all the inane commentary was Dean Obeidallah.  He said that Fox News is "the Al Jazeera of America after 9/11."  Plumbing even more absurd depths, Obeidallah claimed that President Trump is "the Osama bin Laden of January 6th."

The Panic Pandemic.  The United States suffered through two lethal waves of contagion in the past year and a half.  The first was a viral pandemic that killed about one in 500 Americans — typically, a person over 75 suffering from other serious conditions.  The second, and far more catastrophic, was a moral panic that swept the nation's guiding institutions. [...] The panic was started, as usual, by journalists.  As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images:  the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse.  The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that — unless drastic measures were taken — intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer.  The British researchers announced that the "only viable strategy" was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.  This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the "consensus" among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics.

Dear Reporters:  The Capitol Riot Was Not 9/11, and the story is not about the media.  There is a faction of the news media that seems stuck on January 6.  They need to get some perspective.  And political hucksters who claim that the Capitol riot was worse than the September 11 attacks deserve all the derision they get.  One symptom of the January 6 fixation is a recent Vice article entitled, "'So, So Angry': Reporters Who Survived the Capitol Riot Are Still Struggling." [...] Get over yourselves.  The Capitol Hill press corps are not the first people to deal with a traumatic event and be expected to keep doing their jobs.  This was not the worst of those, and some of those other events were also wholly or partly the work of political actors.  Ask any of us who went through September 11.

Pandemics are staged on Television.  When a new epidemic is launched and promoted, despite the lack of good science and good evidence, it is jacked up on television screens.  Images begin to flow:  An emergency medical vehicle on a street.  EMT personnel, in hazmat suits, load a man strapped down to a stretcher, into the van.  On another street, a man collapses on the sidewalk.  We see a quarantined man sitting inside a huge plastic bubble on a third street.  Cut to an airport lobby.  Soldiers are patrolling the space among the crowds.  Cut to a lab.  Close-up of vials of liquid.  Camera pulls back.  Techs in light green scrubs are placing the vials into slots of a table-top machine.  Auditorium — a man on a platform, wearing a doctor's white coat, is pointing a wand at a large screen, on which a chart is displayed, for the audience.  Back to the street.  People are wearing face masks.  These images wash over the television viewer.  Meanwhile, the anchor is imparting his prepared meaning:  "The government today issued a ban on all travel into and out of the city... hundreds of plane flights have been cancelled.  Scientists are rushing to develop a vaccine..."  The television audience has an IMPRESSION of knowing something.

The Left Is Now Scaremongering The COVID 'Delta Variant'.  COVID-19 infection rates are down.  Deaths are down.  Vaccinations are up.  So what's the response from the left?  It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.  The left's bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined "Red America's COVID Problem," in which the Times writes that "COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older" and that it's rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.  "No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties," the Times goes on.  The Washington Post's increasingly leftist "conservative" columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that "Red states are dangerous to America's health."

Washington Post reporter troubled by 'racist legacy' of some birds.  According to The Washington Post, it's hunting season for cancel culture and its latest targets are "racist" birds.  The Post ran an expansive report on Thursday, titled "The racist legacy many birds carry," focused on the "birding community," which apparently is having a difficult debate "about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers."  "Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies," Post environmental justice reporter Darryl Fears began his piece, noting she was hired to "break down barriers" at the Georgia Audubon nature preserve.

The Editor says...
Lots of places and things are named after badly flawed people.  Get over it.  The people insisting on renaming them all are at least as badly flawed.

Someone Needs to Do a Wellness Check Over at CNN.  You'd think a "news" network that exists to shill and promote the party that gained power in the 2020 election would take a deep breath, but things have only spiraled further for the liberal outlet. [...] CNN and the media at large have reached the point of complete derangement.  They see doom and destruction around every corner, well, unless it's coming from any facet of the left.  In that case, they'll make excuses for torching cities and killing cops.  Regardless, imagine waking up this morning and putting together that homepage and thinking you are emotionally healthy?

How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings.  The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings.  However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered.  Whereas suicides are treated as somber tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11.  There's a detailed discussion of the shooter's life story, motives and methods.  Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.

Oprah's new AppleTV+ show says celebrities aren't like the rest of us.  If you want to know what's going on in the world, don't (really, don't) look at the New York Times or Washington Post.  From them, you get only Democrat partisan spin.  Instead, check out the Daily Mail, an enlivening mix of news and gossip that, despite grammatically awful writing, manages to get a lot of information (and dreck) across.  What it succeeded in doing on Friday was to reveal the mental damage that affects so many of the celebrities who opine about and dangerously affect America's values.  AppleTV+ has released a series of interviews between Oprah and Harry (the prince formerly known as Prince) in which we are given a pathetic insight into the mind of a marginally intelligent, minimally informed man who tragically lost his mother in the most explosive way.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that he has emotional issues or that he married a woman who knows how to manipulate all of them.

If There's Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit?  If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and "concerned" NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.  An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona's Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland's Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.  Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount "ludicrous" because "the election is over."  And MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only "dangerous," but also the "end of democracy."

Are Covid Fatalities Comparable with the 1918 Spanish Flu?  [Scroll down]  It is common to invoke comparisons with the 1918 Flu Pandemic, as that was an extremely devastating virus that rocked the world.  The article makes multiple references to the 1918 pandemic but there are a couple that raise interesting questions for further investigation.  The first point is as follows, "Combined with deaths in the first few months of this year, Covid-19 has now claimed more than half a million lives in the United States.  The total number of Covid-19 deaths so far is on track to surpass the toll of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 nationwide."  Comparing the death counts between the 1918 Flu and Covid-19 without adjusting for population growth is extremely misleading.  In 1918 the population of the United States was roughly 103 million, while near the end of 2020 it stood at roughly 330 million.

The True Lunacy of Reparations.  With race relations apparently having a permanent place in the headlines and radical race activists doing all they can to keep us at each others' throats, we once again have the race-baiters out there calling for — you guessed it, reparations.  And when I say "back in the headlines," I mean that the "racial tensions" are a story because the media have a massive vested interest in keeping them in the headlines.  One of the media's goals is to keep Americans angry and believing that we all hate each other, because the headline "Everyone Is Getting Along Today" doesn't sell newspapers or advertising space and doesn't generate the Almighty Click.

Derek Chauvin — The great white defendant.  Cable channel HLN has covered the trial from gavel to gavel.  When bumping in and out of commercial breaks, HLN displayed a graphic, accompanied by foreboding music, showing two fists tearing an American flag in half, with the caption "America's Very Soul Is on Trial."  Black Lives Matter activist Maya Echols, in a since-deleted TikTok video, said:  "If George Floyd's murderer is not sentenced, just know that all hell is gonna break loose.  Don't be surprised when building are on fire.  Just sayin'."  And Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., says she is "hopeful" of a conviction, but if not, Waters said:  "We've got to stay on the street and we've got to get more active, we've got to get more confrontational.  We've got to make sure that they know we mean business."  No, America's "very soul" is not on trial.

Globalists Will Need Another Crisis In America As Their Reset Agenda Fails.  The mainstream media is pushing a non-stop narrative of covid mutation hype.  We hear about UK and Brazilian variants on a weekly basis, and the assertion has been that surely, these variants will be more infectious and more deadly that the original virus.  There is still no proof whatsoever to confirm this, but the globalists only care about planting the idea in people's heads.  They only care about reigniting the fear.  My feeling is that this strategy is going to fail, at least in the US.  Too many Americans are aware of the con game, and a new virus threat is not going to have the same effect as Covid-19 did in the early months of the pandemic.  None of us really knew what we were facing back then, and caution was a practical response.  Today, we know for a fact that covid is not a concern for the vast majority of the public.  Media attempts to amp up the threat will be ineffective, but they will of course still try.

Coordinated propaganda:
Major News Outlets Pledge to Begin Calling 'Climate Change' a 'Climate Emergency'.  A number of major news organizations worldwide, ranging from Scientific American and The Columbia Journalism Review to The Guardian and Al Jazeera, have signed a pledge to begin referring to "climate change" as a "climate emergency" in their reporting.  "Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term 'climate emergency' in its coverage of climate change," the publication announced Monday in a tweet to its 3.9 million followers touting "the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape."  "We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We're Going to Say So," the headline of a Scientific American commentary published Monday declares.  Claiming that that climate change is "the biggest environmental emergency to beset the earth in millennia," the piece announces the name change:  "Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term 'climate emergency' in its coverage of climate change."

CBS reportedly paid $7M for Prince Harry, Meghan Markle interview.  CBS reportedly paid more than $7 million for the rights to air Oprah Winfrey's highly anticipated tell-all interview with Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle.  The two-hour interview, set to air at 8 p.m. Sunday [3/7/2021], cost the network a pretty penny — likely somewhere between $7 million and $9 million, the Wall Street Journal reported.  CBS bought the lucrative rights — the network is charging $325,000 for every 30 seconds of commercial time — from Winfrey's Harpo Productions, and can also license the interview in international markets.  A spokesman for the Sussexes' told the Journal they were not paid for the interview.

Press focuses on Ted Cruz, ignores the building crisis at the border.  The media is intent on reporting on Ted Cruz's one-day trip to Cancun, because it wants to divert attention from Joe Biden's intentional destruction of America.  It is the same reason they lied that Biden was a 'moderate' during the election and why they buried the stories of all the Biden family corruption while they were effectively campaigning and de facto contributing to Biden.  The truth would have destroyed Biden.  The media manipulated and colluded in the election more than Russia or even China has ever done.  Biden is violating his oath of office to uphold immigration laws while flooding Texas and other states with illegals, including many violent criminals, yet Cruz should resign because he left the U.S. for a day?

Fake News Wannabes.  We had a pretty good snowstorm the other day.  I switched on the local news when I got up, naively imagining that they would give me a little useful information in between their usual dire warnings not to leave my home.  For the first time that I can remember they weren't much interested in ice or snow.  They were concerned, instead, that the weather not deter me from going to my local vaccination center.  They wanted to educate me, too, that today was the first day of Black History Month, that blacks die at three times the rate of whites from COVID-19, and that the black vote was suppressed in the recent election.  You remember that election?  The same one that the same station had declared, with smug satisfaction, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won easily.  On the following day, a glutton for punishment, I watched these journalistic titans show a teaser for their upcoming investigative report — on the topic of the rise of extremism in America.  I didn't need to actually watch to know that they would not be talking about Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  Their extremists are my friends and neighbors.  The American middle class.  You know — that majority far-right fringe.

How your Washington news gets distorted by media priorities.  You may not see much news coverage on the world's 100,000 airplane flights that land safely every day.  Let one of them crash, however, and you'll see smoldering wreckage and sobbing relatives for 24 hours.  It's the same in news coverage of U.S. politics.  Now for the first time in memory a research team has examined thousands of news interview transcripts and documented what might seem an obvious but very important conclusion:  Extreme views and words by far get the most attention, air time and views online.  People who speak in moderate tones with reasonable views pretty much get ignored or forgotten. [...] The lesson in all this — especially for House members who must campaign every two years — is that being the mouthiest, loudest, most extreme interview and speaker is the way to get noticed by mass media.  And they often stage conflict and confrontations to obtain media attention.

California, land of delusion.  The latest verbal gymnastics our local San Francisco Bay Area, 11 o'clock news team tried and failed to explain was why, when COVID cases are rapidly plummeting, we are not opening the state.  There are only five counties that have "graduated" out of the deadly Purple Tier as of this morning [2/21/2021].  After months of touting the so-called crisis in ICU capacity, now we get no mention of that issue.  Instead, we're treated to ten minutes of proud stories about massive new vaccination sites.  These are immediately followed by stories about the lack of available vaccine doses.  It's almost funny.  We are exhorted to do our duty and get vaccinated, for the common good, if we can find any vaccine.  I know people who desperately wanted it and had to drive for hours to locate doses.  Personally, I wouldn't get the vaccine.  But that's another story.

Expect Overheated Climate Reports Advancing Radical Energy Agendas.  Don't be either surprised or alarmed to see lots of authoritative-sounding "hottest time ever" media reports in advance of President Biden's pledge to recommit America to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and support for his all-out war on fossil energy aimed at eliminating carbon emissions from electricity by 2035, and achieving "net-zero carbon emissions" by 2050.  An example appeared in a January 26 Wall Street Journal editorial "World's Ice is Melting Faster than Ever" citing "a new satellite study" which concluded that global melting had dangerously accelerated 65% between 1994 and 2017.  The research was conducted by a team of legitimate scientists from the U.K.'s University of Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modeling, the University of Edinburgh, University College London and an Edinburgh-based climate data company called Earth Wave Ltd.  Where the study conclusions go feverishly wrong concerns altogether unsupportable speculations that the melting was "driven by rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions."

Something's in a nosedive.  Scary news stories are the norm in the Age of COVID.  Earlier this month, on January 2, 2021, The Hill reported that experts at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) predicted 150,000 deaths by the beginning of February.  Just one problem:  Recent data suggest that the worst of the pandemic is over.  In the interest of unity, let's analyze the COVID data on daily new cases and deaths from the New York Times — in particular, the seven-day moving averages.  Using a moving average is important since there are obvious reporting problems from the relevant state agencies.  The raw daily data have a suspiciously consistent saw-tooth pattern.  There is an unrealistic drop on weekends and holidays and a corresponding explosion during mid-week.  Using the seven-day moving average effectively eliminates the reporting problems by incorporating data over the prior week.  Looking at the curves for new cases and deaths, the NYT data show something perplexing.  As seen in the graphs, the curves are going the wrong way for nightmare scenarios.  According to the NYT data, the IHME's January model's prediction of 150,000 deaths is a fantasy.

First Duty of the Press:  Make It About Race.  Even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the media felt the need to pile up the false accusations.  Their first order of business was to turn it into a story about race.  The Trump riot has as little to do with race as any story in 21st-century America.  COVID, immigration, tax cuts, the stimulus — I could come up with a racial angle for any of those.  Your assignment:  Make the siege at the Capitol a story primarily about race relations.  You, a normal person, one week later: I'm stumped.  But to our media, the main point to be made about the riot was:  Can you imagine what would have happened if black people had done that?

NBC nonsense
Imagine being this detached from reality.  This installment of unhinged hysterics comes to us from NBC News.  ["]WASHINGTON — After last week's deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, members of Congress are expressing something once unthinkable:  that some of their own colleagues may be endangering their lives.  Not in a rhetorical sense, but in a direct and immediate way.["]  Yes, some Democrats in congress are genuinely worried that their conservative colleagues are going to actually murder them.


Do Not Believe These People.  Maybe I'm just cynical, which I know I am, but every single time one of those teleprompter-reading TV personalities masquerading as journalists use a phrase like "It's a sad day" or "It's impacted all of us," I want to throw up.  There has never been a phonier, less trustworthy group of people with more influence in history.  When idiots stormed the Capitol building, the pearl clutchers went into overdrive with the "this is horrible to see" and some "this is a tragedy" talk.  Yes, both are true, but does anyone believe they actually feel any of it personally?  Why would anyone care about a country when they hold half its citizens in contempt?

News readers consider themselves heroes, until the moment they consider themselves victims.
Jim Acosta goes after Trump supporters: 'A number of us received death threats... we feel endangered'.  CNN's prima donna White House correspondent Jim Acosta became a household name not for his reporting, but for his politically-motivated clashes with President Donald Trump.  Acosta has also targeted the president's supporters, only to then complain that he was receiving death threats, which helped ensure that he remained the center of attention.

The worst-case scenario is the only one that sells newspapers, books, or cable news.
MSNBC Doom and Gloom Doc:  Don't Get Overly Optimistic About the Covid-19 Vaccine, We're in For a "Decades-Long Battle".  MSNBC rolled out a doom and gloom doc Thursday morning [12/24/2020] who warned Americans not to get overly optimistic about a Covid vaccine because we are in for a "decades-long battle."  Dr. William Haseltine promoted his books on Covid as he fear-mongered.  Dr. Haseltine doesn't want Americans to forget about Covid and go on with their lives because he has books to sell.

How dumb would you have to be, to believe this?  So dumb that you'd intentionally watch CNN?
CNN's Sciutto:  Trump Not Conceding Could Put America in 'Potential Danger' for Another 9/11.  CNN anchor Jim Sciutto said Wednesday on CNN's "Newsroom" that President Donald Trump's refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election could put America at risk for a terrorist attack like the 9/11 attacks.  Co-anchor Poppy Harlow asked, "Yes or no, are the actions of the president is taking now putting this country in danger?"  Former Bush administration assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith said, "Clearly, it's not great for our democracy."  Sciutto said, "Yep, that's it fair.  Let's put some teeth on that if we can for a moment because they are sitting members of Congress who were around in their positions at the time of 9/11, and the 9/11 commission report specifically cited the shortened transition after the 2000 election for having an impact on national security.  I'm quoting here, 'It hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.'[...]"

The Editor says...
Whose fault was that?  Who tore all the "W" keys off the White House typewriters in January 2001?  It wasn't a bunch of Republicans!  This whole argument is a red herring anyway, but the Left could at least come up with an honest analogy.

COVID Panic Porn is Meant to Suppress Trump Vote, But It May Do the Opposite.  Right on schedule, the panic pornsters are shrieking in unison that COVID-19 cases in the United States are on the rise.  Virtually overnight, dozens of stories have appeared in the press, on the internet, or broadcast on the nightly news about the renewed danger. [...] Grim-faced broadcasters on CNN and MSNBC might as well be wearing death masks as they solemnly intone the latest numbers of those who test positive.  They even throw in the story of an untimely death or two to add a human interest element to their tale of woe.  Somehow, however, they never find time to mention that mortality rates are way, way down.  It's always how we're all going to die from the China Virus.

'Truth' Over Facts.  In his memoir, Banana Sunday, the late British newspaperman Christopher Munnion described his first encounter with what was then called New Journalism.  This was a style of newswriting that got going in the 1960s and 1970s.  It was more like long-form fiction than conventional reporting. [...] The new style of journalist came to the story with a narrative in mind.  He was a storyteller who would provide the reader with a sense of what it was like to be in the story, at least the story the writer wanted to tell.  As Munnion explained, the journalist showed up with a prepared narrative and then went around looking for people, events, and images to fill in the details.  The facts were mere ornaments to decorate the story, not the point of the story.

Vile Scarborough:  You're 'Un-American' If You Vote for Trump.  While most left-wing journalists try to channel all their anger at President Trump, they will occasionally go straight to the punch and just start attacking people who support him.  On Tuesday morning [10/20/2020], the co-hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe scolded American voters who dare, for any reason, to vote for Trump.  With Election Day exactly two weeks away, and millions of Americans already voting, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski decided it was time to launch a brutal verbal assault against Trump supporters.  Apparently triggered by Trump speaking publicly about the Biden family's alleged corruption on Monday, Scarborough whined that it's unacceptable to vote for him for any reason.

QAnon: The Media's Latest Obsession.  Big media has had multiple obsessions during President Trump's first term.  From Stormy and Avenatti to the myriad tell-all books about Trump, his administration, and his family.  From Russia and an innocuous phone call to Ukraine, to his taxes and how many scoops of ice cream he is served.  These are all red herrings, a way to pick at Trump while studiously avoiding serious policy issues, what he is actually accomplishing as president, promises made becoming promises kept.  The latest obsession is QAnon, in the media and recently at the NBC town hall event.  Despite being billed as a question and answer session, it was more of a debate between President Trump and NBC's partisan newsreader Savannah Guthrie.  Of all the issues facing America in 2020 and of concern to voters, QAnon is not on the list.  Yet she laser focused on QAnon starting with[,] "Let me ask you about QAnon" to which Trump responded, "I know nothing about QAnon."  Rather than moving on to the economy or healthcare, she obsessively persisted, insisting that Trump denounce "the fringe conspiracy theory."

The End of Covid Hysteria.  Most of the nation was stunned by the news that Donald and Melania Trump had contracted COVID. [...] The amount of insanity and hysteria poured into Trump's diagnosis by the Democrat/media complex the rest of the weekend was almost funny to watch.  Did his doctor lie?  Did he lie?  What about the 25th Amendment, the procedure of presidential replacement, the coming election, the pending Supreme Court appointment, the number of people surrounding him who were infected?  How dare he take a five-minute ride with Secret Service agents to thank his well wishers!  Non-stop around the clock hysteria.  Almost none of it was helpful, and most of it was true as believing the sky is falling.  Gotta love our responsible, fact-driven media.

Corporate Media Is Vomiting Trump Coronavirus Reporting All Over The Bed.  The latest news cycle over President Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis illustrates yet again how destructive the U.S. corporate media are to national unity and a clear understanding of reality.  While we are all aware that COVID-19 can be a truly devastating and deadly disease for some, despite the volume of media coverage dedicated to it in the past seven months, the American public still lacks crucial context for understanding Trump's diagnosis.  Not only has major media coverage not brought clarity, but it has also, as usual, obscured reality.  This is especially harmful to a story with such significant potential ramifications for the nation and world.  As the president himself has alluded to in his post-diagnosis social media posts, it's common knowledge that the Wuhan virus hits the elderly especially hard.  Trump is 74.  Yet even among his age demographic, surviving the disease, not death, is by far the norm.

Here Were CNN's WORST Moments Immediately After Trump's COVID Diagnosis.  Throughout Friday's early hours, CNNers repeatedly expressed best wishes to President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump after having tested positive for the coronavirus.  But behind those best wishes, CNN not only levied their usual, poisonous rhetoric, but plenty of subliminal levels of apocalyptic brainstorming, gloating, and calls for a return to global lockdowns.  Perhaps worst of all, it led off CNN analyst and former Obama flack Sam Vinograd claiming the President's diagnosis could "be the most dangerous moment that the U.S. government has ever faced."  No word on why the Civil War, Cuban Missile Crisis, four presidential assassinations, September 11, 2001, or two World Wars tested America and her government less.

Please spare me the maudlin rhetoric about Ginsburg's 'tragic' death.  The insufferable Chris Wallace of Fox News kept referring to the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as "tragic" on yesterday's [9/20/2020] edition of Fox News Sunday.  While I am full of sympathy for her family, loved ones, and friends who all have lost someone they deeply mourn, I cannot see how her death is "tragic" — unless one is a partisan Democrat fearing loss of control of the Supreme Court.  Justice Ginsburg lived to a ripe old age and remained active until almost the very end of her life.  As even President Trump stated, she lived an "amazing life" and lived it to the full until the end.  We all are mortal!  Dying itself, while sad for those left behind, is not a tragedy.

What Has 2020 Taught Us?  [Scroll down]  Then the riots started.  Then the fires, the hurricanes, the election.  I do hope that with all this practice we've learned courage, and that we've learned we must depend on God and His infinite mercy.  We cannot fight this on our own.  We also should have developed an antipathy towards the media.  They have been culpable in spreading and stoking these fears.  They have twisted statistics, adulterated the language, slung clueless accusations, and propped up asinine excuses for the violence.

Eyes Are Rolling After 'Journalist' Jon Karl Equates Covering Trump Rallies to Taking Family Trip to Fallujah.  Every once in a while, the masks completely slip off and supposedly objective journalists accidentally reveal in no uncertain terms what their political colors to their readers and viewers.  Such was the case earlier this week when former White House Correspondents' Association president and ABC News White House correspondent Jon Karl talked to National Journal, which did a story on how "the White House press corps finally drew the line" Sunday on covering President Trump's indoor campaign rallies, which they apparently find hazardous to their health in the age of the Wuhan coronavirus.

The Editor says...
The left-wing news media wants everyone in America to live in constant fear of the coronavirus (and the rioters, and the Russians, and 5G telephone service, and earthquakes, and hurricanes).  They want Americans to believe that it's dangerous to walk into a crowd without a face mask.  I'm not buying it.  It wasn't unsafe a year ago, and it's not unsafe today.  From where I'm sitting, it appears that the coronavirus crisis, if there really was one, is over now.  As soon as the presidential election is over, the news media will forget all about it, because America can go back to (the old) normal at any moment — just as soon as somebody sends out the "all clear" decree.

The Truth About Slavery.  We are continually misled by progressive propaganda on the issue of race.  Misinformation bleeds over to the conservative realm as well.  The media, Hollywood, and academia are consumed with race, tribalism, and hatred for our Founding.  The real agenda here is power, divide and conquer to pursue some ill-conceived Utopia.  The truth is that violence is part of the Left's playbook.  They are opportunists and provocateurs ready for any excuse to attack our freedom.  Much of the violence we see is a planned political strategy taking advantage of the crisis du jour.  Racism is not our Achilles Heel.  It is the ubiquitous manipulation and exploitation of race and racism that threatens our way of life.  Political operatives masquerading as journalists feed the hate 24/7.

The Black New Deal: 1) Abolish Welfare 2) Incentivize The Nuclear Family.  [Scroll down]  The time for black complaints is over.  Slavery happened in America like it has happened in every culture around the world since the beginning of time.  Slavery has been prohibited in the West, and apart from communist China and parts of Egypt, most of the East.  Moreover, as recent studies have shown, racial police brutality has declined to the point of statistical insignificance.  The raison d'etre for the Black Lives Matter organization is a rounding error.  Recent spikes in crime aside, broadly speaking, America has never been safer.  So why does everything feel worse?  For one, media and technology.  Mainstream media, citizen journalism, and nonstop social media all contribute to the sense that our racial divide is at the root of all evil.

MSNBC's Biden Backers Demand Voters End Trump's 'Reign of Terror'.  On Sunday afternoon's MSNBC Live with Alex Witt, during a discussion of President Donald Trump's use of federal agents to counteract rioters in Portland and how it might impact this year's presidential election, MSNBC contributor and liberal historian Jon Meacham conflated segregationist Democrat George Wallace with non-segregationist Republican conservatives like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.  After Meacham encouraged viewers to vote against President Trump's "reign of terror" in November, MSNBC Republican Michael Steele agreed with him and encouraged Democrats to turn out to vote against the President.

The Left is signing up citizens to physically remove President Trump from office if he loses.  The left continued to spread the narrative that President Donald Trump may refuse to leave the White House if he loses the election in November.  And left-wing political commentator and Young Turks host Cenk Uygur added to the conspiracy theories on Tuesday [7/21/2020] as he, too, offered a way to rid the country of the president in case the United States military "does not remove him from office" after a supposed loss in November.

Media Malpractice on COVID Numbers.  COVID-19 data are and have been all over the map since this entire mess gained steam earlier this year.  It has gotten to the point that any "numbers" presented as news are suspect at best and fraudulent at worst.  Is this media incompetence or malpractice?  Ignorant or deliberate?  Fox News ran a constant side bar in the early days of the pandemic, with U.S. death counts, much in the way cable news business shows run a ticker of the Dow or S&P 500.  How morbid, but it provided fodder for media talking heads to run around like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, waving their arms and screaming in panic.  Now that death counts are dropping to the point that they blend in with normal birth and death statistics, the media have predictably pivoted to case counts as their new hair-on-fire statistic to stoke fear, keep the economy shut down, and hopefully banish their nemesis back to the land of Mordor, also known as Mar-a-Lago.

The Press Is Already Trying To Whip Up A New Pandemic Panic.  Oh, no!  With the planet still unlocking and some parts still tightly buttoned down, and with the world economy plummeting, "China Researchers Discover New Swine Flu with 'Pandemic Potential,'" blares CNN.  "Scientists Say New Strain of Swine Flu Virus Is Spreading to Humans in China," shrieks the New York Times.  Say it ain't so!  Okay, it ain't so.  Not in any meaningful way.  The media should go back to "murder hornets," or find another asteroid with a chance in a zillion of hitting Earth.

Not dying is bad for headlines.  As the bumpy COVID-19 path back to normalcy bounces along, you would never know that we were headed in the right direction.  Teasers on television and headlines in newspapers report a "surge" in new cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations.  The teasers and headlines fail to mention that the most important measure of our progress in getting ahead of the virus is the number of deaths recorded.  The fact that the rate of fatalities to infection is very low now is seldom if ever mentioned. [...] The CDC data show that as of July 1, 2020, death in people younger than 25 is less than 170 out of a total of 120,000.  It is almost non-pronounceable to state a fatality rate — too many zeros after the decimal point.  My point is this:  if you are young and healthy, you have nothing to fear from the coronavirus except the fear-mongering from the media.

The Huge Law Enforcement Scandal that Cries Out for Justice.  In the American Thinker (June 30), Jack Cashill offers an eloquent plea for an Atticus Finch to take up the cause of George Zimmerman in suing those responsible for perpetrating the Trayvon Hoax.  There is another case, also in Florida, awaiting its Atticus Finch, the product of an earlier moral panic, the now largely forgotten "mass sex abuse in daycare" hysteria.  These cases, replete with lurid charges the media mindlessly and breathlessly disseminated in the 1980s and '90s, are today widely recognized as a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers.  Despite this, one victim remains incarcerated.  Frank Fuster has now served thirty-five years in prison for a crime not only that he did not commit, but that never happened.  His first parole hearing is scheduled an unbelievable 114 years from now — in March 2134.

Media Begging for a 'Second Wave'.  The media is churning out countless alarmist stories each day about the threat of COVID-19 and the dangers of societal reopening.  "Risk of new lockdown rises with fear of second COVID-19 wave," writes Reuters, as one example of the genre.  These stories generally incite, rather than inform.  They cherry-pick facts and lack context.  Only when the COVID picture is viewed in perspective are people able to make wise decisions about their actions.  It should be safe for society to continue broadly reopening while directing resources to specific at-risk populations, such as nursing homes and prisons, which are more vulnerable.

Don't fear a coronavirus spike.  Mainstream media are sounding the alarm about coronavirus cases spiking across the South and West.  They're distorting the facts to cause panic, instead of reporting the whole truth.  Gov. Cuomo is piling on, accusing states that have reopened of playing politics instead of acting "intelligently." Sorry, but "intelligent" isn't the word that describes his administration's pandemic response.  He caused carnage by forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients.  He also has no good answer for why New Yorkers unfortunate enough to catch the virus had a worse chance of surviving it than people in other states.  The Empire State ranks 48 out of 50 states for survival rates.  Dodging accountability for these [...] facts, Cuomo is bragging about his results and bashing President Trump for encouraging states to reopen.  Cuomo is flat wrong:  The US daily death count from the virus is down nearly 80 percent from its peak in March.  It's telling that the likes of Cuomo and his media allies don't focus on death and hospitalization rates anymore, but almost exclusively on infection rates, to build their doom-and-gloom scenarios.

Brad Parscale:  Campaign Was Not Duped, Media Scared Supporters from Tulsa Rally.  Trump 2020 Campaign Manager Brad Parscale on Sunday [6/21/2020] berated the media for savaging the campaign's small crowd size in Tulsa on Saturday, despite boasting a million campaign ticket requests beforehand.  "For the media to now celebrate the fear that they helped create is disgusting but typical," Parscale wrote in a lengthy statement to reporters.  "And it makes us wonder why we bother credentialing media for events when they don't do their full jobs as professionals."

Pandemic to Protests:  Coverage Shifted But Outlooks Didn't.  After three months of wall-to-wall television coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost overnight the live infection dashboards and often-uttered phrases like "social distancing" have all but disappeared, replaced with images of a nation in racial turmoil.  How are the major cable news channels covering the protests and what do their different narratives teach us about how the media frames national events?  The data provide some clues.  Since late February, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have spent at least 15% of their daily airtime on the pandemic, based on data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project.  CNN displayed a live dashboard of infection and death counts a total of nine hours a day, seven days a week.  As much as half of all news coverage worldwide mentioned the virus.

How do we explain the many thousands of Americans who believe they are entitled to steal?  Night after night, we have watched thieving thugs break windows of small and large businesses, charge into them, and run out with as much merchandise as they can carry. [...] It is very likely that they are proud of themselves.  The media certainly support them, seem to give them permission.  Why do the media do this, support the rioters?  Ratings, of course.  They love riots, cherish their power to get them going.  They love filming the looting without any police presence to stop it.  Do they care about the lives of the business-owners that are destroyed in the process?  Not one bit.  There is not an anchor or guest "analyst" on CNN or MSNBC who feels an iota of compassion for the victim of the destruction wrought by these riots.  To a person, they lend their on-screen approval to the rioters.

Imagining covid-19 under a normal press.  [The New York] Times embraced abnormalcy in August 2016 when it demanded journalists abandon objectivity when covering Donald John Trump.  The Times demanded that journalists treat every statement by him as a lie that he must somehow prove.  The Times also demanded that journalists no longer seek his side of the story when reporting the news. [...] The Pandemic Panic is on the press, not the president.  The press has politicized the covid-19 response.  A normal press would have been careful and balanced in its reporting.  This press is loony.  At one press briefing four different reporters in four different ways asked the president if calling the Chinese Virus the Chinese Virus was racist.

Showboating With 100,000 Dead.  On May 27, the American coronavirus death toll rose to six figures:  100,000 lives lost.  That's a very sad number, made sadder when we ponder that the virus prevents loved ones from saying goodbye in person and makes any funeral an extremely small event.  America's largest national newspapers have all made dramatic front pages out of the number.  The New York Times came first on Sunday [5/24/2020], filling its entire front page and three more pages with names of the victims.  USA Today followed on Wednesday with an entire front page in black and white and photos of the dead.  The Washington Post waited until we reached the horrible number but still printed some stories on the front page.

Carlson: Liberal Media Are 'Thrilled' with Division, Want People to 'Hate One Another'.  Between Wednesday [5/27/2020] and Thursday nights, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson was in rare form when discussing the riots in Minneapolis supposedly in appropriate response to the heinous, police-involved killing of African-American man George Floyd.  Carlson didn't mince words, noting that "news organizations like CNN" want Americans to "hate one another" and wondering if liberals would still support rioting if it involved destruction of their property.  On Wednesday night, he reminded viewers of how "[r]ioting is a form of tyranny" and "oppression," but "CNN welcomes it, however, in fact encourages it" since rioters are instead called "protesters."  Carlson added (as he would on Thursday): "America is a diverse country.  Diverse countries only survive if the groups within them can coexist peacefully and thankfully, almost everybody in America wants to coexist peacefully."  However, he noted that liberal media outlets like CNN don't seem keen on that: "[N]ews organizations like CNN do not want that and that's why every day they work hard to fan racial resentment to make different groups distrust and hate one another."

Trump wins the lockdown wars.  President Trump has won the lockdown wars as coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses are eased across the country, so far with few signs of dire health consequences for the population.  Just weeks ago, the question was whether to reopen, with the first states to press ahead accused of engaging in human sacrifice and killing their residents to appease the "Trump death cult."  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked, "How many will die for the Dow?" as recently as Thursday [5/21/2020].  Now, the debate is primarily over how quickly and to what extent reopening should take place, with the stragglers mainly blue states.

CNN Becomes Unhinged Because Trump Decided to Golf... Without a Mask.  CNN has made a name for themselves as one of the most anti-Trump networks out there.  After all, they heavily pushed "Russia!  Russia!  Russia!" When Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion took place between the Trump campaign and Russia, CNN focused their coverage on Ukraine and a supposed quid pro quo.  Then it was impeachment.  Anything that is anti-Trump can be found on CNN.  So it's no surprise that one of their photographers captured pictures of President Trump golfing *GASP* without a mask on Saturday.  Not only was he golfing with a few other people but he was riding in his own golf cart.

Liberal Media Hypocrisy Never Ends.  If you watched CNN or MSNBC you'd probably think you're going to die. [...] Daily, viewers and readers are told they're going to die, that Republicans want them to starve and Democrats are their only hope... and they believe it.  They all believe it.  If it's unproven and scary, there is no shortage of media outlets lining up to spread that story.  Is there a link between coronavirus and Kawasaki disease, and inflammatory illness the strikes children?  Journalists have no idea, but there is no shortage of stories about how there might be.  Words like "tied to," "believed caused," and "possibly linked" are common in headlines trying to scare [...] parents thinking about going outside as their states reopen.  Lacking evidence used to stop a story from being run, now it's the basis for them.

Limbaugh says the media is using their climate change playbook on coronavirus reporting.  Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh compared the coronavirus to climate change and accused federal health officials and the national media of using a global pandemic to scare American citizens.  "It seems like every day we get some new scare tactic from some supposedly credible source," Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated program Thursday.  "And what generally happens is after some reporting of what everybody would consider good news, in less than a day, a couple of stories come along, maybe three, that try to throw cold water on the good news and make it sound even worse than it was the day before — and that's what this is."

CNN's Brian Stelter Melts Down Over Conservative Media Exposing Russiagate Conspiracies.  Call it a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, CNN's Brian Stelter suffered an on-air meltdown Sunday [5/10/2020] over conservative media paying any attention to arguably the largest spy scandal in American history instead of breathlessly covering ongoing public health pandemic, which, center-right outlets are still doing.

The Editor says...
I think this exposes the real purpose of the coronavirus hysteria:  The media-induced virus panic is deflecting attention away from the Obama spying scandal, just as it comes to light in the middle of an election year.

CNN, MSNBC Suffer EPIC Meltdowns Over 'Nuts,' 'Terrifying' Flynn Decision; 'The Fix Is In!'  In a Thursday afternoon that felt like a trip back to life before the coronavirus pandemic, CNN and MSNBC were not only apoplectic over the Department of Justice dropping its case against retired General Michael Flynn, but despondent over the "demoralizing," "destructive," "nuts," and "terrifying" "injustice" that signaled "the collapse of the Justice Department" and "the rule of law."

The Media Racket And The Coronavirus Numbers Game.  The coronavirus is real, and tens of thousands of people around the world have died from it.  But it is not the pandemic we were told it was going to be.  That's not a complaint.  If anything it's gratitude.  Thank God it hasn't been worse.  Unfortunately, in the build-up to our current reality, the media noticed something — their ratings were up.  Obviously, people were tuning in to find out if they were going to die or not.  Telling them it was highly unlikely that they would only drive them back to their old viewing habits and away from cable news.  Print media found the same thing with their traffic.  This terrified Democrats too, with CNN and MSNBC, along with most newspapers, firmly in their camp and eager to spread fear and blame, something had to be done.  They broke out the boxes — a running total, always on screen, of cases and deaths which, without context, can only scare.  The context is never, ever given.

COVID-19 [is] turning out to be huge hoax perpetrated by media.  A recent Stanford University antibody study estimated the fatality rate from the virus is likely 0.1% to 0.2%.  The World Health Organization (WHO) had estimated that the death rate was 20 to 30 times higher and called for isolation policies.  On which version do you think the media focused? [...] The media has been hyping COVID-19 since Day One, alarming Americans to the point where they voluntarily went along with shutting down the entire economy — a mistake that will likely reverberate for a decade or more.  Even as U.S. states begin to re-open — based on the data, which shows a far lower fatality rate than reported and a much wider spread of the virus — the media continue to report on what they deem frightening numbers over the deadly virus.  They aren't, and it isn't.  COVID-19 is a bad flu at worst.  And the media should be held accountable for telling us otherwise before they knew the facts.

The Most Tragic Case of Governmental, Medical, and Media Malpractice In the History of the World.  [Scroll down]  The little real anecdotal evidence accidentally seeping into mainstream media indicates that the actual fatality rate in our nation from COVID-19 is less than the fear-merchants are displaying on their "Death Dashboards."  Potentially, far less.  Unbiased professional reporting could tell us the real numbers.  But then, that's the rub.  Much of the liberal mainstream media signed up for team "Doom and Gloom" from day one.  At first, they did so to create as much fear and panic as possible so they could use COVID-19 as the mother of all click-bait cash cows.  Once that was accomplished, many in that same liberal media chose to keep the fear-mongering going as a political tool.

A CNN journalist pens a fascinating insight into the left's dystopian worldview.  On April 7, Bill Weir, CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent, had a son.  Weir wrote an open letter to his son telling him that he was born into Hell on Earth, also known as the modern Western world.  The letter perfectly encapsulates everything the left hates and wants to see destroyed. [...] Weir is a tragic figure because he has eyes but cannot see.  The real tragedy, though, is that people like Weir, through the power of the media, drive too much of America's political agenda.

Chris Cuomo's coronavirus performance shows he is an insecure blowhard.  On Monday [4/20/2020], CNN posted video of pseudo-newsman Chris Cuomo "finally" emerging from self-quarantine in his Southampton basement — despite Cuomo having been out and about in East Hampton just last week, getting into a fight with a "jackass loser fat-tire biker" who dared to ask why an infected Cuomo was breaking quarantine.  Without a face mask.  "Who [...] are you?" Cuomo replied.  "I can do what I want."  Yes:  If we've learned anything about Chris Cuomo these past three weeks, it's that he's an insecure, self-important, entitled blowhard who suffers in the shadow of his much more accomplished and respected brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The Left Is an Existential Threat.  The March 2020 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the "existential threat" to the Earth posed by global warming, despite the fact that no significant global warming seems to be taking place.  With its appealing cover art — an image of the Earth tied up in a plastic trash bag — this issue is just what I'd expect from a liberal outfit.  It's typical of climate alarmists to begin by assuming their premise:  warming is an existential threat because, well, it is.  And anyone who questions that premise is a criminal.  Just what is meant by "existential threat" is a bit vague.

Chuck Todd Is Wrong (Again): There Are Huge Downsides To The Media Being Overly Alarmist.  There are no costs associated with being "overly alarmist" in the face of a global pandemic, "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd claimed on Sunday.  His comment encapsulates the attitude of the media and other elites as they drive people and state and local governments deeper into a panic that has resulted in the loss of tens of millions of jobs, the likely permanent closures of hundreds of thousands of businesses, a general inability to pay rent and other monthly bills, a lack of treatment for non-coronavirus health problems, the closure of churches and schools, the exacerbation of disparities by socio-economic status in educational attainment, disruptions to the supply chain, and the destruction of trillions of dollars of American wealth. [...] The problem is that the experts who are being listened to so carefully are solely focused on minimizing mal effects from the coronavirus, all other considerations notwithstanding.

President Trump needs to set the country free now.  For weeks now, nearly every media outlet has behaved as though the Covid19 virus was a cause for celebration.  They broadcast the numbers like they show the stock market or election returns.  It is positively ghoulish.  Even Fox News, which used to have more sense, has capitulated to the hysteria; that network, too, is all in on manufacturing panic and fear.  They are engaged in panic-mongering.  They are encouraging the wholesale destruction of the American economy.  The worst are hoping and wishing for that outcome.  That is how much they are willing to sacrifice to see the president defeated.  The American mainstream media is the most dangerous enemy of America.  There can no longer be any doubt about that fact.  For nearly four years, they have worked hand in hand with the Democrat party to do whatever harm it can to this country if it will take Trump down and out.

Does America need Journalists?  Here's a free tip for the media:  If you don't want to be accused of bursting with glee over America's misfortune, it is generally helpful to not cheer America's misery while doing all in your power to amplify and extend it. [...] Here are a few obvious suggestions.  For one, a journalist's reporting on the current crisis would show some sense of proportion and would weigh tradeoffs between protecting America's physical and economic health, since they can't be uncoupled.  In the long run, economic destruction if allowed to proceed unabated will do far more damage than the virus can ever achieve. [...] What we have are the media that cried wolf, completely incapable of informing when an actual crisis shows up since their faux outrage is always cranked to max power, even if indeed they wanted to inform.

Trump's not scaring people about the coronavirus:  The media are.  I understand critical reporting, but if anyone is guilty of scaring the public, it's the national media.  They have reported on this pandemic and the administration's response to it as though it were something out of the Book of Revelations.  Every single death is characterized as an avoidable tragedy — something that we should have been able to stop if not for an inept president.  In fact, the experiences of many countries not led by Trump has been strikingly similar.  The truth is that no one, not the president, not scientists, and certainly not the media, has a firm grasp on what will happen with the coronavirus.  So far, we've identified trends in how it affects people, and we have some projections about how bad things will get, but that's about it.

Trump's Kiplingesque Coronavirus Leadership.  [Scroll down]  The yellow journalism storm hit hurricane strength when Fox's Tucker Carlson told the Trump base that America would end unless the president came forward with a comprehensive national plan.  Even then, President Trump's next proposals were moderate.  They mostly loosened government rules restricting private medical responses and still emphasized federalism and decentralization.  But in the face of the media blizzard and Congress' belief that spending trillions was the only way to "do something," all Washington agreed on the need to throw trillions of their borrowed money at the crisis and exert drastic new controls.  The executive finally accommodated to this panic.  Even then, he expressed hope that extreme controls would last only for a limited time, setting the restrictions for 15 days.

Fear and Panic for A Purpose — The Coronavirus Evolves Into "The Blue Plague".  The "Blue Plague" is an intentional effort by various interests to create fear-porn amid the American population by intentionally hyping a mass hysteria about the coronavirus.  In many ways the Blue Plague is exponentially more dangerous than COVID-19 itself.  Earlier today [3/26/2020], The New York Times became the epicenter of the Blue Plague by stating people in hospitals throughout the city were dying, as desperately under-prepared and under-equipped doctors and nurses could not find ventilators for thousands of arriving patients in a state of panic.  This was/is incitement at its worst.

Explosion of leftist hate aimed at Dr Birx after she demolishes media's panic narrative.  Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has proven to be a voice of reason in a time of crisis — much to the angst of the hostile, anti-Trump media.  The hair-on-fire media is pushing a panic-inducing worst-case narrative in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, focusing on predictions of alarming increases in those who contract the Chinese virus while reporting on dwindling hospital supplies and do-not-resuscitate orders allegedly being discussed to free up more beds.  Yet, Birx stands calmly before the American people at the nightly press briefings and reminds agenda-driven journalists of a little thing called facts, beseeching them to be more responsible in their reporting.  "There is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion," she implored.

We Should Start Mocking The Media More; Two Suggestions They'd Hate.  The corporate political news media in America is an absolute disgrace that deserves something far less respectful than criticism.  They deserve mockery.  If you're paying attention and I don't blame you one bit if you're not, then you know that our nation just watched the corporate media in America 1) create a national panic meant to inflict economic and social destruction that they could weaponize and use against President Trump, and 2) further bolster that attempted domestic terrorism by siding with the Chinese Communist Party's every lie and attack on our nation and the Trump administration.  As if the last four years of being useful idiots for Russia and doing everything they can to stoke division, distrust and discord in America weren't bad enough — the corporate media in America, aka the swamp's marketing arm, are now actively trying to create economic and social carnage in America while literally cheering on the Chinese Communist Party's attacks on our President and nation.

The Manchurian Media.  Last Thursday [3/12/2020], the Media Research Center assembled a video clip of the media melting down over Republicans correctly noting the origin region of the coronavirus, screaming that it's rrrraaaaaccccccism and/or xenophobia to refer to it as either "the Chinese Coronavirus" or "the Wuhan Virus" — along with 35 times the media referred to the virus as "the Chinese Coronavirus" or "the Wuhan Virus." [...] I'm pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn't intend for The Manchurian Candidate to be a how-to guide.  But if the media were paid Chinese agents, could they do more to harm this country than they're already doing now?

A little perspective helps.  What's worse?  The rapid spread of a novel virus which originated in China or the media hysteria created and broadcast around the world?  If it was the intent of the American media to create a state of fear and panic, they've succeeded brilliantly.  The dissemination of information pertinent to the virus has morphed into a murky river of rumors, innuendo, outright lies and blather proffered by pundits who are neither doctors nor experts on much of anything other than opinionating.

If It Bleeds, It Leads:  The Morbidity Of The News.  New York Magazine ran an article in 1989 titled "Grins, Gore, and Videotape — The Trouble with Local TV News" by journalist Eric Pooley.  Pooley was angry about the quality of the stories being published locally and the sheer volume of stories whose subject matter was grim and menacing.  Pooley said, "The thoughtful report is buried because sensational stories must launch the broadcast:  If it bleeds, it leads." The media in and of itself is a physical manifestation of our primal desires and fears, and they take great joy in using it for their own political purposes.  Most likely, the populace is the very cause of the demand.  Ever notice the number of rubbernecking motorists who slowdown in order to see something on the other side of a road or highway, often the scene of a traffic accident.  It's the same thing with this Covid-19 outbreak.  If it bleeds, it leads, and they are doing their best to panic America.

Here's Why the Deep State and Wuhan Virus Are Like White on Rice.  The Democrat-media complex and their Deep States allies have elevated the Wuhan virus crisis to virtually a mass hysteria over the past couple of weeks.  Their goal is transparent, of course:  to instill fear, to tank the economy, and to ascribe blame for everything on President Trump as a means of setting the table to take him out in the November election since their impeachment farce (and other gambits) have failed to get the job done beforehand. [...] This is precisely the reason why the Democrats and their lickspittle media are weaponizing the Wuhan virus crisis.  It is yet another overt attempt on their part to take out the president.  Compare their hysterical actions over the past few weeks to the virtual silence during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu epidemic.  Obama didn't even declare a national emergency until over 1,000 Americans had died of the disease, yet President Trump has been repeatedly castigated for his supposedly "chaotic response" to the Wuhan virus.

'Trump's Chernobyl': Media Wuhan Virus Hysteria Stokes Public Panic.  Since the coronavirus came on the horizon, media figures have been stoking panic, leading to mass shortages of basic health supplies, business travel cancellations, and market drops, all while the confirmed disease number hiked yesterday [3/10/2020] to around 0.000002 percent of the U.S. population.  So far, U.S. cases of the basic seasonal flu outnumber coronavirus cases by a factor of 45,000 (using federal stats for this year's flu and real-time tracking of coronavirus confirmations).  The flu season has even been especially bad this year, with between 20,000 and 52,000 deaths, compared to 29 so far from coronavirus.  According to infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Carson, who works for the North Dakota public health department, the flu appears to be about five times more contagious than coronavirus, which means containment is possible, although especially for the elderly coronavirus appears to have higher death rates.

Dr. Drew Pinsky slams media for inciting coronavirus 'panic'.  Celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky said the media is stoking the flames of coronavirus "panic" in the United States, and the industry should "be held accountable."  "What I have a problem with is the panic and the fact that businesses are getting destroyed, that people's lives are being upended, not by the virus, but by the panic," Pinsky said in an interview with CBS last week.  "The panic must stop.  And the press, they really somehow need to be held accountable because they are hurting people."

Coronavirus By The Numbers.  Big media is all about ratings, view, and clicks, hence their axiom, "If it bleeds, it leads." A viral outbreak is the perfect story, on par with a missing Malaysian airliner or a celebrity football player named OJ on trial for murder.  The added bonus is that any negative news can be laid at the feet of a president loathed by the media, who just so happens to be running for reelection.  The media is in full campaign mode, trying desperately to drag the carcass of one of their corpselike candidates across the presidential finish line.  Stoking fear over quarantines and supply chain disruptions have sent the stock market on a downward roller coaster ride.  One of President Trump's major achievements is the roaring economy.  Taking the stock market down 25% or more may help the Democrats. [...] Look also at past viral illnesses, far more lethal than coronavirus.  The fatality rate for MERS and SARS was 34.4 and 9.5% respectively.  Neither illness generated as much media hysteria as coronavirus.

Can the Coronavirus-Panic-Creating Media be Sued for Closed Businesses and Lost Jobs?  The deliberate panic created over the coronavirus is not victimless.  Far from it.  When the radioactive dust settles from this orchestrated panic-strategy, potentially hundreds of billions will have been lost, thousands of businesses closed, and millions of employees fired.  When the coronavirus first reared its ugly head, many in the media instantly saw it as a cheap and easy way to increase clicks, newspaper sales, viewers, listeners, and most especially Ad revenue.  In the guise of "informing the public," they intended to run scare headlines and stories to spike attention to their sites.

Latest Climate Report Feeds into Alarmist Fearmongering.  The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public.  Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media.  After all, disaster sells.  But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren't just highly unlikely; they're close to impossible.

The Coronavirus Numbers Are Not Quite What They Seem.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the articulate, veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described at the presser how the efforts to prevent the spread — or "contain" the virus — would continue, but warned that we should expect the number of coronavirus cases in the United States to increase.  Fauci emphasized that the chance of becoming infected remains low and that the majority of those who contract the virus — 75 to 80 percent — will experience it like a "bad flu or a cold."  The other 15 to 20 percent, he said, may need "advanced medical care."  "For the most part, the people who get in trouble and ultimately tragically would die from this are people who are elderly and or have underlying conditions ... heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity," Fauci said.  Some of the "if it bleeds, it leads" media immediately jumped on the 15 to 20 percent figure, multiplied it by the entire U.S. population of about 330 million, and concluded that we might need 50-60 million hospital beds, for which we are unprepared.

Think Trump is 'outrageous?' He's nothing compared to these past presidents.  Unprecedented, unprecedented.  Everything is unprecedented.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  Except it pretty much has.  Whenever you see the word "unprecedented" in the media, you should ask yourself:  Has this reporter ever read a history book?  Make the case against Trump if you want to, but if you pretend the sorts of things he does are without precedent, you simply make yourself look ignorant.

How Dumb Are America's College Students?  It is an article of faith on the Left that college girls are raped at a rate orders of magnitude above the national average.  If that were true, not only would law enforcement be devoting much of its resources to the college rape epidemic, but 18 year old girls and their parents would avoid our universities and colleges like the plague.  But, of course, that isn't happening.  The whole thing is nonsense.

Media Spread Gossipy Barr Resignation Rumor.  "Sources" tell ABC News that "Attorney General Bill Barr told people close to Trump Tuesday that he is considering resigning over the tweets."  Right.  Do any of these corporate media outlets have any credibility?  No, but it keeps the news cycle saturated with hysteria and occasions them a freak out on their political snuff shows and Twitter.  "News" of the Barr resignation was first reported by one the largest purveyors of fake news and gossip:  The Washington Post.  Shortly after the resignation rumor was reported the DoJ shot it down.  "Addressing Beltway rumors:  The Attorney General has no plans to resign," DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted.  It would be absolutely tragic if Barr were to leave because Trump would never, ever be able to get a good replacement.

Really Bad Things the Media Is Ignoring Because of Impeachment.  Have you heard that the president has been impeached?  Seriously, the trial is happening right now in the U.S. Senate.  I'm kidding.  Of course, you can't escape the news because it's the only thing the "news" is talking about.  We're in the middle of the most choreographed foregone conclusion in history and the media is treating it like a whodunit.

Nets Hype Alleged Trump Audio Only ABC Has Heard, Refuses to Air.  Without providing any evidence, ABC News made headlines on Friday when they claimed they had heard an audio recording of President Trump ordering the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to be fired, something that would supposedly aid Democrats with impeachment.  Both CBS News and NBC News pounced on the reporting during their evening newscasts despite the fact ABC had not released the audio or commented on its authenticity.  For something that was supposedly a bombshell uncovered by his own network, World News Tonight anchor David Muir sure kept his distance when he kicked off the program with the report.

Don't buy the media hype over the new China virus.  A CNN reporter broadcasts from Wuhan, China, on the recent viral outbreak.  There is nobody near who could possibly infect him — unless the cameraman has Guinness Book of Records coughs and sneezes.  So why does he insist on wearing a blue surgical mask while talking?  It's called "drama," which is badly needed, because there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus.  It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before.  Over and over.  Heterosexual AIDS, Ebola repeatedly, the H1N1 swine flu that was actually vastly milder than the regular flu and, especially, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003.  Once you start debunking mass hysteria over outbreaks, it gets easy, because the same patterns repeat themselves.

Another dud in the string of bombshells.  [Scroll down]  If it takes exhaustive and complicated explanations to pinpoint precisely why something is a "bombshell," then it is not a "bombshell."  That is the point of a "bombshell."  It is so powerful that it does not need to come wrapped in complicated explanations.  But there is no rabbit hole these people will not venture down in pursuit of President Trump.  There is no zany conspiracy theory they will not gulp down to keep the party going.  And there is no arcane strip of federal code from centuries gone by that they won't dust off to construct their rickety case for impeachment.

Greg Gutfeld Loses It Over the Pomp and Circumstance of Impeachment.  [Scroll down]  ["]We know this was an emotional tantrum directed at daddy who won the election, and they're mad at daddy.  So we have to go through this phony procession.  Ooh, let's show pictures of the cloak room!  Ooh, let's watch them walk down the halls!  Ooh, this is breaking news!["]

The Fantasy War That Never Was.  Over the past few weeks, the media have been singing in 100-part harmony that America is headed to war.  From Fox News and CNN, to MSNBC and the New York Times, media magpies have been proclaiming that America is going to war with Iran, thanks to the rube-in-chief who has no idea what he is doing.  The New York Times declares the U.S. and Iran are, "At the edge of war."  The Wall Street Journal at least asks, "Will the U.S. and Iran blunder into war?" [...] We have been at war with Iran for 40 years, since the Georgia peanut farmer thought the semi-thuggish Shah of Iran was a bad guy, and a religious fanatic would be a better choice to lead the country.

CNN focuses on Trump's twitter typos
CNN's Brian Stelter Does Deep-Dive Data Analysis on Trump's Twitter Typos.  CNN's Brian Stelter used up three-and-a-half minutes of his basement-rated Sunday show to blow the lid off of President Trump's Twitter typos.  Well, two things we can all spell is "3.6 percent unemployment" and "a 40 percent decline in viewers."


When did routine bad weather become such big news?  Bad weather on Thanksgiving week can be stressful in the best of circumstances.  But this week's outbreak of TV weather hysteria was a sight to behold.  For days on end, even Trump news was booted from the top of the network evening newscasts by dire warnings of the "triple storm danger" heading across the country and the "holiday travel nightmare" likely to result.  The reports hit all the usual TV-weather bases: shots of skidding cars and chugging snowplows; airport scenes of passengers stranded by flight delays; Al Roker bounding among the weather maps as though he were plotting a military operation.  And, as always, the alarming statistics: 21 million people under winter-weather alerts; 97 million vulnerable to high winds; "2,000 miles' worth of winter-storm watches, advisories and warnings," stretching from California to the upper Midwest.

The Editor says...
On the other hand, very cold weather at Thanksgiving, including snow in southern California, is newsworthy because it's a little early in the year for all this snow.  What happened to "global warming?"

Everything You Hear About Billion-Dollar Disasters Is Wrong.  The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) counts the number of disasters in the United States that result in losses of greater than $1 billion, starting in 1980.  Over the past three decades that count has shown a sharp increase, from five or less such disasters each year in the decade of the 1980s to ten or more in each of the past 4 years.  That increase must be due to climate change, right?  Actually, no.  The billion-dollar disaster tally is easy to understand, simple to communicate, but — regrettably — incredibly misleading and just plain bad economics.

CBS Anchor Advertises Televised Impeachment Hearings Like Fight Entertainment.  By her excitement and choice of words, one could easily think failing CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell was promoting a pay-per-view boxing or pro-wrestling match during Wednesday's [11/6/2019] newscast.  But no, she was hyping the televised impeachment hearings that would start next week.  In addition to that, NBC Nightly News chided Republicans were wanted the public to know the identity of the infamous anti-Trump whistleblower who helped to start the investigation.  "Tonight, lights, cameras, testimony.  The stage is set for the first televised hearings of the impeachment inquiry," O'Donnell excitedly proclaimed during the program's opening tease.  "We now know when they will happen and who may be the Democrats' star witness."  Once they were finished with the teases, O'Donnell could barely contain her glee as she sprinted to call them "historic," adding, "televised impeachment hearings begin a week from today, and it promises to be must-see TV." [...] She was acting more like a fight promoter for a UFC match than a journalist.  S

Democrats may come to regret choosing impeachment over independents.  Ukraine.  Doral.  Impeachment.  Syria.  Schiff and Pelosi.  Hunter and Joe.  Trump and Trump.  Impeachment.  Secret hearings and secret Russian "assets."  Impeachment.  The media can't get enough of it.  Most people have had enough already.

Local California CBS reporter fired after jumping on, damaging cars during live news segment.  A local CBS reporter in California was apparently fired after he — during a live news segment — climbed atop classic, privately-owned cars, even seemingly damaging one of them in the process.  Angel Cardenas, a correspondent with KMAX-TV's "Good Morning Sacramento," was on air Sunday at the Sacramento International Auto Show, a weekend-long event at Cal Expo that was about to begin its final day.  Someone who caught the segment on air, Adam Copeland, posted a clip of it to Facebook, as he has "never seen such a disregard to someone else's vehicle."

The Editor says...
I've seen several so-called reporters over the years who played the role of out-of-control daredevil/buffoon on the Big Morning Show.  This is the reporter who is the first to ride a new roller coaster at Six Flags, or the one who goes bungee jumping on live TV, or goes rappelling down the side of a building.  (In larger TV markets, the Happy Team of Steve Serious and Suzie Plastique "anchor" the Big Morning Show, but after the first ten minutes, they've run out of news.  At that point they may have to resort to pie-in-the-face slapstick to retain viewers.)  At times, you may hear Steve and Suzie, back in the studio, gasp in phony astonishment at the risks being taken out in the field.  And then, after no more than three minutes, the buffoon in the field will wrap it up.  This is all done for the purpose of grabbing the audience's attention through whatever means necessary, much like a two-year-old screaming in a restaurant.  In this case, the buffoon/jackass thought he could get away with anything, and found out otherwise.

How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings.  The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings.  However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered.  Whereas suicides are treated as sombre tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11.  There's a detailed discussion of the shooter's life story, motives and methods.  Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.  Statistically speaking, mass shootings represent a tiny portion of all deaths in the United States. [...] Despite the low frequency of these tragedies, the media pays outsized attention to them for self-serving reasons, which are both political and economic:  There's a demonstrated anti-gun agenda amongst America's media.  And there's the ongoing shift in the media's business model to attention-based revenue that results in ever-more sensational news coverage and "clickbait" headlines.

Anti-Trump Psychodrama 10.0?  What do the Kavanaugh hearings, Jussie Smollett, the Covington kids, the Mueller investigation, and now the Trump phone call all have in common?  Staged melodrama, media collusion hysteria, progressive demands that justice be served immediately, promises of walls-are-closing-in blockbuster revelations from new witnesses, supposed surprise revelatory documents, fusions between Democratic politicians and Washington bureaucrats — and then bust, nada, and teeth-gnashing as the truth catches up to various rumor-mongers.

Disappointing State Department IG Meeting Deflates U.S. Media.  For two days the mainstream media were breathlessly reporting on an "urgent request" from the State Department Inspector General for a closed-door meeting.  Media sources whipped their left-wing audiences into an anticipatory frenzy with predictions of devastating information soon to come from an "explosive" and "highly unusual" request.  It must must be connected to President Trump and Secretary Mike Pompeo hiding devastating information, they said...  Well, the super-anticipated 'closed door' briefing was held today, and the IG handed out packets of information related to revelations of Democrats colluding with the Ukraine government.  The exact opposite of what the media and the professional left anticipated.

They Demand Our Respect, Yet Treat Us Like Fools.  Six months ago I wrote about the liberal media masquerading as journalists to scam the American people down a rabbit hole with their contrived high noon drama-filled fake news scandals. [...] Unfortunately, we are still bored with these manufactured scandals.  These snake-oil salesmen Washington "insiders" have not figured us out yet.  But we've figured them out.  They are desperados who cannot survive without their 'sky is falling' narratives.  As pathetic as these high-brow so-called intellectuals are, they are simply people who stayed in Washington long enough to drink the Potomac Kool-Aid, catch the fever, and delusively believe the universe centers on them — that all of America is riveted to their televisions and newspapers yearning to hear what these chatterboxes have to say.

CNN Counts Down The Number Of House Democrats Who Support Impeaching Trump With 'Impeachment Clock'.  CNN is anticipating impeachment proceedings to begin against President Donald Trump with an "impeachment countdown clock."  The network has a graphic behind the anchors that is adding up the number of House Democrats who support impeachment.

California ramps up efforts to combat invasive swamp rodents.  The swamp rodents, called nutria, are setting off alarms in California.  They weigh about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) each and eat the equivalent of about a fourth of their weight each day by burrowing into riverbanks and chomping into plants that emerge from the water.

The Editor says...
Nothing new here.  They've been around Houston for decades.

Network Morning Shows Hype Trump Impeachment 17 Times [in One Day].  On Monday [9/23/2019], the network morning shows managed to feature some variant of the word "impeachment" a total of 17 times while reporting on President Trump's phone call with the President of Ukraine about corruption allegations against Joe Biden's son Hunter.  In addition, ABC, NBC and CBS eagerly touted a letter from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accusing Trump of "lawlessness."

White House Press Secretary Says Daily Briefings On Hold Because Grandstanding Reporters Trying To 'Get Famous'.  During [George W. Bush]'s time in office, the White House press secretary held a briefing nearly every day.  Reporters crammed into the smaller-than-it-looks Brady Briefing Room and badgered the secretary with questions, usually for about an hour.  Some in the first row, usually employed by a TV network, would drone on and on, holding court, asking questions that sometime ran for two minutes (air time, don't you know).  And some, like NBC's David Gregory, would ask five, six, seven questions, often as his colleagues behind him moaned.  Barack Obama held fewer daily briefings, and under President Trump, they barely ever happen.

Yellow Journalism to Fake News:  Media lies against Justice Kavanaugh.  [Scroll down]  The stories were frequently alarming, nudging readers toward hysteria and, as the case usually was, largely fiction.  Today its lineage has continued to other gold medal aspirants:  The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and others. [...] But the gold medal remains in the hands of the so-called Gray Lady:  The New York Times.  Frank Luther Mott identifies yellow journalism based on five characteristics:
  •   Scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
  •   Lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
  •   Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
  •   Emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips
  •   Dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.
Yellow journalism has had its day reaching its pinnacle during the early 20th century.

Good News.  I rarely watch cable news anymore.  It's all hysteria, all the time.  CNN: "We are destroying the planet."  MSNBC: "The middle class is disappearing!"  President Donald Trump says drug trafficking "is worse than ever!"  I'm glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth:  There is less war and more food.  We live healthier and longer lives. [...] It's a surprising message, since most journalists tell us everything's terrible.

There's A Good Reason People Hate The Media.  On Tuesday morning [9/10/2019], the liberal media was in a tizzy — National Security Advisor John Bolton had been fired or resigned.  It didn't matter which, there was a "shake up" in the Trump administration and these Democrats with press passes were ready to pounce. [...] The American people aren't watching, they aren't interested.  Who cares if Bolton was fired or resigned?  That he's gone now is all that matters, and that only matters to a very few.  The opening left by Bolton will be filled by someone else, and life will continue.  By next week, fewer people will remember this than care about it now.  The Bolton exit is the latest "STOP THE PRESSES" moment from an opposition media desperate to find something, anything with which to damage President Trump.

CNBC's Jim Cramer: 'The Only People Talking About a Recession Are Us'.  Have you noticed all the talk recently by the mainstream media about a recession?  Of course, many members of the MSM can barely contain their glee at the prospect of an economic downturn hurting President Trump's prospects in the election next year.  Well, Jim Cramer on Thursday's [9/5/2019] Squawk Box told host Joe Kernen that the only people talking about such a recession are "us," meaning members of the media.

Media Meltdown over Trump's Hurricane Predictions.  The Trump-hating media has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since November 2016, relapsing into insanity after each Trump tweet.  The latest trigger is Trump's tweet about the potential course of Hurricane Dorian. [...] It's a typical Trump tweet with presidential well wishes ahead of a massive potential hurricane.  It took only one word to send the media into a psychotic state.  That word was Alabama, one of several states that could have been affected by the hurricane.  CNN, blissfully unconcerned that Joe Biden often doesn't know where he is or who he was vice-president for, was outraged that Trump is "spreading false information during an emergency situation".  This is even more of a national crisis to CNN than when they learned that the President gets two scoops of ice cream.

Is It True That 'Getting Killed by Police Is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men,' as the LA Times Claims?  As is the intent, the headline is an attention-grabber. [...] Most readers of course will not delve beyond the headline, but even those who do will not encounter anything resembling journalism as it was once practiced.  Rather, they'll find more than 1,400 words devoted to the racial-grievance agenda that drives so much of what appears in the Los Angeles Times.  And worse, not only is journalism itself perverted with the story, but so is science, for the story is presented as such on the page and was written by Amina Khan, who is billed on the paper's website as a "science writer."  So, if you dare to quibble with any of the story's details, or heaven forbid question its very premise, it makes you a "denier," one to be cast out into the darkness with climate-change skeptics, believers in sex differences, and all the other benighted deplorables who are so sneered upon among our sophisticated betters in the media.

How The Media Enables Destructive Climate Change Hysteria.  At a 2005 London conference of "concerned climate scientists and politicians" that helped launch contemporary climate rhetoric, attendees warned that the world had as little as 10 years before the Earth reached "the point of no return on global warming." Humans, they claimed, would soon be grappling with "widespread agricultural failure," "major droughts," "increased disease," "the death of forests," and the "switching-off of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream," among many other calamities.  Since then, the Earth has gotten greener.  This year, for the first time since we began logging data in 2000, there were no "extreme" or "exceptional" droughts across the contiguous United States — although we've come close to zero on numerous occasions over the past decade.  Every time there's a drought anywhere in the world, climate change will be blamed.  But world crop yields continue to ensure that fewer people are hungry than ever.

NASA map shows Africa has more fires burning than Brazil.  The dust up with France's Macron and the President of Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro regarding the fires burning in the Amazon left out one small detail.  Africa is on fire as well.  NASA maps show that there are more fires in the African region than in the Amazon.  The on again off again acceptance of money to fight the Amazon fire lost sight that we have fires everywhere.  The G-7 Summit raised $20 Million to assist in putting out the fires in Brazil.  No doubt more proof that humans are just too destructive to the "lungs" of earth.  Another detail never mentioned is that long before planes and humans, fires raged across the planet.  It was nature's way of regeneration.  Old growth was removed and new growth lead to food sources for animals and birds.

Don't Panic:  Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests.  "Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate," declares CNN.  The Daily Beast gives us "Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest."  Here's NBC News:  "Amazon wildfires could be 'game over' for climate change fight."  Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that "it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity.  Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits."  So why are there so many fires?  "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times.  "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."  It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

Yes, Immigrants Should Be Less Dependent On U.S. Welfare, And So Should Everyone Else.  The Trump administration announced long-awaited "public charge" immigration regulations this week, and the furor immediately kicked up to derangement level.  Reason's Shikha Dalmia called the policy a "complete abuse of the original understanding" of the law.  In the Washington Post, opinion writer Paul Waldman said the policy sends a message:  "We hate you and we don't want you here, and if you come we will treat you with all the cruelty we can muster."  CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin went so far as to call the proposed regulation "un-American."  There is very little nuance left in political discourse.  Every administration policy is said to be the key to saving America or the final step in dooming it, depending on your point of view.

(Anti-)Social Media Inciting Hatred.  Twitter artificially increases circulation of the most divisive and polarizing topics by making them Trending.  It directly benefits from inflaming conflicts through increased user engagement, translating into higher ad revenues.  It indirectly benefits from such conduct because lib jornos, MSM, and other agitators enjoy such conflicts and promote Twitter to further the contention.  Twitter was praised for fueling the Ferguson riots in 2014.  Facebook apparently so envied Twitter that it hired left leaning reporters to manipulate its own Trending section.

Press exploits the kids of illegals hauled off in immigration raid.  The press is having a field day exploiting children to attack President Trump and his effort to re-establish rule of law in immigration.  Tossing all previous compunction about showing a child's face on national television out the window, they put the cameras right in a little girl's face to get her to talk and cry about a recent immigration raid in Mississippi.  No blue dot for her over this little girl's face, they went full frontal instead, as if a child that young were capable of giving consent.  Now the video will follow the girl all her life, and will likely end up a topic for mocking memes, something no 11 year-old deserves.  Not a problem for the big-buck press, though, such as CBS, which in fact, does this a lot.

Red Flags and White Supremacists.  For the past two years, the left's 'go to' words were "Russia," "Mueller," and "collusion."  Mueller's investigation and report were a big swing and a miss and not surprisingly these words have quickly been erased from the vocabularies of cable news anchors and their panels.  On a dime, coincident with a handful of mass shootings, the left's new favorite words are "racist" and "white supremacist."

The Media's Disgusting Bloodlust.  If you pay serious attention to network and cable commentators after a mass shooting, you will see something nearly as alarming as the atrocities themselves.  Set aside, for a moment, the horror of the event about which they are holding forth and it will become obvious that their solemn expressions are well-rehearsed affectations that mask a morbid glee.  As you lament truncated lives and traumatized survivors, these creatures count eyeballs and clicks.  While you worry about the health of our society, they search for a connection to some conservative cause or politician.  And the print media are just as ghoulish.

The Media Crossed a Line This Week and There's No Going Back.  [Scroll down]  It really does feel like we are coming apart at the seams, with near majorities of the country being accused of "white supremacy" by some major figures simply for supporting a politician.  Driving the division, broad brushing, and hatred this week had been the liberal media.  Whether it's newspapers amplifying the disgusting rhetoric of people like Beto O'Rourke and Elizabeth Warren or the constant stream of divisive, racially tinged editorials that are being pushed out, there's no question of their role.  The cable news beat has been even worse, with one MSNBC host actually saying that Donald Trump wants there to be mass shootings while another threatened business owners as complicit in white supremacy who donate to the GOP.

CNN roasted over debate production, format: 'A disservice to serious people'.  CNN faced backlash for its first primary debate of the 2020 campaign season, with members of the media comparing its production to a sporting event or movie trailer and others lamenting the time spent to kick off the event.  Journalists noted that the event started on Tuesday night [7/30/2019] at 8 p.m. with an introduction video, a commercial break and opening statements.  The first question to one of the ten candidates was not asked until 8:23 p.m., however.

The latest pathetic chapter in CNN's quest to 'prove' Trump is a racist.  As LU's Howard Portnoy noted yesterday [7/21/2019], the first of what are likely to be a rash of stories in which "a person of color claims that he was told by a person of pallor to go back where he came from" occurred over the weekend.  The alleged victim, who has since walked back her accusation, is a black Georgia state lawmaker named Erica Thomas, whose title instantly catapulted the story to national news status.  The alleged perpetrator is a white man who was standing behind her in a grocery checkout line.  Enter CNN, which is never slow to jump on liberal bandwagons.  The network posted an "open casting call" to its Facebook page asking "immigrants" who have been victimized by Donald Trump or his policies to come forward and share their stories.

The Editor says...
The story turned out to be a fake hate crime.

Media cried wolf:  Calling every Republican a racist lost its bite.  Once upon a time in the world of cable news, a guest or host or anchor calling anyone a racist would have considerable impact.  From what we've seen this week, when it comes to that word, those days are long gone.  A person simply can't turn on the news or scroll Twitterfor even more than a minute before hearing the word "racist" or "racism."  For example, CNN and MSNBC said the word "racist" more than 1,100 times from Sunday to Tuesday, according to a tally conducted by Grabien Media, an online media production and news prep service.  The count, which doesn't include on-screen graphics commonly known as chyrons, [...]

The excerpt below appears to have been extracted from Closed Captioning.
Joe Concha:  According to Grabien Media, Since Sunday, Word 'Racist' [has been] Said on CNN, MSNBC More than 2,200 Times.  There is an actual number around this that since Sunday [7/14/2019] according to gradient [sic] media, the word racist has been said on CNN and MSNBC alone, more than 2200 times.  I don't even know if that is physically or magnetically possible, but that is what has been happening this weekend the myopic focus completely.  [Video clip]

Greg Gutfeld Mocks CNN, MSNBC for 1,100 Uses of 'Racist' in Two Days on Trump.  On Tuesday night's episode of The Five, Fox News pundit Greg Gutfeld mocking the collective mass hysteria of CNN and MSNBC over President Trump's latest tweets against radical first-term Congresswomen.  Gutfeld summarized the hysterics to a T with a simple word count:  "We are reaching peak racism right now.  CNN and MSNBC, according to The Hill this morning, had said the word racist 1,100 times.  That was this morning [7/16/2019] since Sunday [7/14/2019].  Ok, so today's Tuesday... I think when it's 1,100 times by Tuesday afternoon, I'd call that maybe an overreaction.  It's hysterical and it's hysteria."

Media coverage of Hurricane Barry was the real disaster.  There will be no media awards for Al Roker or the Washington Post in recognition of their coverage of Hurricane Barry.  At least if the people living in New Orleans have a say in the matter.  The weekend weather event, fortunately, was nowhere nearly as bad as was predicted in some media accounts.  That's a good thing.  The bad thing, though, is the over-hyped media coverage of Tropical Storm Barry that briefly became Hurricane Barry (a Category 1 storm) before it returned to being a tropical storm.  Barry made landfall Saturday at Intracoastal City, about 160 miles west of New Orleans.  Unfortunately, to read or listen to media coverage, you would have heard calls for mass evacuation in New Orleans, well outside of where the storm hit.  The word "evacuation" has its own connotations for residents on the Gulf Coast and it is not a word to be used lightly.  For a television weather forecaster to suggest such an action when the local authorities are not calling for it, the situation can turn unnecessarily dangerous.

Power Outage in New York — Dramatic Media — Rest of Country 'Meh'.  Fox News talking hair Leland Vitter uses his best dramatic voice, channels his inner Shep, and proclaims the end of the known universe is nigh, because the power went out in a part of Manhattan, New York City.

Could I have some news with my emotions, please?  Emotion now blankets the media landscape like an infant's crib at bedtime.  Google "Shepard Smith emotional," and up come nearly 3 million results, many of them focused on the Fox anchor's recent visceral response to immigrant suffering.  A search of "Rachel Maddow crying" delivers more than 1 million offerings, many for the MSNBC host's reaction to border detentions and the Mueller report.  "Brooke Baldwin tears" uncovers nearly 2 million entries for the CNN reporter's reaction to a variety of news events.  They are not alone.  Contemporary culture trusts feelings over facts, rewards heated emotion — tears or anger — and rejects medium cool.  The effect on journalism is unmistakable.  And a lot of the blame can be placed on those all-too-common twin devils:  television and the internet.

Debunked: The absurd story about smartphones causing kids to sprout horns.  The Washington Post on Thursday [6/20/2019] published a story suggesting that the use of mobile devices is causing young people to sprout horns from their skulls.  But a look at the scientific data behind the story finds that such a splashy takeaway is tenuous at best — and atrocious reporting at worst.  The Post's story was primarily based on a study published back in February 2018 by two Australian researchers.  It earned fresh attention last week after being mentioned in a BBC feature on how modern life is supposedly transforming the human skeleton.  The study was published in Nature's open source journal Scientific Reports, which is supposedly peer-reviewed.  But the study has significant limitations and flaws, and the Post breezed over them for a sensationalized story.

No, Teen Vogue, you should not promote prostitution as a career choice.  The Internet is a crazy place, made crazier with a desire from many platforms to be shocking just to get readership.  Clickbait headlines and outrageous, negative stories complete with aggressive phrases like "owned" and "called out" litter websites and their corresponding social media accounts, which all do their best to out-shock each other to capture readers' limited attention.  While this insanity is definitely detrimental to our health as a society, it deserves even more scrutiny when directed at children.

Arsenic found in bottled water sold at Whole Foods, Walmart, Target.  When you pay premium prices, you expect a premium product — but that's not necessarily the case with bottled water.  California nonprofit Center for Environmental Health has revealed that water bottle brands Peñafiel, owned by Keurig Dr. Pepper, and Starkey, owned by Whole Foods, contain levels of highly toxic arsenic that are above the legal limit. [...] Other symptoms of arsenic poisoning include stomach pain and nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, numbness, even paralysis or blindness.

The Editor says...
This is nothing but alarmism, brought to you by an environmental activist group and gladly passed along by the New York Post.  There's not enough arsenic in bottled water to give anyone arsenic poisoning.  The "legal limit" for arsenic content in bottled water is probably so low that it's easy to exceed that limit.

No, Your Kid Isn't Growing Horns Because Of Cellphone Use.  This week, the Washington Post grabbed plenty of attention for a story that claimed that kids are actually growing "horns" because of cell phone use.  The story, which leans on 2016 and 2018 research out of Australia, was cribbing off of [a] more nuanced piece by the BBC on how skeletal adaptation to modern living changes are kind of a thing.  The Post's more inflammatory take was accompanied by a wide variety of other stories proclaiming that today's children are growing horns and bone spurs because they use their [...] cellphones too much!

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?  Remember when that happened on June 12, 2015?  No?  This was the wildly-inaccurate world of 2015 predicted by ABC News 11 years ago this week.  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 2015 "Gas reached over $9 a gallon."  (In reality, gas cost an average of $2.75 four years ago.)

Paper to staff:  Use 'climate crisis' ... 'change' is 'too gentle'.  Staff at the Guardian newspaper of London, England, has been directed to address "global warming" more aggressively and use "climate crisis" or "climate emergency" instead of "climate change," which it considers "too passive and gentle."

The Media Press Dems for Impeachment Porn.  [This article examines] the motivation of the media as they continue to peddle impeachment.  They know it would be political suicide for the Democrats because only a minority of voters supports removing the President, yet they crave the countless clicks and eyeballs the circus would inevitably produce.  But the Democratic leadership, their antipathy for the President notwithstanding, is loath to take the leap just to provide impeachment porn for the media.

Climate change scare stories reach the point of psychological terrorism.  The corporate media cartels have become hubs of hatred and "journo-terrorism" that targets the psyche of the masses.  The quack science hoax of so-called "climate change" is used to terrorize the public into believing that their planet will somehow be destroyed by carbon dioxide — the very molecule that has been rapidly re-greening the Earth over the past four decades, according to NASA.  Now, a new round of "science" has been studying the mental stress of the victims of this psychological terrorism pushed by the dishonest media, and they've reached an even more bizarre conclusion.  Scientists now claim that climate change is causing "mental anguish" among humans.  Seriously.  Of course, the real source of the mental anguish is the lies and panic propaganda of the corporate media and the pathetic scientific establishment which has figured out that if you want more government grant money, you have to conduct "research" that identifies some new crisis to be blamed on climate change.  In fact, the very phrase "climate change" isn't scary enough yet to achieve the desired goal of mass mental terrorism, so media outlets around the world are now ordering their obedient writers to start using the phrase "climate crisis."

The hoax and due diligence.  Nothing illustrates the decline of serious journalism more than the fact that many of the major media, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have participated (and to some extent continue to participate) in massive hoaxes which would have been easily disproved with basic due diligence.  The first and least important hoax was that of Michael Avenatti.  He appeared on CNN and MSNBC more than 100 times where he was touted as an expert on many things, particularly the alleged misdeeds of President Trump.  Fawning hosts on these networks even referred to him as presidential material — yet he was nothing more than a conman.  He now faces about 400 years in prison if he is convicted on the many charges in several different courts.

Jussie Smollett [is] just a symptom of the fake outrage disease.  Remember folk expressions about the wisdom of being careful?  "Look before you leap."  "Measure twice, cut once."  "Don't go off half-cocked."  All of this should go double for online culture.  Instead lives are being destroyed over misleading, unfair or just plain false accusations.  People are being turned into public enemies or even fired after being framed for racism, homophobia or other perceived social crimes.  Others are casting themselves as victims of hate in order to line their pockets.  These days anyone with a phone in his hand can be P.T. Barnum.  And people who congratulate themselves for being unusually tolerant, kind-hearted and impervious to misinformation are the leaders of frenzied online mobs who are pitchforking innocent people.  Fake news is bad enough.  Fake outrage is even worse.

Climate hysteria.  The UK Guardian Newspaper decided that you're not sufficiently alarmed about climate doom.  Climate change is no longer the term of choice with the Guardian and other news outlets.  Get ready to hear the newly invented terms, "climate emergency," "climate crisis," "climate breakdown," and "global heating."  By the way, when did it become the job of a news organization to hype public concern over an issue instead of just reporting the facts?

Will the Media Ever Pay a Price For Its Irresponsibility?  [Michael] Avenatti was entirely the creation of the media, right down to the idea, which CNN and MSNBC took seriously, that he could be a presidential candidate in 2020.  It is emerging now that the media knew first hand that Avenatti is a first class jerk, from the outrageous and rude way he treated the low- and mid-level media people (producers, etc) he dealt with in his nonstop media campaign.  But because he was saying what the media wanted to hear (Trump is a horrible human being), the media were willing overlook all of the slime this reptile was leaving in media green rooms and on TV sets.

Democrats Claim 'Constitutional Crisis,' Media Repeat It 386 Times.  Evidently Democrats need only utter the words "constitutional crisis" for the media to report it as fact.  Watch cable "news" these days, and you'll surely see talking heads parroting the Democratic line that the Trump administration's noncompliance with House Committee subpoenas amounts to a constitutional crisis.  While a small handful of analysts and guest legal scholars disagree, TV hosts continue to push the idea uncritically, with some even urging the alleged crisis be used as grounds for impeachment.  MRC analysts looked at all coverage on broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC) and liberal cable (CNN, MSNBC) networks from May 8 to 12, finding 386 utterances of the term "constitutional crisis" by hosts, analysts, or guest journalists.  This count did not include cases in which the term was used by political partisans, such as members of Congress, former administration officials, or Democratic and Republican strategists.

Children Have to Listen to Fake News, Too, and It's Not Good for Them.  [Scroll down]  Kids are being propagandized about the ticking climate clock in school, on TV, and everywhere on social media.  It just doesn't help when the parents are scared, too.  A 40-year-old Salt Lake City mother said the release of the U.N.'s latest climate report caused her three teenage daughters a severe emotional crisis.  "There was a lot of crying.  They told me, 'We know what's coming, and it's going to be really rough.'"  Because mom believes it, too, there's not much help she can offer.  "I want to have hope," she said, "but the reports are showing that this isn't going to stop, so all we can do is cope."  I don't believe that these children are really studying climate reports; it's the media's hysterical coverage that's upsetting them.

CNN's Jim Acosta Makes A Fool Of Himself At The WH Medal Of Freedom Ceremony.  CNN's Jim Acosta is in a running gun battle with April Ryan for the worst White House reporter currently on the beat.  Acosta's self-aggrandizement and constant editorializing in briefings have become the butt of jokes everywhere.  His false sense of grandeur has led him to write a book proclaiming how dangerous it is to "tell the truth" in America.  Because Acosta's life is so harrowing.

Scarborough: 'History Has Chosen' the Dem Party to 'Stand Up and Defend the Rule of Law'.  As President Donald Trump continues to spar with House Democrats over subpoenas, MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough applauded Democrats, saying that "history has chosen" their party to "stand up and defend the rule of law" in America.  Scarborough said that as a former Republican, it makes him "sad" to see the GOP "breaking the law."  "You can look at all of the document requests that they've ignored," Scarborough outlined.  "They're in contempt of Congress."

What did she say that isn't absolutely true?
What strange personification:  Does History take a vote, or what does it take to make up History's mind?

Parts of the American Media Are Willfully Twisting News to Stoke Racial Tension.  President Trump is cheering on someone who has not only supported the President, but withstood an online campaign of harassment for doing so.  The media would prefer to make this a race issue and fan the flames of racial tension.  It is unfortunate.

MSNBC Reporter Sticks A Mic In Robert Mueller's Face After Easter Services.  MSNBC reporter Mike Viqueira confronted Robert Mueller with a microphone and camera crew after the former special counsel exited Easter Sunday [4/21/2019] church services with his wife.

CBS Incites Violence Against Political Opponents.  "It's time to punch a few Nazis."  It's hard to shock me, but I was shocked by the trailer for CBS's "The Good Fight." [...] Promoting violence in the abstract is not illegal.  According to the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech is legal unless it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."  The trailer showed an unprovoked assault against a real person.  It told viewers it is time to punch Nazis.  If this isn't a call to violence — at least against Richard Spencer — what is?  If the show had named almost anyone else, there would surely be criminal charges.  While we are to attack "neo-Nazis," communists or non-white extremists are apparently off limits.

Mainstream Media's Worshipping of Michael Avenatti.  Remember celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, the man who represented porn star Stormy Daniels?  Well, the media's favorite guest is back in the news after being indicted on 36 charges Thursday [4/11/2019].  Two hundred fifty-four — that's how many times Avenatti was featured on major TV networks in one year, according to NewsBusters.  CNN alone featured Avenatti a staggering 121 times.  Now he has been charged with numerous crimes, including tax evasion, fraud, and stealing money from clients — including scamming a paraplegic man out of a $4 million settlement.

Media exaggerate impact of US-Mexico border closure.  Let's hope that President Trump's "one-year warning" issued to Mexico Thursday to halt the flood of illegal drugs and migrants entering the U.S. — or face a border closure and new tariffs — will influence Mexico to make some real changes.  Unfortunately, the media's continual exaggerations of the dangers of closing the border may give Mexico the idea that the U.S. lacks the willpower to carry through on the president's threat.  If Mexican leaders conclude Trump is bluffing, there will be little reason for them to change their behavior.

Media ignore border debacle to feed us avocado stories.  Here at the Mexican border in San Diego, the local television press is always looking for ways to Get Trump.  The illegal immigrant sob stories aren't working all that much anymore.  So now they're reporting on President Trump's threatened border shutdown over it as a matter of the price of avocados in San Diego. [...] Obviously, the intent is to create a unified voice to whip up opposition to Trump's vow to shut the U.S.-Mexican border on public hysteria grounds, supposedly because we San Diegans just can't possibly live without our guac and margaritas, we're too la-la over here, and someone messing with our avocado supply should be enough to trigger the fury of Surfer Dude Nation.

Press goes Code Avocado against Trump.  How can you take seriously an occupation that repeatedly dives off the deep end over the tiniest of items?  Avocado sales in the United States are a little more than $2 billion a year.  In a $20 trillion dollar economy, that is 1% of 1% of all activity.  Mexico's $1.2 trillion economy will not suffer much either.  While shutting the border would be a hardship for avocado growers, open borders cost hundreds of Americans their lives every year.  But thanks to the media savvy of Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, the largest distributor and grower of avocados in the world, the press is on a mission to save avocados, not American lives.

The Mueller-Industrial Complex Collapses.  So much media is premediated now, it's almost impossible to find something whose payload isn't partly composed of practice for future events.  Most of the time, nobody even notices this phenomenon.  Premediation works because it homes in on natural anxieties or desires amplified by the hyper-mediated ecosystem in which television, smartphones, social media, and all the rest rot and reanimate.  Whom should I consider voting for in the next election?  Am I going to die if I board a plane?  Those are questions whose future answers seem to demand consideration today.

CBS & NBC Cheer Student Climate Strike, Warn 'Future Might Not Exist'.  On Thursday [3/14/2019] and Friday, CBS This Morning and NBC's Today show celebrated left-wing student activists around the world preparing to walk out of their classrooms to "demand action on climate change."  The CBS report took a particularly dark turn as correspondent Tony Dokoupil warned of "a future that might not even exist" for the young protesters.  "Groups of students across America say they will skip class tomorrow for the first national school strike over climate change," co-host Gayle King proudly announced on Thursday's CBS This Morning.  "Tomorrow's protests are planned in more than 130 U.S. cities and about 90 countries worldwide," she added.

Study: White People Responsible for Blacks' and Latinos' Higher Exposure to Pollution.  A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that white people contribute more to pollution than black and Latino people, but the latter suffer from it more than the white polluters.  "The air that Americans breathe isn't equal," USA Today says in its report on the study.  "Blacks and Hispanics disproportionately breathe air that's been polluted by non-Hispanic whites, according to a study," USA Today says.  "This new research quantifies for the first time the racial gap between who causes air pollution — and who breathes it."

Rebuttal:
Who Declared this to Be Crazy Week?  There are so many things stupidly wrong with this whole story that I don't even know where to begin.  First, this study, and many others like it, anchor their alarm on the supposed fact that particulate pollution causes about 42,000 premature deaths in the U.S. every year.  Though the EPA relies on this figure, the epidemiology behind it is very weak.  But without this scary statistic, a lot of regulations would fail even the most generous cost-benefit test.  Second, particulate levels have been falling fast for the last 25 years, and will continue to fall in the future.  Most studies such as this one are relying on obsolete data.  What this means is that most black and Hispanic Americans, even in the places that still have the highest air pollution levels like the Los Angeles basin, are breathing air today that is lower in ambient pollution than white people inhaled 20 years ago.  Don't expect NPR or anyone else to put it in perspective this way.  They've got an agenda and a narrative that needs to be kept up.

Alabama Tornado Victims Ask Trump To Sign Bibles; Meltdown Ensues.  Another day, another obtuse, ridiculous meltdown in the media over something Donald Trump did.  This time we head to Alabama, in the wake of dozens of deaths and hundreds who lost everything due to a vicious string of tornadoes. [...] This kind of petty craziness, played on a loop daily by our media, is why Trump has a much better shot of winning in 2020 than he otherwise would have.

American Air Is Clean And Getting Cleaner.  [A]ir quality is very good pretty much everywhere in the United States.  This fact stands in stark contrast to utterly absurd claims in the media, such as blaming air pollution for killing 155,000 Americans.  Why is there such a disconnect between reality and what the media say?  Because bad news is intrinsically more interesting than good news.  It's the same reason that murder and violence grab top headlines, even though both are near historic lows. [...] Air pollution is not a problem in the United States.  It is a problem in Europe, and it is a monumental problem in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Media Hypes Roger Stone 'Revelation' That Has Been Public For A Year.  News outlets and media pundits on Friday [2/15/2019] seized on a court filing in the special counsel's case against Roger Stone that referred to communication the longtime Trump confidant had with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, the group of alleged Russian operatives suspected of stealing Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign.  The court filing, which was touted as new, bombshell evidence by numerous news sources, including CNN and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, may be less than meets the anti-Trump eye.

Let's Chill about Hate Crimes.  "Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the television show 'Empire,' was attacked in Chicago by 2 assailants who yelled racial and homophobic slurs," tweeted the New York Times on January 29.  Mark the tone of absolute certainty about an unconfirmed claim.  Many other news outlets took the same tack.  "Celebrities, lawmakers rally behind Jussie Smollett in wake of brutal attack," reported ABC News.  "Jussie Smollett Performs at Troubadour Just Days After Chicago Attack: 'I Had to Be Here Tonight'" read a Los Angeles Times headline.  Many commenters linked the alleged attack to larger alleged sicknesses:  "The racist, homophobic attack on Jussie Smollett is far-right America's endgame," tweeted GQ, in a sentiment echoed by many others.

Bezos vs. the Enquirer Could Be a Watershed.  What to make of the battle between Jeff Bezos and the National Enquirer, which we will delight in calling the affair of Bezos, Pecker and de Becker?  Under any circumstance, the world's richest man cheating on his wife with a sexy helicopter pilot, supported by racy texts and photos, would be a story for the National Enquirer.  Tasteful Americans may wish it weren't so, but Mr. Bezos is a public figure in the Supreme Court's definition.

WaPo Spends $5.2M on Vanity Ad in [the] Wake of 1,200 Media Layoffs.  After some 1,200 people lost their media jobs last week, the far-left Washington Post spent $5.2 million to run a vanity ad during the Super Bowl.  You have to watch the Post ad to understand just how vacuous it is.  What we have here is the highest form of propaganda narrated by a Big Movie Star (Tom Hanks), produced only to give you a chronic case of the FeelSoGoodz.

The MAGA-phobic manure-spreaders of media sensationalism.  [Scroll down]  Question:  How many racist, homophobic menaces wander around the upscale Streeterville neighborhood of liberal Chicago at 2 a.m. carrying rope and bleach, yelling about "MAGA country?"  Question:  How many racist, homophobic menaces have ever heard of "Empire," could recognize Jussie Smollett, or know or care anything about his sexuality?  Despite TMZ's claim that Smollett had the "hell beat outta him" and attackers "broke his ribs" plus subjected him to a chemical attack, an ambulance was not called and he instead "self-transported" to the hospital.  CWB Chicago, a local public safety watchdog site, reported on police dispatch records documenting that Smollett's friend "Frank" refused EMS services for Smollett; no mention of bleach was made; "no or minor injury" was observed; and "officers never sent a 'flash; message with offender descriptions to field units."

An example of news media sensationalism:
It Could Take Joshua Tree 300 Years to Recover From the Government Shutdown.  Though the government shutdown may have ended last Friday [1/25/2019], Joshua Tree National Park will be feeling the ruinous effects of it for hundreds of years.  Throughout the duration of the shutdown, which lasted a record-long 35 days, national parks greatly suffered: human waste piled up, lands were littered with trash, and some campgrounds and other public areas even closed to visitors, as the parks weren't adequately staffed to stay open.  It wasn't until after Joshua Tree closed on January 2, though, that humans became excessively reckless, during which they off-roaded, graffittied rocks, started campfires in illegal areas, and cut down protected trees.

The Editor says...
Sounds like a wee bit of an exaggeration.  Human waste does not stick around for 300 years.  Neither does litter.  Neither do tire tracks.  But aside from that, the obvious solution is to privatize the park.  (By the way, graffiti is not a verb.  Neither is off-road.)  But this whole story seems very far-fetched.  Were a bunch of anarchist maniacs taking advantage the government shutdown, during which they could enter the unattended national parks and spread garbage and feces everywhere?  Sounds like a false flag to me:  Somebody went into the park and trashed it, in order to make the "government shutdown" as ghastly as possible — something that must be avoided at all cost — when in reality very few people outside of a 200-mile radius from Washington DC even noticed the five-week shutdown.

The Famed 'Doomsday Clock' Is Little More Than 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.  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 nuclear annihilation.  After all, the Clock routinely counted down after a Republican wins the White House, and ticked up when Democrats reclaim the presidency.

Apocalypse Creep.  Nothing says "end of the world" like a big fake clock.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave its annual Doomsday Clock presentation on Thursday [1/24/2019] and announced that it's still two minutes to midnight.  Last year, the group of 15 scholars and scientists moved the phony minute hand of fate 30 seconds closer to Armageddon, from two-and-a-half minutes to midnight to its present setting, 11:58 pm sharp.  By the Bulletin's logic, we're as close to the end as we've ever been.  The whole thing is adorably retro.

How the media convinces us we're all outraged — even when no one cares.  Lazy media reporters who are too lazy to even actually speak to people anymore are instead constructing Potemkin Villages of fake hate, fake disgust and fake outrage.  They're Contemptkin Villages.  No one really lives there.  The laziest hacks can build them using tweets, even tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts.  Somehow these hacks are employed at places like the BBC and the [New York] Times. [...] Shameless online editors today figure that readers will click through to anything that is supposedly making anyone mad.  And if the underlying story doesn't actually contain any evidence that anyone has blown his lid, too late!  Made ya click.

Government shutdown lessons — We could take a chainsaw to so much of government.  This government shutdown is now longer than any in history.  The media keep using the word "crisis."  "Shutdown sows chaos, confusion and anxiety!" says The Washington Post.  "Pain spreads widely."  The New York Times headlined, it's all "just too much!"  But wait.  Looking around America, I see people going about their business — families eating in restaurants, employees going to work, children playing in playgrounds, etc.  I have to ask:  Where's the crisis?

Media's anti-Trump addiction amps up the outrage and fuels the public's suspicion.  Alas, much of today's political journalism has fallen into advocacy, intentionally inflammatory, using or omitting selective details, quotes and background to make a case against President Donald Trump.  The criticism generally centers on something he did or said he would do — or something someone, usually unidentified, said he might do or is considering possibly doing.  And then in a kind of staged Kabuki dance, journalists run to gather reaction from waiting opponents who provide a predictably outraged quote calling for counteraction.  Yes, this president's name boosts ratings and clicks from both sides.  But the media's addiction to anything Trump lets this president manipulate them, which he does skillfully.  It squeezes out other important news.  And it denies Americans a set of generally-accepted facts to debate, merely providing fodder for an anti-Trump agenda and more argumentative ammo for both sides.

How many times have the media predicted doom because of Trump, and how many times have they been dead wrong?  On Thursday [1/10/2019], there was a screaming headline on Drudge saying, "Doomsday."  The article was from NBC News, and the source of the doomsday report was the ever reliable Mark Zandi of Moody's.  The purpose of the report was not to be objective news, because anyone with a brain knows that the shutdown will end soon.  The purpose was to scare the public, tamp down economic growth, and destroy Trump.

Sorry, I Don't Feel Sorry For Furloughed Feds.  Now that the nation has heard the President explain how he wants to address our immigration crisis, and we have all enjoyed the comic relief offered by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in lieu of a serious response, the media have launched a propaganda campaign they hope will pull the Democrats from the ditch they have driven into regarding "the wall."  But our friends in the Fourth Estate are approaching the project in a manner that merely highlights how divorced they are from the world beyond the Beltway.  Their primary focus involves the heartrending human tragedy of... idle bureaucrats.

The Media Was Still Unglued in 2018.  The comparisons to dictators (especially Hitler) were once shocking, but no longer.  These smears arrive almost daily.  Take perpetually malcontent Steve Schmidt lecturing on MSNBC. Trump "creates a mass sense of victimization amongst his base," he said.  "And then he asserts extraordinary claims of power to protect the victims from the scapegoated populations and the nefarious conspiracy.  That is fundamentally illiberal, deeply un-American, and, frankly, could be straight out of Munich circa 1928."  Then there's the racial panic.  "Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era," wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.  Trump & Co. is responsible for encouraging the murder of blacks?  O-o-K.  Krugman wrote this junk after a lone gunman killed two African-Americans at a supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky.  Any terrible event can be quickly blamed on Trump.

Chuck Todd's Perpetual Hype Machine: 'What If the President IS the Crisis?'Meet the Press host Chuck Todd has proclaimed he thinks NBC and MSNBC are a very "fact-based environment," unlike Fox News.  But his opening to his show on Sunday sounded like a dramatic editorial, underlining all of Trump's problems with Republican leaders and conservative radio and TV hosts, throwing together the shutdown, the resignation of the defense secretary, and the stock market decline into one grand opinionated summary:  [Video clip]

Flashback: Media Silence After Obama Fires General Mattis Without Even a Call.  The liberal media and DC establishment suffered a complete meltdown on Thursday [12/20/2018] after the sudden resignation by Secretary of Defense James Mattis.  Talk of impeachment, coups, and suicide abound over fears that Mattis was the last 'adult' keeping President Trump in check.  Mattis resigned as Trump moved to assert mastery over his presidency this week in key areas after nearly two years on the job.

Recap and overview of the Jim Acosta tantrum:
Profiles in Absurdity:  Jim Acosta as First Amendment 'Hero'.  The underlying facts are by now well-known:  The insufferable Acosta, surely the most obnoxious "correspondent" ever to hold a White House press pass — a dubious distinction in a competition that includes Sam Donaldson (ABC) and the late Helen Thomas (UPI), among others — had his credentials suspended after a particularly abrasive encounter with President Trump at a November 7 presser.  In a widely publicized incident, Acosta harangued at length, refused to relinquish the microphone when directed to do so, and pushed away a young female intern who was trying to pass the mic to another reporter.  White House press passes have always been viewed as discretionary and subject to regulation, in order reasonably to limit the size of the press pool and ensure proper decorum.  Reporters are expected to be courteous and to exhibit professional behavior.  The attention-seeking Acosta, as is his custom, was grandstanding at the press conference, and breached longstanding protocols by insisting on arguing disrespectfully with the president.  For this, his "hard pass" — necessary to gain entrance to the White House — was temporarily suspended.  CNN was not barred from the White House; only Acosta was.

Like Drug Addicts, Reporters Demean Themselves For Just One More Trump Story.  But, it's not enough.  It's not getting them the high they want.  The high they crave.  The traffic, the clicks, the views, the response... none of it is the same.  There's gotta be a stronger dose somewhere.  So, when it comes time to cover the funeral of the former president, they seek out something stronger.  Trump is sitting by the Obamas and the Clintons!  He's not reciting the Creed!  He is doing this or not doing that!  And in the process, the funeral is no longer about George H.W. Bush.  It is about Trump.  It's wrong.  They know it's wrong.  They can't help themselves, though.  They are addicts.

A little hysteria can make the news go down.  The mainstream/legacy/hothouse media has been rubbing sticks together for months, trying to start a fire under the White House to frighten the administration into abolishing fossil fuels before Christmas.  Hysteria used to be the sworn enemy of newspapers.  (Television, not so much.)  Now everyone manufactures it.  Helene Cooper of The New York Times thinks it's OK to spread a little hysteria because becoming "hysterical" is the right and proper response.

Trump hatred fueled media's yearlong obsession with Avenatti and Stormy.  2018 was the year the mainstream media willingly handed whatever was left of their credibility and dignity over to an aging porn star/stripper and her odious, ethically challenged attorney. [...] At one point, Mr. Avenatti had become such a fixture on certain cable networks that it almost appeared he had joined the prime-time lineup.  Analysts at the Media Research Center categorized his appearances on CNN over a two-month period.  The results are as startling as they are embarrassing.

Another nothing-burger?  Catherine Herridge breaks down Michael Cohen's guilty plea 'bombshell'.  Early Thursday morning word broke that President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress during its investigation into possible Russian collusion.  Following the announcement, the perpetually hysterical left broke into cheers of gleeful applause over the belief that the president would soon be the next one to be indicted.

Trump has the goods on Democrats.  CNN was so excited on June 6, 2017.  Jim Comey was going to testify in Congress in two days.  The fired FBI director would start the ball rolling on the impeachment of the Orange Man.  The cable outlet posted a story, "Comey expected to refute Trump."  Wolf Blitzer cranked up his self-righteousness to Pope Level.  CNN attached a countdown-to-Comey clock to its chyron.  Then Comey released his opening statement to the public a day early.  Blitzer dialed down his attitude to DMV clerk.  The countdown clock disappeared.  The story was downgraded to "Comey unlikely to judge on obstruction."

Jim Acosta Will Only Behave When There's A Democrat In The White House.  President Donald Trump says he's drafting rules of decorum for White House reporters in the wake of the lawsuit involving CNN's aggressively misbehaving reporter Jim Acosta.  Funny how unruly press behavior never comes up when a Democrat is president.

White House has to tell reporters how to act like adults.  Sarah Sanders today issued rules of conduct for White House reporters.  Everyone in the press room should be embarrassed because like kindergartners, they have to be told to share the microphone and take turns asking questions.  These geniuses brought this nonsense on because they were too pathetically lame to tell Jim Acosta to sit down and shut up.  Instead, their self-important White House Correspondents Association issued a statement of support, "Journalists may use a range of approaches to carry out their jobs and the WHCA does not police the tone or frequency of the questions its members ask of powerful senior government officials, including the President.  "Such interactions, however uncomfortable they may appear to be, help define the strength of our national institutions.  We urge the White House to immediately reverse this weak and misguided action."

CNN Requests Emergency Hearing After Trump Warns Acosta's Press Pass in Jeopardy Again.  CNN host Brian Stelter reports that the White House may once again revoke White House correspondent Jim Acosta's press credential after a judge ruled to reinstate the "hard pass" last week.  The network has asked for an emergency hearing in response to the threat.  "Friday's court ruling means that a temporary restraining order is in effect for 14 days.  But W.H. officials sent Acosta a letter stating that his press pass is set to be suspended again once the restraining order expires," Stelter tweeted late Sunday [11/18/2018].

The Editor says...
The suspension of a press pass for a single ill-behaved reporter is not an emergency.

White House Notifies CNN Journalist Jim Acosta of Rules to Permanently Revoke "Hard Pass".  The White House sent a letter to CNN narrative engineer Jim Acosta notifying him his pass granting him temporary access to the White House grounds could be suspended after a temporary restraining order runs its course.

Acosta decision could make it easier for White House to kick reporters out.  In short, the judge said to the White House:  You can't throw out a reporter without going through a process.  But if you go through a process — which you, the White House, can design — then you can throw the reporter out.  In the end, it could be that Kelly's ruling will make it easier for the White House to oust reporters in the future — and to make the decision stick.

Jim Acosta is smug, and no court ruling changes that.  CNN's Jim Acosta scored some court points with a ruling that orders the White House to give back his press pass, at least for the time being.  But he still presents as a smug elitist.  He presented as an out-of-touch elitist the day he jerked away from the arm of the reaching White House intern — the day he refused to cede the microphone and cede the floor and cede his time to the many other journalists who were patiently waiting to pose questions to the president.

Jim Acosta and the Hubris of Celebrity Journalism.  When do Jim Acosta's 15 minutes of fame expire?  Has there ever been anyone less deserving of the spotlight who has managed to hog it quite so thoroughly as CNN's White House show horse?  Most recently, on Nov. 7, Acosta gave President Trump a moral lecture in the form of a loaded "question" about why Trump called the migrant "caravan" an "invasion."  According to Acosta, it is not an invasion because the migrants were hundreds of miles away, and besides, the migrants aren't going to be "climbing over walls and so on."  One week later, as we all know, members of the caravan (and of course it's not really a "caravan") were sitting astride the border wall and invading U.S. territory.  So much for Acosta's credibility.  Mind you, the president answered Acosta's "When are you going to stop beating your wife?" question, and acknowledged that he and the reporter have a difference of opinion about what an invasion is, but Acosta was pressing his left-wing agenda and not actually trying to elicit information with his "fake question."

Acosta Gets His Press Pass Back, But Trump Is the Real Winner.  It would be the easiest thing in the world for the White House to turn Acosta into a non-entity, just another cable-news squawker tut-tutting the president's decisions into a camera from the White House lawn.  Call on him, give him bland answers to his silly questions, and move on.  Or don't call on him at all!  Instead, time after time, Trump and press secretary Sarah Sanders have allowed Acosta to harrumph them into tiffs that become news stories in themselves.  Last Friday's foolishness, with Acosta white-knuckling the mic and Trump shouting and that poor intern visibly wishing she'd taken some other gig, was just the latest, greatest example.  Why?  Because the White House loves it when Acosta is in the spotlight.  He's the perfect foil to Trump, the perfect face for the administration's constant campaign against the "fake news media."

Trump everyone's hard passes then.  A federal judge today [11/16/2018] ordered President Trump to restore Jim Acosta's hard pass access to the White House despite Acosta's belligerence at a press conference.  Just about every media outlet who gets hard passes sided with Acosta. [...] Revoke all the hard passes.  Make them stand in line each day with every other reporter from outlets not so privileged seeking access.  The press wants to play hardball, so play hardball.  Why give them this privilege when they hate him?

Everyone Is Wrong About The Jim Acosta, White House Battle.  Jim Acosta is a pundit who works for CNN.  He was credentialed to attend White House press briefings, which he routinely used as opportunities to share his personal political views and animosity toward President Donald Trump.  The situation with Acosta, who is known as a shameless grandstander who seeks personal attention rather than a journalist who seeks to cover the news, came to a head last week when he repeatedly violated decorum at the White House by offering personal opinions in the place of actual questions, fighting with the president, interrupting the president, and belligerently refusing to return the White House microphone to a staff member.

Levin: 'No reporter has a constitutional right' to be in the White House.  Tuesday [11/13/2018] on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin called out the ridiculous stunt of CNN's lawsuit against the Trump administration over the antics of reporter Jim Acosta.  "The purpose of a presidential press conference is to allow as many reporters as possible to ask pertinent questions, and for the president to answer them.  In other words, a press conference is for the American people.  One of the difficulties the other members of the press and the president are having communicating with each other ... is Jim Acosta.  When Jim Acosta disrupts the press conference, monopolized the time, and basically gives his political opinions about a president who he constantly calls a liar, we learn nothing," Levin said.

Trump White House Responds to Judge's Ruling that CNN's Jim Acosta Has Right to Disrupt White House Pressers.  On Friday morning [11/16/2018] a federal judge ruled that the Trump White House must restore jackass Jim Acosta's hard press pass.  This is unbelievable.  In any other business this jackass would be fired — at CNN he is defended in court.

CNN's Acosta stopped being a journalist long ago.  Invariably, [Jim] Acosta makes his interactions with Trump all about himself.  The fact that the CNN reporter had his press credentials pulled — even if only temporarily — will surely feed the legend and perhaps add a couple of zeros to his speaking fee or a future book deal.  Still, Acosta deserved the rebuke.  He was arrogant, rude and sanctimonious.  He was sent to cover the story, and he made himself the story.  He was supposed to ask questions, but instead he tried to "challenge" the president about the refugee caravan.  He asked several questions, instead of one.  And when he got answers, he rejected them.

When reporters stick together — as a mob.  [Scroll down]  Acosta wasn't there to ask questions.  He was there to lecture and make accusations, as were they all.  But Acosta's disrespect and contemptuousness is special... especially obnoxious.  He is a hothead and, knowing his act, why he gets a front row seat at these briefings would be my first question.  He is no reporter, but rather a Resist Trump community organizer.

Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive.  When CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stages his periodic psychodramatic shout-downs of Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Donald Trump, he is no Edward R. Murrow bucking Joe McCarthy, but rather he is one-upping his progressive like-minded journalists, virtue-signaling to his CNN liberal audience, and scoring career chits with his left-wing bosses and employers.

Jim Acosta isn't disliked because of his 'hard questions' but because he doesn't ask any real ones.  There are a lot of ways to describe what CNN's Jim Acosta does when he shows up for a White House press briefing or a press conference with President Trump: stunt, showboat, grandstand.  But you cannot say he's there to ask "hard questions," as the New York Times characterized his routine in an editorial Thursday [11/8/2018].

Fearmongering on the Left Has Been Ignored in 2018 Coverage.  A CNN screen graphic bluntly asked on the morning of Tuesday's midterms elections, "Will fear win?" I think the answer is "yes," but not necessarily for the same reasons as the Chyron With Attitude.  CNN was referring to President Donald Trump's aggressive rhetoric against illegal immigration, sending troops to the border, and warning of the consequences of Democratic victories in the 2018 elections.  It wasn't alone in portraying the race as Democrats Vs.  The Fearmongerers.  The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump is "painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign's final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty."

Senate report paints devastating profile of Justice Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick.  A new Senate committee report questions the credibility of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's three main accusers, dishing out the worst criticism at gang-rape accuser Julie Swetnick.  The 400-page report by the Judiciary Committee's Republican staff paints a devastating portrait of Ms. Swetnick.  She made the most sensational charges of the women accusers and won airtime on national TV.  The report depicts her as dangerous, a serial complainer, a liar, mentally unstable and cruel toward her parents.  It turns out that in one of Ms. Swetnick's previous sexual harassment complaints she was represented by Debra Katz, the Democratic-connected attorney who took the case of Christine Blasey Ford.  The Palo Alto, California, psychologist emerged as the first accuser of Justice Kavanaugh, who ultimately won Senate confirmation on Oct. 5 to the Supreme Court.

Democrats have intentionally divided the country and stoked fear among the public for a very long time.  Democrats have always tried to scare the people on food stamps, Medicare, social security and Medicaid.  Republicans want to starve children.  Democrats support Iran that spreads terrorism and pledges death to Israel and death to America.  Democrats are the ones who support Louis Farrakhan, not Republicans.  Democrats are the ones that had the KKK leader as an honorable leader in the Senate for years, not Republicans.  Democrats are the ones that pushed the fictional "hands up don't shoot" narrative to gin up racial hate and hate towards cops, not Republicans.  Who knows how many deaths and how much violence that caused.  Democrats are the ones who created a fictional dossier to destroy a political opponent and used the Justice Department to spy on them.  The person that shot up the Jews in Pittsburgh hates Trump yet somehow the media blames Trump.  The media has supported Democrats no matter what they say or do and now they are willing enablers and participants in seeking to destroy Trump and other Republicans no matter how much propaganda they have to spread.

'Nothing to Gain,' Kavanaugh Accuser Raises Nearly $1 Million.  During the crucible of Brett Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation hearings, Democrats repeatedly asserted that Christine Blasey Ford had "nothing to gain" by coming forward with her explosive accusation of attempted rape against the Supreme Court nominee.  "You had absolutely nothing to gain by bringing these facts to the Senate Judiciary Committee," Sen. Dick Durbin said during her testimony last month.  This sentiment was echoed by other Democrats, who presented it as evidence that Ford was telling the truth.  "I want to thank you," added California Sen. Kamala Harris, "because you clearly have nothing to gain for what you have done."  In fact, Ford stands to gain some $1 million and counting from national crowdfunding campaigns launched by friends and other supporters, while she is said to be fielding book offers.

Avenatti's media honeymoon is over following Kavanaugh accuser backlash.  No private citizen has enjoyed more free airtime on two-thirds of the major cable news networks than Michael Avenatti has in 2018.  Tune in to CNN and there's a decent chance you'll find him there.  If he isn't on CNN, there's an equally good chance he'll be on MSNBC.

Are We on the Verge of Civil War?  The internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob.  In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral.  Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.  Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions.  Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism — on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.  Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint.  Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a "fake news" moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.

CNN's Jake Tapper Dedicates Segment to Trump's Penis.  CNN aired a segment about Stormy Daniels' new book that described what Donald Trump's genitals looks like on The Lead with Jake Tapper Tuesday [9/18/2018].

Weather Channel Defends Reporter Mocked for 'So Dramatic' Hurricane Florence Coverage.  The Weather Channel is defending one of their own after a video of Hurricane Florence coverage went viral.  The video, uploaded to Twitter, shows Weather Channel meteorologist and reporter Mike Seidel bracing in the wind during a live shot in Wilmington, NC.  As he is struggling to keep his footing, two people walk behind him showing no signs of struggle.  Twitter was not impressed.

Hilarious video shows journalist 'bravely' reporting on Hurricane Florence — until two men in shorts casually stroll past.  A Weather Channel reporter looked to have played up the drama and severity of Hurricane Florence in a hilarious video that has been circulating on Twitter.  Weather Channel reporter Mike Seidel was shooting a live segment in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Friday [9/14/2018] as winds barreled around him.  In the clip, Seidel appears to brace his feet deeper into the grass so that he won't go with the wind.

Teens Stroll Past Reporter Who Can Barely Stand in Raging Winds.  Weather Channel correspondent Mike Seidel in Wilmington, North Carolina, looks like he's gallantly fighting the raging winds as he courageously reported live from Hurricane Florence on Friday [9/14/2018].  "This is about as nasty as it's been," Seidel said dramatically.  Shortly after he made the comment, two teens in shorts are seen in the background strolling along, taking cell phone photos, having no problem at all. [...] As an aside, did you notice how the media now counts homes without power?  They don't count homes, they estimate the number of people who might be in a home and multiple [sic] it by the actual homes.

Media Hype:  Mueller Probe 'Bombshell' Turns Out To Be Major Dud.  According to various mainstream media figures this week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was all but certain to drop a bombshell Friday [8/31/2018] that would shake Washington, D.C., to its core.  It didn't happen.  NBC's Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on Thursday kicked off the Mueller "bombshell" frenzy, warning viewers that Friday could go down in history as a turning point in the Russia investigation.

The 'Echo Chamber' Isn't A Conspiracy Theory, It's A Fact.  When I finally got to the end of a supposed blockbuster piece by the New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow regarding a dark conspiracy theory that had been spreading within the Trump White House, I was struck by two things:  1) the innocuousness of the memo in question, and 2) how the basis of the memo was plainly true.  The piece, in fact, goes a long way in substantiating the memo's contention about the media, allowing former Obama administration officials and their allies to offer ludicrous claims without even a scintilla of journalistic skepticism.

Lawrence O'Donnell
After Trump's "Worst Week" his approval plummets — I mean, barely changes.  The convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen had #TheResistance giddy with excitement.  This was the end.  He's a gonner.  WORST WEEK EVER. [...] The NBC/WSJ polls is almost exactly what Rasmussen finds as of August 24, 2018, 46% approval.  On August 24, 2010, Obama had a 45% approval rating according to Rasmussen.  So despite a massively negative media environment for Trump and a massively positive media environment for Obama, Trump's approval rating is the same as Obama at a similar time in his presidency.


Liberal media's desperate push for Trump impeachment may actually hurt Democrats.  The liberal news media have a new favorite word to use when discussing President Trump:  impeachment.  For example, MSNBC and CNN reporters, anchors and guests said "impeach," "impeachment" or some other form of the word on the cable news channels an incredible 222 times between 6 a.m. and 11:59 p.m.  Wednesday [8/22/2018].  And of course, they talked about possible impeachment other days as well, and newspapers and websites were also filled with impeachment speculation.  Most Democrats in Congress and their leaders are shying away from talking about impeachment before the November midterm elections — but that's not stopping the anti-Trump media.

All the Talk About Impeaching the President Is Nonsense.  The television-news media desperately need to fill twenty-four hours every day in order to sell advertising to support their stations, their management, their employees, and their negotiated settlements and non-disclosure-agreement pay-outs to women whom they must silence after one or another of their male employees has violated them. [...] So the television-news media have to keep the money pouring in.  Same with the print media.  They need to grab your attention and hold it all day and night, every day. [...] So they have to figure out how to keep the ratings up.  They love a murder — oh, how they love a murder!  Especially of a young pretty White girl.  That grabs the attention of everyone:  men, women, liberals, conservatives, young, and old. [...] Even an isolated unsolved murder of a single young White woman gets the media exercised into a frenzy:  Jonbenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Short, Chandra Levy, Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbets.  The Seedier Media obsess over these individual murders round-the-clock until it emerges that the murderer was an illegal alien.

Summertime and the media are embarrassing — from hating America to loving Antifa.  In the space of one week, the press downplayed a Democrat governor saying America "was never that great" and watched as the governor's brother/CNN anchor defended Antifa.  Another CNN commentator bashed America and mocked a conservative while she told of the discrimination her disabled son faced.  And former CIA director John Brennan, now an NBC national security analyst, recanted his claim that President Donald Trump committed treason and spent the week whining about losing his security clearance.

CNN's Philip Mudd Tells Paris Dennard to 'Get Out' for Telling the Truth.  CNN counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd exploded at conservative CNN contributor Paris Dennard on Friday evening when Dennard made the completely factual claim that former government officials with security clearance can land top D.C. jobs.  Mudd and Dennard were debating on Anderson Cooper 360°, guest-hosted by Jim Sciutto, over the question of whether President Donald Trump had been right to revoke the security clearance of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan.

Newsroom commando Ralph Peters cashiers [him]self.  This weekend, retired lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters went on CNN's dubiously titled Reliable Sources and, in the presence of the show's serially unreliable host, Brian Stelter, and all those unfortunate souls in airport waiting areas across the nation being force-fed this liberal Sunday-morning drivel, cashiered himself.  It appears that fulminating Trump Derangement Syndrome brought this former Fox News military analyst to perform this sad ceremony. [...] As a combat veteran, which Peters is not, I have to wonder if this sneering, whiny-voiced news show commando has a clue as to how many millions of his military family he has just branded as destructive, vengeful, racist couch-potato anarchists, followers of a false messiah and derelict in our oaths to the Constitution.  It is a fact that a substantial majority of military personnel, whether active-duty, retirees, or veterans, are conservative in their politics, so Peters had to know he was spitting in the faces of millions of his former comrades.

Enemies of the People.  [T]here is a certain equanimity that comes with realizing that so many of the daily crises are not crises at all, and that so much of the media screaming is like visiting an ice cream store — each day a different flavor, but all the same basic product ready to kill you if you don't control the portions, the frequency...

How Far Will the Left Go?  All the Way.  [Scroll down]  Each day brings a new outrage, a development enthusiastically promulgated by a brain-dead media that thinks a headline must contain the words "sparks outrage" or "comes under fire," to be newsworthy.  The foxes of anger and resentment have been set among the hens of political cohesion, and every day the squawking grows louder — as it will until that day comes when there are no more hens left to lay the eggs.

As the Swamp Turns.  It never ends, does it?  The daily cable-news soap opera installment.  A new crisis every day.  Sex.  Money.  Secret tapes.  A stripper whose upper torso gives new meaning to the term Silicon Valley.  And then her media-frenzied lawyer steeped in his own fun-to-watch divorce.  Bring out the popcorn.  Pull out some Raisinets.  Refill the Coke and Pepsi.  Sneak in a few plastic straws.  Another day's episode of "As the Swamp Turns."  Children separated from their parents.  Parents sent back with their children — and then telling the authorities:  "Naah, we'll go back, but leave the kids separated here."  Kids who do not even belong to the parents.  Russians — even red-headed Reds.  Secret courts.  Spies.  Married paramours exchanging mysterious messages:  "Andy."  "Secret plans."  An "Insurance Policy."  Smells at a Virginia Walmart.  Secret tape recordings.  The only thing missing is the "other woman" with the unwanted and hidden pregnancy, suddenly revealed — and the drama of whose baby it is.  Enter Bill Clinton!

The Conspiracy Theory That Ate New York.  This is the helpful illustration that New York Magazine published to help readers understand its convoluted — and, needless to say, #FakeNews — cover story alleging a Trump-Putin plot that began in... 1987.  Before the Soviet Union fell.  Before Putin had assumed any sort of true power.

What Critics Missed About the Trump-Putin Summit.  When Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin ended their joint press conference in Helsinki, the punditocracy predictably swarmed all over it like ants around a pile of crumbs.  Was Trump winking at Putin?  Did he really say he believes Putin more than he believes Robert Mueller about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election?  Former Gus Hall enthusiast John Brennan, off his meds again, tweeted that the presser was "treasonous."  Professional chatterer Anderson Cooper said it was "perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit."  Every phrase, every gesture of the event will be picked apart and second-guessed to death in the next few days.

The Jim Jordan Hit Job Implodes:  Ohio State Held Hearing on Reputed Sex Abuser in... 1997.  I did some research on the story alleging that our warrior patriot, Rep. Jim Jordan was aware that his wrestling team members were being molested and did nothing about it. [...] We all have the facts and know that Rep. Jordan is not guilty of this allegation.

How to Read the News:  A Guide for Truth-Seekers.  The recent MSM and celebrity hysteria about the illegal immigrant children being separated from their alleged parents would have had some impact with voters had not the truth been exposed in the Internet on unbiased websites and twitter posts.  Those pictures of immigrant children sleeping in cages brought tears (crocodile?) to MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, who apparently failed to note that these heartbreaking photos were taken in 2014 during the Obama administration.  The detention center used by the Trump administration was a far cry from Obama's if one viewed them on one of the more credible news sites like Breitbart.com.

The Zombie Media.  Journalism schools do not teach journalism anymore.  They teach persuasive storytelling.  They teach the Machiavellian black art of propaganda.  Like most black arts, left-wing "journalism" relies heavily on its own peculiar dogma of magical rites and incantations.  To shut down Herman Cain in 2012, our leftist adversaries invented (or at least exaggerated) the ever popular sex scandal — the trusted and true kill shot they have used to assassinate troublesome public figures for decades.  Republicans nailed by a weeping and well paid accuser have typically curled into the fetal position and faded away.

Chris Matthews Urges Communist Revolution to Stop Supreme Court.  So the Chris Matthews [plan] is for the Democrats to declare a Communist revolution, call in the Russians for help, start executing their own people for being insufficiently left-wing, go down to defeat, flee the country while kidnapping a bunch of children and stealing all the gold?  Actually I think that is their plan.

Journalists circulate conspiratorial claims against DHS Doc claiming it has Nazi code.  Multiple journalists circulated a conspiracy theory on Twitter that a document from the Department of Homeland Security contained a Nazi code Thursday [6/28/2018]. [...] The tweets reference a press release from DHS titled "We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again" and was released in February, garnering little attention until recently.

Ex-CNN producer blasts Jim Acosta for 'self-serving antics'.  A former CNN producer took to Twitter on Friday [6/29/2018] to blast Jim Acosta, the network's White House correspondent, for what he called Acosta's "self-serving antics," saying they "give all good journalists a bad name."  The posts by Steve Krakauer, a former senior digital producer for the network who is now is a top executive at Commerce House, a Dallas-based advertising firm, were prompted by a question that Acosta shouted to President Donald Trump on Friday [6/29/2018] during a White House event on the economy and tax cuts.

Immigration 'crisis' brought to you by the Media Matrix.  Starting a week ago Friday, the media discovered (surprise!) that the Trump White House is taking a hard line on illegal immigration — and the pharisees of CNN and MSNBC began dressing themselves in sackcloth and ashes to impress us with the sincerity of their shock and dismay at finding out that children coming across the border illegally are separated from the adults who accompanied them (not necessarily their parents).  Honestly, if you need a give-away (a "tell" as they say in poker) that the left-wing media is conspiring to damage this president, all you need to do is click back and forth between CNN and MSNBC for about three hours.  If every time you turn on one of these channels they are parroting the same story back at you with different talking heads pouring ashes on each other and cursing Trump, then you know you are in the middle of a feeding frenzy.

Delusion About Detentions:  On Family Separation at the Border.  Upstanding journalists, their fellow right-minded pundits, and progressive elected official friends are outraged!  According to them, the Trump Administration's approach to immigration enforcement is cruel, un-American, inhumane, barbaric, and even medically dangerous. [...] The problem is the facts are at odds with the conventional media interpretation of existing legal precedent, prior administrations' practices, and even relevant federal statutes.  You know, the law.  But being wrong on the facts has never stopped the media and their useful idiots in the commentariat from maligning the Trump Administration unfairly to suit their agenda.  Now they're shrieking about "baby jails."  It's insane.

News Fatigue?  Join the Club.  A Pew Research study recently found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans suffer from "news fatigue" — a phenomenon even more pervasive among Republicans.  The survey focused on the volume as much as the quality of the offerings.  But why wouldn't the public be emotionally expended from the anger and accusations, bullying and backbiting, "fake news" and "fact checks," insults and innuendo, posturing and protests, threats and trolling, and virtue-signaling and violent rhetoric and imagery spewed from every direction today?

The Editor says...
Whenever a big furor suddenly and simultaneously appears on every television "news" channel, there's a reason for it.  It is almost always a manufactured crisis designed to displace some other story.  The "anchor baby prison" and "kids in cages" hype is a false description of conditions that are nothing new.  The same laws and policies have been in place for months and years.  The reason all this is now front and center is that Donald Trump's popularity is steadily increasing — now surpassing that of Barack H. Obama — and it appears that he is about to single-handedly end the Korean War.  That is an accomplishment that must not be allowed to stay in the hourly news cycle if the news media's preferred party is to have any power.

Desperately Seeking Supremacists.  Talia Lavin is (or was, at last word) a fact-checker for the New Yorker.  She achieved overnight Twitter-fame by accusing an ICE agent of being a white supremacist. [...] Part of the story, I think, is that the Left is hard up for white supremacists.  Liberals talk about them all the time, but to the best of my knowledge, I have never met one.  Have you?  Liberals need to come up with someone other than Richard Spencer; hence the eagerness to libel a heroic ICE employee.

Update:
New Yorker staffer resigns after falsely accusing ICE agent of having Nazi tattoo.  The fact-checker for the New Yorker who mistook a Marine veteran's tattoo for a Nazi symbol has resigned, saying the "small mistake" has ruined her life.  Talia Lavin is out of a job following her June 18 tweet that caused mass outrage.  "I feel like I made a small mistake and it's destroyed my life," she told New York Magazine's The Cut.  Lavin's since-deleted tweet was about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Justin Gaertner, whom she falsely accused of having a tattoo of the Nazis' Iron Cross.

Drive-By Media Bombarding Americans With 'Manufactured Crises' to Distract from IG Report, Robust Economy.  The liberal media has been manufacturing crises ad-infinitum to divert the public's attention away from the Trump administration's tremendous achievements and the Democratic establishment's corruption, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh warns.

The Astonishing Silliness of CNN.  The good people at CNN can do what they want, but this blatant chyron-splaining sends a rather clear and unfortunate message:  that they think their audience is daft and incapable of figuring things out for themselves.  CNN is frequently breathless when no one should be breathless, which would be kind of exhausting, if anyone cared.  Take this headline from the network's website this week:  "The 45 Most Astonishing Lines from Donald Trump's Nashville Speech."

Lost Children?  Detention Cages?  Baby Prison Bus?  Trump's Critics Will Believe Anything.  Over the long weekend, President Trump's critics were in a sputtering rage over his supposedly losing 1,500 illegal immigrant children, sticking them in cages, and putting others on specially equipped prison buses.  Turns out, it was all 100% bogus.

Mainstream Media's Credibility Problem Is Of Their Own Making.  So, not only are the mainstream media biased, they're also incompetent.  Headlines and scandalous snippets that the news shows can flash on chyrons trump facts, and they are what is important to the mainstream media.  They eschew fact checking in favor of sensational headlines.  They create salacious news narratives, meant not to inform but to sell advertising.

The Firesign Theater Media.  The "mainstream media" (CNN, MSNBC, the three networks, the major newspapers, et al.) are so consumed by Trump hysteria that it places them squarely in this Firesign Theater zone.  Nicholas Kristof and his wife talk about the president in bed.  Brian Stelter describes himself as "Trump addicted."  Any psychiatrist can tell you that monomaniacal, pathological hatred has its surreal aspects.  Trump as the great white (orange?) whale and the media as Captain Ahab.  MSNBC's exegesis of the importance of the Mueller investigation in its various guises is a good example of this "Credo quia absurdum" (I believe because it is absurd) approach.  Rachel Maddow, Stephanie Ruhle, and Chris Hayes constantly strain to outdo themselves with conspiracy theories.  One would think there were more Russians involved with the Trump campaign than populate the pages of War and Peace.  More entertaining are the nightly shouting matches on Don Lemon's CNN show.

Mueller Year One:  The Real Heroes in Journalism.  CNN won an award for its January 2017 report about President-elect Trump being briefed on the bogus Steele dossier.  While we now know the story was improperly leaked by former Director of National Intelligence (and virulent Trump foe) James Clapper to shotgun the Trump-Russia collusion plotline days before the inauguration — and the celebrated CNN reporters did little more than regurgitate talking points spoon-fed to them by political operatives (one is known to have close ties to Fusion GPS) — the network was applauded for its "depth of reporting."

Estimate:  Cable News Nets Have Given Michael Avenatti $175 Million Worth Of Airtime.  [Scroll down]  Another thing:  He's doing it with no help from Fox.  If I'm not mistaken, the only FNC show he's been on is Shannon Bream's in March.  He was, allegedly, scheduled on Martha MacCallum's show recently but canceled at the last minute.  Tucker Carlson invited him on but Avenatti told his producer that he only wants to do Hannity's show, an obviously deliberate slight to Carlson.  (Or is it a compliment, with Avenatti suspecting he'd have a harder time outmaneuvering Tucker in an interview?)  Whether he's avoiding Fox because he's wary of the hostile reception he'd get there or because he's building a brand as a #Resistance hero and wants viewers to identify him with anti-Trump CNN and MSNBC, the fact remains that he's somehow achieved cable ubiquity without any exposure on the most highly rated cable news network in the country.

Court Documents Show Porn Star Lawyer Reported $8 Million Windfall in Feb.  When he Took on Stormy.  The Michael Avenatti Files — How did a bankrupt attorney come across $8 million after picking up porn star client Stormy Daniels?  Porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti is a huge hit with the Democrat-media complex.  The attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels has held 108 interviews on cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN since March 7th.

2018: When Orwell's 1984 Stopped Being Fiction.  When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a "Revealed" or an "Exposed" for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known.  These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.  But today's Guardian's "exclusive" story "Revealed:  UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance" is doing none of this.  Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being "revealed". No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this "revelation".  Everyone in this story — the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous "Whitehall official", and the named politicians and think-tank wonks — is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

CNN Hosts Porn Star's Lawyer Michael Avenatti 59 Times in Less Than Two Months.  CNN has exhibited a fetish for the Stormy Daniels story, particularly for her Trump-smacking lawyer, Michael Avenatti.  In less than two months (from March 7 to April 30), Avenatti has been a guest on CNN a total of 59 times — an average of more than once per day.  MRC analysts combed through transcripts of all of CNN's 2018 coverage looking for references to interviews with Avenatti, and then double-checked using our video archive.  Since Avenatti's first appearance on March 7, he has been interviewed on CNN a whopping 59 times, more than one-third of which (19) were with Anderson Cooper — who, of course, interviewed Stormy Daniels on CBS's 60 Minutes back in March.

Black Coffee:  The Starbucks Story Is Trash.  This is a country of 325-million people.  If two guys getting tossed out of a coffee shop is news, then things in Donald Trump's America must be going [very] well.  But if the story were only meaningless trash, it would just be typical of American journalism.  But it's pernicious trash meant to advance a false left-wing narrative, which is — oh yeah! — typical of American journalism.

CNN's dicey interview with student on lockdown after Maryland school shooting.  CNN engaged a student to pass along casualty stats from a school shooting, even though the student himself made clear that his own familiarity with the details was limited.  And then, when police showed up to escort him and his classmates from the school, CNN asked him to stay on the line, presumably to get a guided audio tour of the aftermath.

A User's Guide To Media Coverage Of Political Protests.  Liberal protests are newsworthy because they're disruptive; conservative protests are too orderly to be worth discussing.  The news angle with the gun protests was the disobedience involved in walking out, something to be celebrated.  Leftist protests demand police activity because leftists break stuff, and they demand to be arrested because it somehow makes them heroic.  One hundred thousand conservatives could show up on the National Mall in our nation's capital and not leave behind so much as a candy wrapper on the ground.  Bo-ring.

The 'scandal' of Perla Morales-Luna's arrest is fake news.  The arrest of Perla Morales-Luna on March 3 in San Diego is an absolute nonscandal.  Yes, at first glance the video looks a little concerning.  It shows a mother being separated from her screaming family as Customs and Border Patrol officers struggle to put her in the back of a vehicle.  But only at first glance.  Because if you watch again you'll see that the CBP officers use proportionate force and good efficiency in getting Morales-Luna off the street and into custody.  That's the best way to ensure no one is harmed and the situation isn't escalated unnecessarily.  Moreover, the CBP wasn't simply detaining Morales-Luna because she was just a random illegal immigrant.

Nikolas Cruz Is the Result of 'It Takes a Village'.  Does everyone see what the Democrats have done?  They've pitted children against us, thereby mainstreaming and normalizing child exploitation.  What the Democrats did to Parkland student Emma Gonzalez was as sickening a display as any I've ever witnessed.  They coaxed an understandably distraught child to spew one debunked Democrat lie after another — and, of course, plenty of invective toward President Trump.  David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland student, asked on CNN:  "If you can't get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?"  Normal question from a 17-year-old, right?  Wondering aloud if he came up with that question all on his own, with such emotionally vivid lingual sophistication and political acumen, must make me a grumpy old gun nut who thinks our youth are stupid.

The Portraits and the Obama Reality Distortion Field.  [T]he Obamas are the center of the most delusional cult of personality that the media has yet spawned. [...] This isn't journalism.  It's not a free press.  It's a bunch of cult members rushing out to explain that the flawed thing is flawless.  You're the flawed one for not seeing its gloriousness.  All hail the beloved leader.

Joe Concha:  Media's Trump Anger Mostly 'Performance Art at This Point'.  After it was made public that President Trump had requested the Pentagon to plan a military parade through Washington, DC, there was a steady stream of forceful condemnation of the President in which they claimed he was imitating foreign dictators.  And in an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight Thursday [2/8/2018], Hill media reporter Joe Concha knocked them for playing up their outrage and playing to an audience.

CNN: Undetected Asteroids Could Threaten Earth During Government Shutdown.  Two CNN correspondents claimed during an episode of The Lead with Jake Tapper that an asteroid could potentially threaten the Earth if the government shutdown continues.  CNN correspondent Tom Foreman recalled the time NASA could not monitor "potentially dangerous asteroids" for over two weeks, implying that NASA would not be able to prevent an asteroid attack if it hit Earth while the government shut down.

TV crew busted trying to sneak fake bomb into airport.  Seven members of a cable TV crew were arrested at Newark Airport on Thursday [1/18/2018] after trying to film themselves passing a fake explosive device through a security checkpoint and onto a plane, according to reports.  The crew was working for the cable network CNBC, according to nj.com.  The fake explosive device was in a carry-on bag and never made it past security, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Michael McCarthy said.  "They failed, were caught and were arrested on multiple charges," he said, without elaborating on the charges.

CNN's Sanjay Gupta Diagnoses Donald Trump With Heart Disease.  Wednesday [1/17/2018] on CNN's "New Day," Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the network's chief medical correspondent, proclaimed that based on President Donald Trump's coronary calcium scores going back to the previous decade, Trump has heart disease.  Gupta's diagnosis came a day after Trump's doctor, Navy Rear Adm. Dr. Ronny Jackson, offered his assessment of Trump's health at a White House press briefing.

Armchair diagnosis of a patient he has never examined:
Sanjay Gupta:  By all standards, Trump has heart disease.  CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, said Wednesday that he believes tests reveal that President Trump has heart disease.  Gupta said dating back to 2009, Trump started to have "these tests that are actually looking for the presence of calcium in the blood vessels that lead to the heart."  "Steadily, up until just this past week when he had it performed again, those numbers have gone up," he said.  "When they get to a certain range ... that means he has heart disease."

Leftist Toilet Mouths Condemn Trump as They Corrupt Nation.  President Trump denies having used a vulgar term last Thursday [1/11/2018] to describe dysfunctional Third World countries.  Yet there's no denying that the leftist media, believing he did, responded by repeatedly disgorging the term in a childish orgy of decadence.  Of course, the media no doubt think they're damaging Trump — but they're actually damaging society.  Let's be clear:  Leftists certainly object to the substance of Trump's comments, that we shouldn't continually absorb poor, unskilled, often functionally illiterate and unassimilable people from Third World nations.  But they also object to his alleged style, labeling as obscene the use of s-hole (toilet) to describe such places.  So to show us how bad such language is, the Crude News Network (CNN), for example, used it at least 36 times on Thursday.  It's sort of like inveighing against animal abuse and then bludgeoning dozens of dogs to death on air to prove your point.

CNN Leaps Into The Toilet:  Network Aired 195 Uses of 'S***hole' on Friday.  In the contest for Most Offended News Network after President Trump reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole" countries, CNN wins hands down.  NewsBusters staff combed through CNN transcripts on Nexis for the S-hole word in the 24 hours of January 12 — the first full day after The Washington Post reported the controversy — and found CNN staffers and CNN guests uncorked the profanity 195 times in one day.  That doesn't count Saturday, Sunday or Monday.  They could be headed for 1,000 by now.  It also doesn't count the amount of time they put the S-word on screen (sometimes twice, as you can see on Cuomo's temporary prime time show.)  Compare that to Fox News Channel.  Their curse count was zero.  FNC told staff and guests not to say it.

Revealed:  Trump guzzles Diet Coke.  [Scroll down]  If not for Fox News we'd be totally in the dark, about everything, and it was from there that I first heard about CNN's alarming report:  [Something important?]  No, not exactly.  Rather, it's been reported, first from The New York Times, that Trump likes Diet Coke.  Wait — it gets worse.  He guzzles down a dozen a day.  So given such a scoop, CNN could not resist breaking it at around the same time that [a terrorist attack] was going on at Port Authority.  New Yorkers were running for their lives... but first things first; Trump is a glutton for Diet Coke

What Were the Motives of the Port Authority Bomber?  What were the motives of Ayaked Ullah, the Port Authority bomber in yesterday's attack?  There are many news headlines that address the issue, and they advance differing theories, each of them presented as fact.

CNN Promotes 'White Nonsense Roundup:' White Liberals Who Save Victimized People Of Color On Social Media.  In a piece titled "These are your white allies on Facebook," CNN enthusiastically introduces us to a group called "White Nonsense Roundup" (WNR).  Essentially, the group of roughly 100 "white ally" volunteers take turns swooping in to save African American people (already suffering from the "emotional labor" of systemic racism) from social media arguments when issues of race arise.  You know, because these white liberals are "woke" enough to recognize their inherent sin of whiteness and, apparently along with CNN, think people of color need white people to fight their social media battles for them.

New York Times forced to heavily amend another supposed K.T. McFarland 'scoop'.  The New York Times got ahead of itself again with yet another supposedly hot scoop involving former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, the Russians and the 2016 presidential election.  The story, now titled "McFarland's Testimony About Russia Contacts Is Questioned," reported originally that an email sent by the former Trump transition official indicated she lied to Congress this summer when she was questioned about disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn's communications with the Russians.  The article has been heavily amended since publication so that it is now mostly innuendo.  The initial references to the emails have been removed, and the story now leans mostly on Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who only questions whether McFarland was forthright in her testimony.

How D.C. political assassins use media to oust Rex Tillerson.  If several major media outlets are to be believed, at least two senior administration officials say Chief of Staff John Kelly has drawn up a plan to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who would be replaced by Sen. Tom Cotton by year's end or soon after.  The Washington media lap up these anonymous leaks like starving kittens.  Personnel contests, like shallow election horse race stories, are easy to do, appear to contain drama and inside info and elevate the reporter to someone-in-the-know.  The fundamental problem with these self-serving reports is the sources are unknown, so news consumers cannot judge their trustworthiness and motivations.  Which, of course, is the point of hiding their identities.  Consumers must trust the reporters and media outlets, a dubious act in this era of rampant Trump antipathy.  The New York Times started this latest Tillerson-is-a-goner meme.

Unhinged coverage of Trump is hurting the media.  Not only is everything (still) hyper-politicized, but the lines between news media, lifestyle media and flat-out activism have faded into irrelevance.  On Wednesday [11/22/2017], the lead story in Teen Vogue, next to stories about how "I Will Never Use Regular Soap Again After THIS $6 Foam Body Wash" and "Everyone Basically Wore Lingerie to the VS Fashion Show After Party," was this screaming headline:  "The United States Voted 'No' on an Anti-Nazi UN Resolution."  It ran over a terrifying picture of crowds carrying banners, some featuring swastikas, with smoke in the background suggesting a terror attack.  Only when you click through do you discover that there is no news here whatsoever:  The US votes against this meaningless, nonbinding UN gambit every year because the US has this thing called the First Amendment.  President Obama's appointees also opposed the resolution.

A Year to be Thankful For.  I'm thankful my fears about Donald Trump seem to have been unfounded.  Not a fascist.  Not a secret liberal.  Not an incompetent.  ISIS is defeated.  GDP at 3% plus.  Some 60 great originalist judges nominated.  Regulations cut back at an amazing rate.  Our lying leftist press humiliated and discredited.  I'm thankful because, whenever I get tired of watching an America in crisis, all I have to do is turn off the mainstream news and America is not in crisis anymore.  In fact, America is doing quite well.

Whittle: The News Media Knows How To Stop These Massacres, But Refuses To Do It.  In his latest video, conservative commentator Bill Whittle discusses the most effective way to end the surge of mass murders that America has suffered in the last twenty years — and it's one that falls squarely at the feet of the national news media.  Citing forensic psychologist Park Dietz, who has studied mass murderers extensively, Whittle contends that we've seen a wave of mass shootings like Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs because the media insists on providing 24/7 coverage of the tragedies, turning suicide massacres into a chance for glory for the sociopaths carrying out the heinous acts.

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.

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.

A Tsunami of Exaggeration.  One of the current obsessions is how much debris from the tsunami in Japan last year — some of it possibly radioactive!!! — will be washing ashore in North America.  Usha Lee McFarling writes in the Los Angeles Times that we should all calm down.

When 'Minority' is a Trick of Definition.  When the Census Bureau this month issued a press release headlined "Most Children Younger Than Age 1 are Minorities," the media snapped to attention.  News outlets nationwide covered the announcement, hailing it as a "historic demographic milestone" (CNN), as the "dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority" (Washington Post), and as an "important turning point for the nation" (McClatchy) that would "starkly ... change the face of America's next generations" (Time).  None of that was true.  None of that was new, either.

Mike Wallace, Entertainment, and Journalism.  On the back nine, Mike liked to think of himself exclusively as a journalist.  The network might have plucked him from daytime television — but taking the shill out of the entertainer was another matter.  Wallace was the quintessential barker, an ambulance-chaser with press credentials.  He perfected the art of "ambush" journalism at CBS.  With such tactics, copy led only when it bled.  Indeed, Mike Wallace's career echoes some of the more predatory traditions of broadcast journalism.

Journalism's Eroding Integrity.  The ABC News product increasingly ceases to be journalism.  It is sensationalism.  It is reprehensible.  It's time to let ABC News feel the sting of public disapproval.

Journalists don't have good grasp of religion.  Evidence of big media's bias against religion that doesn't advance the secular and liberal agenda of the Democratic Party is beyond dispute.  Any faith attached to a conservative agenda is to be ridiculed, stereotyped and misrepresented.  Islam is a notable exception.  The media appear to bend over backward not to offend Muslims.

ABC News' reporting on the Aurora shooting is even worse than we thought.  Apparently this story isn't horrible enough already.  The people we used to count on to tell us the news keep doing [everything they can] to make it even worse.

Police called in because of disruptive MEDIA members harassing employees at Hollywood Chick-Fil-A 'kiss-in'.  Apparently, in Hollywood, CA police had to be called in because of disruptive people.  The police weren't called in because of the protesters doing anything wrong, but rather for the pink slime media members who were harassing the employees!

Upon Further Review?  How the media does love its monsters.  The media got an early Christmas gift from Jerry Sandusky, who fills the hideous monster vacuum that had developed after Osama Bin Laden was slain.  How the media does love its monsters.  After Bin Laden, the monster niche was neatly filled by Dominique Strauss-Kahn (almost forgotten now, relegated to media monster purgatory.)  Prior to DSK we had folk villain Bernie Madoff, after which Michael Vick's head was served to us on a platter.  Prior to Vick came loony monster Mel Gibson, preceded by Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and, to be sure, O.J. Simpson, a sort of monster emeritus.  Qadaffi was October monster of the month, giving way to Sandusky.

What is Poverty in the United States Today?  [Scroll down]  Mainstream news media also present poverty in America as severe material hardship. ... The ongoing use of examples of severe hardship in TV news should not be surprising.  TV news thrives on drama, and reporters naturally seek out the starkest and most sympathetic examples of poverty to build the most compelling stories.  By contrast, a realistic portrayal of the living conditions of the typical poor family in America would not make compelling viewing.  In fact, the audience would be unlikely to regard such a family as seriously deprived.

Payday Loans.  The mindset of the left was recently displayed in a big, front-page story in the October 30th issue of the San Mateo County Times.  It was an investigative reporter's expose of the "payday loan" business and its lobbyists.  According to the reporter:  "In California lenders charge up to $45 in fees on a maximum $300 loan.  This amounts to an interest rate of 460 percent, trapping some borrowers into a never-ending cycle of debt." ... Using this kind of reasoning — or lack of reasoning — you could quote the price of salmon as $15,000 a ton or say a hotel room rents for $36,000 a year, when no consumer buys a ton of salmon and few people stay in a hotel room all year.  It is clever propaganda, but do people buy newspapers to be propagandized?

Jackie, Oh No.  Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV?  I'm sure there must be — around seven billion of them, probably.  But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer?  Not a chance.  When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of someone who's just seen your lab results and is trying to figure out how to break the bad news.

The Editor says...
Bill Curtis of WBBM-TV has perfected the "phony concerned look".

Understanding Poverty in the U.S.  Poor Americans, on average, live in larger houses or apartments than does the average, non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.  The media cry with alarm that "nearly one in four kids" in the nation are hungry.  Again, government data show otherwise.  Fully 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during 2009, despite the severity of the recession, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A Weather Newsgasm.  [Scroll down]  The incessant "news" coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts.  So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

Here's an example of news media alarmism:
Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain That Runs Nonstop.  Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems. ... One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year...

The Editor's rebuttal:
Do the math.  446 kWh a year, consumed by an appliance that runs 24 hours a day, is an average power consumption of only 50 watts.  Is that more power than your "central air-conditioning system" uses?  Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to get a high-def DVR and a cable box.  If that's how you want to spend your money, that's your business.

Exploiting the Japanese.  For the left, no crisis is too terrible to go unused.  So it is with the horrific suffering that has taken place in Japan. ... In [an] appearance on the NBC Nightly News, Edward Lyman of UCS stressed the ominous situation in Japan while at the same time stressing that "it can happen here."  The "safety bar is set too low," Lyman insisted.  We need more restrictions — presumably the sort that would slow down further nuclear power development or shut it down entirely.  Suddenly, the media was full of the "worse than Three Mile Island" scenario — the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl.  Come to think of it, has there been a nuclear "catastrophe" since Chernobyl?  Is the situation in Japan, however serious it may be, a Chernobyl-scale accident?  Not likely, but the media seems to be licking its lips, hoping it will come close.

Fear the Media Meltdown, Not the Nuclear One.  Relax:  this is not another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and I'll tell you exactly why.  The only thing to fear is the sensationalist reporting that has the world panicked.

The Media's Deadly Sin.  Last year I was listening to the radio and heard that our area had experienced an earthquake during the night.  I took the reporter's word that it happened; it had been so mild that I slept right through it.  In December 1995, if one weren't visiting a national park or applying for a passport, the government shutdown had the same impact as that earthquake.  In other words, if it hadn't been for the media caterwauling, the majority of us wouldn't have even known the shutdown had happened.

Journalists' sob stories block reform.  Now that budget battles have begun in earnest all around the country, those advocating spending cuts, Democratic and Republican, had better not expect any help in furthering their cause from the mainstream news media.  In fact, the news media might be their most formidable foe.  How so?  Well, now that we know the targets of the cuts, the news media, suckers for a sob story, are already throbbing with carefully orchestrated, heart-rending tales about what devastation those cuts will cause:  Children who won't be fed; students unable to afford college; classrooms bursting at the seams; cancers that will not be treated; trains that won't run; roads that won't be built; families becoming homeless or freezing in their unheated homes; single mothers who will lose child care and job training; food that will not be inspected; water and air that will be more polluted; farmers who will be forced from their land; playgrounds, parks, museums, libraries and health clinics that will be closed.  You know the drill.

The Toyota Death Panel.  The Toyota scare was just the latest in a long series of orchestrated crises, in the tradition of the Alar scam of the 1980s, or DDT hysteria before that.  It's very easy to provoke a media stampede against a large corporation.  The narrative plays into the anti-business biases of reporters, whose ears are hungry for the distant cry of trumpets calling them to battle in a populist crusade.

The Anti-Cop Trend That Isn't.  [Scroll down]  Dig into most of these articles, however, and you will find there is no real evidence of an increase in anti-police violence, let alone one that can be traced to anti-police rhetoric, gun sales, disrespect for authority, or "don't tread on me" sentiment.  (CNN is one of the few media outlets that have covered the purported anti-police trend with appropriate skepticism.)  Amid all the quotes from concerned law enforcement officials in MSNBC's "War on Cops" article, for example, is a casual mention that police fatality statistics for this month are about the same as they were in January 2010.

The Media's Debacles.  Without an analysis of the significance of an event, the news becomes an arena in which to compete for attention and the most outlandish, shocking, offensive or bizarre becomes "newsworthy".  Competition for sensational news is no less intense today than it was when the so-called "yellow press" in the United States, largely under the control of editor William Randolph Hearst, found Spain guilty for the disaster of the sinking of the U.S. battleship "Maine" in Havana harbor and provoked the Spanish-American War in 1898. ... A viewing audience unequipped with basic background information is likely to take at face value the absurd, shocking and grotesque if portrayed often enough and presented as "news".

IPCC Distortion Of Weather And Climate Is Reinforced By Media Hyperbole.  It's pathetic to watch the US mainstream media yearn for a hurricane, especially one that will threaten people.  They anxiously scan the weather maps off the coast of West Africa for any low-pressure system that might develop into a news making, life threatening, normal event.  It is another measure of how the media is not about news but editorializing, speculation and sensationalism.  Sadly, they are joined in this or at least not dissuaded or counteracted by government agencies.

Jacksonian America.  On September 11th 2001, about an hour after the planes hit the twin towers, Jo Moore, a senior advisor to Britain's Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, turned away from the TV and fired off a departmental e-mail:  It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.  I'm not sure where Ms Moore is these days, but June 25th and all the following week were even better days to get out anything you want to bury.  The House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey "cap-and-trade" bill ... And nobody cared.  Because Michael Jackson had died.

A pandemic of panic — are we dead yet?  We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu.  But here we are, proof that there really is life after death.

The Great Liberal Pandemonium Machine.  The Mexican swine flu pandemic?  Oh, that's soooo yesterday.  Global Warming?  All those confident "scientific" predictions are falling apart around the world, even as greedy politicians still try to squeeze the last little drops of power and money out of them.  Human flesh-eating bacteria?  SARS?  Ozone holes?  Mad Cow?  The Curse of the Killer Tomatoes?  Water torture?  CO2?  Bee Colony Collapse?  It never ends.  As long as scare stories sell, as long as millions of indoctrinated suckers fall for them they will never end.

After salmonella, bird flu, the Millennium Bug... should we actually be scared this time?  Don't we have the sense that we have seen this kind of panic before, which eventually turned out to have gone way over the top?  The moment which more than any might have set off a severe attack of deja vu came when the BBC Today programme wheeled on an expert from the World Health Organisation to tell us that '40 percent' of us in Britain may catch swine flu — while another unnamed expert was quoted predicting that '1.2 million' Britons could die.

Yellowcake and Yellow Journalism:  On MSNBC they're covering the [Scooter Libby] trial like it's the Normandy Invasion, starring Elvis Presley, as told by Joseph Goebbels.  MSNBC's "reportage" consists of endless repetition of arbitrary assertions, half-truths and thoroughly debunked canards.  No one else cares about the trial — except presumably Scooter Libby — so the passionate left is allowed to invent a liberal fable without correction.

Yellow Science:  Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism.  Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge, particularly knowledge of something sensational.  It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science.

The Fog of Breaking News:  Why you should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt.

Paris, Lindsay and A-Rod?  We Don't Care!  Apparently, the causal relationship between the media's supply of celebrity gossip and the public's demand for it is a two-way street.  America's seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrity scandal is a troubling sign, but here's an even more alarming truth:  Our enemy — facing the most powerful military force in history — has never concealed its belief that its ultimate triumph, as well as our ultimate demise, will come about because Americans are too fat, lazy and decadent to care enough to fight for their civilization and their values.

Movie shows photo fraud involved in wartime journalism.  Numerous examples of Photoshop embellishment and throw-down toys carefully arranged by news photographers to evoke emotion.

Amped-up storm coverage may become the norm.  Nearly a year later, hurricanes Katrina and Rita are still fresh on Gulf Coast minds, and Houston's television stations are trending toward more aggressive storm coverage.

The Editor continues to rant...
How can someone report current events aggressively without dishonest hype?  What does "aggressive coverage" really mean anyway?  It means the poorly educated masses in Houston will be drenched, if you will, with sensational, pessimistically speculative, tabloid television.  This style of "journalism" benefits only the TV stations and their advertisers, not the viewers.

How a New York Times reporter's passion for Castro led him astray:  Aha!  Finally we've discovered the missing ingredient in American journalism, the vitamin deficiency that's been shrinking newspaper circulation and TV newscast audiences all these years.  What Americans clamor for is not information but passion.  The heroes of the coverage of Katrina were not the reporters who got the most accurate stories but the ones who shouted the loudest or cried the hardest.

TV News Meets the Vast Wasteland:  Those amusing, though sadly depressing man-in-the-street interviews are an indication that the American hoi-polloi get whatever knowledge they may have only from TV newscasts, not printed material.  For this reason, national TV news has become increasingly more dependent on the sensationalism that their entertainment brethren can provide to attract viewers.  It's sometimes hard to determine where news coverage leaves off and entertainment begins, but the signs have been around for a long time.  The O.J. Simpson day-by-day trial was the most egregious example, but John Kennedy Jr.'s fatal flight coverage was a close second in televised excess.  Aging stalwarts like Barbara Walters think they can alternate between slobbering celebrity interviews and interrogating prominent political figures without suffering a lack of credibility.

Barbara Walters is not a role model.  She's written a tell-all autobiography.  And she's promoting it on ABC, which continues to employ her.  Once upon a time, legitimate news organizations would not have allowed a conflict of interest like this.

ABC Even Complains About Charity.  No good deed goes unpunished — that was the theme of an ABC Christmas day segment about donating clothing to charity.  "World News Tonight with Charles Gibson," took "A Closer Look" at charities and gave the appearance of dishonesty.

RIP:  protest films, e-porn and bimbos.  Year's end is a time of many media traditions.  For example, the tearing away of the last page of the calendar is all the excuse TV producers need to recycle hours of sensational video footage of dubious news value on the pretense that viewers need to relive the last 365 days. ... And then there's the practice of "spotting trends" from the year.  Trend-spotting has become something of an obsession with today's journalists, particularly at newspapers coping with the fact that they don't "break" news the way they did in the past.

Long Winter for the Media.  It is an unsettling time to be a journalist.  You are either on the edge of extinction or in charge of the universe.  The newspaper industry is condemned to write piecemeal its own obituary without knowing when or how — or, truth be told, if — the end will come.  Broadcast media now possess a self-inflated importance that they rarely bother to deny.

The L.A. Times's Human Wrecking Ball.  Great newspapers take decades to build.  We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order.

Fence fiasco:  Or Feliz ano nuevo.  The decline of American sovereignty would typically be a big story in any year, but with all the news coming out of Hollywood this year, maybe it was a bit overshadowed by more significant events.  I mean, how can the virtual surrender of a 231-year-old nation to the Pollyanna-ish forces of political correctness possibly compete with the dramatic real-life struggles of Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Tom Cruise, and the nation's hot new nymphet, Britney's baby sister, Jamie Lynn Spears?

Summertime, and the news is so cheesy.  Last year's Great August Story was left-wing activist Cindy Sheehan's absurd campout near the president's Texas ranch, which, much to the dismay of Mrs. Sheehan, was interrupted only after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.  Remember the Summer of the Shark?  That was 2001, when the media hyped shark attacks, despite the widely acknowledged fact that the season's attacks were no higher than previous seasons'.

Bigotry and Sports:  Although not too many years ago, sports-writing was considered the "toy department" of journalism, the boys and girls in the press box have been eager to catch up to their counterparts in the "real" world.  And so, they are also no longer content with merely reporting the scores, trades and what have you; they must now generate the news.  And, similar to the mainstream media, they need divisive issues in order to push the agenda of all J-school graduates:  to change the world.

Hurricane Hype Clouds Warming Debate.  ABC's Jeffrey Kofman sounded the alarm about storms so bad scientists "are now considering adding a fearsome category 6.  That's hurricanes of more than 175 miles an hour.  Something no one would want to meet head-on."  No one did.  Category 6 wasn't even added, and the chorus of media hype about another deadly season of storms turned into so much hot air.  That's right — forecasts for the 2006 hurricane season, which ends November 30, have proven entirely wrong.  Instead of 17 tropical storms and hurricanes, we got only nine.

Frivolous politics:  In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a C.I.A. "agent" — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.  This is the frivolous media — and the biased media.

9/11 Myths, Debunked.  Trust that conspiracy theorists will attempt to exploit the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to spread sensational claims and sensational lies.  Moreover, it's a fair bet sensationalist media will collaborate, not because the squawk show host or headline scribbler believes the poisoned foolishness, but because anger, fear and trembling sell.

Shepard Smith Smears Swift Boat Vets.  While some press attention has been focused on the seeming odd-couple of Rupert Murdoch raising money for Hillary Clinton, another fascinating relationship has apparently been developed between Fox News and Hugh Hefner's Playboy.  Fox News' Neil Cavuto aired an interview with Hugh Hefner on May 4, on the grounds that the announcement of his "Playmate of the Year" was "business news," and Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is interviewed in the June issue of Playboy magazine.

Al Gore and the Global Warming Scare.  People are naturally prone to worry about dangers that are invisible: radioactivity, for one spectacular example.  The media know this, and are forever trumpeting the discovery of new perils to scare us with.  Hardly a week passes without someone announcing that some familiar food or other useful substance has just been discovered to cause cancer (though usually only when administered in huge doses to mice).  Dangers associated with weather are special favorites because they are usually so difficult to cope with.  In recent decades, we have been treated to alarmist reports about impending disasters to be caused by nuclear winter, acid rain and the ozone hole.  But the Big Daddy of all such scare stories is "global warming."

Did someone mention Global Warming?

TV Jumps on Stale NSA Database Story.  Like the TV coverage, USA Today's story insinuated that the existence of the database was a major violation of Americans' privacy rights and evidence that the President was lying last December when he described the NSA's eavesdropping on suspected terrorist communications as limited and targeted.

Simply Put, the US Mainstream Media Provides an Inferior Product.  They may have the most advanced technology for delivering the news and the flashiest sets, graphics and promotional tactics; they may have scoured the earth for the "prettiest" people who can read Teleprompters and those with the most important sounding voices, but they have sacrificed their credibility at the altar of the almighty advertising dollar and because of that the public's trust in the mainstream media is shattered.

Drivin' and Not Cryin'?  When it comes to gas prices, the media too often know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Flip open a paper and turn on the TV and you'll learn that gas prices are rising again.  "Stormy 6 Weeks Ahead" says CBSNews and warns consumers to expect "pain at the pump."

Digging for the truth:  Too many journalists fail to dig deeply enough to get to the real story.  They breathless hype the latest scare about everything from pesticides and "road rage" to cell phones and irradiated food.  Deadly dangers lurk everywhere, and your Intrepid Reporter is all that stands between you and certain disaster.

Media eat up absurd rape story.  I called it back in April.  When a black stripper claimed three white Duke University lacrosse players gang-raped her at a party, I knew instinctively it was a lie.  The tale reeked of Tawana Brawley-like fabrications.

Movie shows photo fraud involved in wartime journalism.  Numerous examples of Photoshop embellishment and throw-down toys carefully arranged by news photographers to evoke emotion.

Hold that opinion.  Opinion journalism — the business not of reporting what happened, but of commenting on it — tends to place a premium on speed.  When that story breaks on Tuesday, members of the pundits' guild spring into action as well.  Editorial writers and columnists tell their readers what the news means.  TV talking heads and radio pontificators pass judgment.  Internet bloggers — the commentariat's newest, increasingly influential players — scramble to weigh in.

CBS Whips Up Worry about Hurricane Season:  The first day of spring [2006] proved perfect timing for the CBS's Jim Acosta to resurrect global warming as the villain behind last year's hurricane season, downplaying how hotly debated the matter is in the scientific community.

NASCAR Furious With NBC Over 'Dateline' Segment.  "It is outrageous that a news organization of NBC's stature would stoop to the level of going out to create news instead of reporting news," [NASCAR spokesman Ramsey] Poston said [4/5/2006].  "Any legitimate journalist in America should be embarrassed by this stunt.  The obvious intent by NBC was to evoke reaction, and we are confident our fans won't take the bait," he said.

ABC Hatches Weeklong Series on Bird Flu:  In 2003, ABC questioned government's bioterrorism warnings, but now emphasizes the latest concerns on bird flu.

Are You Satisfied With Your TV News?  Sound bites!  They may be the death of Western civilization!  The triviality of our network and local TV news is well known.  Locally, so much of the local channels give us a steady diet of blood and guts that is debilitating.  All the accidents, the murders, the court appearances of sordid criminals, the crimes of all descriptions seem to be their main focus.

The propaganda broadcasting network:  The definition of propaganda describes ABC News' decision to enlist the services of actor and teenage heartthrob, Leonardo DiCaprio, to interview President Clinton about the environment:  "the spreading of ideas, information or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a person."

Cool Britannia:  Sometimes, during what are called "slow news periods," newspapers and magazines struggle to fill pages.  In America at least, they solve this problem several ways:  by printing what are generously called "puff pieces", by covering tabloid trash stories, or by recycling old items to try to get more mileage out of them.  We seem to be in one of those times nationally, even with the so-called "war on terrorism."  When George W. Bush choking on a pretzel is the big story of the week, you know it is a slow news time.

How CNN Creates The News:  CNN's "Compound" Interest:  Their interest is in ratings and sensationalism, not in accuracy or justice.

What is the media thinking by ignoring the Medal of Honor?  "If it bleeds, it leads" is a canon of today's mass media, so bad news usually trumps good news for editors and producers.  But this week proves there is an even more powerful maxim:  "Trivial celebrity news beats all."  The carefully choreographed royal pronouncement pushed at least two other events — far more important to Americans — well into the background of U.S. print and broadcast media.

Soft News Erodes Audience The rise in "soft news" and "critical journalism" could be turning off traditional news audiences, according to a Harvard University study.  Soft news was defined as being typically more sensational, more personality-centered, more entertainment-oriented and more incident-based than traditional public affairs news.

Christmas with Hef:  They claim that she gets "the big stories."  But MSNBC's Rita Cosby continues to dig in the bottom of the barrel to attract an audience.

Our most destructive kind of racism.  Paula Zahn devoted two of her hour-long CNN shows this week to the topic "Skin Deep: Racism in America."  After taking the time to watch, the question I walked away with was:  "What was the point?"  In my view, the shows told us little that most of us don't already know — strong racist sentiments exist in the country — and really never asked the deeper and more important questions about what this means and why we should care.

O.J., "Kramer" and limits:  This "If I Did It" book and TV interview monstrosity was deliberately planned for the last week of the November sweeps, and Simpson reportedly was to be paid a cool $3.5 million for his efforts.  It was a disaster.  Fox News Channel discussed the story relentlessly, obviously promoting both the book and the upcoming interview, but it backfired and open revolt ensued.

Celebrities At The End.  The surrealism of celebrity pop culture erupts when a major celebrity dies.  The sudden, mysterious death of Michael Jackson caused a near-total eclipse of the real news.  The cable-news channels blurred into 24-7 wailing walls for the so-called "King of Pop."  Television ratings surged with a big ka-ching.  So much for the "news" business.

The Michael Jackson funeral.  In their rush to pander to the lowest common denominator, the major media, especially television, have fallen for their own hype, in a self-reinforcing cycle of Jackson mania.  They believed the importance of their coverage was revealed by the fact that all their peers and competitors regarded Jackson as equally important.  The public has even less reason to place their confidence in the antique media that brought us the sensationalistic coverage of the funeral of a celebrity whose career and life have been falling apart for many years.

The 12 Days of Michael.  There's no doubt about it.  Celebrity is the media's top priority.  Michael Jackson's June 25 death overshadowed all other news for almost two weeks.  Nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC featured at least one story each night about Jackson since his death.  More than half of those broadcasts aired since June 25 lead (sic) with a story about Jackson.

What ever Happened To The Erupting Iceland Volcano?  The Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to erupt in Iceland, but the story has fallen off the very small mainstream media tabletop. ... A brief examination of climate history shows how much it changes naturally and how those changes are a great influence on nature and human history.  The planes may be flying again but the fallout from the eruption is just beginning.  The mainstream media ... quickly lurch on to the next hysteria leaving the outcome and fallout of previous hysterias unreported.

The Lies of Duke:  "She was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air."  That's how a Washington Post columnist described the atmosphere that led to the brutal gang rape of Crystal Mangum by a group of Duke University lacrosse players in 2006.  You remember, right?  That was the violent, racially motivated hate crime that never happened.

Journalists become 'self-reverential' celebrities.  Newsmen have become the news.  And the gossip.  One may run for office.  Many are vying for a single plum job.  Another is suing his old network for millions.  It is a long way from the austere days of Eric Sevareid, when staid anchormen left stardom to Hollywood.

The national news media provide publicity for every crazed gunman who goes out with a bang.
Dial CNN for Murder.  The same dangerous pattern has been repeated again and again.  The disturbed man who took hostages at Sen. Clinton's headquarters in New Hampshire told loved ones to "watch the news tonight."  The shooter who terrorized an Omaha shopping mall by mowing down total strangers has achieved his goal (and I will not add to the problem by publishing his name).  He left a suicide note in which he predicted "at least now I'll be famous."  His picture is featured in every newspaper and is flashed on television hourly.  His miseries are being dissected and analyzed. ... And other disturbed people are watching and taking note.

The Media Has Declared... WAR!  Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common:  the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears.  The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity.  While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news — and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive — the similarities end there.  Hospitals gird for the incoming and the flood of bad news to follow; most newsrooms do not.  In a newsroom, tragic events are met with a different vibe:  an electric jolt that energizes the room with a sense of self-importance.  The shot of adrenaline that surges through a newsroom is fascinating to watch.

Media madness:  The Virginia Tech story.  There seems to be just one template for the media in covering tragedies like that which just occurred at Virginia Tech:  Discussion of further regulation of guns and so much coverage of the perpetrator that copycats are sure to be impressed. … Seeing the glorification of the latest mass murderer, the next Cho may be already getting some ideas about how to take follow in his footsteps.

Reducing the risk of copycat killers:  The way the media cover an event influences whether there will be repetitions.  For example, if a fan runs onto the field during a baseball game, the broadcast cameras usually avoid showing pictures of the fan.  The TV producers know that the fan on the field is seeking attention, and that, presumably, getting his picture on television will reward him.  Moreover, broadcasting the man's antics would encourage copycats.

Five Questions about Shootings at Universities.  The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was:  "6 Dead in NIU Shooting."  "6 dead" included the murderer.  Why wasn't the headline "5 killed at NIU"?  It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.  This is something entirely new.  Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims.

In time of tragedy, media are at their worst.  The press, particularly television news networks … [are] competing with each other like starving dogs for the slightest new morsel of information they can then put on a permanent loop on cable TV, until the next fragmentary detail is pried loose by a reporter desperate to be first, for 15 minutes.  Because there isn't enough new information to fill the infinite void allotted to these stories, the press quickly succumbs to a kind of emotional vampirism, feeding off the grief, fear and anguish of victims clearly incapable of understanding their own feelings….

Murder by media?  Did the non-stop playing of the Virginia Tech killer's twisted thoughts help to push a fragile mind in Houston to walk the same grisly path?  Has the airing of that video set in motion other killers and imitators who may not carry out their copy-cat crimes for months or years?

Autism Fraud Just the Tip of the Iceberg.  The lead author of that anti-vaccine study, which also appeared in one most respected medical journals, The Lancet, was British physician Andrew Wakefield.  And its consequences include millions of terrified and confused parents, large drops in vaccination rates and death.  Yet while this "deliberate fraud" has been exposed, others continue to go unchallenged, or worse, get trumpeted by reporters who should know better.  Regarding Wakefield, many people, including me, have spent years puncturing his claims and those of his acolytes in the anti-vaccine movement.  But a media that thrives on sensationalism instead played up the phony link.

Hooked on trivia.  We try to hear and see no evil, but it's not far-fetched to suggest that future world events could quickly change the lives of millions.  So why then fixate on Anna Nicole, Rosie, Imus and Alec?  Simple — they are the modern equivalents of grotesque carnival freak shows that used to provide a perverse sense of escapism from what people dare not face.  Yet as our dependency on such tabloid distraction grows, so, too, do the real dangers that we ignore.

The Lines Between News and Entertainment are Blurring.  An on-screen NBC News identifier for a fictional debate on "The West Wing" and a "news conference" by a fake Boston Red Sox executive on ESPN show how fuzzy the lines between news and entertainment have become.

Too much TV drama over storms.  We are now celebrating the anniversary of the Katrina hurricane and if one did not know better, one would think it was a fantastic event. … The hurricane season started a couple of months ago, and when watching TV, reading the papers or listening to the radio, it was obvious that the media was waiting with bated breath for the next disaster.  The season is half over and we can report no disasters.  They really are disappointed.

Like the wind, hurricane predictions keep shifting.  Hurricane forecaster William Gray's team downgraded its predictions again for the 2006 Atlantic storm season Friday [9/1/2006], saying 13 named storms are likely to form this year instead of 15. … Before hurricane season began June 1, Gray's team called for 17 named storms.  He trimmed that to 15 early last month.

Weather has become bogeyman, news staple.  It began as a mass e-mail in a certain Seattle office building on December's first day.  A cold front was arriving!  Snow!  Ice!  Untold inches for the city and surrounding area! … The cautious drove home after lunch.  The brave stayed behind.  And the snow never came.  Not even an inch.

Global Warming to Blame for Hot Weather Hyperbole.  A heat index of more than 100 degrees for days on end not only drains the body and spirit, but it also takes its toll on the thesaurus.  There is a limit to the number of ways to describe the heat and still sound relatively intelligent.

Silly Talk:  How many times have you heard a weatherman say that the sun will try to come out later in the day?  Sometimes their prediction turns out to be false and I wonder whether they would explain it by saying the sun didn't try hard enough.  But it's not just weathermen who use teleological explanations, ascribing purposeful behavior to inanimate objects.

The Media Rush to Duke's Defense.  Usually, reporters breathlessly take everything prosecutors and the police say at face value, often to devastating effect upon criminal defendants.  The "perp walk," in which a suspect is paraded publicly in handcuffs from place to place, often after officials have told television producers where to place their cameras, is only the most visible example of this practice.  The reporters get their shot.  The police get to portray the defendant, innocent or not, as dangerous (i.e. guilty) in the eyes of potential jurors.

All the news is a stage.  As they spin the Saddam trial and deride our soldiers in Iraq, the lesson is clear:  These media masters of theater are incapable of delivering real drama and good news unless they control the script.  Fortunately, you control the remote.

What's Right About America!  Last Sunday when I returned from church services I opened my hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and settled in with a cup of coffee to review the day's news.  It was a good thing I had already received my inspiration at church, or I could have easily become downright depressed over the negative headlines in nearly every section of the paper.  The majority of headlines on the front page of each section promised a story that would focus on the negative aspect of an event or issue, rather than the positive contributions people are making to fix the biggest problems we face.

Don't put much stock in the TV experts.  Stocks go up and down, but eventually, most go up.  So if you invest and hold on, odds are you'll do quite well.

Ending a losing streak:  The left is on another losing streak today, and so their intellectual leaders in the liberal media have gone back to the old playbook for an easy win that will get their team out of its slump.  This time, it is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, which has been working for them since the days of Karl Marx.

Fred Barnes Calls Sheehan a "Crackpot," Rues Media Focus on Her.  Barnes criticized both her and the media's treatment of her:  "This woman wants to go in and tell the President that the war is about oil because the President wants to pay off his buddies.  She's a crackpot, and yet the press treats her as some important protestor."

The Brawley Case of the South:  [Scroll down] Reluctance to change a popular story line helps account for the strange press coverage of Cindy Sheehan.  That line pitted moral mom versus stone-hearted president.  When Ms. Sheehan's outbursts grew stranger, the press stayed with the soft line about a mother's grief and simply omitted her increasingly bizarre comments that American troops were "being sent to kill innocent people" in Iraq and that President Bush was "a filth spewer" and "an evil maniac" guilty of "blatant genocide."  The insurgents who killed her son Casey, on the other hand, were "freedom fighters."

Did someone mention Cindy Sheehan?

Let's keep arguing.  It's true that we have more semistructured "Crossfire"-style debates than ever before.  But much of this is rigidly preprogrammed sniping (I was once chastised by a TV producer for not interrupting other speakers more.  What a failure!)  Even when the sniping is downplayed, TV demands sharp sound bites, which pushes all talking heads toward more vehemence and simplemindedness.  Instant certainty becomes mandatory, a delivery style many talking heads start to regret before they're even out of the studio.  Where is the real debate?

None Dare Call It Fascism.  After Johnson's War on Poverty, Nixon's War on Drugs, and Carter's Energy Crisis, then came the premier liberal crisis of modern times, the Environmental Crisis.  The media predictably plays an enthusiastic accomplice in these schemes, not just because its members are mostly liberal, but more importantly, crises generate more readers, viewers, and listeners.  This is why the principal product American media sells to its customers is crisis, not information.



"The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were."
— David Brinkley *    

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart


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

Bias is one thing, but sometimes newspaper and TV reporters are just overtly dishonest.

Overview and recap articles:

If it's in the media, it isn't true.  We cannot trust anything uttered by any politician or mainstream media outlet.  Nothing.  If the politicians and media are saying it, we would be safer to assume, until proven otherwise, that they are lying, treat it with suspicion and look very very closely at it.  A safe rule of thumb is: if it's in the media, it isn't true. [...] One thing that is becoming a strong feature of the current political puppet show is that nobody is proposing any real actions to improve the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and overall survival level of the honest citizenry or to resolve the real problems that trouble, impede and suppress that citizenry.  If you look closely at what these con men are saying, you will discover mostly, if not totally, mere waffle and spin with no substance.  We are at the same time constantly and relentlessly told how bad everything is. [...] Thus we are encouraged to view the world as worse than it actually is.  That is not to say that there are not bad situations, just that they are always presented as worse and more frightening than they actually are.

The Editor says...
TV weather reports always make approaching storms seem more dangerous than they are.  Reporters try to make global warming sound like more of a threat than it is.  There is no "climate crisis."  The TV reporters certainly made Covid-19 sound worse than it was.  DDT never hurt anybody.  The polar bears aren't disappearing.  Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.  The official explanation of WTC Building 7 is a pack of lies.  The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — ditto.  The Crash of TWA 800 — ditto.  The Kennedy assassination — ditto.  (Just ask Dorothy Kilgallen.)  Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.  Neither did Vince Foster.  Nobody knows who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.  Nobody knows who left a packet of cocaine in the White House.  Nobody knows who leaked information from the Supreme Court.  Nobody knows who left dummy pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC headquarters on January 6, 2021.  (But if you took a cell phone to Washington DC that day, they know exactly where you are today!)  Islam is not a "religion of peace."  Riding on mass transit is not safe.  The 2020 presidential election was stolen.  Barack H. Obama is a Muslim, his birth certificate is a forgery, and he uses somebody else's Social Security number.  Numerous other examples of news media dishonesty can be found on this page.  I'm not the only skeptic in America.  There is no longer any good reason to have a TV in your house.  The TV is a liar.

The Media-Democratic Fusion.  If one were to listen during the last few years to NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, or CNN, or read the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, then one would have believed the following:  A) Donald Trump worked with the Russians to throw and win the 2016 election.  As part of that skullduggery, frolicking amid prostitutes he urinated on a Moscow hotel bed to spite Barack Obama.  B) He was mentally incapacitated as president and should have been removed under the 25th Amendment.  C) In 2020, his campaign once more worked with the Russians to create an exact replica of Hunter Biden's laptop, replete with dozens of lurid fake photos and hundreds of cleverly doctored emails to smear the Biden family and aid his own reelection effort.  D) Trump as chief conspirator preplanned a violent and armed insurrection that sought to storm and permanently occupy the government, violently hijacking the balloting and seizing the presidency — resulting in the murder of a Capitol police officer and the subsequent deaths of other traumatized officers.  E) For the last eight years, none of Trump's political opponents have ever destroyed subpoenaed evidence, conspired to hire foreign nationals to compile false and lurid files on him to subvert his political campaigns, or used their political offices to help solicit foreign money for family lobbyists.  F) Trump is the first major candidate and politician who allegedly overvalued his real assets to obtain a loan that he repaid; the first to have concluded non-disclosure agreements with potential embarrassing liaisons; the first ex-president to remove sensitive files to his personal residence; and the first to phone a state official to whine about the integrity of the vote count.  G) He is the first losing presidential candidate or major politician to question an election result or to seek redress through government agencies to rectify the purported corruption of the balloting.

It is no wonder Americans are so confused.  Here are some of the lies the media intentionally spreads as they push the leftist agenda and seek to destroy anyone who gets in their way:
  •   The border agents whipped illegal immigrants.  The media, Justice Department and other Democrats knew this was a lie from day one but didn't care.
  •   Women are going to die because abortion is limited or prevented.  This is a despicable lie meant to scare everyone.  Not one state that restricts abortion prevents the termination of a pregnancy when the mother's life is in danger.
[...]
  •   The "Hands up don't shoot" lie was meant to gin up racial hate and division against white cops.  How many cops have been injured or killed because so many in the media and others spread this lie?
  •   That January 6th was an armed insurrection.  The FBI determined it wasn't planned or organized and no arms were confiscated. [...]
  •   That the 2020 election was pure as the driven snow.  The media and other Democrats know that many states intentionally violated election laws and that Mark Zuckerberg's money violated laws but don't care.
  •   The Antifa and BLM riots were mostly peaceful
  •   That the U.S has always been a racist country, that all whites are racist and privileged, and all other races are oppressed.
  •   That the vaccines will prevent the virus.  The media sought to silence anyone who disagreed with the false narrative.
  •   That the CDC based everything on science.
[...]
  •   That the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.  They made this up to bury the story before the election as they campaigned for Biden.
  •   That the science is settled that humans, fossil fuels, and CO2 cause warming.  There is not one piece of scientific data from the last 150 years that supports this theory, only easily manipulated computer models that have always been wrong.

Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization.  Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media.  But they grudgingly admitted that many liberal journalists of the last century were mostly professionals.  News divisions mostly reported the news rather than simply made it up.  Not so now with Big Tech and 21stt-century [sic] "woke" journalism.  Few reporters have yet offered apologies for helping hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that paralyzed the country for three years.  Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.  Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the "hands-up-don't shoot" Ferguson distortions.  Journalists promulgated misinformation about the "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.  They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant — but now utterly disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo — as well as the "Russian disinformation" yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.  Most recently, reporters spread serial untruths surrounding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.

When all the media narratives collapse.  [Scroll down]  Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed.  They viciously defamed the Covington boys.  They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump's denials only made them more certain.  They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. [...] Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty "white supremacy" narrative.  They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). [...] More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. [...] Any concern was "fearmongering politics."  And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. [...] We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. [...] We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. [...] We were — and still are! — being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn't in high schools at all.  Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is — in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states' education policies.  We all get things wrong.  What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party.  And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods.

Radio Free America — Rush's Legacy.  For decades — before the internet and satellite TV — news in America was controlled by a select few entities, all of which were closely aligned with the Democrat party.  ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN controlled television and radio news.  The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times set the tone for printed news.  The media and leftist politicians they supported were creating narratives to shape public opinion.  They crafted their narratives by being selective in what news they presented, or by outright distortion of facts. [...]
  •   Walter Cronkite told us the Vietnam war was lost after the Tet Offensive.  In fact, Tet was a devastating loss for the North Vietnamese.
  •   We were told that socialism was superior to capitalism.  It just needed to be implemented correctly.
  •   We were told that Ronald Reagan was a fool and a dangerous warmonger.  Yet he won the Cold War without firing a shot.
  •   We were told that Cuba was a workingman's paradise with free education and medical care.  Yet people were fleeing the island on anything that would float.
We knew what we observed didn't quite fit the narrative being presented, but we weren't sure why.  We began to question our worldview.  We were being gaslighted.

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.

Journalistic standards have had nothing to do with the truth for a long time.  The media knows that Trump gave aid to Ukraine with nothing in return and Obama/Biden withheld aid and only gave a loan to Ukraine after they demanded and got a prosecutor fired, but they say Biden/Obama did nothing wrong and Trump should be impeached.  We don't have the right to hear from anyone who disagrees on climate change.  How does so much of the U.S have exceptionally low temperatures if 150 years of fossil fuel use, 150 years of CO2 increase and an exponential increase in the number of people worldwide causes warming?  While the media intentionally hides the truth for things negative to Democrats, they collude with Democrats to perpetrate a known lie that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016.  They perpetrated gossip to take out Kavanaugh in 2018 with no evidence.  They intentionally lie about what Trump said about Charlottesville to gin up racial hate and violence.  They treat congenital liars Schiff, Brennan, Clapper, Rice and others as credible people as they seek to destroy Trump and elect democrats.

If Anyone Should Be Impeached, It's the Liberal Media.  For decades now, in violation of the public trust, liberals in the American mainstream media — including the news, information, and entertainment media — have willfully corrupted the values and institutions that made the United States of America into the greatest nation in the history of humanity.  Their lies and immorality have wrought havoc on families, churches, schools, businesses, corporations, governments, and so on.  Contrary to their sacred duty to provide what is truthful, they have willfully presented false and misleading information to the public at large concerning, but not limited to, the following:  [#1] The election of Democrats over Republicans. [...] [#2] The role of good government — especially in most every fiscal matter. [...] [#3] The nature and details concerning radical Islam and Islam in general. [...] [#4] The nature and details of the burning of fossil fuels as it relates to global climate change — specifically what is often referred to as "global warming."

Trump, Kavanaugh, Lewandowski and our malignant Left.  This new attempt by the NYT and two wholly unethical reporters at that paper again crosses all lines of respectable, legitimate journalism.  The NYT is no longer, and has not been for ages, an honest broker of the news; it is rag that dispenses fake news intended to deceive.  The facts of this campaign to ruin Kavanaugh and his family, because the left wants to protect unimpeded abortion rights, are well-known and obvious.  They are also a stain on all those who participated in the scheme, a scarlet letter of a sort.  Nothing any of them ever writes again can be or will be trusted.  Nothing published by the NYT can be trusted.  Nothing on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS or NBC can be trusted.  They are all agents of corruption and deceit.

The Best Of CNN 2018.  CNN's version of "news" has become outright parody so many times in 2018 it was difficult to keep track of.  Thankfully, Mark Dice has done just that with a "Best of CNN" video that lays out just how idiotic the Establishment Media now is as they get completely lost within their own anti-Trump hysteria.  Anyone who still considers CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc., actual news needs to get their collective heads examined.  It's globalist propoganda — all of it.  [Video clip]

Who Watches the Media Watchdogs?  Who was it that told America Al Gore won the 2000 election?  Who told us the Fort Hood shooter wasn't an Islamist terrorist?  Who told us a meek and mild Michael Brown was shot with his hands up, begging to surrender?  Who told us CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood front in the U.S., is a "civil rights organization"?  Who is still telling us that after 9-11, there was a violent "backlash" against Muslims in America?  Who told us climate change is settled science?  Who ducked the story about abortionist Kermit Gosnell's Philadelphia slaughterhouse?  Who told us all the troubles in the Middle East are caused by Israel?  Who told us that Robert Mueller's list of indictments proves Trump colluded with Russia?  Who told us it was Trump who initiated the "policy" of family separation at the southern border?  Who ran a fake magazine cover to show Trump looming over a crying Honduran toddler?

Hall Monitor Nation.  The media relentlessly lied to the public about Hillary's health, denouncing conservatives as "conspiracy theorists" for mentioning it.  Then an alert citizen with an iPhone captured Hillary having to be carried to her car at the 9/11 memorial service in 2016.  Mainstream media outlets painted a cherubic picture of Michael Brown after he was fatally shot by Missouri.  He was a "gentle giant," gunned down like a dog as he plaintively cried, "Hands up! Don't shoot!"  HEY!  Wait a second!  How did that video get out of Brown manhandling a tiny Indian man while robbing a convenience store?  That should have been suppressed like the Broaddrick interview!  Would we ever have known about Monica Lewinsky, but for the Drudge Report publishing the blockbuster story that Newsweek had killed?  Currently, the establishment media are in a rage that the public has found out about the modern genocide being waged against white South African farmers.

The 2018 Breitbart News Fake News Awards.  Until you actually take the time to research the amount of lies and lies and lies the establishment media deliberately spread, you can't begin to fathom just how bad things are.  By the time I was done going through the entire year, I literally, no joke, had 11 pages of headlines to choose from for these awards.


Timely news and commentary:
This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart

Is It Any Wonder That No Sane Person Takes Fact Checks Seriously?  Making fun of Pravda media "fact checks" is, perhaps, a little too easy at times.  But doing so is a good reminder of just how distorted their worldview is.  Without being reminded, we might fall into the bad habit of taking these people more seriously than they deserve.  [Advertisement]  [Tweet]  The Politifact "fact check" on conservative complaints (I'm pretty sure that the complaints are more "common sense" than conservative) that aid to Africa has nothing to do with aid to North Carolina is a perfect example of how the government hypnotized think.  Having worked in government and around politicians, I can assure you that from the perspective of the bureaucratically minded, the dissociation between spending in one area and that of another is indeed totally disconnected.  People in government think in terms of bureaucratic fiefdoms, and the budget of one fiefdom is in a different universe than that of any other.

Some of the lies the mainstream media and liberal politicians are demanding we believe.  There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.  While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them.  [Tweet with video clip]

Harris Campaign Advisor David Plouffe Accidently Exposes How Legacy Media Lied to the American People With Junk Polls.  There have been extensive postmortems on Kamala Harris's failed campaign and the absolute drubbing she received from Donald Trump.  Democrat strategist James Carville said the moment he knew the campaign was doomed was when 'The View' co-host Sunny Hostin asked Harris, "If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?"  Kamala answered, "There is not a thing that comes to mind."  But legacy media keep gaslighting voters with polls showing Harris neck and neck with Trump and even leading in some surprising places.

An epidemic of lies.  [Scroll down]  Fortunately, people have noticed and it looks like we've all had enough.  Americans don't like being lied to.  Our trust in our own government and the media have been declining for years and we're increasingly turning to independent sources.  MSNBC and CNN have reportedly lost a large portion of their viewership, and rumors abound that Elon Musk may even purchase the former.

The 2024 Presidential Election Landslide.  The people are not stupid, despite what the self-styled "elites" believe.  Ordinary working folks are trying to raise families and earn a living.  They don't have the time to be fully versed in day-to-day politics.  In the past, they've relied on the legacy media to report objectively.  It is clear, though, that in the 2024 election, the people rejected what the legacy media was spinning.  The legacy media abdicated their responsibility to educate, inform, and report the day's news objectively and fairly.  They failed in their role as a watchdog to serve as a check on government abuse of power.  The legacy media devolved into an activist partisan organ that parrots the talking points of the Marxist left and government.  Media outlets both outright lied and concealed information from the people without any remorse.  The legacy media gaslighted the people for "wrong" thinking when challenged by common sense critiques and questions.

Media Describes Muslim Terrorist as "Homeless Florida Man".  Harun Abdul-Malik Yener considered joining ISIS, had been looking into bombmaking since 2017 and boasted, "I feel like Bin Laden."  So clearly this is a Florida homeless man problem.  And not another Muslim terrorist problem.

No one should believe economists — they are apologists for bad policies.  This article in USA Today is so full of misinformation that it's hard to know where to start.  They work very hard to absolve Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their policies for the rapid rise in inflation — but the actual evidence shows how responsible they really are. [...] Foremost, these economists blame the pandemic for the inflation, but looking back at the data reveals that inflation stayed somewhere below 2% for the year of the pandemic (2020) before Biden was even in — it was 1.4% when Biden actually took office, and had remained low even with all the stimulus that was approved during Trump's last year of his first term.  Next, they intentionally lie that Biden-Harris policies brought the country out of the downturn.  The economy was soaring prior to Biden taking office.  The recession was the shortest ever, ending two months after it started in April 2020.  For the next eight months of 2020, jobs were coming back at over 1.6 million per month and yet the inflation rate was still 1.4%.  Next, they falsely try to deflect blame for the high inflation to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which occurred in February of 2022.  This is so easy to disprove, it is laughable that anyone believes it.  The price of oil, which affects everything, started soaring as soon as Biden got in because Biden campaigned on destroying the oil and natural gas industries.

Some Democrats Are Admitting They Lied Before The Election.  [Scroll down]  Before the election, no media leftist would dare to have said anything of the sort.  It was all, "Crime is down," even though the books had been cooked by not having the statistics from the largest Democrat-controlled cities in the country where the crime problem lives.  They knew it, but they insisted otherwise anyway because they wanted to win.  Illegal aliens committed fewer crimes than we stinking Americans, they insisted, even though the collection of data on the immigration status of criminals was forbidden in blue states, making it impossible to prove.  That also made it impossible to disprove, which was the point.  "Migrants are a boon to the economy," they cried while demanding more money from the federal government to help support these bipedal economic stimulus packages that were starting to bankrupt city budgets with their "economic growth."

Here Lies the Mainstream Media.  On Tuesday night, roughly 72 million Americans buried the reeking carcass once called "legacy media." [...] Trust in the news outlets that were, many ages ago, the hallmark of integrity and investigation has plummeted — steeply.  Why?  Because we found out that the mainstream media has been lying.  When it became blatantly obvious to much of the nation that Biden may, in fact, be suffering from cognitive decline, memory lapses, and possibly even dementia or Parkinson's, mainstream media covered it up, as they had covered it up for years.  ABC News even offered the sitting president an opportunity to persuade voters on air that he was fit as a fiddle.  When Harris took Biden's place as the Democratic presidential candidate, mainstream media rushed to downplay her extreme, left-wing record.  When the vice president sat down for an interview on CBS News's famous "60 Minutes" program, the news team apparently doctored the recorded interview, cutting and pasting Harris's incoherent answers to match questions that might make more sense to viewers.

How media fails.  Of all the institutions that have failed us in past years, none has been worse than the media. [...] The total lack of reporting and curiosity about what was really going on at the southern border was beyond the pale.  The flow of 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants was barely reported for three years until, again, the ramifications were becoming evident to too many people.  Where were the nightly photos of immigrants from some very dangerous places flooding over the Rio Grande?  If you looked at a few conservative outlets you were aware of it.  If you only looked at the traditional media, you weren't.  They just reported the obvious misinformation coming from the administration that the border was secure.  We should demand better from the press.  They can't understand why the public holds them in such low esteem but they have earned the current lack of trust.

Whom Should the Media Blame for Harris's Defeat?  [Scroll down]  In all of these discussions, the media do not point to a prominent element common to each of the perceived problems: the media themselves.  Of course, the media were too compromised by partisan motives to report what they had known for most of Biden's term: he clearly suffered from advanced dementia.  As Axios political reporter Hans Nichols recently noted on Fox's America's Newsroom, the media came down hard on any reporter who proposed a well sourced story on Biden's lack of acuity, because that would help Trump.  Publicizing this infirmity would have had several salutary results.  Obviously, as all disappointed Democrats now appear to admit, Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier.  But the same media relaying this judgment do not point a finger at themselves for aiding and abetting his clueless clinging to power.

Say, What Happened To 'Closest Election In History'?  For months running up to the Nov. 5 election, the "experts" told us that this would be the closest in history.  Over and over again they said it.  Always with great certainty.
    "This could be the closest presidential election since 1876"
    "Uncertainty reigns in an election closer 'than any I have ever seen'"
    "Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump is the closest presidential race of the century"
    "2024 Election Is The Closest Presidential Race In At Least 60 Years: Polls"
    "Coping with election-related anxiety in a razor-thin race"
    "Razor-thin race between Harris and Trump should motivate Democrats ahead of Election Day"
    "Dead-heat poll results are astonishing — and improbable, these experts say"
    "America's dead-heat Trump-Harris election"
    "Poll shows presidential race in dead heat"
Turns out, it wasn't close at all.  Trump is currently ahead by 3.5 points in the popular vote.  That will tighten as the millions of votes in deep-blue states such as California, Washington, and Oregon continue to be counted, but if it holds it will be the first time since 2004 that a GOP candidate won the popular vote and only the second time since 1988.  But unless you failed civics class, you'd know that we don't elect presidents by national popular vote.  And if Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan end up in the Trump camp — he's currently leading in all three states plus Alaska — Trump will end up with 312 electoral votes.

2024's Biggest Loser Is The Corporate Media Industrial Complex.  In the early hours of Wednesday morning, legacy news networks were already sliding toward 2016 levels of melting down about the increasingly definite prospect of a presidential victory by Donald J. Trump.  For them, Harris' stinging defeat is personal — because it's just as much a defeat for them as it is for her.  The corporate media industrial complex has spent Donald Trump's entire political career trying to destroy him.  Hand-in-hand with triple-letter government agencies and Democrats, they ran a hoax painting Trump as a Russian stooge based on ridiculous rumors commissioned by his opponent's campaign in 2016.  They continued to spread the lie for the duration of his presidency, awarding each other Pulitzers for it.  And they've only ramped up their efforts since then.  The problem they're reckoning with tonight is this:  those efforts didn't work.  They're no longer able to control Americans by controlling their information intake, because their credibility is farther deep-sixed than the Clinton family's enemies list.

Media Misinformation Undermines Our Democracy.  Have you ever wondered why the media seems to feel so emboldened when broadcasting unfounded claims about public figures like Donald Trump, as if they're shielded from any consequence?  The answer lies in a questionable Supreme Court decision from 1964 — NY Times v.  Sullivan — which established a novel and radical interpretation of the First Amendment that has, for six decades, let media outlets slander public figures with impunity.  The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, yes, but nowhere in its text does it explicitly allow the press to defame individuals without consequence.  Yet in 1964, in a 9-0 decision authored by Justice William Brennan, a Supreme Court dominated by activist judges established a precedent without clear constitutional grounding, declaring that public figures could only succeed in defamation suits if they could prove "actual malice" — that is, that the media knowingly lied or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.  The justices defined this standard of "actual malice" in a way that makes it exceedingly difficult for any public figure to win a defamation case.

Fight! Fight!  Fight!  Vs. Fake, Fake, Fake.  In the place of news that greatly matters, the propaganda press has filled the airwaves with demonstrable lies in the days leading up to the election.  Fake journalists lie about President Trump taking away birth control and forcing women to have babies against their will.  After covering up Joe Biden's dementia for years, they now lie about Donald Trump showing fake signs of fatigue.  They parrot the FBI's fake crime statistics and lie to Americans about the safety of their communities.  They parrot the CDC's fake COVID statistics and lie to Americans about the success of lockdowns, mask mandates, and fake vaccines.  They parrot fake jobs reports and lie to Americans about economic growth.  Despite the fact that Kamala Harris has the lowest approval rating for any modern vice president, our fake journalists lie to Americans about her remarkable popular appeal.  And after mocking President Trump for being the victim of two separate assassination attempts, the propaganda press now pushes the lie that his words somehow threaten RINO Liz Cheney's life.  The Deep State spews blatant lies, and the propaganda press treats those blatant lies as irrefutable truths.

Here's A List Of Every Garbage Journalist Who Lied About Trump's Liz Cheney Chickenhawk Comments.  Democrats' propaganda press is completely lying about comments Trump made about neocon and former Rep. Liz Cheney in an interview with Tucker Carlson.  Trump called Cheney a "radical war hawk" and pointed out how easy it is to make decisions about the lives of American troops when you are sitting in a cozy, insulated office and have no sense of how it feels on the field of battle to face the life and death consequences of decisions made in Washington.  "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.  Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face," Trump said.  "You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington, in a nice building saying, 'Oh, gee, well, let's send — let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.'"  Anyone with a basic grasp of English and a bit of context understands what Trump was conveying.

Corporate Media's Shameless Liz Cheney Hoax Is What Real 'Disinformation' Looks Like.  One of the most powerful and corrupt players in American politics is spreading a sensational lie to manipulate voters four days before the final day of voting in the 2024 presidential election.  The lie is that Donald Trump threatened to execute dynastic war hawk Liz Cheney by firing squad, and the culprit is America's propaganda press.  Anyone who watches the clip of what Trump said will discern that he was obviously suggesting Cheney pick up a rifle and join the thousands of young Americans she's sent overseas to fight in forever wars.  Anyone who interprets it differently is either lying or so stupid he should take a lifelong vow of silence starting today.  "She's a radical war hawk," Trump said of Cheney on Thursday night.  "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?  Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.  You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, 'Oh gee ... let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.'"  Cheney, beside herself at the thought of having to do what she asks young American men and women to do, ripped the first half of Trump's comment from its context and claimed Trump had "threaten[ed]" her "with death."  The corporate media didn't issue one of their infamous "fact" "checks" or call Cheney out for her disinformation.  They quickly joined in on the lie that Trump had "fantasized" about putting Cheney in front of a firing squad.

You Are Forewarned:  If Kamala Harris Loses, the Democrats Will Try to Kill Free Speech ASAP.  Upon being badly trounced in a national election, members of the losing party have one of two choices:  They can be introspective, take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror, and undergo an honest, no-holds-barred critique of all their missteps, poor tactics, and ineffective messaging.  Or they can lie to themselves.  Candid, unflinching self-analysis is torturous.  It puts you face-to-face with your own failings; there's nowhere to hide, nowhere else to point the finger.  And in a presidential campaign with thousands of people, hundreds of regions, and countless moving parts, it also requires you to hold your team members accountable.  Which is why lying is so popular!  Whenever the media talks about lying, they always portray it in a negative light.  (What gives?)  Because when you really stop and think about it, lying is a GREAT way to make people believe something that's totally untrue!

Trump Is Right.  There Is an 'Enemy Within' the United States.  [Scroll down]  The idea that those people might try to use violence to impact the election is so realistic that it should be considered probable, especially if it's close.  Funnier still is the idea that "Trump would use the military against his enemies on election day," since that's what the question was about — election day violence.  Donald Trump, win or lose, will not be President on election day.  I realize reality has no impact on the pearl-clutching class on Morning Joe, but for everyone else that should be an important factoid.  While the goon squad mob on the left are undoubtedly an enemy within our country, so too is the left-wing industrial complex that props it up.  The media — so-called journalists — people who coined and echoed the phrase "mostly peaceful" as people's lives were destroyed, businesses were destroyed and dozens were murdered.  Anyone who could look at that and turn an indifferent eye has something broken in them nothing will fix.

Laura Loomer Files $150 Million Defamation Lawsuit Against Bill Maher After He Suggests Secret Trump Affair.  Laura Loomer filed a $150 million lawsuit against Bill Maher and HBO after the comedian made comments suggesting that Loomer "might be" having a secret affair with former President Donald Trump.  The lawsuit filed on Tuesday argues that Maher falsely claimed Loomer was in an "arranged relationship" with Trump, during a "Real Time" talk show taping on September 13th. [...]  [Tweet with video clip]  Loomer has accused Maher of making the false statements with "malice" while causing her significant personal and professional harm.  Loomer's lawsuit goes on to assert that the allegations are "baseless" and "fabricated for attention, notoriety, clicks, and profit."  She also claims that Maher made disparaging remarks in a subsequent segment on the comedic political talk show, titled "24 things you didn't know about Laura Loomer."

Did The New York Times Publish a Hoax?  I am not a ballistics expert and don't play one on TV.  I didn't even sleep in a Holiday Inn Express, so what I write here is based entirely on the analysis of others.  [Advertisement]  But I am pretty sure they are right, given the balance of the evidence and the provenance of the opinion piece published by the New York Times.  [Tweet]  At issue is a piece published by the Times in which 65 medical personnel who have worked in Gaza during the Israeli operation accuse soldiers of deliberately targeting Gazan children, shooting them in the head.  There are lurid stories and X-ray images that purport to show bullets lodged in the head and neck of children.  Those X-rays appear to be — according to doctors and ballistics experts — totally fake.  And even I, a layman, can [challenge] them due to obvious problems that a 10-year-old can spot.  Look at the linked photos in the above tweet, and you will immediately notice a few things:  there are no entry or exit wounds, despite the claim that a military rifle supposedly shot these children with a bullet designed to penetrate armor.  The bullets show no deformation and appear to have been placed under the body.

4 Years After The Biden Laptop Coverup, Media Election Interference Is Worse Than Ever.  Just last week, CBS News used deceptive video splicing to replace one of Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris' answers on "60 Minutes" with one that sounded less awful.  A preview clip of the interview showed Harris responding to a question with nonsensical babble, but when the full interview aired, that answer was nowhere to be seen, having been replaced by a completely different response.  The original answer was also missing from the transcript released by the network, and CBS continues to refuse to release an undoctored transcript.  The most outrageous election interference from the press this cycle might be the pile-up on Trump by ABC News "moderators" when Trump met Harris for a singular presidential debate in September.  They lobbed "fact checks" at Trump left and right while refusing to question Harris' many falsehoods.  Throughout the debate, the format resembled ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis asking Trump to explain how he could possibly be so horrible and then giving Harris a chance to opine on whether she thought Trump was horrible and why.

They Are Lying To You About Hurricane Helene.  After what we have just witnessed, how will anyone be able to trust those that are running the country ever again?  Hurricane Helene's extremely unusual journey left an immense trail of destruction that was more than 500 miles long, and there are many communities that were completely and utterly wiped out.  Authorities are telling the mainstream media that only a few hundred people died, and so that is what the mainstream media is telling us.  But those that are on the ground in the areas that got hit the hardest are telling us a completely different story.  For example, one woman in Asheville, North Carolina says that thousands of people are missing and that there are still "bodies hanging from trees they haven't gotten to yet" [...] Another local woman is claiming that there are more than 900 bodies at a local hospital in Asheville which still have not been identified[.] [...] Please keep in mind that Asheville is just one of the cities that was absolutely devastated by this storm.  There are hundreds of others that are dealing with dead bodies as well.

Hilarious job numbers from the Bureau of Labor.  As the media campaign so vigorously for Democrats and cheer how great the Biden-Harris policies have been, suddenly, the Department of Labor comes out with an unemployment report that blows away expectations.  Biden and Harris were out bragging as a significant number of people still can't pay their bills without running up new debt or going delinquent on the debt they already had.  Supposedly, 254,000 jobs were created in September.  Isn't that amazing, that this report came out one month before the election?  Of course, the media gave the headline number and never got into the details.  Here is one important detail:  government jobs showed a gain of 785,000 because of the second biggest seasonal adjustment on record.  (It is easy to manipulate numbers when you have "seasonal adjustments.")  This would mean that private-sector employment declined 531,000 with seasonal adjustments.  I would say that is not too much to brag about.  Somehow, the voters don't get to see that number, but they know that the economy has sucked the past four years because they can't pay their bills.

The Democrats Defraud the Voters With A Little Help From Their Friends.  In 2016 the Democrats fabricated the Trump-Russian collusion hoax.  That's far more serious than lying about how a politician voted years ago.  The CIA furthered this lie by enlisting foreign security agencies to generate contacts between Russians and peripheral Trump campaign members to create suspicion against Trump.  After the election, the Democrats used the same fabrication to hamstring Trump's administration and try to drive him from office.  The CIA issued false leaks to the MSM claiming growing evidence of Trump-Russian collusion.  The MSM eagerly published stories day after day claiming "the walls were closing in" on Trump.  But the walls were not closing in.  The claim was a lie.  The MSM is so brazen that when New York Times and Washington Post reporters were awarded Pulitzers for their falsehoods, they proudly kept them even as their falsehoods were exposed.

BBC blames child marriage in Bangladesh on climate change.  WHATEVER the BBC report on climate change, it is pretty good advice to assume the opposite is true!  BBC World Service broadcasts a weekly radio programme called The Climate Question.  A couple of weeks ago the topic was child marriage in Bangladesh, with the claim that extreme weather 'fuelled by climate change' was making farming impossible in many parts of the Bangladesh.  Consequently people were moving off the land and into towns.  As a result, supposedly, young girls were being married off.  But far from farming becoming impossible, the opposite is the case.  Cereal production continues to rise every year to new records, and the area harvested is also increasing.  To cap it all, poverty levels have declined by a factor of eight since the 1980s.  Bangladesh is a success story, but you won't hear that from the BBC.  Everything the BBC has reported is a lie.  They obviously have a problem with admitting the truth about child brides in Muslim countries, so why not blame it all on global warming instead?

On State Department Censorship and Blacklisting.  Last Friday, Josh Christenson at the New York Post published "State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over conservative 'blacklist.'"  The article described an internal memo showing the State Department strategizing public relations responses to the Washington Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky, me, and Republican congressman Jim Banks.  The memo criticizes Banks in an extremely devious way.  The Indiana Republican last February was quoted by Gabe in the Examiner saying the Biden administration appeared to be "knee deep" in efforts to "crack down" on speech.  The State Department memo listed the Banks quote among its list of criticisms to answer.  However, the agency didn't quote the Examiner.  It claimed to be quoting the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, giving the impression that Banks offered his criticism of Biden in Russian state media:  [Exhibit]  But Banks never spoke to RIA-Novosti, or any Russian agency.  His quotes only appear in wholesale Russian translations (read: thefts) of Gabe's Examiner article. [...] A miffed Banks just responded with a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.  "The State Department, in defense of its domestic so-called 'disinformation' operation, purposefully spread disinformation about a U.S. lawmaker," he wrote, adding that "this is a sloppy and hypocritical lie and it is typical of the Biden-Harris State Department's repeated attacks on the First Amendment."

The New Yorker Doesn't Care About Facts When They're Making [Stuff] Up About Trump.  Perhaps no period in modern journalism has exposed major structural problems in the media as the Trump era.  Since Trump careened into American politics in 2016, reporters have thrown story after story trying to ensnare Trump with Russia's Putin.  Many of these stories never held up to honest inquiry.  As investigative journalist Jeff Gerth examined in scrupulous detail — a 24,000 word, three part series, in the Columba Journalism Review to be exact — top American journalists misled the public while claiming to cover Trump fairly, dispassionately, and — most important — accurately.  Gerth notes that some of these reporters went on to win awards for their failed Trump stories.  You likely haven't read Gerth's series in Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and that's for good cause.  Many journalists who wrote misleading stories on Trump refused to speak with Gerth, likely because they'd be hard pressed to defend dubious articles that led to coveted journalism prizes and promotions.

The second assassination attempt was not 'apparent'.  Everywhere I look for news updates on the Trump assassination attempt I'm confronted by the word "apparent."  Headlines all over legacy media (my browser's cache was chockful of them) disseminate variations of "Trump's apparent assassination attempt..."  Up until at least 0930 PST, the day after.  My goodness, the would-be assassin is a Dem donkey's ass-assin, without the wit to repugn the verbal violence from Dem asses against President Trump.  That's apparent, but his acting out is manifest.  The ass-assin wasn't out there shooting birdies with his AK-47 from the out-of-bounds rough on the golf course.  There was nothing "apparent" about it — his intentions (corroborated by his social media profile) were bleedin' obvious.

That media 'narrative' about pets going uneaten by Haitian migrants in Ohio is starting to fall apart.  Yes, they're getting eaten.  ABC News debate moderator David Muir made a big deal of "fact-checking" President Trump when he cited reports at last night's debate that pets were being eaten by Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, whose flooding 20,000-strong presence was creating many problems for the city of 58,000. [...] Well, now it turns out that Muir the self-appointed fact-checker who cited a city manager's claim that he didn't get any reports about it didn't know what he was talking about.  President Trump, however, did.  Reports from a wide variety of sources are starting to emerge about pets and park wildlife such as ducks and geese being stolen, dismembered, chopped, cooked, eaten and used for bizarre voudou ceremonies to summon evil spirits by Haitian migrants, some of them flown in from Haiti by as "parolees" by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

It is a joke when journalists claim they care about journalistic integrity.  A media that spread lies about Russian collusion for years with no evidence does not have integrity.  Journalists who buried the story about the Hunter Biden laptop and Biden family corruption as they campaigned for Joe is not honest.  They have known that the Biden family pockets were lined with kickbacks for years but continue to perpetuate the lie that Joe was not involved and did nothing wrong.  Journalists who have spread the lie for fourteen years that the Affordable Care Act makes health care cheaper while prices have skyrocketed are just Democrat campaign workers.  Anyone who pretends that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are moderates is intentionally spreading misinformation to voters.  No matter what Joe said or did during his first three and a half years in office, the complicit media claimed that he was an excellent president and sharp as a tack.  They continued this lie until the debate.  Journalists who continued to say that Kamala was a drag on the ticket now say she is fabulous.  That is not honesty.

Newspaper article preposterously equates KKK members with Christianity, patriotism.  No matter how much you disdain and despise the mainstream media[,] it is not enough.  Not nearly enough.  Case in point: the newly rebranded "Minnesota Star Tribune" recently ran an article — on the front page of the 'A' section — about the history of the KKK in Minnesota.  The headline read "Her mission:  Documenting history of KKK in Minnesota."  Clever.  The piece never mentioned the Democrat party, never once noted that the party was the home of the KKK, the pro-slavery party, the Jim Crow party, the anti-integration party, the anti-reconstruction party.  Misinformation.  Disinformation.  Mal-information.  Lying by omission.  Shameful.  Instead, the article hinted throughout that it was those with the mindset of today's Trump Republicans that were responsible for the horrors of extreme discrimination.

The Los Angeles Times blames Republicans for California's woes.  One of the hallmarks of narcissism is that when things go wrong, it's always someone else's fault.  Being a narcissist means never having to say you're sorry.  Nothing more perfectly illustrates this truism than an essay from yesterday's Los Angeles Times blaming Republicans for California's myriad woes.  While the author is correct that, when Republicans had the chance, they didn't make smart decisions, the reality is that it's the Democrats who have led California to the desperate place it's in now.  Steve Lopez's essay doesn't make the mistake of blaming Republicans for all the state's problems.  He concedes that Democrats have long controlled the former Golden State, which is plagued by homelessness, crime, out-of-control housing costs, and poverty.  He contends, however, "that none of that happened overnight, nor did it happen exclusively under Democratic leadership."  Lopez believes that Republican mismanagement during the times that Republicans controlled the government is as much to blame as Democrat mismanagement.  The easy challenge to that argument is that, since 1970, the legislature has had a Democrat majority, which became a vetoproof supermajority in 2018.

MSM tells only part of the story, highlights 'record number of deaths' from 'climate change'.  The Hill recently ran an article by Zack Budryk, which highlighted the "record number of Americans killed by heat" last year; here's what he had to say:  ["]Extreme heat killed more Americans in 2023 than any other year over nearly a quarter century of records, according to research published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  At least 2,325 people died from the heat last year, according to the study, which included deaths with heat as both an underlying and contributing factor.["]  If you didn't already figure it out, this piece was on "climate change," and its purpose, like most pieces on climate change, is to get people to capitulate to the radical green agenda.  Why don't journalists ever report on the number of people killed each year by extreme cold, which is much higher than heat deaths?  The answer is that facts don't matter when the media and other Democrats are trying to force people to surrender to their agenda.

The Media Lies Add Up.  During the 2020 Democratic primaries, the general election, and throughout the first three years of the Biden administration, it was evident that Joe Biden was physically and mentally incapable of serving as president.  Yet his aides and the media all misled the American people.  They insisted that Biden was vigorous and sharp.  Then suddenly in June 2024, within a 24-hour period, Biden was declared by these same insiders as unfit to continue as the Democratic nominee.  Their new problem with Biden was not just his long-standing embarrassing dementia.  Rather bad polls increasingly warned that voters no longer believed their lies and thus would likely not reelect Biden but would instead punish most Democrats in the upcoming 2024 election.  So, a new media narrative arose:  the once-hale Biden was forced to resign as the Democrat nominee.  His once widely caricatured vice president, Kamala Harris, just as abruptly was coronated as his replacement candidate by an equally suddenly gushing and colluding media.  In sum, for some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies.

Hiding Danchenko.  Rolling Stone magazine has just published a hugely perfidious puff piece about Steele dossier source, Igor Danchenko.  Even by the standards of media puff pieces, the article is notable for the sheer amount of misrepresentations of basic facts.  Among many other falsehoods, it misstates how the FBI found out about Danchenko and fails to acknowledge that the FBI paid him several hundred thousand dollars.  Most notably, the article attempts to revive the notion that the dossier was credible, while omitting the crucial detail that Danchenko himself disavowed the dossier in January 2017.  However, what particularly caught our attention was the timing of the piece.  There seemed to be no apparent reason to publish such an article now, several years after Danchenko faded from public view.  Why the need to remind everyone of this deeply sordid chapter in American history?  Every time the media publishes a puff piece for no apparent reason, we must assume they are attempting to preempt some negative news.  But what could this negative news be?

Minnesota news station conveniently "loses connection" when state senator starts ripping them for being Tim Walz puppets.  No "state-run media" happening here folks.  It's just Minnesota's incredibly Democrat- and Tim Walz-friendly media having "technical difficulties" the moment anyone challenges their neutrality.  Check this out:  [Tweet with video clip] [...] I'm not sure that North Korean media could be this blatantly corrupt.  Before the cut, Senator Jensen got some great blows in.  I can't imagine the panic going on in the newsroom when they  cut  lost the feed.

The Editor says...
I worked in broadcasting for 48 years, much of the time occupied in establishing "live shot" signals for remote pickup links, and I can assure you that live feeds of this sort, from a fixed point of origination, NEVER fail without some advance warning (as in this case), except when someone manually kills the feed.  If a signal is about to drop, there's usually some disturbance in the video or audio before they both disappear.  Not this time.  You can safely surmise this was not a case of "technical difficulties" beyond the station's control.  The feed was obviously cut because the Republican politician was developing momentum and had to be stopped, as if the TV station is owned and operated by socialist Democrats.

Mainstream media misinformation, mendacity at PBS.  PBS recently reported that, via a phone call, former President Trump urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas until after the 2024 presidential election to benefit himself politically.  Turns out, that wasn't true.  In any way, shape, or form.  Knock me over with a feather.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that this, too, was a lie made out of whole cloth!  "PBS NewsHour"  propagandist  reporter Judy Woodruff subsequently apologized for reporting the story about Trump and Netanyahu "that both leaders have staunchly denied," according to Fox News.

Fear and Trembling in the Deep State.  During the [DNC convention in Chicago], Judy Woodruff reported (using the most authoritative voice and concerned visage she could muster) that Donald Trump had a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during which he told him to reject the Biden ceasefire deal because accepting it would help Biden's reelection.  Both Netanyahu and Trump denied the claim upon which Trump was instantly being charged by the usual shills with a violation of the Logan Act.  When pressed to substantiate her charge, Woodruff "clarified" her remarks and said she'd relied on accounts in Axios and Reuters and had done no independent verification.  In fact, neither publication reported what she had said was the content of the conversation.  More damaging to the credibility of her "clarification," days before her assertion both accounts had reported the men denied having any phone conversation regarding the proposal.  Did she misread the articles?  I think it obvious she repeated something someone in the administration told her, someone whose identity she dares not reveal for fear of losing valuable access.

Fake News:  Judy Woodruff does a Dan Rather.  [Scroll down]  The [worst] element of Woodruff's statement, that Trump urged Netanyahu to reject the ceasefire because it would help Harris in the 2024 presidential campaign — never happened at all in either report, not even by wink, hint, or suggestion, not in the corrected or uncorrected versions.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Zero.  Nada.  Trump never did that.  And they never reported that.  Trump wouldn't even need to do that, as Bibi already knows which presidential candidate would be better for Israel.  I knew that claim was fake the minute I read it and put on my skepticism goggles.  It was completely made up by Woodruff.  Yet here Woodruff is, blaming other news agencies for her own error, focusing on some mild to moderately fuzzy elements of the stories open to interpretation, and making a blanket claim that Trump is busy interfering with the peace process in Gaza by phone, and for only the most venal and selfish reasons, to advance his presidential campaign, when nothing of the kind happened nor was ever reported to have happened.

No, illegal immigration does not help the U.S. economy.  The media and other Democrats have been working very hard to say that Kamala has not been responsible for the open border policy that allows millions of illegals, including terrorists and gang members, to flood our country.  Sanctuary cities and states have been whining continuously about Texas sending these illegals to them and begging Gov. Greg Abbott to stop.  They are complaining about how much these illegals are costing and how they are running out of room.  They are begging the federal government for money.  The voters aren't buying these lies so now the Los Angeles Times comes to the rescue with a fictional piece of trash describing how great these illegals have been for the country.  Of course, they don't use the term 'illegal' in their article.

The Guardian Newspaper Says "Two-Tier Policing" Is a Myth Following Years of Making That Exact Claim.  The riots in the United Kingdom have brought the concept of two-tier policing into the limelight once again as the government seems more concerned in targeting those protesting against the consequences of mass immigration than actual criminals.  As we reported earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised a crackdown on rioters with "standing armies" of police officers and 24-hour turnarounds in the courts.  His focus, however, on right-wing rioters has leant itself to the nickname "two-tier Keir."  When it was Brits rioting over the death of George Floyd, a man who didn't even live on the same continent as them, Starmer said "Like you, I was shocked and angered at the killing of George Floyd, and the response of President Trump and the US authorities to the peaceful protesters, to people rightly demanding justice, has been an affront to humanity.

Liberal Gaslighting Goes Global.  The problem with many liberals is they can't live in their own truth.  They abandon ship as soon as it becomes inconvenient to maintain their current persona.  The most obvious and telling recent examples come from the Democrat Presidential candidate-by-fiat, Kamala Harris.  For the last three and a half years, she was 'The Border Czar.'  Everyone knew it.  Biden announced it with much ballyhoo, and she was referred to as 'The Border Czar' by the television, print, and electronic media repeatedly.  As the Vice President, she ran interference for Joe Biden.  (He didn't create the huge border fiasco; she did.) [...] Any stain of failure, especially one tied to the massive disaster of the southern United States border, was a huge threat to her Presidential aspirations.  So, the Democrat political machine, together with their legacy media propaganda juggernaut, went full George Orwell on John Q. Public.  CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Axios, and a score of other legacy media began trumpeting:  'Kamala Harris was never the Border Czar!'  Unfortunately for the gaslighters, and thanks to the internet, there are an abundance of records of them dubbing her with that title.

The Media Still Turn Tricks For The Democrat Party.  [Scroll down]  That's how business works.  Toe the line, or you're out!  The same can be said of all the self-important newscasters, anchors, and hosts whose media bosses quite literally give them their marching orders — or, more accurately, their talking orders.  Not just talking orders, but word-for-word memes, which is why no matter which lefty network or cable show you turn to, they're all using the same vocabulary, the same expressions, and the same keywords.  I first noticed this when Dick Cheney was chosen as George W. Bush's VP candidate.  Suddenly, the media talking heads discovered the word "gravitas"!  We still witness this echo chamber every day.  Objectivity has never been part of the media's agenda, only slavish obeisance to their bosses.  Watch for yourself.  In fact, take notes.  There is a remarkable absence of originality in today's political reportage.  It's all an echo chamber of talking points and leftist propaganda that the anchors and reporters have received beforehand and have literally been commanded to utilize at the risk of their jobs.  There's not an original word, phrase, or sentence!

Turns Out We Were Right:  Dems Were Playing The Long Con.  Back in February, we noticed a spate of articles claiming that there was no way that Joe Biden would not be the Democrats' nominee.  "In the span of two days," we wrote, "articles started appearing making the exact same argument:  That Joe Biden will definitely, no questions asked, be the nominee come November."  We noticed that these articles — all written by supposed political pros — made the same argument:
  •   It's too late for Biden to step aside.
  •   Party elites are all behind Biden.
  •   There's no way Biden would ever drop out.
  •   Nobody wants Kamala Harris to be the nominee.
Horsefeathers, we said, Democrats' only interest is in defeating Donald Trump and keeping power, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve that. [...] Today's mainstream journalists are the domestic version of Baghdad Bob.  The public must learn to start treating them that way.

Slow news month.  [Scroll down]  What goes less noticed is the undisguised political bias of today's "news" media.  Pertinent information?  Nah!  They're in business just to further the partisan leftist agenda.  There is no longer the annual summer season, but rather a three-month severe heat wave.  Kamala Harris is certainly not a cackling nincompoop.  She's the most able holder of the destiny of civilization.  She's not some hack politician.  Instead, she's a "person of color" and of Asian descent... not to mention also a female human being.  This pandering is, of course, protected by the First Amendment.  What is not protected is the intangible concept of credibility.  It keeps getting harder and harder to take these sources seriously.

It's Hoaxes All the Way Down.  Since at least 2015 there is pretty much nothing we read in the mainstream media about politics that is unquestionably true.  That's not to say that nothing true has been printed.  You could produce reams of stories in which the basic facts are defensibly true, although you could probably produce many more reams in which many, most, or all of the facts were lies.  It's just that almost everything written about politics, medicine, public health, the border, Israel, and so many other major issues are driven by narratives completely unrelated to what is really going on.  From the Steele Dossier to "safe and effective," everything we are fed by the mainstream media is built on some hoax or another.

There Never Was A Mythical Time When 'The News Was Just the News'.  Freedom is messy.  As much as anyone, I'd love to have the news media simply present facts to American and world citizens in the form of easily digestible tidbits, allowing us to discern narratives and conclusions as individuals.  But that's simply never been the way that the news media worked in America or anyplace else.  Our Founders were brilliant men who weren't given to fantasies about utopia, and they were realists about the fallen condition of humankind.  You and I may foolishly imagine that it's possible to have a large, nationally syndicated news media that would be stalwartly objective and without projecting any sort of bias.  But the Founders recognized this as impossible.

The Attempted Assassination.  The mainstream media has abandoned their raison d'être:  to be an objective, independent source of information to keep citizens informed about societal matters.  In that scenario, better-educated citizens would join together to take action to support improved living conditions — e.g., by voting for responsible representatives.  Instead, the mainstream media has determined that citizens are incompetent and/or could care less, so they have appointed themselves as the judge and jury as to what needs to be done to improve society.  Of course, they never fully disclose their agendas, as that would expose the reality that they are bluff bidding on a bust hand.  That they continually attack an individual like Trump, is now just an everyday matter.  That they dishonestly portray him in numerous ways (e.g., Hitler), is so commonplace that we think little of it.  "Existential threat" rhetoric is not only false, but specifically intended to inflame[.]

To Call Them Journalists Is A Misnomer.  [Scroll down]  When you listen to the commentary on the mainstream media (the Left supporters) about an event you saw in person, you would think you were at different versions of the same.  An example is the assassination attempt of Donald Trump.  We heard the shots and saw the President grab his ear and drop to the stage for safety.  He reflexively knew to get down behind the bulletproof protection.  The Secret Service agents immediately surrounded him, but he quickly got up and pumped his fist to the crowd with blood streaming down his face.  According to CNN, the President was injured, not shot, and MSNBC said the President fell.  They did whatever they could to downplay the attempt to kill Donald Trump and the way he responded.  It is pathetic and obvious.

Here's How The Media Are Lying Right Now:  RNC Edition.  Now that Republicans have formally nominated Donald Trump for president and the party's convention went off this week without a hitch, it's a good time to check in on how the media processed these past few days.  Spoiler:  not well.

You May Think You Hate the Media, But You Can't Hate It Enough, Chapter 12,186.  When I first started seeing clueless mainstream media headlines pop up on Twitter Saturday afternoon I assumed most of them were fakes, attempts at bad satire, or the Babylon Bee trying to get ahead of things.  But no — these are real:  [Screenshots]

Leftist Media Downplays Trump Assassination Attempt.  Elements of the international media did an impeccable job of covering the attempted assassination of former U.S. president Donald Trump — an attack which also saw one person killed and two seriously injured.  To his credit, the BBC's senior North America correspondent Gary O'Donoghue conducted an insightful on-the-ground interview with a witness shortly after the gunshots rang out.  [Tweet with video clip]  Many have also praised the first-class photographers who potentially risked their lives to secure instantly iconic images that will be printed in the history books.  [Tweets]  Other elements acted shamefully, as readers would expect them too — either downplaying the seriousness of the event or putting a portion of the blame on Trump himself.  Even after footage had emerged which made it quite clear — even if on a very basic level — what had happened, various mainstream media publications pumped out such euphemistic headlines as these:
  CNN: "Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally"
  USA Today: "Trump Removed From Stage by Secret Service After Loud Noises Startles Former President, Crowd"
  Associated Press: "Donald Trump Has Been Escorted Off The Stage During A Rally After Loud Noises Ring Out In The Crowd"
These and other headlines prompted recent Trump-backer Elon Musk to criticise the "legacy media" as "a pure propaganda machine."  [Tweet]

The Legacy Media Has Passed the Point of No Return.  A massive poll of 20,000 participants undertaken by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that Americans' hope for and trust in an objective media was all but lost by 2020.  They saw not only an ever-growing partisanship in news reporting but a determination by the legacy media to push a political agenda instead of honestly disseminating the news.  This poll was one of the most devastating indictments of the media in polling history.  Some highlights:
  84% of surveyed Americans laid either a moderate or a great deal of the blame for partisan hostility at the feet of the media.
  Further, 82% believed news outlets are either deliberately "misrepresenting the facts" or are "making them up entirely".
  This is further amplified as 79% of those surveyed said media outlets are trying to persuade people to adopt a certain opinion about an issue or an individual.
  Similarly, while the respondents in the poll believed that the media is "critical" or "very important" to democracy, 86% say they have witnessed either a fair amount or a great deal of bias in news reporting.

This Won't Be The Last Time Democrats Attempt To Assassinate Trump.  It shouldn't be news by now but if it is:  These people aren't playing games. [...] Democrats and anti-Trumpers have spent the past three years calling the political opposition a life-or-death threat.  They claim they'll be imprisoned and people will die if their opposition gains power, while they themselves attempt to imprison and now kill the opposition.  They called him a fascist.  They called him a dictator.  They called him Hitler.  Literally the front page of New Republic magazine — still influential in Washington, believe it or not — this month portrayed Trump with a tiny mustache to drive home the point.  The vertigo you're feeling is normal.  We don't know yet much about the motives of the shooter.  Perhaps he was simply insane, though it's doubtful.  If he turns out to be politically motivated, there's nothing confusing or inexplicable about this even as news anchors will surely say in the coming days that "we all" bear blame.  We don't all bear blame.  This is one side acting out in fatal violence just as they did through 2020 and just as they did after Trump was elected in 2016.

Our Brezhnev, Our Pravda, Our Soviet Union.  [Scroll down]  Something similar has happened to a calcified America under President Joe Biden.  Like the late-stage Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only.  He has outsourced his administration to a vestigial hard-left apparat from the Obama years.  Now, Biden can no longer even perform his assigned ceremonial tasks of putting a moderate veneer on radical, nihilist agendas that are stagnating the country.  Yet our Pravda journalists have sworn to the American people that, in private, the reclusive, three-day-a-week Biden outpaces the energy and drive of those half his age.  Obsequious staffers plant stories in the Soviet-like ears of reporters about Biden's singular dynamism.  Any dissenters are publicly demonized as peddlers of "cheap fakes."  When Biden's reclusiveness prompts too much gossip that he is near senile, he is wheeled out for a staged interview that must be edited before release.  Or he answers questions secretly shown to him in advance.  On sporadic occasions where the state media and the Biden nomenklatura cannot control events — such as rare presidential debates or international summits — our Pravda media go into overdrive to convince the public that what they see and hear is not real.

The Loss of Political Trust.  Trump's epitaph must include credit for injecting "fake news" into the lexicon.  You are reading these words via alternative media born in response to the industrialization of fake news.  The news business is zero-sum.  Every lost NY Times or Washington Post subscriber becomes a Twitter, YouTube, Rumble, Gateway Pundit, etc. viewer.  The industry just experienced a staggering crisis of trust over the Biden coverup.  The overall financial implications of continuous erosion of trust in government have yet to be grasped.  For homework, online search:  fake+u.s.+government+economic+statistics.  Especially significant will be the coming de facto credit downgrading resulting from the Biden fiasco.  Credit is from the Latin credere, to believe.  Biden shines a spotlight on government/media lies of all flavors, awakening creditors to our extreme government trust deficit.

Milwaukee Radio Station Admits To Editing Interview With Joe Biden At Request Of White House.  Joe Biden participated in two radio interviews following his debate with Donald Trump, a debate that raised significant questions within the Democrat Party about the president's ability to win re-election.  The first interview was with WURD, an all-black radio station in Pennsylvania.  The host of the interview, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, admitted she asked the president questions sent to her from the White House.  The radio station fired Sanders later that week, acknowledging that agreeing to pre-determined questions jeopardized the credibility of the outlet.  The second interview was with CivicMedia, a progressive talk-radio network in Wisconsin.  The host of that interview, Earl Ingram, also confirmed that the White House supplied him with questions that he asked Biden. [...] In addition, the Wisconsin station published a press release on Thursday in which it admitted that it made two edits in an interview with Biden at the request of his campaign.

Reporters need to learn to apologize.  Two weeks ago, Georgetown University held a symposium about the state of journalism.  When asked what the main problem facing the press is, Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, came up with a surprisingly compelling and honest answer:  Journalists need to learn how to apologize when they make mistakes. [...] Wemple has hit on something profound.  The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole.

The Editor says...
Lying is probably the news media's most common "mistake," for which they would need to apologize; but the apologies don't come forth because most of the lying is done on behalf of their preferred politicians.

Mediaite Caught Lying in Blatant Distortion of Transcript of J.D. Vance Interview.  Mediaite, a leftist publication, has been caught lying in a blatant distortion of a transcript of an interview that now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) did years ago on MSNBC in an obvious attempt to interfere in former President Donald Trump's vice presidential selection process.  The left-leaning anti-Trump publication ran a headline on Wednesday as part of the globalists' last-ditch effort to stop Vance from getting selected as Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election that, if true, would certainly make heads in Trump world turn: "JD Vance Said He Believes Trump's Sexual Assault Accuser in Unearthed Interview."  The problem with Mediaite's headline — and its story — is that this is not an accurate reflection of what Vance said in a 2016 interview with then-MSNBC host Chris Matthews.

Russell Brand Blasts Corporate Media for Normalizing Heart Failure in Young People.  Britsh comedian Russell Brand has accused the corporate media of pushing to normalize the global crisis of young, healthy people dying suddenly from heart failure.  Brand argues that rather than highlight the fact that the surges in cardiac injuries and related only surged after the Covid mRNA shots were rolled out, the corporate media is attempting to gaslight the public into believing it is completely normal.  During an episode of his "Stay Free" podcast this week, Brand said:  "On legacy media, it's quite possible to watch a kind of bright breezy, cheerful news item about heart attacks as if it's like some new trend, as if it's Pogs or Pokemon Go or something.  "It's a new sensation, heart disease in young people."

The Media Is Fully Exposed as Much as Biden in Debate.  The debate showed everyone what happens when the Democratic communications machine, formerly known as the media, is bypassed, and candidates can be seen clearly by the American people without the filters.  The media has been lying — expect this word to come up a lot — to the American people on behalf of Biden and Democrats for years.  But the very second they are unable to control the content and the narrative, the truth comes busting out for everyone to see.  It was glorious and horrific.  President Trump could not have been more right when he said in April 2019 that the media is "truly the enemy of the people."  The Hill (media) said Trump was "ratcheting up his use of the derisive label to attack the news media."  There's some straight reporting.  It quickly evolved in the media narrative of Trump's war on the media, the go-to phrase of the lemming journos.  No.  The Hill was wrong.  It has long been the media's war on the American people who are not bi-coastal elites.  Trump was so right.

Barack Obama and the Stupidity of the American Voter.  Is the American media establishment fair, balanced, and independent?  Do the FBI, CIA, IRS, and Justice Department stand for the rule of law, judicial fairness, and the American way?  Is the GOP a formidable political foe, working hard to contain the excesses of crazed liberal Democrats?  No, not remotely, and you gotta be kidding.  The despicable media spread the lies they're given, enthusiastically and in unison, often using the exact same language.  It's almost as if they've been given a script to follow.  They have.  If the current American justice system didn't have two standards, why, it would have no standards at all!  A simple comparison of the judicial treatment afforded, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump makes that abundantly clear.  You're free to burn down a city, if you're BLM, but say prayers across the street from an abortion abattoir, and you're going to prison.  As for the GOP, those pretenders and senders of strongly worded letters and subpoenas that are thrown into the circular file as soon as they're received, they have a perfect avatar in former Senate leader Mitch McConnell:  a chinless, bespectacled turtle.

Biden's Failing Brain Exposes Deep State Treachery.  [Scroll down]  You knew that Biden lost his marbles long ago, but the propaganda press has been telling the world that he's just fine for years. [...] Just as reporters in the first half of the twentieth century lied to the American people about FDR's reliance upon a wheelchair, reporters in the first quarter of the twenty-first century have lied to the American people about Biden's debilitating dementia.  On June 27, the lid on journalists' barrel of Biden-protecting lies shot right off.  Not even halfway through Biden's debate disaster, his communications people were spreading a new lie — that he was suffering from a cold — to explain away his enfeebled and bewildered presence on stage. [...] but the guy had been hiding away at Camp David for over a week!  When you first tell the public that you are unable to perform your presidential duties and prepare for a debate at the same time and then tell them that your weeklong debate camp destroyed your immune system, you aren't in a position to inspire sympathy.

An MSM fairytale.  Since he shuffled into the White House in 2021 we all knew that there was something off about this guy. [...] For the last several weeks, the MSM has been trying to continue the Biden-as-competent fable by blaming Republicans for "cheap fakes."  That was an accusation that Republicans were toying with video and pics of the president to make him look incompetent, as if any such effort was needed to expose his deterioration.  Then the news regarding Biden's absurd debate boot camp.  Why would a professional politician for over 50 years require such an absurdly long and involved prep?  The answer is that the MSM has been complicit in the "fit as a fiddle" charade by fully embracing the regularly administered marching orders and talking points from the White House.  Many commentators are now complaining that they were misled and cannot believe that they were lied to about Biden's infirmaries.  If this is true, it demonstrates a stunning level of naivete.  If they were lied to about something so obvious, what else are they lapping up off the floor?

The Gaza Famine That Never Was.  New evidence indicates that, contrary to claims by top U.S. officials and international media, the Gaza Strip is not on the precipice of a widespread famine that Western experts claimed would endanger millions of innocent Palestinians.  "Famine is imminent" in northern Gaza, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a network of Western governments, the United Nations, and nonprofit groups, warned in March, prompting unfounded accusations that Israel is using starvation as a war tactic.  The IPC's report was quickly amplified by outlets like the Washington Post, which foretold "imminent famine" in Gaza.  Politico, the New York Times, and CNN alleged Israel is guilty of war crimes.  But on Tuesday, the IPC revised its initial assessment, saying that the projected famine in Gaza did not come to fruition in May.  "The available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring," the organization said in its latest report, which notes that Israel has significantly increased aid and that conditions as a whole in Gaza have drastically improved.  This is the latest example of an international agency walking back its initial assessment of the situation in Gaza.

What to do about woke science journals.  Let me define the "woke" in the title very broadly as promoting any of...
  a) a favored narrative or questionable treatment (e.g., publishing only articles supporting a huge climate change impact or government COVID-19 policies while rejecting high-quality articles with solid evidence to the contrary);
  b) CRT and DEI (e.g., employment processes and medical treatment; justifying BLM rallies during a mandatory and supposedly necessary COVID lockdown);
  c) the trans agenda (e.g., suppression of literature on psychological diagnoses or social media influence; transition surgery for minors; birth certificate with the desired gender of the baby or its parents; males in female sports);
  d) TDS (e.g., numerous get-Trump Lancet editorials having nothing to do with medicine; the Lancet by-passing its usual peer-review process to rush a negative study on hydroxychloroquine to print after Trump said HCQ might work, only to have to retract it ten days later after the data were proven bogus);
  e) rescinding already published or posted articles after pressure from advocacy groups.
There can be overlap between categories.

Wrong, Mainstream Media, Tree Rings Aren't Reliable Indicators of Past Temperatures.  Dozens of media outlets such as ABC News, The BBC, The New York Times, and many more, hyped a study that claims summer temperatures in 2023 were unprecedented over the past 2000 years.  This claim, in fact, can't be verified by tree ring data, which isn't that precise.  Researchers are falsely assuming tree rings are reliable temperature indicators when in fact tree rings can indicate a multitude of different conditions, not just temperature.

BBC Climate Disinformation Reporter Attacks Kenyan Farmer.  On 15th June 2024, the BBC Climate disinformation reporter Marco Silva published a hit piece on the Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu, entitled "How a Kenyan farmer became a champion of climate change denial."  The reporter claims that Mr Machogu, a 29-year-old farmer with many thousands of followers on X for his campaign "Fossil Fuels for Africa," holds dangerous views denying climate change.  I don't personally know Mr Machogu, and I am certain that he doesn't need defense.  I grew up without electricity and I recently explained how I questioned the official climate narrative.  I do find it extremely disgusting that a senior journalist sitting in Greater London, using daily modern technologies powered by fossil fuels, in a country that became rich thanks to fossil fuels (and loot from Kenya), should write such a disdainful piece on one of the biggest media outlets on earth about a young man who appears to have knowledge, hard work, and passion to serve his community and people.  I also find this piece below the BBC's editorial standards which include values such as truth, fairness, accuracy, and impartiality.

The intellectual dishonesty of Democrats proven once again.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer was forced on June 18, 2024 to retract entirely a June 9th op-ed written by Democrat lawyer and political consultant Neil Baron when it was threatened with slander and libel lawsuits from three FBI whistleblowers because of the blatent false accusations Baron included in this op-ed.  Baron's op-ed, which [one] can still read [elsew]here, was mostly a partisan attack on Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his effort to expose the FBI's non-stop abuse of power.  In doing so, however, Baron accused three FBI whistle-blowers of doing things they did not do. [...] In other words, Baron was making these accusations up, and the newspaper did no fact-checking prior to publication, accepting those bald-faced lies without question.  That they were lies is illustrated by how fast the newspaper reacted when told they were lies, retracting the op-ed only one day after it was approached by representatives of the whistle-blowers.

The dictionary just got a little heavier.
Biden Loyalist Media Are Gaslighting Us Again.  Of all the the 2020 election's dirty tricks, the nastiest was when the media and the IC abused public trust to suppress an entirely-true, but highly damaging story about Hunter's laptop.  Because Blinken leaned on his buddies to suppress the story, the New York Post scoop about Hunter's laptop had been suppressed.  Polls have since told us that enough Biden voters in battleground states would have changed their vote based on that laptop information that the Presidential race would have turned in Trump's favor.  The truth eventually came out — in the Hunter Biden prosecution this month, ironically — but the Biden was sworn in and the damage was already done.  One Conservative voice has given it a name:  Laptopping.  [Tweet]

Obama Seeks 4th Term.  With Obama still at the helm, the fundamental transformation of America continues.  Meanwhile, the entire American news propaganda machine continues to act as if they don't know, including Fox News personalities, referring to Biden as if he really is a President, Harris as if she really is a Vice President, and the 2024 election as if there's any legitimacy to U.S. elections since 2016.  Oh, they know, but they don't dare tell it like it really is, which is why the entire U.S. news industry has a popularity rating even below Biden's anemic levels, and the talk-talk-talk but do-nothing Congress.  People started turning to Tik Tok and other social media platforms in a desperate search for any real news years ago.  That's why everyone in D.C. was united in the power grab of Tik Tok.  Not because of so-called "Chinese spying," but because it was the last place they didn't totally control the narrative for public consumption.

No, ScienceNews, Your "Ocean's Record-Breaking Hot Streak" Claims Are False.  A recent ScienceNews (SN) article claims that ocean temperatures are out of control in a year-long record-breaking hot streak.  This is false.  Numerous ocean temperature data sets show no such record-breaking values and the source SN cited to support its claims was thoroughly discredited when it made similar "record breaking" claims last year.  The entire claim of the article is based on one data set, which is seen below in the SN article: [...] The problem is this single source isn't even an "official" ocean temperature data data set, rather the source is: Source:  Climate Reanalyzer/Univ. of Maine ∙ Visualization:  C. Crockett.  In fact, that isn't temperature data at all, but climate model output.  The data SN cited was not official data, but from a private website run by the University of Maine.  Examining actual data sets show that SN claim of record ocean heat is a gross error.

The Feds Are Itching to J6 Us Again.  [Scroll down]  To this day, White House spokespeople, members of Congress, federal judges, and television news anchors describe January 6, 2021 as a "deadly insurrection."  It does not matter to them that none of the J6 protesters was armed or that the only people killed were Trump-supporters.  It does not matter to them that the vast majority of J6 defendants were engaging in harmless acts of political advocacy.  It does not matter to them that there was never any nefarious plot to somehow topple the federal government.  Reprehensible prosecutors seeking outrageous sentences for questionable trespass crimes and unsympathetic, partisan judges who insist on haranguing defendants for engaging in imaginary sedition have railroaded scores of Americans for the "crime" of exercising their free speech.

A Slate writer gaslights about the allegedly great Biden economy.  Zachary Carter, writing for hard-left Slate, has issued his verdict on the economy:  It's great.  Wholly contrary to popular belief, he assures us, "Inflation Is Not Destroying Joe Biden."  So why can't the rest of America see it?  'Tis a mystery to be solved, and he buries us under "data" to make his point.  Ultimately, his piece is a primal scream of horror that Americans insist on believing the realities of their wallets over the cherry-picked data in his analysis.  First, Carter first declares that inflation is a thing of the past.  "According to the Federal Reserve's preferred measure, prices rose just 2.7 percent between April of 2023 and April of 2024."  The problem with the Fed is that its "core" inflation number excludes the cost of food, housing, and energy — the things that average Americans spend the vast majority of their income purchasing.

June temperatures [are] at half the level of this time last year.  Temperatures in June 2024 are at half the level of 2023, the Met Office has said, although warmer weather is predicted towards the end of the month.  While London was experiencing 32C (89.6F) a year ago, temperatures were around 16C (60.8F) in the capital on Tuesday.  Similarly Cambridge had temperatures of 30.3C (86.5F) on June 11 2023, and 15C (59F) on the same day in 2024.  Temperatures are around 2C (35.6F) below average for the time of year, with scattered showers this week that could turn into heavy rain by Thursday, while some areas could see ground frosts.

The Editor says...
Somehow I would like to rebut the article above without including a cliché like cherry-picking.  Oops, too late.  It's easy to find examples of a high (or low) temperature on some date that was "half" (or "double") the temperature on the same day in the previous year.  This is made easier by the use of the Celsius temperature scale, in which the day-to-day ambient temperatures are recorded with smaller numbers than in areas that use the Fahrenheit scale.  But a decrease from 32°C. to 16°C. does not mean it's only half as warm outside.  On the absolute (Kelvin) scale, that's a change from 305°K. to 289°K.  Hardly any difference.  This is another example of the news media attempting to make problems sound worse than they really are, and hoping you don't know why they are in error.  These are the same people who sound the alarm about a one-half degree average temperature increase by the end of this century.  On the absolute scale, it's almost no change at all.  It's background noise, especially compared to the temperature differences between day and night and between summer and winter.

What the Biden Campaign Doesn't Want You to Know About His Philly Audience.  As I reported earlier, Joe Biden went to Philadelphia on Wednesday to try to make another pitch to black voters to stop fleeing and vote for him and Kamala Harris. [...] In his photos, you can see the people are all in the front of the gym, only about half of it is full and there's a big press bandstand, then a whole press area with tables.  The second photo on the top right shows most of the people although there may be a little more on the left that are not shown.  I'll leave it to you to assess how many people there were, but it wasn't a lot.  Certainly not "packed" or "huge."  Trump has more people waiting for him hours before his events start.  In other words, as the GOP noted, Joe Biden couldn't even fill up a school gym in Democrat-run Philadelphia.

The Top 20 Lies of the 2020s.  Lying is an epidemic even worse than COVID.  Our president and his press secretaries seem to lie with every word they say and deny facts that anyone with a pair of eyes can see for himself.  Scientists and doctors, formerly among the most trusted members of our society, lie to foster popular environmental theories and get government grants, or to promote Big Pharma and deter people from effective treatments.  Our news media no longer report the news; they shape the news as instructed.  Here is just a sample of commonly promoted lies starting in 2020. [...]

They lie because they get away with it.  The death of Morgan Spurlock showed why people in the media lie.  They get away with it and it pays well.  He made a movie for $65,000 called Super Size Me and collected a hefty share of its $22 million gross at the box office.  The premise was he ate nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days and it ruined his health.  The food did not.  He died of cancer not obesity.  His liver likely was in bad shape but it wasn't from milkshakes and Big Macs.  It was from 40 years of drinking, going back to when he was 13.  Nevertheless, the media sold the lie for 20 years, and continued the lie in his obituaries, although a few outlets included a paragraph or two buried in the story that put his lie in perspective. [...] The media heavily promoted him and his movie when it debuted 20 years ago.  Overnight, journalists became instant dietitians — just like they became instant virologists 4 years ago when covid 19 arrived from Wuhan.

How the Propaganda System Works.  This major new piece of distracting disinfotainment is solid misinformation.  It's fortified with pseudo-nutritional lies that support the Official Narrative.  On whatever...  The Covid scamdemic/plannedemic.  Or the "safe and effective" vaccines that keep killing and maiming millions with heart damage, blood clots, myocarditis, neurological disorders, paralysis, autoimmune disease, turbo cancers, infertility, sterility, and death.  Or the apocalyptic "killer virus" that never existed.  It was just another mild seasonal flu, if it existed at all.  Or that whopper, life-threatening man-made "global warming."  Which morphed into the "climate change" hoax.  Or the 2020 US presidential election where vote-counting suddenly stopped in five or six key states so that rejiggering could take place, but you were assured nothing untoward happened — and if you think it did happen then you're a right-wing dupe misled by bad people and conspiracy theories.  Or "Israel's right to defend itself" as it carries out a televised genocide in full public view to complete its extermination/removal/dispossession of the Palestinian people begun in 1947-1949. [...] Inflation is firmly under control, thanks to our great "president" Joseph Robinette Biden, a usurper/imposter like his CIA-groomed puppetmaster Barry Soetoro (aka Obama).  Today a fast-food meal — burger, fries, soda — costs nearly 20 bucks, going up to $26.99 real soon as America's wars continue.

About those 'all electric' 'zero emissions' fire trucks.  They have diesel engines.  When Albuquerque announced plans to acquire a new fire engine, New Mexico's governor lauded the "zero emissions" technology while a fire department spokesman called it "all electric" and KRQE 13 gushed about the "fully electric" fire truck.  San Diego's NBC 7 reported on what it called that city's first "all electric fire apparatus."  When the electric fire engine debuted in Portland, NBC's KGW 8 quoted a fire department spokesman lauding the "monumental" "zero emissions" vehicle.  When an electric fire truck came to Gilbert, Arizona, FOX 10 quoted the fire chief saying that "There's no cancer coming out of the tail pipe and I say it that way because diesel particulates are a contributor for cancers."  Viewers could be forgiven for thinking that the new fire trucks were all electric and zero emissions.  They'd be wrong.  All the fire trucks also have a diesel engine and a tailpipe releases those "cancer-causing particulates."

The Ravings of a Kindly Old Man with a Poor Memory.  [Scroll down]  Speaking of pathetic, who among you believes anything the sad, servile mainstream media parrots?  Do they not lie as easily as they breathe?  Are they not completely predictable as to how they will deal with a given circumstance?  Are they not foul creatures fully under the control of the D.C. swamp?  They are.

Sorry, Climate Activists, Montana Climate Harms Are Not Occurring.  An environmental activist website called The Cool Down (TCD) just embarrassed itself by making provably false claims about climate change in Montana and by showing it cannot read a basic calendar.  On May 7, 2024, TCD published an article titled, "State lawmakers pass unprecedented anti-science law: 'Our families are already suffering.'"  The article begins, "Montana's legislature has passed the nation's most aggressive anti-science law, prohibiting state agencies from considering the impacts of excess heat-trapping pollution when reviewing permits for large projects like coal mines and power plants."  Apparently, TCD doesn't know how to read a calendar.  The Montana legislature passed the law in question in April 2023, more than a full year before the TCD article, which is written as if the law had just recently been passed. [...] TCD's sloppy research is not restricted just to calendar reading.  The article embarrasses itself regarding climate change, also.  According to TCD, "This legislation comes at a pivotal time, as Montana's climate has already changed significantly over the past century.  The state has experienced earlier snowmelt, more frequent heat waves, and a growing risk of wildfires."  Let's examine these three claims. [...]

Fearmongering keeps the elites in power.  [Scroll down]  More recently, experts told us that COVID-19 was so deadly, it could kill us all if we didn't do precisely as they said.  Turns out that what they instructed us to do was deadlier than COVID-19 itself. [...] There are only two types of societies.  When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.  When the government fears the people, freedom can reign.  This explains our current government's reaction to Jan. 6.  (Sadly, "the government" now includes academia and the mainstream media.)

Don't fall for this trap when watching the news.  While watching news coverage of the protests on college campuses, one segment caught my attention.  A TV Anchor reacting to a Forbes report about some employers hiring fewer Ivy League school graduates.  The main reason had nothing to do with the protests but with Ivy League universities' recruiting being more about specialists than well-rounded students.  But this anchor used the report as an opportunity to stir up a culture war.  North vs. south.  Elite private institutions vs. public universities.  All while saying, "See?  This is why they don't want to hire you."  While criticizing a school's handling of a situation is fair and so is student behavior, good journalists know better than to make blanket statements about a group or a place.  Having worked for years as a reporter, I know that within crowds are many stories and journalists should share them and offer context and nuance.

Why would the public ever trust media outlets [...] ?  [Scroll down]  So why would it be a surprise that the people who support Obama and Biden would also support the protesters wreaking anti-Jew havoc across the nation? [...] The media also pretends that Trump politicized the Justice Department[,] when that is most certainly Obama and Biden.  They pretend that Democrat policies want to help the poor and minorities, when the goal of Democrats for over sixty years has been to make more people dependent on the government, instead of giving them more of an opportunity to move up the economic ladder due to the joys of capitalism.  The media and other Democrats acted surprised and shocked at how much damage keeping schools closed caused children.  Only an idiot would be surprised.  They pretend that rich people like Bill Gates, Obama, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, John Kerry, and others care about their carbon footprint as they fly in private jets, own multiple mansions, and buy yachts.  They pretend that rich people buying worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits reduces their massive carbon footprint.  Those pieces of paper do nothing.

Why climate change ISN'T going to end the world.  Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.  Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.  And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.  In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.  Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.

The Editor says...
The article immediately above is accompanied by an Associated Press photo showing brown clouds coming from three vertical stacks.  This is an attempt to depict a factory (probably a power plant) emitting huge quantities of smoke into the air.  Astute readers will notice that the vapor comes out of the big pipes and quickly disappears in the ambient air.  That is the behavior of water vapor, not smoke.  The photo has been doctored in an attempt to make a problem out of something that is not a problem.  That's propaganda.

The imaginary "climate crisis" is a product of climate activists and click-bait media.  The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ("IPCC") reports don't define what a "climate crisis" is.  The crisis that supposedly requires society to achieve zero carbon emissions or, at least, "net zero."  On the contrary, the IPCC's latest Assessment Report ("AR6") published in 2021 points out that corporate media's opinion of climate change has moved away from a neutral position by adopting and promoting terms like "climate crisis," "global heating" and "climate emergency."  Such a statement by the IPCC should leave no doubt that the concept of an ongoing "climate crisis" is a joint product of climate activists and the click-hungry media, lacking a solid scientific basis, Aivar Usk writes.

Truth Has Become A Casualty In Modern Journalism.  Journalism once provided truthful insight into the news of the day. [...] Those days are long past.  We should all be mourning the death of truth, but alas, few recognize what has happened to truth as a tool to strengthen nations and guard against ruinous corruption.  Truth has become a casualty of evil people's schemes.  The murder of truth was intentionally committed by individuals and organizations who cannot accomplish their goals through rational, logical, and reasonable public debate.  The world is in the grips of mass propaganda, deceit, and an otherworldly strong delusion.

L A Times Editorial Claim that "The planet is experiencing a horrifying streak of record-breaking heat" is Unsupported by NOAA's Climate Data.  The opening L A Times editorial paragraph claims that for California "the last few months have been more than 2 degrees hotter than average".  This claim is erroneous as demonstrated in the discussion below.  NOAA's data for the maximum temperatures experienced in California for the month of February 2024 as well as all February months for years from 1895 to 2023 are shown below.  [Charts]  NOAA's data shows the mean February maximum temperature over its base period interval of 1901 [to] 2000 is 55.6 degrees F compared to California's February 2024 maximum value of 56.0 degrees F (0.4 degrees F above the mean) as indicated in NOAA's data table below versus the Times distorted and false claim of "2 degrees hotter than average".  [More charts]  More importantly, the February 2024 maximum temperature of 56 degrees F in California is only the 62nd highest out of 130 total February recorded highest values with the 2024 temperature clearly not representing "a horrifying streak of record-breaking heat" as falsely hyped by the L A Times editorial.

Media Hoax:  No, Israel Did Not Dig 'Mass Grave' At Gaza's Nasser Hospital.  Another day, another Hamas hoax amplified by Democrats and the mainstream media.  This time around, the story is about a mass grave at Gaza's Nasser Hospital that was allegedly only recently discovered, according to workers for the Hamas-run Gaza Civil Defense.  CNN, of course, was among the numerous media outlets to breathlessly report on the story, which strongly insinuated the IDF dug the graves and, in the process, committed war crimes.  Make sure to take note of the framing:  [Advertisement]  ["]The United Nations has called for an 'independent, effective and transparent investigation' into the discovery of mass graves at two Gaza hospitals that were besieged and raided by Israeli troops this year.  The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement he was 'horrified' by the scenes reported from both the Nasser and Al Shifa medical complexes in the besieged enclave.["] [...] Hamas Caucus leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) pounced and seized, and demanded to know where the media coverage was, apparently ignoring the fact that national news outlets had already picked up the ball and run with it:  [Tweet]

Divide & Conquer:  The Government's Propaganda of Fear & Fake News.  [T]he political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population. [...] As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer's seat, we'll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.  Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch — and I would posit that it's all reality TV, entertainment news included — the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.  "We the people" are watching a lot of TV.  On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television.  By the time we reach age 65, we're watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older.  And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

The Collapse of the Mainstream Media Part 3: COVID-19.  During a major crisis, the mainstream media has a duty to ask hard questions and scrutinize official claims and thus fulfill its responsibility to provide objective, accurate, and reliable reporting.  During the COVID pandemic, however, legacy media became the mouthpiece of officialdom whose ever-changing and backpedaling claims were unquestionably parroted by their media assets.  As a result, the public's trust dropped, according to Gallup, who noted in October 2022 that "this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined."  As fears and hysteria over COVID grew and grew, the public looked increasingly to the media for information and assurances regarding the safety and effectiveness of the experimental mRNA vaccines that were rushed to market during Operation Warp Speed.  In response, legacy media dutifully echoed the assurances from the authorities that the vaccines are "safe and effective."  However, these claims were ultimately proven false.

USA Today Wants You to Believe Joe Biden 'Clamped' Down on the Illegal Immigration.  President Joe Biden has "clamped" down on illegal border crossings, according to USA Today — the millions of immigrants still crossing the southern border must have not gotten the memo yet.  USA Today is taking heat after publishing an article on Friday claiming that Biden has done tremendous work on securing the U.S.-Mexico border. [...] Since day one of Biden's term, he has halted deportations, stopped border wall construction, Ended the Trump-era Remain In Mexico policy and Title 42, and reinstated a catch-and-release program — all of which have encouraged illegal immigrants to come to the United States.  As of Saturday, Biden has yet to reverse any of those policies and put his foot down on illegal immigration.  So unless there is an invisible fence along the southern border, the U.S. border is still wide open for aliens to cross.

Former ESPN host reveals that her 2021 Biden interview was scripted.  In a recent interview with Fox News, former ESPN host Sage Steele revealed that her interview from March 2021 with Joe Biden was scripted by network executives.  "That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured," Steele revealed.  She said her superiors asked her to repeat "every word" that they wrote for her and warned her to "not deviate from the script" they'd prepared. [...] Since Steele wasn't sitting with Biden in person, it is quite likely that he was reading the answers from another script before him.  To sum it up, the Steele interview was more like a scripted short video than an interview.

Sage Steele Says ESPN Bosses Made Her Follow 'Every Word' Of Carefully Planned Q&A With Biden.  Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele opened up about an interview she conducted with President Joe Biden while working for the network in 2021, telling Fox News that her bosses made sure she would follow "every word" of the script during her exchange with the commander-in-chief.  Steele, who left ESPN after criticizing its COVID vaccine mandate, said her headline-making interview with Biden in March 2021 was carefully planned out by the network's executives, and she was told "not to deviate" from the written questions.  The interview focused on sports returning to normalcy following months of COVID lockdowns, along with athletes and fans being hesitant to get the COVID shot, Fox News reported.  Biden repeatedly admonished Americans to "follow the science" and get vaccinated during the interview.  "That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured," Steele said.  "And I was told, 'You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go.'"

Dems, Media Push New Study Linking Climate Change to Inflation, But Economists Aren't Buying It.  Liberals are touting a new study linking climate change and inflation, but economists say that the real causes are more likely to be massive government interventions in the economy purporting to save the climate.  The study, authored by four European researchers and published in the scientific journal Communications:  Earth and Environment on March 21, argues that "temperature increases cause nonlinear, persistent increases in food and headline inflation," according to its text.  While corporate media outlets, climate activists and Democrats have boosted the study's findings, the forces related to climate change that are likely to drive persistent inflation are massive government taxation, spending and regulation pushed by policymakers to fight climate change, according to economists who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Jon Stewart Falsely Claims Loans to Trump Meant Fewer Loans To Other People.  Claim:  Comedian Jon Stewart said this week that the loans at the center of the civil real-estate case against Donald Trump meant there were fewer loans available to other borrowers.  "Money isn't infinite.  A loan that goes to the liar doesn't go to someone who's giving a more honest evaluation.  So the system becomes incentivized for corruption," Stewart said.  Verdict:  False.  The amount of money available for loans from banks is not diminished when banks make loans to other customers, except in the rare case of a distressed bank that is capital-constrained.  A loan to one customer does not subtract from a fixed pool of loans available to the other customers of the bank.  Stewart's comments reflect a misconception of a bank as a kind of money vault where taking some money out to lend leaves less money out for other loans.

The Editor says...
Joe Biden seems to think the money supply is infinite.  Just look at the federal deficit.  Does the national debt keep him from spending more money?  Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Stewart would benefit from economics classes.

Gaza:  Truths Behind All the Lies.  [Lie #1]  "Occupied Gaza."  Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza.  Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them.  It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals.  Hamas cancelled all future scheduled elections.  It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.  [Lie #2]  "Collateral Damage."  Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians.  It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays.  It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants.  It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.  Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques.  Why?  Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.

Jon Stewart found to have overvalued his NYC home by 829% after labeling Trump's civil case 'not victimless'.  Jon Stewart is facing online backlash after the comedian opined on air this week that Donald Trump's civil real estate case for overvaluing his properties was "not victimless" — when it turns out the price of a previous home sale finds Stewart doing the exact same thing, The [New York] Post has learned.  On Monday night, Stewart, 61, unpacked Trump's $454 million appeal bond, calling out experts framing the former president's New York civil case as not causing direct harm to any individual.  "The Daily Show" host rolled a clip of CNN's Laura Coates interviewing "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary, who commented that the ruling didn't "go over well" with the real estate industry that was now fretting over the possibility of becoming the next target.

BBC Meteorologist Falsely Claims South Sudan is Experiencing "Extreme Heat" for March.  South Sudan is experiencing "extreme heatwaves" and is shutting schools and cutting power, reports BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor.  "It is exceptionally early for South Sudan to experience such heat — temperatures often exceed 43°C but only in the summer months, according to the World Bank's Climate Change portal," he states.  Hot days in the capital Juba — five degrees north of the equator — are for some a big 'climate change' story, but it is difficult to read into the World Bank data the interpretation that Taylor wants to publicise.  In fact it is impossible, since the data clearly show that average South Sudan temperatures peak in March and then fall away through the wet monsoon 'summer' months.

Tony Bobulinski's Lawyer Threatens Lawsuit Against Fox News' Jessica Tarlov for Dishonest Accusation.  Tony Bobulinski's testimony before Congress is upsetting all the right people.  As a former associate of Hunter Biden, he has been spilling the tea about the Biden family's business dealings, which isn't sitting well with folks on the left.  They responded to his involvement with House Republicans' impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by doing their level best to smear and discredit the witness.  However, Bobulinski has been fighting back.  Jessica Tarlov, a left-leaning co-host on Fox News' "The Five," stepped in it on Wednesday when she claimed, without evidence, that Bobulinski was being funded by Super PAC aligned with former President Donald Trump during a recent broadcast.

Liberal FOX News Host Jessica Tarlov Forced to Issue On-Air Correction About Tony Bobulinski.  Jessica Tarlov, one of the rotating liberal hosts of The Five on FOX News, was forced to issue an on-air correction about former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski on Thursday.  On Wednesday, Tarlov made some comments about who is paying Bobulinki's legal fees.  His lawyer was quick to react and apparently threatened a lawsuit.

Larry Summers:  Inflation [is] Much Worse Than [the] Government Says.  Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary under Clinton and economic advisor to Obama, is likely getting himself into trouble once again with the Left.  While president of Harvard, he blurted out the obvious fact that men and women may be different, leading to a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Harvard, and since Biden's election he has been critical of the president's economic policies, warning that they were harming the economy.  Well, he's done it again, this time in an economic paper that provides the explanation for what the Left calls the "vibesession" — the persistent belief by Americans that the economy is much worse than the official statistics indicate.  [Tweet]

Trump talks 'bloodbath' in auto industry if cheap Chinese EVs flood the market — Dems pretend he called for violence.  The media and other Democrats know that Joe Biden and his policies are unpopular, so for the last eight years, they've sought to destroy Donald Trump, no matter how much they have to intentionally lie and mislead the public, and this latest iteration is beyond absurd.  While speaking at a recent campaign rally, Trump said there would be a "bloodbath" in the auto industry if China flooded the American market with cheap electric vehicles flowing through Mexico — but instead of showing the full quote, much of the media, along with Biden campaign workers and Democrats like Pelosi, decided that with polls as bad as they are, they should intentionally mislead the public that Trump had called for violence if he doesn't win in November.

Regime Media:  ABC World News Tonight Advances The Bloodbath Hoax.  Despite clear, documented context to the contrary, ABC continues to push the discredited piece of Biden campaign propaganda known as the Bloodbath Hoax, and ties it to the Capitol Riot.  Additionally, ABC promoted a 2024 version of an immigration narrative that was trotted out both in 2015 and 2019.  Watch as ABC's Chief Biden Apple Polisher Mary Bruce broadcasts campaign disinformation from behind the anchor desk, framing correspondent Maryalice Parks' video package:  [Video clip]  As I said during my recap of the Sunday shows, to accept the idea that people who are the elite in the industry of communicating with words are suddenly unable to comprehend plain English requires multiple significant suspensions of disbelief.  That's not to say that some of these elites are not intellectually deficient.  But not to this extent.  Which leaves willful deception as the only likely reason why reporters, correspondents and anchors would, in near unanimity continue to promote Trump's assessment of damage to the American automotive industry under a second Biden term as both a violent threat and a January 6th-adjacent attack against democracy.

President Trump Warns of a Looming Bloodbath in the Auto Industry Related to Chinese EV Plants in Mexico - Media Go Bananas.  Having previously written about the issue of three major Chinese EV makers putting massive investment into production facilities, the remarks by President Trump in Ohio warning of a "bloodbath" in the auto industry are exactly accurate.  According to media, last December the three Chinese auto manufacturers, MG, BYD, and Chery, announced they were going to spend billions building new EV manufacturing plants in Mexico.  Each Chinese auto manufacturer was going to spend between $1.5 to $2.0 billion.  The Chinese don't make that much of an investment in something unless they are sure the U.S. government is going to force the EV market to exist.  These manufacturing plants would crush the U.S[.] EV market.  Drawing attention to the issue, President Trump said he can stop the pending crisis.  However, if he did not win the election the American auto industry would end up with a "bloodbath" of closed plants, lost jobs and diminished labor union workforce.  Trump is not wrong.  [Video clip]

Media Bloodbath:  Elon Musk Is Now More Trustworthy Than Every Major News Outlet.  Shortly after Donald Trump made remarks at a rally in Ohio, Joe Scarborough posted on X: "Donald Trump's America.  And he is proud of it.  Promised another 'bloodbath' if he loses again."  The picture was from the Jan. 6 riot.  Soon after, however, Scarborough deleted the post.  We can't say for certain why, except that he hit the delete button shortly after Elon Musk responded to "Morning Joe" with this comment:  [Tweet]  At least Scarborough had the good sense to take back his inflammatory and wildly out-of-context portrayal of what Trump had said.  The same can't be said for almost every other major news outlet, which ran blood-curdling headlines about Trump's supposed call to violence if he loses.

This could be the devastating proof that Hamas is faking its death figures.  One of the marks of anti-Semitism, George Orwell observed in 1945, is "an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true".  Which brings us smartly to Hamas and how the broadcast media, aid organisations, international bodies and world leaders take its disinformation as gospel.  Last week it became clear that this gullibility may have led to a crime against reality.  A new analysis of the group's casualty statistics indicates that the rag-tag terror army may have pulled off one of the biggest propaganda coups of modern times.  The figures, repeated by everyone from the White House to the BBC, are freighted with familiarity: 30,000 dead in Gaza, 70 percent of whom are women and children.  Yet it now seems overwhelmingly likely that these statistics are fabricated.  Professor Abraham Wyner, a data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has conducted a thorough analysis.  He found that Hamas's official civilian death toll was statistically impossible.

Reporter Leaves Out Key Facts in Hit Piece on Libs of TikTok.  Vice News published a story last fall asserting that Libs of TikTok, the popular social media account run by Chaya Raichik, was responsible for a rise in school bomb threats.  The reporter, Tess Owen, wrote that "bomb threats targeting schools or school districts following Libs of TikTok posts appears to be a particularly ominous escalation."  She then cited a "disturbing pattern" from 11 school districts.  Newly obtained emails, released Thursday by Raichik, suggest that Owen wasn't completely truthful in her reporting.  In a post on X, Libs of TikTok claimed Vice News and Owen "knowingly withheld critical information about me because it didn't fit their narrative."  [Tweet]

Entire staff at Deadspin fired months after they smeared 9-year-old Chiefs fan as a racist.  Just five months after Deadspin tried to smear a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan as a racist, all of the sports media outlet's employees have been fired as a part of a buyout.  Employees received an email announcing the sale, and some were told at a meeting before their access to the company's digital resources was cut off.  "Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings," the email read in part. [...] Deadspin was excoriated by many after it tried to misrepresent the costume worn by a young fan of the Kansas City Chiefs as "blackface."  Critics immediately slammed the outlet by pointing out that they had used a misleading photo only showing one side of the child's face and not the other, which was colored in red.  In February, the family of the boy named Holden Armenta filed a defamation lawsuit against Deadspin.  The Armenta family said they have received "a barrage of hate, including death threats" as a result of the article.

Trump's Promise — Retribution or Revenge?  [Scroll down]  The New York Times, with a long history of publishing falsehoods about Donald Trump, has already labeled Trump's potential second term, "The Retribution Presidency."  There is a smell of panic rising from midtown Manhattan and from the Beltway.  Is this revenge or retribution?  Is there a distinction? [...] Here is a summary of the two terms.  Words do matter.
  •   Retribution is a form of punishment imposed by law and legally authorized.
  •   Revenge, in contrast, is a form of personal punishment, one not sanctioned by law.
  •   The ultimate goal of Retribution is to punish the wrongdoer or offender and ensure that justice is served to the victim and public as a whole.
  •   Revenge, however, is a form of payback, to ensure that personal justice is served.  Thus, the goal of Revenge is vengeance or getting even.
  •   Retribution is only carried out for crimes and wrongs recognized in the law.  It is not personal and not fueled by a desire to persistently seek the suffering of the wrongdoer.  Instead, it imposes a punishment that is proportionate to the gravity of the crime or wrong.  Furthermore, it is governed by procedural rules and codes of conduct.
  •   In contrast, Revenge can be carried out for various wrongs, injuries, suffering and any other action considered harmful or hurtful.  There is no limit to the type of punishment imposed and the severity of such punishment.  As mentioned before, Revenge is personal and driven by a strong emotional desire to see the suffering of the person who committed the wrong or injury.
Which of these two words describe what the deep state ruling class has done to Trump versus what he will hopefully do if reelected president?

Our Constitutional Republic Has Gone Crazy But There's Nowhere To Hide.  [Laken] Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered in Georgia for jogging alone (as the Associated Press insinuated) or by an "Athens Man" (according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) — anything other than the realities of her alleged murderer Jose Antonio "Athens Man" Ibarra being an illegal migrant from Venezuela, arrested and released once already since his arrival in September 2022.

The MSM Is Corrupt Beyond Repair.  It's not news that the MSM is obsessed with pushing a narrative and that the narrative is grotesquely slanted to the left.  That's why Americans' trust in media is at record lows.  The decline has been rapid, and there is zero chance it will reverse any time soon.  Pretty much the only people who express any trust in the sewage that the MSM pumps out are people who love to swim in it:  Leftists.  But that doesn't mean that the propaganda mills that our media have become don't accomplish the task to which they have been set.  As much as people know that what they have been sold is [worthless], it's still the only news that most people ever get.  By sheer force of repetition, people wind up believing much of what they are told, even though they know it is slanted.  Millions of Americans believe in the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and a whole host of other lies.  As long as the media selectively edits clips, loudly and often repeats lies, and pushes for the censorship and "fact-checking" of alternative media, lies often become conventional wisdom.

NYT Editor Blames Swing Voters Who 'Don't Know Or Remember' Trump.  New York Times headline, Feb. 20: "A Big Opportunity to Define Trump as Unacceptable."  The short item by Times Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy follows up on an unintentionally hilarious focus group session the paper conducted last week, wherein 11 out of 13 voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 say they now support Trump.  Among the switching voters was a man who said he would support Trump even though he believed him to have committed "sexual abuse" and two others who said criminal convictions in any of the charges against him would not change their minds.

Gaslighting: To Help Reelect Biden, Media Claim Trump Is Going Senile, Too.  It's quite timely that after writing on article yesterday on media bias, the following headline popped up on my MSN homepage:  "Donald Trump's cognitive decline worse than Joe Biden's due to 2 signs, professor says."  Notice what's assumed (and what's assumed is learned best) in the above headline:  We're to take it as a given that Trump is declining cognitively.  The only question is the severity.  Of course, the message here essentially IS, "Yeah, our guy Biden is senile.  But the other guy is even more senile!  Vote Incumbent Dementia!"  And that, citizens, is what you call gaslighting.  Joe Biden's cognitive decline is obvious and severe.

USA Today can't stop promoting the global warming fallacies.  [Scroll down]  Every one of these articles starts with the intentional lie that people who disagree with the radical green agenda are climate change deniers.  I have never seen anyone deny that the climate changes.  We tell the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally.  What we deny is that humans and our use of natural resources cause global warming and that warming causes the ice to melt in the Arctic and that melting will cause a massive rise in sea levels.  They also tell us that the warming causes more severe and deadly storms.  We also don't believe that politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, or anyone else can establish policies that control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever.  We also don't believe the computer model predictions because previous dire predictions have not come true.

Met Office Says it Cannot Back Up its Senior Meteorologist's Claim on BBC Radio That Storms in the U.K. are "More Intense" Due to Climate Change.  The Met Office has been unable to back up a claim that storms in the U.K. are "more intense" due to the effects of climate change.  The claim was made by senior Met Office meteorologist Claire Nasir on January 22nd on BBC 5 Live Breakfast in the aftermath of Storm Isha, and led to a freedom of information request for an explanation by investigative journalist Paul Homewood.  The Met Office has replied that it is unable to answer the request due to the fact that the information "is not held".

Respect for Authorities 'Died Suddenly'.  Given the U.S. government's love affair with censorship and propaganda, I sometimes imagine future historians piecing through the shards of Western civilization in order to understand the reasons for its collapse.  According to the prevailing "narrative," everything right now is tremendously great!  We are told that the economy is strong, that crime is under control, that our borders are secure, that paying twenty bucks for a fast-food hamburger is cheap, and that endless war produces endless peace.  According to the news media, Americans have never had it so good!

Is the Electoral Fix Already In?  The fix is in.  To "protect democracy," democracy is already being canceled.  We just haven't admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.  On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story:  "Fears grow that Trump will use the military in 'dictatorial ways' if he returns to the White House."  It described "a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers" that is "quietly" making plans to "foil any efforts to expand presidential power" on the part of Donald Trump.  The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims.  Since Joe Biden's team "leaked" a strategy memo in late December listing "Trump is an existential threat to democracy" as Campaign 2024's central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes.

Reporter Gets Torn to Shreds for Claiming 'Learn to Code' Was Never a Thing.  It's one of those cases where you know they're wrong.  You could probably ignore them, but it's the liberal media, so you attack at them like a pod of orcas.  Better yet, like orcas, play with your prey before mutilating and devouring it.  That's what's happening with some in the establishment media trying to say that "learn to code" was never a thing and that Joe Biden never said it.  Like their allies in the Democratic Party and now the Department of Justice, these people just lie.  It's a phrase created by this insular circle aimed at working Americans whose jobs were being unnecessarily targeted by Democrats, specifically Barack Obama, who declared war on coal during his presidency.  The PR pitch for destroying the livelihoods of these Americans was that job retraining would be part of their transitioning process into what Democrats feel should be our energy future.  Even labor unions know those two words are snake oil, being sold to them when NAFTA was passed to ease the growing concerns about that trade agreement.

You're Going To Get Dirty.  The trouble I find with conservatives in general and America First people is their demand that everything be pure and sparkling with virtue.  This tendency is what allowed the feds and Democrats to manipulate the January 6th protest into a riot and subsequently into an insurrection.  The immediate response to the horrible events described on that date by a well-known corrupt media should have been:  No, it isn't a riot, it isn't an insurrection, it's a peaceful demonstration.  I noticed on the very day of the event, listening on the radio (probably a federal charge under this DOJ) that the reporting went from:  "It's amazing how many people came out to support Donald Trump and protest the obviously crooked 2020 election" to "It's shameful for these protesters to violate the sanctified halls of congress" in fifteen minutes, by the same broadcaster.  That's a lack of situational awareness and a desire for liberal acceptance.

Another Bogus Border Story Goes Viral and Most Outlets Aren't in a Hurry to Issue Corrections.  The left wing response to the border crisis can be summarized as a series of misleading viral stories designed to vilify anyone who believes border control is a basic operation for a nation.  It started under Trump with the panic over "kids in cages." [...] Then there was the AOC-led campaign to re-label Border Patrol facilities "concentration camps" [...] And lets not forget the viral claim that Border Patrol agents on horeseback were whipping Hatian migrants.  This was such a big deal that President Biden promised the people who did it would pay.  [Tweet]  Once again, it never happened.  Even the photographer said so.  Sec. Mayorkas knew it hadn't happened even before he went to the White House and claimed it had. [...] Given how often the media has jumped on these stories only to have them fall out from under them, you'd think they might learn to be more careful.  But it seems that's never the case.  Two days ago another story went viral.

2023 "Earth's Hottest Year on Record" Claims Fail.  The year-end 2023 global average temperature anomaly measurement data outcomes have climate alarmist media falsely claiming these results established that "2023 Was the Hottest Year on Record" since records began in the mid-1800s.  These "hottest year on record" claims are based on misrepresenting the year 2023 obscure "global average temperature anomaly" outcome that is not applicable to any specific location or region on earth. [...] NOAA's global regional temperature anomaly data establishes that the assertion of year 2023 being the "highest ever measured average temperature anomaly" claim did not occur across the globally dominant regional land areas that include Asia, Europe, U.S., Oceania, Hawaiian Region, Arctic and the Antarctic.

ESPN [has been] forced to return 37 ill-gotten Emmy awards.  ESPN has been ordered to return 37 Emmy awards the sports network received under false pretenses.  For 13 years, ESPN committed "fraud" by submitting fake names to the credit list for the Emmys, according to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).  "Since at least 2010 ... ESPN took the awards won by some of those imaginary individuals, had them re-engraved, and gave them to on-air personalities," The Athletic reported on Thursday.  ESPN gave some of the re-engraved trophies to front-facing figures on "College GameDay," such as Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, Chris Fowler, Desmond Howard, and Sam Ponder.  The report claims the on-air personalities were not aware of the scheme as ESPN higher ups convinced them they had won the awards containing their names.  Eventually, NATAS ordered ESPN to return the ill-gotten Emmys, each of which was intended for a behind-the-scenes employee who does not exist.

The Editor says...
Obviously, NATAS is Satan spelled backwards.  Just a coincidence, right?

More Lunatic Legal Coverage.  Reporters keep plunging to bizarre new lows in coverage of Donald Trump.  The new jam: his lawyer argued presidents can assassinate rivals.  Except he didn't, at all.  [Paywall]

Taking a look at my hometown data I discover the very opposite of the 'global warming' narrative is true.  The following are actual pieces of scientific data related to Springfield, Illinois, where I live:  The warmest day recorded in January is 73 degrees Fahrenheit on January 23, 1909, so every day in January, for the last 115 years, has been colder; the warmest day ever in February is February 24, 1930, when temperatures hit 78 degrees; the warmest day in March was March 21, 1907, when the temperature hit 91 degrees.  The average high temperature in Springfield today is around 36 degrees, and this weekend we are supposed to have highs around 30 degrees below normal, with wind chills around 20 below zero.  So, after 160 years of exponential growth of all the things the green pushers say cause warming, we are thirty degrees below normal.  Temperatures have always fluctuated cyclically and naturally.  Humans have no control over them, and there is no correlation between CO2 content, crude oil use, number of vehicles, and temperatures.  Yet, here is an article from two days ago, full of worthless information and repeated talking points, all to push the radical green agenda to scare people into capitulation:  ["]Earth shattered global heat record in '23 and it's flirting with warming limit, European agency says["]

Five Things Every Patriot Should Be Furious About.  [#2] The news is lying:  How can you tell if your favorite news dude/dudette is trustworthy?  Here is a hint:  see how many of these Blue Anon conspiracy theories they pushed:
  •   Trump/Russia collusion
  •   Pee-pee gate
  •   Hunter's laptop is Russian flapdoodle
  •   Ivermectin is only for horses
  •   Masks, lockdowns, and the vaccine will save lives
  •   COVID-19 came from a bat salad
  •   Unarmed grannies tried to topple the government
  •   Biden got 81 million votes and didn't even campaign.
The lying liarheads in the news are your enemy.

Separating fact from fiction on 'climate change'.  Why is it easier to find lies in the media about "climate change" than truthful information?  Why is honest reporting on the environment an outlier instead of a rule?  Media parrots have said for decades that humans, and our use of natural resources are killing the planet, and that oceans, species, and forests are dying.  They report on future predictions, but rarely on scientific facts — so I thought I would fill the vacuum.  We have been told that we are responsible for irredeemable destruction in the Great Barrier Reef, but that is not true.  The reef is making a "comeback," yet we don't see that story because it doesn't push the radical green agenda; [...] It was thinning cyclically and naturally, and it has come back cyclically and naturally.  Humans didn't cause the thinning, and government policies didn't cause the comeback — or we would see the green pushers claiming victory.

Let's Stop Using the Words: 'Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election'.  After almost three years — and as Democrats in Colorado and Maine ban Donald Trump from the Centennial State's ballot — it is beyond time for the media to stop "reporting" that "Trump tried to overturn a presidential election" and to quit referring matter-of-factly: to "the election that Trump lost"; to "Trump's defeat" and his "baseless" "false claims"; and to "Trump is challenging the results" of "Biden's victory (in, say, Georgia)" and to "swing the election in his favor."  It is equally time for news organizations to stop "reporting" that the four (who's counting?) indictments are nothing more than valid or understandable (if ill-timed) reactions to punish Trump for his ("criminal") attempts to "disenfranchise voters" and thus "subvert democracy."  This is not a neutral, objective, and non-partisan view of of the facts of the 2020 election.  Far from it.  No.  It is the (self-serving) DNC version.  It is akin to asking "When did you stop beating your wife?"  Phrases like "baseless fraud claims," "sham election investigations," and "false claims of election fraud" come straight from the Democrat party.

Waking Up to the Age of Deception.  Each day in this "Age of Deception" constantly raises challenges in finding reliable information.  The 2024 election has already demonstrated that disinformation will be used regarding the economy, climate, immigration, voting, and woke thinking.  The legal attacks against former president Donald Trump are a example of vicious deception.  Another example where truth has become a minor consideration is the Israel/Gaza conflict.  We are shown scores of contradictory reports, each of them appealing to our most primitive emotions.  Fake news identification has expanded due to the growth of digital communication and social media.  In the field of journalism, information is power.  It doesn't matter whether it is true or not, only that it is persuasive.  Individuals now have a wider range of news sources, which disseminate biased perspectives.  The echo chamber effect gives self-proclaimed attention seekers the power to spread their deceptive message.

Democrats and Media Deceptively Change Trump's Word 'Retribution' to 'Revenge'.  The latest misinformation that the Democrat "news"-media colluders (hereafter the DNC) to smear Donald Trump before the 2024 election is that Trump called for "revenge" for his political opponents if wins re-election in 2024.  Brett Samuels in The Hill says that "Trump signals he's out for revenge in his second term."  The Daily Mail and the left-wing The Guardian, both in the U.K., makes the same accusation.  Politico states that in a second term, Trump will be seeking revenge.  Felon Michael Cohen, now a regular useful expert guest on CNN, stated to Jake Tapper that he could be the target of Trump's revenge, to which Jake replied, "That has occurred to me too" (thereby admitting that his view of Trump is tainted by self-interest).  The Washington Post, which used to be a newspaper, reports that Trump and his allies plot revenge" in his second term.  The Huffington Post announces that Trump "vows vengeance" against "vermin" in his second term.  CNN states ominously that in his second term Trump will use his justice department "for revenge."

Tesla 'Recall' Is Nothing of the Sort.  If you have any doubt that the MSM and online influencers have it out for Elon Musk, all you need to do is search Google for the fake news about a Tesla "recall."  The news is everwhere.  Tesla must "recall" almost every vehicle they ever sold, proving that the product is defective and that Elon Musk is a total fraud or something.  It is, of course, total bunkum.  That is not even remotely true. [...] I admire that Musk built a new car company out of almost nothing and made it successful.  That's a tough task, and the argument that he did it on the backs of American taxpayers is a bit rich, given how big the subsidies the feds have tossed at other American carmakers.  But as for the cars or the company?  Other than wishing I had invested in the company years ago since I could have easily retired by now if I had done so, I have no special affinity.  With that said I have to laugh at the claim that the feds are issuing a recall on all Teslas, as if owners were being forced to bring their cars into the shop to get some work done.

Reporter Kiera Butler is a Disinfo Dupe.  Kiera Butler is a journalist on a crusade to "save the world" from Donald Trump, "Russian disinformation," and those dangerous "anti-vaxxers."  However the real danger is within the mix of truth, lies, and spin that Butler combines in her reporting at Mother Jones.  Rather than having certain fields in which she seems to excel, Butler's reporting tends to take a confrontational tone in claiming the latest mainstream "current thing" topic is unquestionably correct and anyone questioning it is stupid or has bad intentions.  This type of slippery journalism that seems more concerned with taking sides than the truth is dishonest but also brings us face-to-face with the loss of values such as free speech and civil liberties.

Telemundo Omitted That Killer of Texas Cheerleader Is Here Illegally.  One of the most egregious form of business-interest bias in Spanish-language media occurs when it is deemed necessary to conceal the immigration status of the suspect of a heinous crime.  Such is the case with Telemundo blatantly omitting that the recently-arrested killer of a 16-year-old Texas cheerleader was in the country illegally.  [Video clip]

Reporter claimed Gaza couldn't use cell phones, spokesman proves her wrong.  Major Doron Spielman from the IDF spoke to Sky News about the resumption of fighting against Hamas in Gaza. [...] On the question of Gazan residents being notified of IDF targets while not having power to power up their mobile phones or Wi-Fi, Major Spielman responded, "I think that you and all of your viewers saw our hostages being paraded through the streets as they were released to Israel over those seven nights.  Hundreds of Gazans were holding their phones and videoing them, so clearly, there's enough power to power their phones when they're parading our hostages throughout Gaza.  Now that same power to their phones will be used to get the maps downloaded and look at the flyers [giving them information on IDF attacks]."

Sports Illustrated Published AI-Generated Articles Under Fake Names.  Sports Illustrated was once the benchmark for sports content but today the site has been accused of publishing AI-generated content under the names of authors who are also AI-generated.  Case in point, Drew Ortiz who had a photo and an author biography on the site.  ["]Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist.  He has no social media presence and no publishing history.  And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, [...]["]

More Media Malpractice.  One of the major reasons why Americans are divided and hostile toward each other is that we live in alternate universes.  Not literally, but functionally.  We have all seen the polls that show Americans have been losing trust in the MSM for a long time.  Only 36% of Americans say they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in the MSM, but this fact hides an important distinction: the majority of Democrats trust the MSM, while Republicans have given up on getting anything remotely close to the truth from the MSM.  Republicans have earned their distrust not just because they are often lied about and can't help but notice this fact, but also because they are literally unable to avoid getting the majority of their news from MSM news sources, while consciously exposing themselves to alternative points of view.  Democrats rarely do.  They automatically distrust alternative or conservative media and tend to trust without question what they hear from the MSM. This is not because they are universally stupid or uninterested in the news, but because they are inclined to trust the "misinformation" narrative.

Do we even know what we're dealing with?  If you lived in a cave and the only thing you could view was cable news, what would you see?  That's easy:  Donald Trump, Climate Change, and so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion issues.  There is no fourth place.  These three subjects reliably suck up virtually all the oxygen.  They also serve to misdirect, miseducate, and mis-prioritize our country against the genuine perils aligning against us.  This isn't surprising.  With few exceptions, America's journalists graduated from many of those same radical hotbeds of anti-Americanism that are now, for the first time, showing their true colors.  Students, graduates, and faculty will need a generation or more to grasp the truth if they ever do.

Sidney Powell Didn't Flip on Trump or MAGA.  It is alarming (although not surprising) to see the misinformation in headlines, new articles, and on social media about Sidney Powell's plea in Georgia last week.  Even good Republicans and MAGA supporters seem confused and misinformed about the facts of her plea, many believing she has disavowed her position on the 2020 election and betrayed her supporters or that she has "flipped" on Trump.  First, let's be very clear that Sidney did not plead guilty to a conspiracy with Donald Trump to unlawfully overturn the 2020 election. [...] Claims she flipped on Donald Trump are outlandish and without basis.  We say that someone has flipped when a defendant agrees to testify/incriminate someone else in exchange for a lighter charge or suggested lighter sentence.  But Sidney's plea agreement is for conduct unrelated to Donald Trump and only tenuously related to even Sidney herself.  Simply put:  Sidney agreed to take the rap for the disputed access to Fulton County machines.  Second, keep in mind that Sidney's plea is different from the other pleas.  The media has been reporting on each plea as if each co-defendant is caving and pleading to the same serious charges — admitting the fight for election integrity was a fraud and there was a conspiracy with Trump.  This is not true.

Media Erase Killing Of Jewish Man Like They Erased The Violence Of 2020's Race Riots.  Corporate media banded together on Tuesday to cover for Hamas apologists after a 69-year-old Jewish man was killed due to injuries he sustained at an anti-Israel demonstration in California over the weekend.  Videos show emergency responders in Thousand Oaks, California loading Paul Kessler, who reportedly carried an Israeli flag at the protest, into an ambulance while the anti-Israel crowd chanted and waved Palestinian flags near a pool of his blood on the ground.  At least one police officer was seen trying to discourage a man yelling in a megaphone from disturbing the scene.  [Tweet]  The pro-Palestine demonstrator who allegedly interacted with Kessler has not been publicly identified or arrested but Sheriff James Fryhoff did confirm during a press conference on Tuesday that the 50-year-old's house is being searched.  "These witnesses provided conflicting statements about what the altercation and who the aggressor was," Sheriff James Fryhoff said.  The Ventura County Sheriff's Office, which might investigate the incident as a hate crime, said witness accounts suggest that "Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground."

World 'Recoiling in Horror' at IDF; Nets Smear Israel Not Being in 'Mood to Compromise'.  Between Sunday and Monday, the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC used their flagship morning and evening newscasts to start a new week of anti-Israel smears and siding with Hamas terrorists as Tuesday marks one month since the latter's animalistic barbarism murdered at least 1,400 innocents and resulted in over 200 hostages.  This time, the networks argued the world's "recoiling in horror" at Israel's 'search and destroy mission" that's "shattering...lives" in Gaza and Israel remaining still "not" being in a "mood to compromise" with Hamas.

The Corrupt Media Tried to Implicate Me in a Mass Shooting Because a Psychopath 'Liked My Tweets'.  According to reporters, producers and editors at major news organizations, my Twitter, which is full of my disapproval of leftists and their policies — somehow contributed to the deaths and injuries of innocent people in Lewiston, Maine.  Those same people would have you then believe that had other conservative commentators and I only not run our mouths, none of his actions would have occurred. [...] Caving or even becoming complacent to the constant attacks and spin from the left will never get us out of the situation we're in.  In the middle of record inflation that includes fuel and grocery prices that are in our faces every single day — it's important to know that we are in an information war with the very people who have traditionally been the providers of information.  And while they're the first to scream "disinformation" at stories they disagree with — they're also the ones who are first to serve us disinformation.

We Must Learn to Ignore the Colin Kaepernick Media Narrative.  The news cycle has been full of stories about Colin Kaepernick and the latest speculation of his signing with another football team.  These stories are similar to those that have circulated for the past seven years.  To recap, Colin Kaepernick played quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers until he was benched and released in 2016. He's also known for his protests against the police by kneeling during the National Anthem.  Nothing else has happened for seven years.  Nothing.  The story has not really been about Colin Kaepernick at all.  The story has been (and is) about how the establishment media creates news out of nothing, and keeps the narrative on life support long after the patient has died.  Since 2016, while nothing was happening, we have been bombarded with "news" stories anticipating yet another milestone in Kaepernick's career.  From reading seven years of headlines, a reader would conclude that Kaepernick has actually played football for various teams during that time.  An October story announced "NFL world reacts as Colin Kaepernick makes major move."  But, if one reads the actual story, one would see that there was no "major" anything behind the headline.  The headlines that pop up on our mainstream news (MSN) home pages are designed to plant a seed in the minds of people too busy to click and read the actual story.

The Editor says...
That's why you shoud be able to spot a click-bait headline and ignore it.

22 Years of Blowback from the USA Patriot Act.  [Scroll down]  News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing.  The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the "events," manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state.  Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we're being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it's difficult to stay focused on one thing — namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law — and the powers-that-be understand this.  In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government's steady encroachments on their freedoms.

Here's Why The Media's Lies About Rep. Jamaal Bowman Should Concern You.  During a series of contentious spending votes on Saturday ahead of a looming government shutdown, while House Democrats were trying to slow-walk a vote, Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in a House office building on Capitol Hill, forcing an evacuation.  Bowman's stunt, which is under investigation by Capitol Police, was caught on a security camera.  It's clear he pulled the fire alarm as a delaying tactic, precisely to force the evacuation of the building and disrupt official congressional business (the kind of thing the media would call an "insurrection" if a Republican had done it.) [...] But here's the important thing:  Bowman's claim is that he thought pulling the fire alarm would open the door.  That sounds like an outlandish lie, doesn't it?  The sort of patently false thing no one in his right mind would ever believe or even try to explain.  Just a bone-crushingly idiotic fiction that requires us to believe Bowman is mentally ill or psychotic.  Every single person in Washington knows it's not true.  And yet, every single Democrat and the entire corporate news media immediately responded as if it were a reasonable and acceptable explanation for Bowman's actions, like of course he didn't know what would happen when he pulled the alarm.  He thought it would open the door, OK?  How many of us have encountered a locked door and immediately pulled the nearest fire alarm?

Please Stop Telling Us Everything Is Fine With the Economy.  Two weeks ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour there is a peculiar disconnect between how the economy is doing and how the public is feeling about it. [...] People think the economy is bad because they are paying, at least here in western Pennsylvania, $3.99 a gallon for gas, and in places such as Arizona, where the state now ranks seventh among the nation's highest-paying markets at $4.69; last week alone it climbed 14 cents a gallon.  In Nevada, it jumped a whopping 33 cents a gallon, with California coming in at a 29-cents-a-gallon jump.  When gas prices rise, food prices rise.

Bring back the chaos then.  Less than a month after President Trump's inauguration, Time magazine rolled out the Democrat-RINO message of a chaotic White House.  Its proof was as thin as the hair atop John Fetterman's head.  Time reported, "Federal judges in four courts froze a hastily issued Executive Order barring certain immigrants from entering the country.  Intelligence officials leaked descriptions of classified intercepts in a winning attempt to force Trump to fire his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who had misled the nation about his ties with a Russian diplomat.  Then more leaks came, from current and former officials to the New York Times, asserting that Trump campaign aides and senior Russian intelligence officials had been in contact during the 2016 presidential campaign. [...]"  That was not chaos.  That was sabotage by the deep state and its seditious resistance.  The leaks were illegal and impossible to fact-check.  But reporters claim they need access and so they go with leaky stories regardless of how true they may be because they need access to even juicier stories that may or may not be true.

Univision Host Amplifies Florida Curriculum Hoax In Fox News GOP Debate.  The Univision co-host of the Fox News Republican presidential debate reinforced false leftist narratives Wednesday night when pressing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on his state's K-12 curriculum.  Univision's Ilia Calderon implied DeSantis promoted educational standards that suggested slavery benefitted the victims.  The question emanates from claims Vice President Kamala Harris fabricated this summer.  "Florida's new Black History curriculum says 'slaves developed skills that in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit,'" Calderon said, ignoring that the left-wing College Board has apparently made nearly identical statements.  "You have said, 'Slaves developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of it.'  But many are still hurt.  For descendants of slaves, this is personal.  What is your message to them?"  The Florida governor attacked the question as a "hoax" engineered by the vice president to smear Republicans as racist.

The Editor says...
Dishonest left-wing talking heads on TV often make little speeches and inject socialist talking points while pretending to ask a question.

Whose idea was it to invite Ilia Calderón?  How many Republicans watch Univision?  How many Univision viewers become Republicans?
Second GOP Debate Marred By Univision Moderator's Anti-American HATE and LIES.  The second GOP presidential primary debate Wednesday night was a case study in why the Republican Party shouldn't award debate moderation privileges to hostile and dishonest members of the liberal media.  While Fox Business Network occupied two of the moderator positions (Stuart Varney and Dana Perino), the third was given to Univision anchor Ilia Calderón.  Her questions were by far the most anti-American and dishonest; ranging from lies about gun violence being "unique" to America to blaming America for the drug trafficking at the southern border, and more.  In a question directed to North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Calderón peddled the liberal media's BIG LIE about gun violence:  "Mental health concerns are not unique to United States.  But gun violence is."  Back here in reality, Central American and South American countries were some of the most dangerous countries in the world.  Their violence was often cited as a primary driver of illegal immigration to the U.S. According to reporting from NPR, those countries have per capita violent gun death rates many times that of the U.S.

The ten commandments of liberalism.  Liberalism has been likened to a religious movement- a secular quest for heaven on earth.  Like legitimate religions, it has its own tenets.  Thou shalt seek social justice.  We're all in this together. [...] Thou shalt embrace diversity.  Diversity is our strength.  Not really.  Diverse forces flying off in their own direction weaken a society's locus.  Strength lies in overcoming diversity. [...] Liberal activism, especially since the advent of woke progressivism, has evolved into an atheistic, fundamentalist "religion."  Fundamentalism involves strict ideologic adherence, conformity, and maintenance of an in group-out group distinction.  At its core are ideological lay preachers who confer eternal damnation onto those heretics and apostates who challenge its self-appointed role of secular clergy.  Its apostles — media, academia, HR departments — are driven by self-righteous, prejudicial, vengeful hypocrisy.  Liberal dogma knows no compromise.  Nonconformists must be silenced, forcibly if necessary.

BBC 'Disinformation' Reporter Caught Lying on Her Resume.  The BBC's so-called "Disinformation Correspondent" Marianna Spring has added yet more controversy to the corrupt "fact-checking" industry as she was caught lying on her resume.  Spring is facing claims that she filled her resume with "disinformation" about her experience in order to advance her career.  According to a report from the Daily Mail, about five years ago Spring was trying to get work as a freelancer in Moscow for U.S.-based news site Coda Story.  When Spring applied to the website's Editor-in-Chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, she said she had worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.

Climate scientist:  Yes, I cooked my Nature article on global warming — and here's why.  Consider this lengthy essay an exposé of a kind of Unified Field Theory of Academia-Media Corruption.  It's not so much that Patrick T. Brown reveals any new angles, but at the Free Press, the climate scientist connects many of the dots — and from the inside, at least at the time. [...] Brown still stands behind that paper, although he has since left his job in Academia for a non-profit where he can speak and act more freely.  In the narrow confines of his paper, limited to only climate change, he writes that his paper remains accurate and useful.  But because the media and Academia establishments are now limiting all discussion of practically any natural phenomena to "climate change," much of the causes of wildfires remains undiscussed — and so, therefore, do any practical policies that would mitigate them.  That is no accident, Brown argues, and it is very well known in scientific circles: [...]

The public isn't being told the full truth about the climate threat.  Patrick Brown, the co-director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California, has blown the whistle on an open secret about climate science:  it's biased in favour of alarmism.  He published a paper in Nature magazine on the effect of climate change on wildfires.  In it he told the truth:  there was an effect.  But not the whole truth:  other factors play a big role in fires too.  On Maui, the failure of the electric utility to manage vegetation along power lines was a probable cause of the devastating recent fires, but climate change proved a convenient excuse.  Editors at journals such as Nature seem to prefer publishing simplistic, negative news and speculation about climate change.  "It is standard practice to calculate impacts for scary hypothetical future warming scenarios that strain credibility," wrote Brown.  So, after learning this lesson the hard way when his nuanced papers were rejected, he adapted his latest to suit their apparent prejudices — and it was published.

A Preview Of How The Dishonest Media Will Lie And Mislead About Trump's Show Trials.  As we wait for the political show trials of Donald Trump to begin, it's good to remember a hard and fast rule:  Quotes and summaries of events reported by the corporate media are always either half wrong or deliberately misleading.  A perfect example of that truism was provided this week by Axios' Mike Allen, who claimed Monday that Georgia Democrat prosecutor Fani Willis included an "Easter egg" in her I'm-a-very-serious-lawyer indictment.  Allen said that a specific portion of the documents had "a twist" that "could spoil" Trump's legal team's effort to have the entire case moved to federal court, a move that could possibly secure him a more favorable jury (as opposed to the pool of "marginalized, underserved and disadvantaged" voters he would surely get in Fulton County).  That "twist" is an open letter Trump sent to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in September 2021, which was after the former president was out of office, thus supposedly undercutting the Trump team's assertion that the criminal charges are purely federal in nature, rather than addressable at the county court level.  In that letter, the indictment notes, Trump solicited Raffensperger to "unlawfully" undo the 2020 election outcome "and announce the true winner."

Fox News and Martha MacCallum Caught Presenting Koch Brothers Activist as Fake GOP Voter in Wisconsin to Support Ron DeSantis.  By now we are all too familiar with the schemes and plots of the corporate media as they participate in the political illusion of choice game.  However, for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News debate moderator Martha MacCallum, this catch shreds the remaining little credibility they carried.  Fox News is hosting the GOP debate in Wisconsin.  During this build up segment, Martha MacCallum introduces the "random Republican voters" in Wisconsin who will watch the debate.  Except, well... there's a little problem.  MacCallum introduces Chris Lawrence as a "Wisconsin GOP voter" who seemingly supports Ron DeSantis.  However, MacCallum fails to mention that Chris Lawrence actually works for the Koch Network, who have recently pledged to spend $70 million to defeat President Trump.  Not only has Chris Lawrence worked for the Koch Network for the past 9 years, he is also the Senior Field Director for the Koch group Americans for Prosperity.  In essence, Lawrence is a political operative planted in the group by Fox News to support Ron DeSantis and make it appear like he is an innocuous voter.

A Reckoning on COVID Coverage.  [Scroll down]  In both the CDC and FDA examples, you didn't need to be a virologist or epidemiologist to expose the glaring weakness of their argument.  Yet no major conservative media did so at the time.  One Fox newscaster repeated the FDA's "You're not a horse" tweet, but he made no mention that IVM comes in human tablet form which the FDA has made hard to get.  Why not? [...] There occurred no critical analysis of an entire host of COVID issues, including lockdowns, medical establishment sabotage of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, vaccine side effects, issues with remdesivir, etc.  (A notable exception is the Epoch Times, which has offered extensive, scholarly and critical COVID coverage throughout.)  Another problem among conservative news outlets was that they routinely, robotically and uncritically printed Reuters and AP articles, taking their COVID reporting at face value.

Stop Saying That 'It Can't Happen Here' — It IS Happening Here.  But make no mistake, tyranny is here.  It's hidden by state-run news outlets that distract us from the truth with stories about little green men and Lizzo's latest chunky stunt.  They lie to Americans on their 24-hour news propaganda platforms about our own president's skullduggery with China and downplay or ignore the ramifications that chicanery presents, such as spy balloons left unfettered, a border left open, secret Chinese police stations, and more than 13,000 military-aged Chinese people flooding into our nation.  Our leaders lie to us with "The sky is falling" flapdoodle about how climate change and phantom white supremacy, not the tyranny they sponsor, will be our downfall.

The climate scaremongers:  Heatwave hysteria.  The New York Intelligencer magazine called it the 'Worldwide Heatwave', which according to the UN has 'engulfed the Northern Hemisphere'.  It was of course nothing of the sort, simply the usual mix of hot and cold weather we see every year. [...] The Telegraph made several claims which were not borne out by events.  For instance:
  [#1]   They claimed that 41.8C in Rome was a record.  However in 2005 temperatures there hit 42C.
  [#2]   They said temperatures in Sicily might reach 48C.  They got to 45C, well below the record of 48.8C.
  [#3]   They said temperatures in Madrid and Rome could reach 'mid to high 40s' — in the event, Madrid got to 39C and Rome to 41C.

Overheated.  The short version is an underwater Pacific Ocean volcano named Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, 490 feet under the waves, massively erupted, bigger than any other modern eruption, even bigger than Mount Pinatubo.  You never heard about it since it was underwater and nobody died.  But the erupting lava instantly vaporized fantastic, unimaginable amounts of sea water, which billowed into the atmosphere, changing the water composition of Earth's atmosphere and heating it up for years. [...] But I bet you never heard anything about Hunga Tonga, did you?  Thanks, media. [...] For the first time since tracking began, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is pegged out at the maximum, across the board.  Here's why corporate media is ignoring the most dramatic climate even in modern history:  because you can't legislate underwater volcanoes.  You can try, but they won't listen.  So what's the fun in that?  Corporate media only exists to further political ends.  Since volcanoes aren't subject to politics, why bother?

How modern media became the world's second-oldest profession.  The New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post (WaPo), from their perch atop the liberal media pyramid as it evolved in the wake of the JournoList, drove the content of the rest of the mainstream media ecosystem.  CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, HuffPo, Slate, Politico, and myriad other liberal outlets took their lead from NYT and WaPo.  As such, seeding a story in either of these outlets guaranteed media saturation.  It's widely recognized that NYT is the outlet of choice for the FBI and the national law enforcement (DOJ...) blob, while WaPo is the go-to outlet for the CIA and other elements of the national intelligence blob.  Both our law enforcement and intelligence communities worked overtime to seed the Russiagate stories, both knowing how false they were, into these outlets and into the conscience of the American public.  The question that must be asked here is, where were the real reporters?  Why would they risk their credibility reporting "stories" always laden with anonymous sources, from both the intelligence and law enforcement communities, without questioning the motives of those sources or outing them once it was known that the information they provide was false?

CNBC releases list of 'best and worst states to live in'.  CNBC recently released a remarkable ranking of "America's 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023."  Unsurprisingly, considering the source, the list consists exclusively of red states.  The rankings were purportedly based on crime rates, environmental quality, health care, quality and availability of childcare, and inclusiveness in state laws such as reproductive rights, protections against discrimination, and voting rights.  Oh, got it.  Guess we know how they weighted these factors.  Access to unfettered abortion ("reproductive rights"), worship of the LGBTQ community ("Protection against discrimination"), and the "right" to vote sans identification, via mail, and early and often, obviously superseded "crime rates."  [Lists omitted for brevity.]  Notice something oddly amusing, gentle readers?  Most of the states CNBC ranked as the worst in which to live and work are the states everyone is moving to, and several of the states it ranked as the best in which to live and work are the ones everyone is moving from.

The Left's 2020 'Fake Electors' Narrative Is Fake News.  Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump's "fake" electors accepted immunity deals.  Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors' testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct.  Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media's continued peddling of the "fake electors" narrative.  There were no "fake" electors.  There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia's certified vote.  Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers.  On the contrary, Trump's election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided.  And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii's three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.

Press roosters crow about Joe Biden for a fake economic sunrise.  Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell would have you think what Joe Biden thinks — that he is the hero of the American economy just because inflation has stopped ballooning: [...] It's garbage.  Joe Biden is still attempting to force people to buy electric cars and is handing out green goodies to people who claim they can control the climate.  There is also his intentional destruction of companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  The price of crude oil is down from its high but is still over 75% higher than it was before he took office.  (Note to Catherine: Please describe which of Biden's policies brought crude oil down.)  The price of energy affects everything.  Crude oil is used in over 6,000 products.  Statistical inflation increases have been reduced to 3% or 4% but Americans are still suffering.  He is forcing all federal projects to use prevailing wages which inflate costs.  He is taking away the ability for healthy people to buy reasonably priced health insurance policies.

Don't Believe The Leftist Media Narrative About The State of the 2024 Race.  To the surprise of no one, the leftist corporate media's coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been abysmal.  Predictably, their reporting is full of omissions, half truths, and wishful thinking.  Once again, they only report their preferred narratives, in a desperate attempt to persuade stupid people and gullible news outlets into believing them, including Conservative Inc.  As usual the leftist coastal elites are attempting to shape their perceptions into reality.

Climate Fact Check: June 2023 Edition.  Ten more false climate claims from June have already gone bust and are presented below.  [#1] Canadian forest fires caused by climate change?  Smoky American skies caused by Canadian wildfires are not new.  The historical record shows Canadian wildfires have darkened U.S. skies repeatedly since 1706. [...] [#4] Florida strawberries suffering from climate change?  As shown in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) chart [not seen here], Florida's strawberry harvests increased nearly 50 percent between 2001 and 2019.  [#5] Summers getting hotter?  The New York Times reported in "Tracking Dangerous Heat in the U.S." that: "Summer temperatures have become hotter and more extreme in recent decades."  Fact Check.  The New York Times uses the 1951-1980 global cooling period as the baseline temperature and ignores hot summers before 1940.

The Big Gaslight.  The term "gaslighting" was just selected word of the year because of its overuse.  But why would that usage increase have happened?  Maybe because the practice itself has become more common as a political weapon.  In practical parlance, "gaslighting" means trying to persuade others not to believe their "lying eyes," or not to believe what they already had known as established fact.  Recent examples of such disinformation themes include:
  •   The summer 2020 riots were not really riots but "mostly peaceful" demonstrations.
  •   The Hunter Biden laptop emails are not real but instead a Russian disinformation tactic.
  •   The U.S. southern border is closed.
  •   It was Republicans, not Democrats, who favored defunding the police.
  •   Voter ID requirements are actually voter suppression.
  •   Critical Race Theory is not really racist — and is not being taught in schools anyway.
  •   The Afghanistan surrender/retreat was really a great achievement and success.
Curiously, all these familiar ploys are authored by the same political camp.

13 Reasons Joe Biden Isn't The 'Ethical' President Time Magazine Claims.  The corporate media kicked off the week with another outrageous story to spin President Joe Biden, the man guilty of politically persecuting his chief political opponent and potentially selling American policy out to foreign adversaries, as an "ethical" president.  Biden is "reset[ting] the guardrails against ... abuses of power" and "increas[ing] public trust in government," reads a Time magazine article unironically titled, "Biden Is Resetting the Ethical Norms Trump Trampled as President."  "President Biden is proud to have restored respect for the rule of law and will not exploit his office with convention events on the White House lawn," Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates told the magazine.  "He will not exploit his office for political gain in the way that we saw in the last administration," Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added.  Below are 13 reasons Biden is not "ethical," and may in fact go down as one of the most corrupt and immoral presidents in American history.

The press just can't stop propping up Democrats.  I bet no one can recall when the media tried to help George Bush's and Donald Trump's poll numbers.  Nope, they continued their efforts to push them down because they always campaign for Democrats.

The Liberal Media Need Shock Treatment.
  •   The IRS whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden matter are ignored by the liberal media.
  •   Biden steals thousands of classified documents — without the authority to declassify them — when he was a senator and vice-president and the story disappears.
  •   FBI insiders bravely reveal the blatant pro-Democratic bias of the organization and their testimony is sloughed off.
  •   Joe Biden commits one embarrassing verbal gaffe after another, demonstrating an unarguable diminution of mental acuity, and the video clips are nowhere to be seen on the mainstream stations.
  •   James Comer finds one ironclad, tangible example after another of inappropriate, even illegal, financial dealings by the entire Biden family and Comer's investigation is dismissed by the liberal media as unfounded hearsay.
  •   Talk of the 2016 presidential election being stolen by President Trump from Hillary is hailed as heroic, patriotic protest, but presenting the mountains of indisputable evidence of 2020 election fraud committed by the Democrats against President Trump gets you branded as a traitor by the mainstream media.
This list of examples could go on and on, but for the sake of brevity and current relevance, we'll leave it there.

Here's How You Know Conservatives Are Winning.  If you want a good indication that conservatives are, at long last, scoring a few actual victories these days, look at the apoplexy it's causing those on the left.  A prime example is a piece written by Jill Lawrence, a former editor at USA Today, which posted on July 4 on MSNBC and carried the scary title:  "Seeing the erosion of our freedoms makes it hard to celebrate this Fourth of July."   It is a remarkable display of fearmongering, incoherence, and illogic.  "The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms," Lawrence writes.  "The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have.  The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing."  Ok.  So, how about some examples?

Has the mainstream press lost all desire to investigate climate alarmist claims?  Being something of a questioning soul, I have found mainstream news sources somewhat unsatisfactory in recent years — banal reporting, simplistic (and error-strewn) reporting and homages to vested interests have turned me off the commonly used channels for consuming the output of the fourth estate.  Having leafed through various fairly anodyne articles that mostly avoided the difficult questions of the day, tucked away on page 36 was a small article by the environment editor of The Times entitled "Antarctic Ice Melts to 'Shocking' Low".  Intrigued — because there are some fascinating observations coming from the world's oceans that are worthy of closer investigation — I read the article in more detail.  I was genuinely astonished.  Not, I should say, by the quality of the article, or the incisiveness of the reporting.  I was astonished by the extent — not of any ice loss — but of the twisting of facts to fit an agenda.  Bereft of nuance, we seem to be spiralling into a polarised world where broadsheet 'journalism' can see fit to distill context-free factoids into an easily-digestible apocalyptic pill to be popped down a reader's gullet: [...]

Under Biden, Fake News Soars to Whole New Level.  "Biden calls China's Xi a dictator; Beijing slams remark as 'provocation,'" headlined the Washington Post on June 20.  "Biden calls Xi a dictator, who was kept in the dark about spy balloon," chimed in the New York Times. [...] That is not exactly the same as saying "China's Xi Jinping is a dictator," or "Xi Jinping is like other dictators." Contrary to what the reports assume, Xi Jinping would have no problem with the label.  The People's Republic of China is a Communist country, and in Marxist-Leninist doctrine the dictatorship of the proletariat rules.  Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu-Wen and Xi Jinping are all totalitarian dictators in the true sense.  Marxist-Leninist doctrine allows no party but the Communist Party, and the Party decides who will run the show.  Xi Jinping is the man of the hour, and the notion he "didn't know" about the balloon is ludicrous.

Living in a Media World.  From National Public Radio (aka state radio), I've gained information that while guns are dangerous in the hands of most of our fellow citizens, they are necessary for transgendered Americans, who must stockpile them because of "hateful rhetoric."  Our brave sexual pioneers are being constantly threatened by Christian bigots and other vicious obscurantists.  NPR has also taught me that whatever riots followed the killing of George Floyd were mostly peaceful and that the slaying of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny was driven by contempt for a minority member struggling with mental illness.  The transgendered youth who murdered six people, including three children, in a Christian school in Nashville did not really cause this "tragedy."  The non-binary shooter was a victim of Christian prejudice and "the gun lobby," and what he did out of emotional desperation led to "an escalation of hate" against the LGBT community.  Yesterday I had the scales fall further from my eyes when I discovered that Hunter Biden had not committed a host of felonies, some of which implicated his dad.  Hunter is a recovering drug addict whom Joe Scarborough on MSNBC is defending against "hyperventilating right-wingers" who have taken their playbook from Joe McCarthy[.]

Did You Breathe Smoke Last Week?  This is Why.  Michael Walsh published the below piece on his the-pipeline.org last week, and in the meantime, the propaganda press has issued one full-throated [objection] after another.  I scan them, not one single writer has ever been to a forest, he is grabbing paras from another, and another grabs another paragraph, all ending in a mess of words that add up to something issued from the WEF's PR Department.  I thought for a split second Jim Geraghty at National Review would be sensible.  He was not.

Media blames 'climate change' for Canadian wildfires despite arrest of multiple arsonists.  Despite the arrest of multiple arsonists, the mainstream media in Canada seems intent on attributing the nation's recent wildfires to "climate change."  As wildfires continue to spread across western, and now central and eastern Canada, burning forestland and homes, the mainstream media continues to imply that climate change is the main culprit, despite a growing number of reports showing that arsonists have been arrested for allegedly setting dozens of fires.

Target Received Bomb Threats From the 'LGBTQ+ Community.' The Media Told a Different Story.  Target stores across America were evacuated over the weekend due to bomb threats that alleged the chain had "betrayed the LGBTQ+ community" and "bowed to the wishes of far-right extremists who want to exterminate us," according to police.  But that's not how some major news outlets presented the story.  The Washington Post, USA Today, and others buried or simply left out the nature of the emailed threats, all of which were false alarms, while prominently mentioning conservative backlash over Target's LGBT Pride merchandise.

The Leftist Green Agenda Is Buying Its Way Into The News.  One recent analysis found AP stories mentioned the phrases "climate change," "global warming," and "Climate disaster" hundreds of times since receiving grants totaling $8 million in early 2022.  The stated purpose of the money is to fund the AP's "Climate Journalism Initiative," which would employ 20 new reporters to "transform how the AP covers the climate story."  Perhaps it also funded the story that gave us Biden's hard-hat environmentalism?  In another example from the story, former top Clinton adviser John Podesta is heavily quoted in his role as overseer of the $369 billion for green energy from Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act.  The story fails to mention Podesta's political operative past, including his unofficial title of "White House clean-up chief" during the Clinton years.  Also quoted are the extreme eco-groups the Natural Resources Defense Council and Center for Biological Diversity.  They are all given a lot of space in a story with a lot of reach.  As a wire service, the hard-hat rebranding from the AP will appear in thousands of newspapers across the world as news.  We don't know if the millions the AP received for climate coverage played a role in helping Biden rebrand his energy policy, and that's precisely the point.

Blame the Media for the National Debt.  Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement to lift the debt ceiling, and nothing is going to change in the disturbing pattern of America's national debt climbing by leaps and bounds.  The best reason for pessimism?  Our Democrat-messaging media.  They can't be bothered to offer the most basic facts in budget coverage.  What is the budget for the current fiscal year?  What was the last budget deficit?  How large is the national debt?  These are questions that are rarely answered by news anchors.  What we get is a lot of horse-race jockeying and finger-pointing instead of facts.  They must think the viewers are too stupid to juggle numbers.

'The Official Truth': The End of Free Speech That Will End America.  According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as "truly the enemy of the people."  This is a majority view, held regardless of race:  "58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities" — all agree that the mainstream media has become their "enemy."  This scorching indictment of the Fourth Estate piggybacks similar polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Big Picture Explanation of What Happened in the Past 15 Years.  In the 50 years that preceded 2008, those same groups had an approach of distrust toward government, and the media apparatus had a very distinct supportive and cynical outlook, favorable to the leftist anti-government perspective.  Now, all of that has reversed — seemingly flipped.  In the 50 years that preceded 2008, media pushed a one-way narrative in defense of those who were "targeted" by the institutions and mechanisms of government.  As the activists railed against the regime, the media framed narratives to excuse the transparently guilty.  Now, that entire dynamic has reversed.  Now we see the media pushing a narrative in support of weaponized government targeting, and — here's the kicker — framing the transparently innocent.  The activists went from accusing government of wrongdoing and defending the transparently guilty — to aligning with government, excusing government wrongdoing, and helping to attack the transparently innocent.

Corporate Media's Coverage Of The Debt-Limit Fight Is Intolerably Dishonest.  [Scroll down]  Biden and Chuck Schumer gambled that Republicans would never unify around a debt-ceiling hike.  Schumer kept snarkily demanding McCarthy show the public his plans.  House Republicans did — one that "slashes" spending all the way back to 2022 levels and then allows one percent increases per year moving forward.  Everyone on the left, which is to say most people in political journalism, keep framing the debate as if this never happened.  So while we can't bore into the souls of the participants and expose their true feeling about a potential default, the fact is that the only people in that entire conversation who have already passed a hike to the debt limit are House Republicans.  Democrats could just sign off on it if they wanted.  No default.  No one, of course, expects Democrats to unilaterally surrender.  But media always covers negotiations over spending as if the organic center, the endpoint, the only reasonable place to be, stands not between the desires of two competing political parties or two competing branches of government but rather wherever Democrats happen to reside.

Harris-Harvard poll: liberal corporate media is radically out of touch with the views of Americans.  It's not just that corporate media rejects Americans' views.  They don't permit those views to be heard.  To start:  Majorities of Americans say it's *false* that Trump colluded with Russia.  The the Steele Dossier is also "false."  In other words, they view the story the US media aggressively centered for 3 years as a hoax and a fraud, yet NBC and CNN won't even air this view.  Americans also believe that the materials on the Hunter Biden laptop are real, and are not and never were "Russian disinformation."  So again, Americans view the claim that the US corporate media and CIA spread for weeks before the 2020 election — to help Biden win — as a fraud.  Majorties of Americans also believe:
  •   Hunter Biden engaged in criminal influence peddling using his father's name.
  •   The FBI is not investigating these crimes.
  •   Joe Biden participated in Hunter's illegal influence peddling and profiteering schemes.

Moscow on the Potomac.  Picture living in the Soviet Union circa 1980.  You wake up and turn on state-run radio.  The great war in Afghanistan is going exceptionally well.  You know that story is a lie, as your neighbors just buried their son, and your cousin tells of the horrors of fighting the Mujahideen in the frozen mountains.  The next story speaks of the great economic success of the most recent Five Year Plan.  You know that it's also a lie, as there has been no meat in the local stores for weeks, and the lines outside of bakeries are only getting longer. [...] Now, let's move to the present-day US. You get up and turn on any of the morning programs with the presenters who do not know how to stop smiling.  They tell us that the war in Ukraine is so successful that the US and its allies will be sending a few billion dollars more in weaponry shortly.  Next, you learn that inflation is actually good for you, as it is proof of a successful economy.  You see that many items that you used to buy are too expensive, but hey, but now you know it's a good thing.  And forget about baby formula.

An Appeal to the Thinkers Left Politically Abandoned.  [Scroll down]  No matter your political beliefs, you likely align yourself with one of these three broad philosophies [Conservatism, Progressivism, Independent].  News stories would make you think the nation is ideologically split down the middle though, between right and left.  However, 25% identify as Liberal or Progressive, while 73% of Americans identify as conservative or moderate.  You wouldn't be aware of this if you relied on Democrat messaging and a breathless press that constantly "informs" you otherwise.  Moderates historically defect from conservative thought when mainstream outlets do not report important news, or slant events unfavorably.

TV portrays Covid vax victims as Coronavirus deaths.  The three screenshots below come from the closing one-minute segment of the nightly news show News Watch 9 on NHK, the Japanese equivalent to the BBC, which aired on Monday.  The segment title in the top-right reads "Various feelings about returning to normality."  The full segment (which can be viewed with English subtitles [elsew]here) is a montage of footage contrasting Tokyo streets deserted during states of emergency and now full of tourists in addition to the three bereaved people below and photos of their dead family members.  You get the idea.  Now, based on what NHK shows them saying, what would you assume their family members died from?  If you assumed they died from Covid, as the millions of NHK viewers who saw the segment doubtlessly did, you'd be completely wrong.  The three people above are actually members of the Bereaved Families of Covid Vaccination Victims that I wrote about in November.  But the segment didn't mention that fact or anything about vaccines.  NHK's creatively deceptive editing generated such a tsunami of criticism on social media that it issued an apology at the end of News Watch 9 the following night.

CNN shows Anderson Cooper 360 and Primetime make NO mention of discredited FBI probe into baseless Trump-Russia claims network previously claimed were 'corroborated'.  Struggling CNN spent all of primetime ignoring John Durham's investigation that tore apart the FBI for launching a baseless probe into claims of Donald Trump's collusion with Russia.  The network's two highest profile nightly shows - Primetime and Anderson Cooper 360 - each failed to mention the probe by the special counsel in two hours of programming.  CNN was among liberal media outlets obsessed with Trump-Russia collusion claims when they first emerged, with since-fired former anchor Don Lemon claiming the infamous Steele Dossier had been partly corroborated.

The Left's 2020 'Fake Electors' Narrative Is Fake News.  Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump's "fake" electors accepted immunity deals.  Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors' testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct.  Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media's continued peddling of the "fake electors" narrative.  There were no "fake" electors.  There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia's certified vote.  Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers.  On the contrary, Trump's election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided.  And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii's three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.  The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.

Weaponizing Death.  Recently, there has been a spate of horrific murders.  The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype. [...] Unfortunately, these tragedies have increasingly become politicized.  Yet our media and politicians do not apply a common standard of reporting about either the victims, the killers, or the apparent motives and circumstances of the violence.  Instead, each horror is quickly analyzed for its political usefulness.  Then its details are selectively downplayed or emphasized, depending upon the political agenda at work.  A sad example was the terrible murder spree at the private Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.  A transgender male shot and killed six people, including three 9-year-old children.  Almost immediately, three media narratives emerged.  One, semi-automatic weapons, not the killer Audrey Hale, were mostly responsible for the massacre.  Two, the shooter's transgender identity profile played no role in the killing whatsoever.  Three, the public had no need to know of the contents of the shooter's "manifesto."

Biden's corrupt?  The MSM shrugs.  The MSM spent 3 years promoting a narrative that they knew was false about Donald Trump colluding with Russia.  Not one of them could possibly believe that it was true because it was so transparently a lie.  Yet they, the intelligence community, and every talking head spoke breathlessly about how the walls were closing in on Trump.  It took the Special Counsel to set them straight, and they still have their Pulitzer Prizes and half the country still believes their lies.  Yet Representative James Comer lays out a straightforward, obvious case that might not stand up in court yet but is clearly true that Joe Biden and his family have engaged in a corrupt influence peddling operation going back over a decade and the press not only shrugs but comes to the president's defense.  Comer didn't pass the "beyond the shadow of a doubt" standard, so it is a big nothing.  Look away.  Those millions of dollars from foreign nationals just MIGHT conceivably be legal or something.  [Tweet]

Most of the media doesn't care about anything unless the story fits their radical leftist agenda.  Every day we hear that there have been hundreds of mass shootings in the U.S this year yet we see the details on only a few.  Why don't we ever see the details of all the mass shootings in Chicago and elsewhere that involve black gang members shooting other blacks?  Why don't we see the names of the victims, the records of the shooters, and the motives?  The answer is it doesn't fit the agenda.  We see little interest in all the subway and street crimes in New York each day, but when a white Marine hero gets involved to protect people from a mentally ill, black, career criminal and accidentally kills him, he is accused of murder and there is endless coverage and violent protests.  A Hispanic commits a mass murder in Texas, and he has magically been converted to a white supremacist and we get huge coverage.  It reminds me of when the media converted the Hispanic shooter George Zimmerman to white in order to gin up racial hate and division.  When a black teen, who had robbed a store in Ferguson, Mo, reached for a white cop's gun, the cop defended himself and killed the teen.  Instead of telling the truth, the media and others regurgitated the fake "hands up don't shoot" narrative to gin up racial hate and violence.  How many cops have been killed and injured because of that false narrative?

How Liars Wreck a Country.  Last year, Forbes concluded that "only 16% of adults in the U.S. say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, and just 11% said the same for television news."  Anyone confronting these stats must conclude that our media are deeply incompetent or crooked or both.  The New York Times announced a few years ago that defeating Trump was the important thing.  They gave themselves a free pass to lie all they want.  How can they now reclaim their honor or their usefulness? [...] Unfortunately, our liberal journalists do not care about true or false.  When they hear an assertion, they try to determine whether it will help their agenda... their narrative.  If it won't help, they know they must attack the assertion, typically by declaring it debunked, fake news, or misinformation.

Andy Ngô sheds light on bizarre reporting about Allen, TX mass shooter Garcia in thread.  Full transparency, this has been the craziest media push after a mass shooting in a long while, and at this time this editor can honestly not say what is and isn't the truth which is a sad reflection of what our mainstream media have become.  As Twitchy readers know, within maybe two hours of the horrific shooting in Allen, Texas, major outlets were running with the story that Garcia 'may have had white supremacist beliefs' based on a patch someone 'close to the story' said they saw on his vest.  Then came the claims about Garcia's social media and tattoos ... which are all over the place.  Not to mention we're not even sure at this point what Garcia actually looked like because there are multiple pictures of different Hispanic men floating around social media.  So all of that is by itself, insane.  Yes?  But then add in the bizarre claims about Garcia having a white supremacist account created on some Russian social media site?

In a World Gone Mad, the Jordan Neelys Rule.  Jordan Neely was a mentally ill homeless man who had terrorized the citizens of New York — especially subway passengers — for many years.  He had been arrested at least 40 times for crimes ranging from assault to disorderly conduct and fare evasion.  And on the day of his death, several eyewitnesses report that Neely had made repeated threats to the well-being of passengers, "stating his willingness to 'hurt anyone' and saying that he was unbothered by the prospect of returning to jail or being killed," according to NRO.  [Tweet]  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Jordan Neely was "murdered" because he "was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself."  So passengers and bystanders are just supposed to allow Mr. Neely to terrorize and assault them with no thought of defending themselves?  You picked the wrong hobby horse to ride, AOC.  [Tweet]  AOC also didn't mention this attack on the gay community.  [Tweet]

Video Of Jordan Neely Defecating In A Subway Station, Then Walking Around Naked (NSFW).  A video of a schizophrenic homeless man, Jordan Neely, [defecating] and then walking around naked in a NYC subway station has surfaced.  The media and BLM have done their best to portray Neely as a friendly Micheal Jackson impersonator when in reality he was a dangerous individual with a long, violent arrest record with little regard for the law.  [Video clip]

Elon Musk Asks Why the Media Misrepresents Interracial Crime Stats "To Such an Extreme Degree".  Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned on Saturday why the establishment media misrepresents interracial crime statistics "to such an extreme degree."  The media's lies and false claims result in more innocent people being killed while inciting more anti-white violence than ever. [...] Now under the control of Musk, many hate hoaxes and disinformation is being countered, including media lies regarding Jordan Neely.

The Auckland Mobbing of Kellie-Jay Keen Was Fuelled by Media-Peddled Misinformation.  Kellie-Jay Keen is a five-foot-one, British middle-aged mother of four children who happens to believe that the word "woman" should be reserved for those who are biologically female.  As many Quillette readers and podcast listeners will already know, she headlined a March 25th women's rights event in Auckland called Let Women Speak, which was shut down by protester violence.  Keen has been under fire for years from trans-rights activists (who believe that men can become women, and vice versa, by acts of self-declaration).  And many such activists in New Zealand were quick to smear Keen as a fascist, on the basis that a small group of apparent Nazis had showed up in the vicinity of one of her recent events in Australia.

Senate Republicans Accuse Democrats, Media Allies of Smear Campaign against Conservative Justices.  Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee tore into their Democratic colleagues during a Tuesday hearing on Supreme Court ethics, accusing the lawmakers of joining with their ideological allies in the media to undermine the conservative Supreme Court majority because it stands in the way of their desired policy outcomes.  The hearing was scheduled by Judiciary Committee Democrats after ProPublica published a series of articles detailing Justice Clarence Thomas's relationship with Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.  Despite the fact that Crow has not had business before the Court during Thomas's tenure — with the exception of one case that was never taken up involving a company which Crow had a minority interest in — many Democrats have seized on the report to argue that the Court should adopt stricter ethics rules to prevent undue interference.

AP redefined 'insurrection' to include J6 protests, then redefined it again to exclude TN and MT protests that disrupted legislatures.  Writing in Human Events, Libby Emmons calls out the AP for redefining the word "insurrection" to apply to the January 6, 2021 demonstrators, and then, when that definition was applied by others to the left wing demonstrations that disrupted the Tennessee and Montana state legislatures, re-redefining the term so as to solely apply to its enemies, the pro-Trump demonstrators.  I's an absolutely clear instance of AP acting as a propaganda organ for the left, not as a news agency.

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.  For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals:  a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.  Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class.  A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election.  Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.  None of it was true.  After reviewing Hamilton 68's secret list, Twitter's safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing "real people" to be "unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse." [...] When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press.

Those scary guns the National Guard leaker possessed?  Airsoft rifles.  This captures so much about the MSM.  It combines total ignorance and open contempt for their audience along with a determined insistence that whatever the intelligence community says must be accepted at face value.  Before I get into the story I want to make clear that am not a fan of dropping classified documents into the public realm, with the exception of whistleblowers revealing the corruption of government.  I haven't followed this story closely, so I really haven't an opinion worth sharing about the whole affair. [...] With that out of the way, I do have a strong opinion about the propaganda we are being fed, and there appears to be proof that we are being lied to.

Teixeira Whistleblower Case Raises Troubling Questions.  Last week, 21-year-old low-level Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Douglas Teixeira was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act and leaking sensitive defense material.  Among other things, the leaked top-secret documents show that the Biden administration has been misleading the public about the reality of the situation in Ukraine, overstating the country's success in its war with Russia.  The leaked documents, which appear to include briefings prepared for senior Pentagon leadership, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, contained assessments from a multitude of agencies.  The real story, however, is how corporate media organizations, rather than focusing on the content of the revealing documents themselves, chose to focus on finding out who leaked them.  Only after first working to identify Teixeira as the alleged whistleblower, which resulted in his arrest, both The Washington Post and The New York Times began to publish "exclusive" stories about classified information — some of it still unseen by the public — that had been leaked by Teixeira as if the discovery were their own.

'Too Big to Fail' Is Too Big Period.  A recent Gallup poll found that public confidence in our institutions is collapsing.  The only institutions that still garner majority confidence are the military and small businesses.  Nearly three quarters of Americans have lost confidence in government, big business, academia, and the media (among others).  The vast majority of our institutions are failing.  They aren't failing to survive.  They're failing to meet our expectations — which means they're failing to satisfy their reason for being. [...] Media haven't lost our confidence because they're boring.  They have lost it because they are untruthful.  They are pushing a narrative and are unwilling to sell unbiased news or entertainment at any price.

The Most Important Thing To Be Learned From The Teixeira (Ukraine Docs) Leaks.  America no longer has a free press; more specifically, the vast majority of the media are simply mouthpieces for the UniParty and/or the Biden-regime:  [Tweets]  But just keep telling yourselves that 2024 will be different than 2020[,] that all we need to do is nominate Trump or all that we need to do is "move on" past Trump[,] and that magically the media that routinely LIE to us will suddenly become truth-tellers, that the ballot-harvesters will disappear, that the Democrat mega-billionaires who are literally buying votes will go back to buying super-yachts.

BBC News caught spreading Disinformation which accidentally confirms COVID Vaccination is in fact to blame for Excess Deaths.  Official UK Government data has revealed a startling truth that has left the people in a state of disbelief.  England and Wales suffered the highest number of excess deaths in over half a century in 2022, and a non-stop weekly rally of excess deaths since week 16 of 2022 that equates to 62,543 excess deaths as of March 2023.  And thanks to the BBC lying to the public, we know that the main cause of this huge increase in deaths is COVID-19 vaccination.

Elon Musk Takes Ownership of the BBC After Epic Exchange With Dishonest Reporter.  Elon Musk participated in an interview on Tuesday evening and ended up taking ownership of the BBC by the time it was over.  In an epic exchange, the billionaire worked over James Clayton, a reporter from the British network, after he attempted to push claims about "hate speech" and COVID labeling on Twitter. [...] Musk employs a strategy throughout the interview that I've long been a fan of when interacting with the mainstream press.  Namely, he doesn't accept unproven premises that set up biased questions.  When a reporter says something meant to paint you into a corner, make them prove what they are saying is even true.

Miami Herald isn't fit to be fish wrapper.  When I wrote about Rebekah Jones' son's arrest I relied upon the reporting of the Journal for the facts of the case.  I chose to do so despite there being a Miami Herald story because it was biased and left out the most important point:  he wasn't arrested for sharing memes, as they claimed, but for making threats to shoot up a school.  That's a bit different.  [Tweets]  The Herald is still soft-pedaling the story and pushing the notion that Jones is being persecuted somehow.  And Jones is tweeting up a storm with an ever-changing story.  It is a remarkable example of gaslighting, and the Herald is crying about being criticized for pushing the story of an admitted felon.

Trump Isn't A Special Case, He's A Test Case.  Liberals might be scratching their heads over why potential Donald Trump rivals are rushing to denounce his indictment.  The reason is simple.  Conservative Republicans know that if this assault is allowed to stand, they will be next.  The left, as well as the rabble of never-Trump Republicans, like to tell everybody that the unprecedented measures taken against Trump — culminating with this week's indictment — are justified because he poses a unique threat to our precious democracy.  Just to review, we're talking about measures like Democrats impeaching him twice on the flimsiest of grounds.  Like federal law enforcement engaging in a coordinated campaign to smear him as a Russian stooge.  Like journalists dropping any shred of objectivity and professionalism to attack Trump, up to and including peddling obvious falsehoods.

Ukrainian Journalist Uses Makeup And Poses People To Make Them Look Injured.  This is not the first time Ukrainians have used this tactic of using crisis actors with fake blood and makeup to make them look like war victims.  [Video clip]

How the Media Doubles Down on Falsehood.  [Scroll down]  Still, there are people who blindly believe the media.  My older brother called me this week, and, in our conversation, we talked about how people, when challenged about this, would reply, "they can't put it in the newspapers if it isn't true."  Often when you point out the error of such a statement with facts, they give you that "deer in the headlights" look.  Hopefully, some events of late might actually open some people's eyes.  In an effort to look like they are combatting this issue, we are inundated with "misinformation checkers" (aka fact checkers), who often still miss out on important facts and whose checking often leans significantly to the Left.  And what's worse is that people still believe the administration despite its disastrous impacts on our nation: readiness, strength, increased drug traffic and deaths due to the open borders, the COVID and COVID vaccine lies, the inability of almost three-quarters of our youth to even qualify for military service, long-term inflation, high energy costs, woke policies, and so on; all with a complicit media.  And still the public hasn't learned.

Not ALL reporters are trash, but...  There are isolated instances of reporters who actually do their jobs, which last I checked was to provide information to people so that they can make informed choices in their lives.  But these days those reporters are rare, and fewer and fewer exist in mainstream news organizations.  Few politicians have the gumption to call them out, because all people who are required to deal with the media follow the dictum that "it is never wise to pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel."  That used to be true but is no longer.  Reporters don't care what you say, what is true, or whether you play nice with them.  They care about promoting whatever narrative they have in mind.  If you feed them what you want they will make you a hero; if not, expect to be savaged.

Mainstream Media's New Obsession: Labelling Criticism of 15-Minute Cities 'Conspiracy Theories'.  "Conspiracy theories" about 15-minute cities are "false", "unhinged", "dangerous" and "not to be believed", declare mainstream media in unified chorus.  "In recent years, conspiracy theories that were once almost unheard of have spread like wildfire, with a growing number of Australians now sceptical of things like vaccines, 5G and election results," News.com.au reports in one such article, titled, 'Inside the 15-minute city conspiracy theory sucking in gullible Australians'.  The article explains that 15-minutes cities (also called Smart Cities) are a common sense way of attempting to boost liveability for residents.  City dwellers in proposed Smart Cities — including Melbourne, Paris, London, Edmonton and Oxford — will have access to everything they need within a 15 to 20-minute walk, cycle or public transport trip, and that's really all there is to it.  "Anyone who has ever faced a long and painful commute will immediately see the appeal of having the daily essentials at their fingertips," the article assures readers.  However, "gullible Australians" who cannot appreciate common sense or convenience have been "sucked in" to a "dangerous conspiracy".  These "unhinged" conspiracy theorists actually believe that Smart Cities are "part of a secret plan by global elites to restrict people's freedom and movements" — a form of lockdown justified by climate action.

The Editor says...
When the government nannies tell you that "you have everything you need" in your neighborhood, they presume to know what you need, every minute of your life.  In a free country, you decide for yourself what you need, and where you would like to go.

Mainstream Journalism Is Dead, Long Live the Age of the Private Journalist.  You're more than well aware of just how deeply the mainstream media is obedient to the whims of the Democrat Party and leftist agendas.  It shamelessly pushes narratives that encourage strict obedience to the Democrat Party and even activist groups through fear and hate — with an emphasis on the "fear."  For instance, a couple of months ago, ABC News attempted to scare parents by telling them that if they don't cure their child's obesity right now, then they will have it for the rest of their lives and that includes all the health problems and issues that come with it.  The article encourages parents not to do this slowly by changing up their diet and having them get plenty of exercise, but by giving them weight loss drugs.  CBS just so happened to have a report on a new weight loss drug for kids, and it just so happened to be out at the time of the report and at your local drug store no less!

The Editor says...
That's not a news report, it's an infomercial.

Rathergate redux at the NYT?  And the media wonder why no one believes them any longer.  Earlier today, John picked up NPR's critical take on Rolling Stone's coverage of an arrest of an ABC News producer last year.  Be sure to read it if you missed it, but it's not the only mainstream media outlet that should be embarrassed this week.  Over the weekend, the New York Times dragged up the hoary conspiracy theory of the 1980 October Surprise, with a single source claiming he'd been duped into it 43 years ago — Ben Barnes.  Some readers may remember Ben Barnes from another conspiracy theory: the Texas Air National Guard (TANG) story that blew up in the faces of CBS News execs in late 2004.

Rolling Stone Magazine Faces New Journalism Scandal After Misleading Readers in a Big Way.  [Scroll down]  This is not the first time Rolling Stone has abused and discarded facts about a major story in order to (possibly) push an agenda.  The magazine landed in serious hot water several years ago after publishing a "bombshell" report about a gang rape on the University of Virginia campus.  That "bombshell," though, turned out to be entirely fabricated.  That story led to a major defamation case against the magazine.  They were found guilty, and the resulting damages ultimately resulted in the sale of the magazine.  Of course, the magazine has a well-known leftward bent, more recently calling Democrat Joe Manchin a destroyer of worlds and attacking ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic.  The case of Siegel's report on Meek, however, isn't so much a story of lefty reporting.  It's a story of the inherent corruption of the media in general.

Time Is Running Out To Speak Freely About Free Speech In America.  Donald Trump's rise, his successful use of social media, and new media's refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship.  With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government's definition of "truth" and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.  The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.  We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.  But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.

Democrat Plans [are] Looking Bad, So Biden Pivots Again.  The left knows that the only way it can achieve its long-term goals is if the populace is not paying attention.  If the American people, or a large portion of them, at least, are spending all day on TikTok or Twitter or Facebook arguing about often petty and ridiculous ideas and fads, or, for the ones actually paying attention, are talking about irrelevant issues, the left knows that no one will notice when the left is doing something that will change the course of society for generations, in the most negative ways imaginable, or feverishly covering up the massive failures of their own ideology and policies.  These distractions are not something, at this juncture, that any rational American can afford to pay attention to.  The left is launching an all-out assault on society and the culture, a battlefield maneuver that has failed time and again in the past and resulted in countless deaths around the world.  You cannot afford to be distracted by the media.

Wonder why most of the media aren't trusted?  It is no wonder we have so much political corruption when the media are so biased.  They will create fictional stories to go after Republicans while burying true stories about Democrats.  It is absolutely pathetic!  And not once have they asked for scientific data to justify the destruction of companies that produce reasonably priced energy... because they don't care.  We have an absolutely corrupt and incompetent man as president who is actively destroying America with radical, extreme policies and massive taxpayer money to political supporters, and most of the media cheer about how great his policies are.

Save it for the jury.
Sacramento Bee Apologizes for Saying Charlie Kirk Called to 'Lynch' Transgenders.  The Sacramento Bee, a Northern California-based newspaper, has apologized for falsely claiming that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called to "lynch" transgenders.  Charlie Kirk had been scheduled to speak at the University of California Davis on Tuesday when Sacramento Bee opinion writer Hannah Holzer called the activist "another fascist" and said that he wanted to lynch transgender people.

The Democrat-Media Insurrection Myth.  The storyline put together by what passes for our news media is that Trump led an armed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 that necessitated a House Committee investigation of what happened that day (actually for the political motive to recommend Trump for an indictment in advance of the 2024 election).  The media's job, including CNN, MSNBC, and most newspapers was to refer confidently to "the Jan. 6 insurrection" as if that were a settled fact already in the history books.  What passes for our news media did not say that some people believe it was an insurrection and others believe it was only a riot by some buffoons and then present the facts and let the peasants decide what they thought about the matter.  No, what passes for our news media needed to state the conclusion of that "investigation" long before it was completed.

They Are Intolerant, Divisive, And Anti-Liberty — Call Them Leftists, Not Liberals.  Democrats have moved so far to the left in recent years that they should no longer be called "liberals," unless the true liberals among them start to stand up to the leftists who have taken over.  The term is misleading, giving the impression that Democrats support individual freedoms and accept people of different viewpoints, when increasingly they do not.  The word "liberal" gives yet more power to those who seek to take more of our liberties.  Right-leaning publications often use the term "liberal" when "leftist" would be better.  On the other hand, left-leaning newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times like to use the word "liberal" to describe their own illiberal political views.  It obfuscates how Democrats and their media allies have become more extreme, supporting censorship, authoritarianism, and racial division:  Twitter staff who denied conservatives their right to free speech and eagerly complied with censorship demands from the federal government were described by the Post as milquetoast "liberal employees."  MSNBC says those pushing the tyranny of wokeness are just naughty-sounding "liberal rascals."

Cable News Is Riddled With War Profiteers.  The problem with cable news is that — outside of perhaps Tucker Carlson, who seems genuinely committed to exposing truths and has paid the price for it in the form of the Majority Leader calling for his censorship from the Senate floor — it's not news.  It's state propaganda, by and for the special interests that have purchased the state.  These special interests include big agriculture, big pharma, and, of course, the private weapons manufacturers that comprise the military-industrial complex.

Trust the Science: White people driving cars are poisoning POC in LA.  When earnest reporters at the LA Times got ahold of the study, they couldn't wait to dissect the possible racism contained within.  Make the scientific argle-bargle accessible to your everyday white drivers (aka "THE BAD GUYS") so they would be educated on their transgressions, feel miserable about themselves, self-flagellate, and change their habits of perpetual vehicular oppression.  [Excerpt omitted for brevity, among other things.]  That lad certainly has all the SJW codewords down.  In another column, a second LA Times type waxes on about his drives, how he tries not to drive, and how guilty he should feel every time he drives.

The actual insurrection in DC went unpunished.  For two years now, we have heard about an insurrection that everyone knows was bogus.  The media deliberately lied in its vain attempt to ruin President Donald John Trump — one in a series of attempts by the real deniers of election results.  Tucker Carlson's revelation that the Capitol Police incited peaceful protesters has been dismissed by a media obsessed with lying.  The key to Pravda — the Soviet version of propaganda — was not to get people to believe it, but to get people to stop following the news.  Judging by television ratings in the 21st century, it is working.  It indoctrinates Americans to believe they are powerless and that resistance is futile.  So the lies continue.

Treason of the Science Journals.  At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments.  What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken.  In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.  New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory.  Fauci then cited the paper — in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published — as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.  "There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve," Fauci said at a presidential briefing on April 17, 2020, exactly one month after "Proximal Origin" was published.

AP Promotes Unfounded and Non-Evidenced Israeli Claim That Pro Trump Twitter Accounts Are Bots Attacking DeSantis and Haley.  As many major stories have shown in the past few years, the big battle over human control is taking place on social media platforms as they continue to be manipulated by government agencies.  The Twitter Files released have shown just how extensive the government manipulation of information has become.  The U.S. State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Defense Dept, and a host of ancillary networked agencies and public-private partnership all occupy this space.  Essentially, it is a fight for control of the public psyche.  In addition to the Twitter Files, stories averse to the interests of the state (Hunter Biden laptop) and fake stories created in the interest of the state (Trump-Russia) are all manipulated by the network of intelligence agencies, quasi government actors and the social media platforms.  This is not debated any longer.  There is overwhelming evidence of this reality now.

The Death of Expertise.  The "experts" told us that inflation was transitory, that the Green New Deal would lower energy prices, that trillions in new government spending costs nothing in taxes, and that Joe Biden's crippling recession reflects economic strength.  They told us that free speech is dangerous; that disinformation governance boards don't promote government propaganda; and that government agencies' blacklisting of news sites, social media content, and public dissent is something other than unconstitutional censorship.  They told us that border walls don't work, that skyrocketing illegal immigration is imaginary, that drug-traffickers aren't killing record numbers of Americans, that illegal aliens cost American taxpayers nothing, and that concern for border security is racist.  They told us that the deadly retreat from Afghanistan was a humanitarian success; that NATO has a military obligation to defend non-NATO Ukraine; that Russia blew up its own Nord Stream natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea; that fighting a lethal proxy war with Russia won't increase the likelihood of nuclear conflagration; and that escalating hostilities with Russia, China, and North Korea won't risk sparking World War III.  The "experts" were wrong again and again, but they held the most fashionable opinions.

CNN and Election Disinformation.  My friend and I sometimes argue about media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.  Why do they spread misinformation?
  A.   Are they grossly uninformed?
  B.   Do they know the truth but tell falsehoods anyway?
  C.   Do they think we are stupid or naïve?
My buddy feels that the media outlets know the truth but lie about it.  To me, it is more complicated.  The nice-looking journalists who read the teleprompters are genuinely ignorant.  On the other hand, the news producers probably know the truth but spread misinformation anyway.  Producers are the ones who select the topics, construct the programs, and hire the special analysts.

The Only Thing Conspiratorial About The Covid Lab-Leak Theory Was Media's Coordinated Dismissal Of It.  This week, Democrat activists posing as journalists were forced to admit a hard truth millions of Americans have known for years: The outbreak of the Covid-19 virus most likely came as the result of a lab leak in China. [...] Conservatives, who had considered evidence of a possible lab leak from the beginning, have seen this routine before and remember well the coordinated squelching of a dissenting origin theory.  We know exactly how these same self-professed truth-seekers went out of their way to accuse anyone who considered the possibility that Covid leaked out of a Chinese lab of promoting a "debunked" "conspiracy theory."  "This question about the Wuhan lab — we know it's been debunked, that this virus was man-made or modified or anything like that," then-MSNBC host Kasie Hunt previously said. "The Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis Is A Conspiracy Theory, Not Science," a June 2021 headline from Forbes reads.  Other outlets that attempted to dismiss the theory include NPR, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, CNN, NBC, and The New York Times, just to name a few.

Former Reuters science reporter: The media is lying about CO2 and a "climate crisis".  This corruption of news reporting into narrative journalism has been apparent for years to climate-hysteria skeptics.  Until recently, however, that revolution-by-evolution process hadn't become apparent to most of the rest of the populace.  Now, however, with all sorts of new data coming out about masks and natural immunity in the COVID pandemic, many more people have seen The Science exposed as based entirely on political agenda.  The mainstream-media refusal to cover new and conclusive meta-analyses of scientific studies that refute their three-year narratives in support of government emergency rule now demonstrates that corruption on a much broader scale.

Habitual liars: Democrats and the media blame Trump for Ohio train carnage.  A disastrous chemical spill occurs in East Palestine, Ohio, and Biden and Mayor Pete don't say a word or visit for weeks.  Shouldn't the media stop pretending that Biden is empathetic?  (Had the event involved a firearm, you know they would have been on site in less than 24 hours to exploit the tragedy as a means to a political end.)  After three weeks, President Trump shows up and the media goes into protection mode, blaming him for the carnage, asserting his "deregulations" were to blame[,] even though his rule-cutting had nothing to do with the cause of the wreck.  Yet, even if Trump's policies were to blame, wouldn't that be all the more reason for Biden and Mayor Pete to go?  I mean, they sure love to blame Trump for everything.  If Trump actually undid crucial safety regulations, shouldn't Biden and Mayor Pete have reinstated the measures?  [A recent] article in Politico shows the deplorable priorities of a significant majority of journalists.  They clearly care more about covering up for Biden's incompetence and inaction than they do about the people suffering from the chemical spill.

America Is Becoming a Corrupt Country.  Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails and had her staff literally take a hammer to destroy a hard drive.  Who are we to question the purity of her intentions?  The FBI has been corrupted at the top and lied about Donald Trump as candidate and president.  The great American newspapers published these lies — and won Pulitzers for it.  Now, it's clear their journalists were either duped or knowingly dishonest.  Yet, they still have the Pulitzers.  Fifty-one intelligence officials signed a dishonest letter just before the 2020 elections discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop and claiming it was probably a Russian hoax.  So what?  This steady drift toward dishonesty and toleration of blatant open hypocrisy is a cancer at the heart of American culture.

Are Helicopters Racist?  I call your attention to [...] the Los Angeles Times, more particularly a story that ran in the paper's Sunday print edition but appeared online Friday evening.  Los Angeles Police Department and County Sheriff's Department helicopters fly lower over black neighborhoods than others, we are told, causing all manner of misery for those living below.  Left unsaid but implicit in the article is that the only possible explanation for this is racism among the people flying the noisy whirlybirds.  The article is truly a shining example of agenda-driven journalism, in which the reporter, Jeong Park, had to ignore every last bit of relevant information regarding both air traffic control and crime in South Los Angeles so as to assign malign intent among the airborne cops and bring this embarrassment to print.  He even linked to an FAA document he apparently believed supported the argument, but which in fact undercuts it.  The piece's many deficiencies have been brought to the attention of several editors at the paper, yet as of this writing it remains online and uncorrected.

Truth in Government.  Whether it is the mainstream media, the social media giants, academia, Hollywood, or corporate America, these institutions lie about everything.  They lie that climate change is a mortal threat to civilization.  It's not.  In fact, there has been zero warming for the last eight years.  Has the media reported that?  They lie that gun violence is out of control.  It is not.  Americans are safer from guns 2023 more so than at any time in our history.  Your chances of being killed by a gun is lower by orders of magnitude less than your chances of getting hit by lightning.  They lie about abortion involving women's health when it is really the murder of children in the womb.  They lie that the nation has secure borders as millions illegally enter our country including terrorists and drug runners.  They lie that the rich pay no taxes despite the U.S. having the most regressive tax regime in the world where our richest citizens pay a disproportionate percentage of the nation's taxes.  They even lie about basic biology, exploiting the sad plight of victims of gender dysphoria.  In recent years there has been a 4000% increase in young females claiming to be the opposite sex.  Is no one in our vaunted institutions — academia or the media — interested in how this could be happening?  They lie about the police being murderous brutes when the truth is that overwhelmingly the police are honest, brave, and fair public servants doing a thankless job to keep our citizenry safe from criminals.  Americans need to demand truth from all our institutions.

Poll: Half Say Media Intend to Mislead, Misinform Public.  Fifty percent of Americans say the national media intend to mislead, misinform, and persuade the public, as just 35 percent say most news organizations could be relied upon, a Gallup and Knight Foundation poll found Tuesday.  While 50 percent say the national media tried to push a false narrative, only 25 percent say the national media do not intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.  Twenty-three percent neither agreed nor disagreed.

Canadian Broadcast Corporation: 'Freedom' is a Far-Right Rallying Cry.  I find myself at a loss for words after reading an article from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) on how the word "freedom" has become a "far-right" buzzword.  After pondering and deliberating and contemplating and a lot of other synonyms for "thinking" I found in the thesaurus, I eventually decided the best approach to this topic is an honest one.  This is the craziest, crazy-pants article from Crazytown I've ever read. [...] The premise?  The word "freedom" has become a dangerous "rallying cry" for right wingers in the Great White North, and, presumably, beyond.

Panel that awarded Pulitzers for Russiagate stories mum after scathing exposé on reporting failures.  The panel that awarded Pulitzer Prizes to the New York Times and Washington Post for reporting related to the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative has gone mum as it faces new scrutiny following publication of a four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) documenting the establishment media pillars' lapses from their claimed journalistic standards.  The 19-member Pulitzer Prize board for 2017-2018 was comprised of various journalists, professors and writers, including several current or former staff members of the New York Times or Washington Post.  Just The News reached out to 13 members of the panel to find out if the CJR exposé had prompted second thoughts about the Russiagate prizes.  Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute had an auto reply set, saying he was out of the office, while Steve Coll, former dean of Columbia Journalism School, had an auto-reply saying he is on sabbatical.  None of the other board members replied.

It is no wonder the media has lost the trust of the people.  No matter how many false predictions the UN, Biden, Kerry, Gore, and others make about natural resources causing an existential threat of climate change, the media just repeats the false predictions and calls it settled science.  People who tell the truth that the climate has always changed cyclically and naturally are falsely called climate change deniers to shut them up.  These false predictions are greatly harming the poor and middle class, but the subjective and biased media clearly doesn't care.  The media claims they care about laws and corruption, but they campaign for corrupt, career criminals like the Bidens and the Clintons.  The media claims that no one is above the law and the Justice Department is now an independent agency that doesn't care about political affiliation.  That is the biggest lie of all. [...] Journalists who believe it is their job to push a political agenda instead of reporting objectively and factually is a much dangerous threat to our survival as a great country than anyone who challenges elections.

The Supreme Court Is At The Heart Of America's Racial Division.  If you are trying to make sense of how our nation has become so toxic, a good starting point is the Supreme Court's 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.  That case radically altered existing law so that, for the first time in our history, it was impossible for any "public figure" to bring a successful defamation suit. [...] Since the 1960s, progressives have been using the race card to demonize and defame their ideological opponents.  In that vein, it would be hard to imagine a more classically defamatory article than that penned the other day by Renée Graham, an associate editor of the Boston Globe:  "Ron DeSantis's Fear of American History."  Graham outrageously slanders DeSantis by claiming that racism motivated him.  She compares DeSantis's refusal to allow the wildly ideological African American Studies AP Course to be taught in Florida to the actions of a slave owner who refused to allow his slaves to learn to read.  It is, she says, an act of "white supremacy."  Graham paints DeSantis as an evil and immoral person.  This relieves her of the burden of addressing the substance of the DeSantis Administration's complaints about the College Board course.  It is enough that she labels him a racist and white supremacist.

Straight Talk on the Latest Riots.  Riots broke out in Memphis and are rapidly spreading through the usual urban areas.  The purported rationale is the horrific beating to death in Memphis of Tyre Nichols captured on video and released by the police.  As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) observes, Nichols' beating was administered by "Black officers in a majority Black city with a Black police chief."  The officers involved have been criminally charged, but the media to which every Black killed by a cop is just proof that we are still in the Selma, Alabama world of decades ago — another case of some innocent Black person victimized by racist oppressors.  The odious Joy Reid at MSNBC highlighted a guest who blames Nichols' death on "white supremacy" and CNN's Van Jones opined "The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black.  But they still may have been driven by racism."

Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud.  Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages.  Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club:  Hamilton 68.  If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.  Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington PostMother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group's "research."  Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.

Media outlets keep promoting 'forest defenders' and ignoring that they shot a police officer.  I really believed that once the facts of this story came out it would be over.  There was some room for questioning the story of what happened in the forest south of Atlanta initially.  Police told one story and protesters told another.  According to police, they entered the forest to clear out protesters who are trespassing and preventing construction of an approved project.  They found one man under a tent.  They asked him to come out and instead he fired a gun and hit a Georgia State Trooper in the abdomen.  The trooper was taken to a hospital for emergency surgery.  The protester who fired the shot was killed by police.  The alternative story pushed by protesters and their supporters is that the victim had been unarmed and "murdered" by police.  The trooper who was shot?  They strongly suggested he might have been hit by friendly fire.  Since then the official police version of events has been confirmed by evidence and the protesters' version has fallen apart.

Antagonizing the Scapegoats.  [Scroll down] [I]n view of the press' oft-repeated rush to smear its chosen targets, sinister suspicions suggest themselves.  The maudlin interviewer weepily bearing witness to the moving testimony of Jussie Smollett; the glum commentators endlessly recycling the "fine people" hoax; the monotonous chorus solemnly commemorating the all-but-sacred martyrdom of petty thugs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; the casual assignment of guilt by accusation (to police officers, the Covington school kids, Kyle Rittenhouse) — all this arouses our suspicion.  Even when these obscene abuses of the public trust are exposed, there is no retraction or apology; the brazen liars simply soldier on.  Perhaps no institution is more conspicuous in its utter moral failure than the contemporary American print, broadcast, and online media. [...] Contemporary journalists are, as a general rule, embarrassingly unimpressive, poorly educated, self-promoting hacks having no understanding of (or loyalty to) the American heritage (a phrase from which many would probably recoil as a "racist dog whistle").  Journalists represent the worst the American university system has to offer a society its brainwashed graduates routinely degrade.  Any truth a media activist deems detrimental (like the Twitter files) is buried.  Any lie deemed serviceable — no matter how dubious the source or implausible the claim — is amplified and promoted.  Every cherished falsehood is blared at the public until it's exposed, then the activist simply trumpets the next serviceable lie (e.g. "Russia Collusion," "hands up, don't shoot," and so on).

Media Claims 'Largely Peaceful Protest' in Atlanta, Mayor Quickly Demolishes That.  Saturday night brought rioting by Antifa people attacking police targets in Atlanta.  Now, the night started with a protest against the police, in the memory of one of their comrades, Manuel Teran.  Teran had been shot and killed by the police after he allegedly shot a cop, when police came to clear protesters out of an area they had been occupying where the city is constructing a police training center.  The radicals have had several people, in multiple incidents, arrested for domestic terrorism at the site, including for throwing Molotov cocktails at the police.

Who You Gonna Call (When the Cops Aren't Allowed to Help You)?  [Scroll down] If you need further evidence that the [Los Angeles] Times story is an advocacy piece, read no further than the first person quoted.  It is Patrisse Cullors, a cousin of Anderson and, though it goes unmentioned in the story, a major beneficiary of the BLM real estate windfall.  "There is no reason why law enforcement should be the first responders at traffic stops or accidents," Cullors said.  There are actually many reasons they should, but the reporter apparently wasn't up to the task of challenging Cullors.  Next comes the canard inevitably raised in stories like this.  Activists argue, says the Times, "that communities of color have historically borne the brunt of such enforcement."  Put aside the fact that in Los Angeles, as in every other city, "communities of color" are those where crime is highest.

What Is the NOTAM? Flights Grounded Across U.S. After Major System Outage.  All flights have been grounded and paused across the U.S. early this morning until 9 a.m. EST after the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM (notice to air missions) system failed, causing travel chaos across the country.  The FAA asked in a statement for time "to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information."  The FAA has said it systems was coming back online but that the NOTAM systems was still being restored.

The Editor says...
A NOTAM is a notice to airmen, not a notice to air missions.

Reluctant correction:
The definition of NOTAM  was apparently changed 12/2/2021 to be more politically correct.

Here's the Problem With Mike Rogers 'Lunging' at Matt Gaetz on the House Floor.  In the midst of the battle over Kevin McCarthy becoming Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Rogers set newsrooms ablaze by "lunging" at Rep. Matt Gaetz.  At the time, Gaetz and others had just finished securing major concessions from McCarthy, and one ballot later, the deal would finally be sealed.  On the prior ballot, though, Rogers, who is set to chair the Armed Services Committee, was apparently angered by Gaetz voting present and chose to lash out.  Because Gaetz was on the receiving end of the rage, the press largely took Rogers' side, exuding a "serves him right" attitude about the ordeal.  That's not a shock given the press will take the side of essentially anyone who opposes someone they themselves oppose.

2022, Perhaps the Apex Year for an Era of Pretending.  In an era of great pretending, when you speak factual and pain truth, people thirsting will come for the sanity.  Yes, there's only so much hypocritical nuttery that can possibly fit into the social fabric of a nation, and we're full.  I see that dynamic starting to play out now.  Mainstream media are openly mocked everywhere for being the Baghdad Bob's they are.  The MSM credibility and influence essentially destroyed by the Potemkin villages and Eco-chambers they built around themselves.  The congressional J6 committee is yet another example of a proclaimed thermonuclear ICBM missile that ended up delivering a contrasting reality.  The fading whistle & pop akin to a dysfunctional bottle rocket.

Why you can't trust 'the science' about anything anymore.  To those who still care about science as a process that uses honest data to produce replicable results, the last couple of decades has been disheartening when it comes to everything from so-called "Anthropogenic Climate Change," to COVID's origins and treatments, to so-called "transgenderism."  Still, we consoled ourselves that there were certain things so cut-and-dried that they could not yield to politics.  For example, how certain diseases affect men and women differently.  A monkeypox study in The Lancet blows even that faint hope to smithereens.  There is something bizarre about a Lancet article entitled "Human monkeypox virus infection in women and non-binary individuals during the 2022 outbreaks: a global case series."  It had all the earmarks of a reputable study. [...] The fact that it referred to non-binary individuals was a bit concerning, but the casual reader would assume that the article focused on biological women, no matter what they claimed to be.  After all, we've long known that diseases affect men and women differently, including the fact that men and women perceive the onset of a heart attack in very different ways.  That makes sense, given that men and women have different organs, bone structures, and hormones.  The devil, as always, is in the details.  It turns out that almost half of the "women" involved in this study about monkeypox in women... were men.

Keystone Pipeline Allowed to Reopen, Media Continues Lying about Spill.  The Keystone Pipeline runs from Alberta to Houston, almost in a straight line south down "Tornado Alley" in America's midwest, running from North Dakota to Texas.  The overall pipeline is 2,687 miles long, is owned by TC Energy, and carries 860,000 barrels of oil per day through its 30 inch diameter tubes.  The current price of oil per barrel is roughly $80.  So the pipeline is moving roughly $68.8 million worth of oil through its pipeline every day, or $25.1 billion per year.  The pipeline shut down on December 7th after a spill of 14,000 barrels of oil in rural North Kansas.  The Calgary, Canada-based company received permission from the Biden administration on Friday to reopen the pipeline, though it did not give a definitive date when it would restart.

A Life Beyond the State.  According to one estimate, the average American adult, whether on the right or the left, spends almost 12 hours a day watching and listening to media, much of it news and political commentary.  This interaction with media is largely a one-way street.  Viewers are not engaged in active discussion or thought; they are told what to think, even as they are encouraged to "like" and "follow."  With most media, such as the mainstream news channels or morning shows, they are harangued by anchors who raise their voices, lift their eyebrows, and employ all sorts of other gestures and expressions to end the discussion even as they read the "news."  Viewers are made to feel that they are ignorant or immoral if they dare to disagree.  This has certainly been the case from the beginning with reporting on COVID, when liberal media endorsed the Chinese lie that the disease originated in a "wet market" and followed up with a string of justifications for lockdowns and restrictions, including long-term school closures.  As with everything else, liberal media served as the handmaiden of the State.  This dependence on media is deadly for the life of democracy.

The 'Twitter Files' are the final nail in the media's credibility.  The vicious and coordinated attacks by mainstream news figures against independent journalist Matt Taibbi in recent days reinforce an essential point about the American news media: they think we are all drooling idiots.  Their response to Taibbi's release of the Twitter Files, which details the company's calculated suppression of a major news story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, underscores this exceedingly low estimation of its audience.  Outlets like MSNBC and the New York Times seem to hope the American public is ignorant of the fact that they got every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop story wrong from the start.  While real journalists tenaciously reported the facts, such as the New York Post's Miranda Devine , a disinformation machine comprised of Biden campaign officials, intelligence officials, liberal journalists, and Twitter higher-ups (with the omission of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was strangely left out of the loop) acted in brazen coordination to suppress the story.

MSM: Democrats Can't Be Election Deniers.  There's always a double standard for the radical left.  There's always a reason why it's "different" when Democrats say something racist, break the law, or question the results of an election.  Case in point:  Time magazine published an article claiming that Republicans who dub House Minority leader-elect Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) an "election denier" are wrong in doing so.  There's no doubt that Jeffries is an election denier.  We have the receipts.  He is actually one of many Democrats who have called Donald Trump an illegitimate president.  According to Time, the term "election denier" has become associated with Republicans who say the 2020 election was stolen because they "assert without evidence there was fraud in 2020 voting."  But the author says that calling Jeffries an "election denier" is misleading and "conflates different issues."  The real issue, which goes unsaid in the article, is that Jeffries and others in his party who have routinely denied the results of presidential elections won by Republicans are Democrats.  Since 2000, every single presidential election won by a Republican has been called "illegitimate" by Democrats.

Leftist Journo Still Believes Hunter Laptop Is Russian Misinformation and Trump Colluded with Russia.  In 2020, when we first learned about Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," we all knew it was real.  It wasn't until after the 2020 election was over that the mainstream media slowly but surely started to concede the laptop was genuine, but at least one left-wing journalist still thinks the laptop story is dubious.  David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief of Mother Jones and an MSNBC analyst, apparently still believes that the laptop isn't legit.

The Media Undertakers Must be Getting Exhausted.  Among the stories Twitter actively blocked was that of the salacious Hunter Biden laptop contents.  So shocking was the material on this laptop, so revealing of the perversity of Hunter and the corruption of Joe Biden, that one post-election survey reports that 16% of persons who voted for Biden said they would not have had they known of the contents of this laptop.  One major newspaper, the NY Post, did publish a story about it, and several online posters did as well.  The most detailed, should you care to see for yourself what was on the laptop, is [elsew]here.  The laptop reveals not only sexual depravity and illegal drug use, but corruption and influence buying as well.  Taibbi reports "Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be 'unsafe'."  The only person it was unsafe for was Joe Biden, the Democrat party's presidential candidate[.]  Even then, White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about it.  Several insiders questioned what was going on and received the untrue defense that the material was removed because it violated the company's "hacked materials" policy.  The laptop was never hacked.  It was abandoned by Hunter, then was unlocked while in the possession of the NY Post, and it and its contents are authentic.  At any other time in history of which I am aware such a scandal would have been front-page news in the weeks preceding an election.

Vicious dogma.  The COVID pandemic is just a flash in the pan when compared to the dogmatic hysteria surrounding most aspects of weather and climate.  When CBS News periodically covered the enormous blanket of snow that recently fell on Buffalo, NY and environs, they would then immediately jump to coverage of the world climate conference (COP 27) at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.  The abrupt juxtaposition caused me to burst out laughing.  Never once was it mentioned that the historically significant northeast blizzard happened a month before the beginning of winter, i.e., the middle of autumn.  Just about every news story regarding floods, wildland fires, drops in lake and river levels, high tides, etc. winds up including "climate change" as a significant component.  In this year's political season, even candidates for city council included climate activism in their proposed agendas.  Imagine, local political hacks saving their constituents from the weather.

McCarthy: Twitter Disclosures Show Biden Doesn't Want Free Speech, I Wonder What Facebook, Google Are Hiding.  On Friday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Jesse Watters Primetime," House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reacted to disclosures on Twitter's suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by saying he thinks the disclosures are just the tip of the iceberg, he wonders what internal machinations at Facebook and Google have been hidden, and the disclosures show "why the White House is going after Elon.  They do not want him to tell the truth and they do not want to have free speech."

FTX scammer gets kid gloves treatment by the media.  Sam Bankman-Fried, who often goes by SBF, has been doing a media tour to rehabilitate his reputation after scamming his customers out of billions of dollars.  It's actually going very well indeed for him.  Unsurprisingly so, since his victims were average folks and he spread his ill-gotten gains around to the media and the Democrat politicians. [...] It really has been remarkable how easily SBF has been treated.  His scam wasn't penny ante — it was large enough to rank among the largest ever pulled off.  In less than 3 years he managed to build an empire, acquire the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, partner with Mercedes Benz, advertise his wares with some of the biggest stars in the world, become the 2nd-largest donor to the Democrats after George Soros, and be lionized by the media as a savior figure.

IRS Watchdog Destroys Media Claim That Trump Ordered Audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe.  Liberal media outlets like the New York Times and MSNBC claimed former President Donald Trump ordered audits of former FBI chiefs James Comey and Andrew McCabe for political payback.  According to the Internal Revenue Service's internal watchdog, that's not true.  The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration determined that the IRS randomly selected Comey and McCabe for audits of their tax returns from 2017 and 2019 as part of a program the IRS uses to refine its technology, according to a report released Thursday.  The watchdog found no evidence of malfeasance on the part of Trump or any Trump-appointed officials.

Google Gives Millions To Boost Leftist Disinformation Peddlers Of Legacy Media.  Google and its subsidiary YouTube just gave a $13.2 million grant to the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network to combat "misinformation," in the Big Tech sites' "single largest grant in fact-checking" yet and the latest instance of the medical, political, and media establishments tightening their grip on the free-flowing digital public square.  For years, the world's elites have been trying to recapture the control they lost to the free flow of information on the internet.  They've shelled out millions for celebrities like Prince Harry to slander the First Amendment and hand-wring about an alleged "disinformation" crisis.  They've pressured individual tech companies to ban content, people, and entire platforms.  The Biden administration even tried implementing its own, now-defunct "Ministry of Truth," all to convince us that freedom of speech and inquiry is somehow dangerous and that the threat can only be neutralized by "trusted" experts seizing dominance of the information exchange.

Now the Truth Can Be Told.  In focusing on America's rising rates of violent crime leading up to the midterm elections, Republicans were routinely accused of playing a dirty trick on voters.  "We don't really have a common definition of what crime means," crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher asserted in an October interview with NPR.  Apparently, the range of activities that constituted a violation of statute made it difficult to discern what voters meant when they said "crime."  And when "crime" wasn't a nebulous concept that eluded the unsophisticated, it was cast as a problem presided over by Republicans.

Our Lying Idiot Media Really Is That Dumb.  It's not just that the media lies all the time in the service of its cause, but that its wretches no longer have the skill or even understanding to tell the lies apart from the truth.  And so they simplify matters in the timeless fashion of extremists by declaring everything they believe to be the truth and everything that they disagree with to be a lie.  Or disinformation.  Faced with Hunter Biden's laptop, they phone up a few experts from their contact list who tell them what they want to hear and the media proclaims it's Russian disinformation.  Faced with actual Russian disinformation accusing Trump of frolicking with prostitutes in Moscow, they cheerfully amplify it as loudly as they can.  And they are too dumb to even know any better.  Like their old Pravda predecessors in Moscow, they don't know anything except the party line.

NPR says bombs in Israel are "rare." They aren't, but the truth doesn't serve their narrative.  These are not "rare" events.  There are an average of more than one pipe bomb every day this year.  If NPR was doing its job, it would have known this information and reported on it way before deadly bombs exploded in Jerusalem.  And it is pretty obvious that the "rare" statement was meant to downplay Palestinian terror, and to avoid mentioning that this has been the bloodiest year for Israelis since 2015, and second deadliest since 2009.

FTX now right-wing according to Forbes.  I kid you not.  FTX — the crypto-fraud firm that just collapsed — is the brainchild of Sam Bankman-Fried, the second largest Democrat donor in the country.  He helped find Joe Biden's campaign, contributing more than any other than our old friend George Soros.  He spent $40 million on Democrats, and promised them $1 billion to help win the 2024 presidential campaign. [...] What is hilarious about this — actually there are many things hilarious about this — is that FTX is actually a darling of Forbes Magazine, who helped it vault to the top of the crypto world.  Forbes hyped the company, hyped Sam Bankman-Fried as a genius, and along with the New York Times turned SBF into a hero, genius inventor.  To the extent that Caroline the fraud was enabled, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, and the New York Times were the chief enablers.

Yesterday's conspiracy theories are today's legacy media news reports.  [Thread reader] NBC Bay Area reporter @BigadShaban reported on the Pelosi attack based on source who saw body cam footage.  It was almost identical to what Miguel Almaguer said 11/4 that got him suspended.  DA says Pelosi will "need to explain... why he did what he did" [...] WashPost reports after all that "secret docs!" drama, Trump raid produced basically nothing of interest. [...] NBC reports the January 6 committee will ignore "law enforcement failures" in final report, instead making it all about Trump. [...] NYT reports the #2 man in the Oath Keepers, Greg McWhirter, was actually an FBI informant, talking to them for months ahead of the Capitol attack.  Oh the day he was supposed to testify in the Rhodes trial, McWhirter, 40, had a heart attack & couldn't. [...] If you said any of this — about January 6 and the FBI, Paul Pelosi, the Trump raid, SBF's virtue signaling — you would have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist.  And now, in the post-midterms news cycle... they are all just true.  Period.

Progressive 'Journalists' Claim Georgia Is Limiting Voting to Celebrate Robert E. Lee.  [Scroll down] In fact, Stacey Abrams, the Voting Rights Maven™, voted for the law about which these people are complaining.  As of this writing, none of the aforementioned media activists have bothered to correct their original tweets with the correct information.  Why not?  Because they are not journalists, they are activists.  Their aim is to influence, not inform.  Sure, we expect authentic reporters to make mistakes from time to time.  But one of the signs that an individual in the media is trying to practice journalism is how they respond when they mess up.  In this case, these folks didn't correct their error because the reality is that none of them care about the truth.  Their audience believes Georgia is stopping voting in order to honor a Confederate general, and that is just fine with them.  No wonder trust in the media is at an all-time low.

We Need To Talk About What Didn't Happen On Election Day.  A number of noteworthy things did not happen on Election Day 2022.  Everyone knows the red wave didn't happen.  But that isn't all that didn't happen.  The chaos at the polls that was going to be caused by the presence of citizen poll watchers did not happen.  Despite being hysterically predicted (hoped for?) over the past 18 months by reporters who wrote the same story with some version of the same headline [...] Every story breathlessly claimed that having citizen observers engaged in the election process was a "threat to democracy," with NBC News warning in early November, "Election officials are bracing for conspiracy-fueled threats — while still hoping for the best..."  The Biden administration did its part to sow seeds of dissension by launching in June 2021 a national hotline at the FBI for reporting "threats to election officials and workers," creating a task force to address "threats against election workers."  But nary a word from Attorney General Merrick Garland about protecting poll watchers, even though federal law makes it a crime to injure, intimidate, or interfere with poll watchers.  Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be "Peaceful.  Lawful.  Honest."  Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process.

Voter Suppression: ABC, CBS Cast Doubt on Midterms, Blaming Violent Right-Wingers.  On Monday morning ahead of Tuesday's almost certain Republican tsunami at the ballot box, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS Mornings moved away from a fixation on abortion or vague warnings about the fate of democracy if voters choose incorrectly.  Instead, they engaged in voter suppression by hinting a vote for Republicans could be enabling violent individuals who'd cause violence and/or cause serious doubts to be raised about our country's future.

Six Reasons Corporate Media Failed to Frame MAGA for Paul Pelosi Incident.  [#5]  The media are trying to frame us for a crime they support — the physical assault of politicians.  [Numerous tweets]  Do the corporate media honestly believe we have forgotten how they laughed and made jokes about a Democrat assaulting Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)?  Do the media honestly believe we have forgotten how after Rep. Steve Scalise was shot by a Democrat assassin, they dropped the story after 18 hours?  Do the media believe we have forgotten how they blamed Trump for the leftists who caused violence at his rallies or how they ignored the firebombing of countless pregnancy centers, the SWAT-ing of Republican politicians, and told us Antifa attacks on state capitols were mostly peaceful?  And do the media honestly believe we have forgotten how after the terrorists in Black Lives Matter and Antifa wounded up to 50(!) Secret Service agents during a 2020 attack on the White House, the corporate media ridiculed Trump over reports of him being rushed to a secure location?

Could [Democrat] Politics Be Even More Childish?  Within the press, the demise of our political system is a talking point that must be repeated.  Jane Pauley, a longtime media operative for the Democratic Party, has tried to convince voters "the very future of our democracy" is in the balance in next week's elections.  Former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote last spring that "democracy is at stake" because the Republicans will lead a coup in 2024 to ensure the GOP presidential nominee is declared the winner of that election.  More recently, MSNBC political analyst and one-time New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas put the left's madness on full display.  He has decided that the midterms are "a contest between part of the country that believes in continued and expanded liberal democracy, effort to pursue a more perfect union, and a part of the country that is now attracted to the idea of fascism in the United States."  And of course the New York Times can't help itself.  It's screaming that "many voters" are "frustrated and resigned" because they have "fears" over the "fate of democracy."  If they do, it's because the media, in their constant campaigning for Democrats, have unleashed the torrent of lies.

Left-Wing Media Insists the Parrot Isn't Dead.  It's Just Resting.  In a couple of weeks, John Fetterman will be back home in Braddock, Penn., in his loft apartment, playing with his kids and continuing to recover from what we now know was a devastating stroke.  It's what he should have been doing since he suffered the stroke in May.  But because he and his campaign hid the severity of his condition from the media, his party, and especially his opponent, Mehmet Oz, it came as a shock to see the 49-year-old giant of a man in such a confused state.  Whether it was due to hubris or simple denial of reality, Fetterman's vulnerabilities were exposed for all to see.  That is, everyone but a certain segment of the left-wing media that is working very hard to tell us that we didn't see what we actually saw, that Fetterman didn't do that badly.

Seven Times the Media Lied about 'Disinformation' that was True.  Just about every time the mainstream media tells you that something is "disinformation," it turns out that it's the media that is pushing the lies.  Last week, Just the News put together a list of seven important times that the media told everyone something was "disinformation," but that later turned out to be true.  The list includes:
  •   Hunter Biden's Laptop
  •   The origins of COVID-19
  •   COVID-19 vaccines
  •   Pelosi's Jan. 6 role and calling in the National Guard
  •   The mistreatment of Jan. 6 defendants
  •   Irregularities in the 2020 election
  •   Critical race theory in schools

UPI hiding the decline in order to promote climate change agenda.  Last week, I ran across a UPI story that left me scratching my head.  Titled "In a surprise, global greenhouse gas emissions seem to be on the decline" by Daniel J. Graeber, it's purportedly evidence that there's good news on the climate change front.  The Joe Biden Inflation Reduction Act has caused a bunch of people to buy electric cars, and that, along with wind farms and increased solar capacity, shows we may have turned the corner on climate change, according to data.  Except here's the problem.  The data suggests no such thing.

The Mainstream Media Lied to Me About Conservatives.  Looking back, when I was a Democrat, I never personally knew any Republicans or conservatives yet my entire perception of what they stood for was based on left-leaning media filtering.  I felt that I was being informed when I was being highly misinformed about what an entire political spectrum generally believes and advocates for.  Even more so, as a black man, I bought into the bad-faith political position that "all Republicans & conservatives are racist".

Democrats Whistle Past the Graveyard.  November is almost upon us, and the consensus among credible election analysts is that any momentum the Democrats enjoyed this summer has evaporated.  Despite implausible claims about the ephemeral "Dobbs effect," the election was always destined to be about inflation, crime, immigration, and President Joe Biden's job performance — all issues that favor Republicans.  Yet the Democrats and the corporate media continue to engage in magical thinking about the midterms.  Their latest fantasy involves an all-but-extinct creature known as the "split-ticket voter."  After telling us for years that political polarization has rendered such voters very rare, publications such as the Washington Post have suddenly decided that they could be pivotal this year in several key battleground states.  Oddly enough, a number of corporate media outlets have simultaneously come to the same conclusion.

Using a "fact check" to deceive.  "Fact checks" are almost always intended to deceive or distract you.  During the Trump Administration, every "fact checker" in America needed you to know that every bit of hyperbole Donald Trump spewed out was a "lie," not an intentional exaggeration for effect and that the Babylon Bee was not a credible news source.  Fact checks, in other words, are about spinning you.  Misleading you.  Burning up straw men and then declaring victory.

Leftist Newspaper Lies about First-Trimester Abortion.  The leftist publication The Guardian published images of gestational tissue from the first nine weeks of pregnancy and misleadingly called it an embryo.  An article titled "What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks — in pictures," featured eight photos of the gestational sac, implying that it was an embryo, even though the embryo was removed during the abortion.  "Each of the images in the article shows a gestational sac but clearly the embryonic and fetal human beings have been removed from the images," OB-GYN Christina Francis told the Daily Caller.

Democrats take 'fake news' to new lows.  Democrats are expanding their misinformation campaign, devising new avenues to promote a false narrative.  In a stunning revelation, The Washington Examiner reported that over the course of the last year, Democrats have launched fake "local media outlets" to swing elections in favor of their candidates. [...] They've stooped to literal fake news outlets to promote themselves, which some might consider election interference, all while they lecture the public about the threat of Republicans and continue with the January 6 theatrical performance.  WaPo — which seeks to elect Democrats and push the leftist agenda everyday — complains about newspapers who push a partisan agenda.  They hilariously act like they are unbiased.  Yet, the WaPo and the NYT both won Pulitzers for peddling lies about Russia collusion for years.  How many times does the media have to see the absolute corruption and partisanship of the FBI as they target Trump and other Republicans with fictional crimes, while protecting criminals like Hillary and Biden, before they tell the public the truth instead of pretending that they are apolitical and that no one is above the law?

Huge percentage of Americans have 'no trust' in newspapers, TV, radio.  According to Gallup, nearly 4 in 10 Americans (38%) have "no trust" in America's media, including newspapers, TV and radio.  The political divide is stark.  Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents trust the media, but 70% of Democrats, whose agenda largely has been adopted by reporters and publishers, trust the media.  Overall, 34% of respondents trust the mass media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly."  But "Just 7% of Americans have 'a great deal' of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have 'a fair amount,'" the poll said.  At the other end of the scale, 28% say they do not have very much confidence and 38% say they have "none at all."

Reuters "fact check:"  We never said the vaccines would prevent anything.  There has been a considerable amount of understandable buzz and unrest making the rounds since a Pfizer executive was forced to admit to a European Union conference that they never tested their COVID vaccine to see if it would actually prevent infections or halt the transmission of the virus prior to it being rushed onto the market and mandated almost universally.  This has left many health officials and elected officials with pie on their faces and vocal sectors of the public demanding answers.  Stepping into the breach to quell the uproar this weekend is Reuters, publishing yet another one of their infamous "fact checks" to clear the matter up.

Hours Before Decrying 'Horrifying Images,' Mayorkas Was Told CBP Agents Did Not Whip Haitian Migrants.  You may recall an incident last year in which Leftists from Biden, all the way down to your neighbor with the "In This House We Believe" sign became absolutely apoplectic over the cruel and sadistic border agents riding down Haitian immigrants and whipping them.  Whipping them, I say!  Comparisons were even made to antebellum slavery as the Left worked itself into a full-on foaming-at-the-mouth rage.  Except, of course, that wasn't the case.  The agents were using the reins to control the horses and no immigrants were harmed.  There even were pictures of immigrant children petting the horses.  The truth eventually came out and of course was largely ignored by the media, Democrat politicians, and your neighbor.  But as it turned out, the government knew that the allegations were false, but decided to let the narrative take its course.

Ukraine and the Malevolent Legacy of the Obama-Biden Administration.  During the current Ukrainian war, the media has created a mythology that the Left was tough on Vladimir Putin's Russia.  And thus, now it simply continues its hard-nosed efforts in Ukraine.  But nothing could be further from the truth. [...] Indeed, many of America's current difficulties in Ukraine originate from the Obama-Biden Administration's former disastrous policies toward Russia birthed between 2009 [and] 2016.

Democrats Run 50+ 'Local' News Sites in Swing States to Spread 'Fact-Based' Propaganda.  Democrats are reportedly running dozens of "quasi-local" news sites across multiple swing states, producing pro-Democrat and anti-Republican content under a veneer of non-partisanship.  At least 51 of these "local" news sites across 10 swing states are being run by Local Report Inc., founded last year in Florida, Axios reported.  Six writers from "progressive" Washington-based The American Independent have also contributed to most or even all of the websites, according to Axios.  Many of their articles appear exclusively on the news sites, although the sites aggregate content from other sources as well.

Dem Operatives Behind Network Of Fake News Pop-Up Sites In Battleground States: Report.  Democratic operatives are flooding battleground states with more than 50 supposedly local media outlets that are really designed to promote liberal candidates, according to a bombshell investigation by Axios.  One man linked to the scheme is David Brock, the one-time conservative journalist who did a 180-degree turn and founded Media Matters For America, the controversial nonprofit that attacks conservative news sites.  Axios' investigative reporters Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley say the operation uses a "patina of independent local news content designed to put a sheen of original reporting on partisan messaging."  The 51 pop-up sites have names such as the Milwaukee Metro Times, Macomb Digest, Mecklenburg Herald, and the Tri-City Record, and are aimed at key swing states Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the report.

Democrats are operating a series of 51 'fake news' websites pushing left-wing stories in toss-up states.  A liberal political media operation being run out of Washington, D.C., and Florida is pushing left-wing stories in 51 different fake news outlets in order to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections, it is claimed.  The allegations came in a shocking new investigation from Axios that was published on Thursday.  The report alleges that in the past 12 months, multiple new 'news' website have appeared across the country, all run by a company named Local Report Inc.  They do report a wide variety of stories — but sprinkled throughout are news items pushing Democrat lawmakers and policies.

Media Falsely Links Hurricanes to Climate Change.  Here Are the Facts.  As Florida deals with the cleanup from Hurricane Ian — which ravaged the state, killed hundreds, and displaced thousands more — media outlets have peddled the idea that this tragedy is the result of climate change.  Some even suggested that Florida shouldn't get aid because some of its elected officials oppose federal legislation that would pump billions of dollars into various green initiatives.  The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws.  Now They're Seeking Storm Aid."  The subheadline read, "Senior Republican politicians in the state have opposed federal action against global warming, which is making storms like Hurricane Ian more destructive."  The Times report said that while Republicans in the state are requesting aid, they "don't want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive."  What was the cause, according to the Times?  "The burning of fossil fuels."  Of course.

Do Republicans Cause Hurricanes?  With the grim inevitability of Greek tragedy, three things always happen when a hurricane makes landfall in the United States.  First, the storm will be touted by the corporate media as evidence that anthropogenic climate change presents an existential threat to humanity and the planet.  Second, anyone who dares question the accuracy of this claim will be either ignored or denounced as a dangerous anti-science "denier."  Third, if the hurricane happens to hit a state with a GOP governor, he will be blamed for causing any resultant death and destruction.  In the case of Hurricane Ian, all three commenced more than 24 hours before the storm actually arrived in Florida.

The Media's Coverage of Hurricane Ian Proves They Think You're Stupid.  Democrats want to convince you that they can somehow control the weather and that all we need to do to prevent natural disasters is give them power.  That's either unmitigated hubris coming from Democrats or malicious lies.  Maybe both?  [Video clip]

'Absolutely Fake News': Even Liberal Former PM Dismisses 'Fascism' Brewing in Italy Claims.  Former liberal Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Renzi has dismissed alarmist claims in the global media that incoming Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a "danger to democracy", telling CNN "the idea that now there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news."  "Personally, I was against Giorgia Meloni.  I'm not her best friend.  We grew up together in politics, but we are, and will be, rivals, always," said Renzi, who served as Prime Minister of Italy for nearly three years until December 2016, and is the leader of the liberal "Italia Viva" party.  "At the same time, I think [Meloni] is not a danger [to] Italian democracy," Renzi continued.  "She is my rival, and we will continue to fight each other, but the idea that now there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news."

Gavin Newsom's laughable gripe about conservative media bias.  You have to admire the chutzpah of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who ludicrously claimed last weekend that Democrats were at a disadvantage because conservative media controls the story.  Really!  "These guys are ruthless on the other side.  Ruthless on the other side," Newsom said. "That prime-time lineup by Fox, they are ruthless.  They dominate the most important thing in American politics today, and that's the narrative.  Facts become secondary to narrative.  They dominate with illusion.  We are getting crushed."  It's the ultimate in projection.  On story after story, the media follow Democratic talking points to the letter.  Asking for young children not to be taught about sex becomes "Don't say gay."  Crime-ridden Democratic cities?  They're not that bad, the press says.  As Post columnist Michael Goodwin pointed out on Sunday, nowhere is this more true than with immigration.  The media have ignored or minimized the flood of illegal migrants, and ask no hard questions on President Biden's open-border policies.

Media midterm games at border.  If you're trying to understand why Democrats are making a comeback in polls despite President Biden's many failures, look no further than the political firestorm over the crisis at the southern border.  The battle offers a case study of how the media shapes public opinion by magnifying left-wing talking points, ignoring key facts and distorting conservative criticism.

It's Time to Stop the Left's 'Fact Check' Scheme.  [Scroll down] Both examples above are how the modern "fact-checking" regime works.  They don't like your opinion, so they add "context" that wasn't there in the first place, then disprove the context they added, knowing you will be flagged and possibly suspended from social media.  It seems impossible, but this is how modern-day fascism has crept into our society.  When considering where we have landed as a society, I always think of the book-burning scene in Indiana Jones.  In the scene, Nazi soldiers are throwing every book they disagree with on a massive fire and celebrating the destruction of opposing opinions.  Modern-day book burning doesn't look as dirty.  In my case, two young female "journalists" named Mariah and Kyley attempted to eliminate my opinion from society, most likely while sipping on a $7 latte in a trendy coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Miami Herald Warns That Christian Rhetoric Could 'Mobilize Fringe Mobs'.  The Miami Herald has discovered something about Republican politicians, and boy, is it a problem.  You may want to sit down for this one.  GOP politicians who are Christians use scripture in their speeches. [...] I know.  You're not really shocked or appalled, but this information came as news to the Miami Herald's Ana Ceballos, particularly when it comes to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who Ceballos' article says is "playing with fire."  The reporter goes all the way back to February to cite a speech DeSantis made at Hillsdale College to make her point.

The Political Party That's Built On Lies.  The Democrats' tower of lies has been constructed with the help of the media, which outside of a few exceptions, are no longer objective, or even pretend to be, and are instead propagandists for the party they are loyal to.  In just the last six years the media have perpetuated the stolen-by-Russia 2016 presidential election lie, the Stacey Abrams I'm-the-real-governor-of-Georgia lie, and the lie that the incriminating information on Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.  The press also lies about policies, casting Democrats' ideas in the best light possible, the Republicans' policies in the worst.  A recent and especially egregious example:  Both the Democrats and the media have been calling Florida's Parental Rights in Education law the Don't Say Gay Bill, a gross and intentional mischaracterization intended to vilify and poison.  Rather than promote freedom and prosperity, Democrats' policies enslave and impoverish middle and lower America while at the same time prop up the leftist ruling class and its cronies.  But no one would know this by listening to the media and their handlers in the party.

Zuckerberg's Admission Of FBI Meddling In 2020 Election Is Even Bigger Than It Seems.  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's admission last week that the FBI pushed the social media giant to censor Russian misinformation — and thus the Hunter Biden laptop story, as that's how the agency and Democrats characterized it — shortly before the November 2020 election is but a breadcrumb of a bigger scandal: the widespread interference by the FBI in the 2020 presidential election with the potential that the bureau coordinated its efforts with the Biden campaign.  When asked during a Thursday podcast with Joe Rogan how Facebook handles controversial news, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, Zuckerberg stopped his host to provide a backdrop to Facebook's decision to decrease distribution of the scandal.

FBI Reportedly Said to 'Routinely' Work with Social Media Companies to Censor 'Threat Info'.  Collusion between government and Big Tech goes deeper than Joe Biden's incompetence.  The FBI reportedly responded to the revelation it pressured Facebook to censor during the 2020 election by saying that the agency "routinely" works with social media companies to target "potential threat information."  The FBI "cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received," but does coordinate with "social media providers" to moderate content, according to an Aug. 26 FBI statement reported by Reclaim The Net.  This revelation comes after multiple efforts by various arms of the Biden administration to increase censorship leading up to the 2022 midterms.  The FBI claimed, according to Reclaim The Net, it "routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats."  How many companies is the federal government working with to censor free speech?

The Economic News Is All Bad, And The American Public Knows It.  Reporters and analysts are getting used to describing news about the U.S. economy as "mixed."  The public, however, knows it's all bad, because the results of President Joe Biden's economic and energy policies are hitting Americans right in their pocketbooks.  The latest ostensibly good news was Thursday's Bureau of Economic Analysis report that the second quarter decline in U.S. gross domestic product was a little less than previously stated: -0.6% instead of -0.9%.  That's good only if your definition of success is slightly slower failure.  The reality is that the U.S. economy is in serious decline and getting worse.

LA Times columnist blames Trump for crime in California.  It's hardly a secret that the crime rates in California are out of control.  We've been talking about this tragic fact here until we're blue in the face.  The critical question that everyone needs to be asking is "why." How did things get so far out of control?  Los Angeles Times columnist Anita Chabria gamely took a stab at the question on Friday.  She first listed the correct collection of suspects sharing the blame, including permissive, soft-on-crime laws and the permissive, soft-on-crime officials who enact and enforce those laws.  But she then sweeps those answers away and reveals the real culprit.  Clearly, the wave of killings and other crimes in the state of California is the fault of the Bad Orange Man.  Yes, folks, the person who has not been in office for more than nineteen months and has never lived in the Golden State must be at fault.

Mark Zuckerberg Admits On Joe Rogan That Facebook Censored The Hunter Laptop Story At The Request Of The FBI.  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, the social media giant received a warning from the FBI which prompted Facebook to limit the story's reach on the platform ahead of the 2020 presidential election.  The billionaire tech mogul said the FBI approached Facebook and warned it "be vigilant" before the New York Post story on the contents in Joe Biden's son's laptop.  [Video clip]

Zuckerberg's Meta going all in in censorship as the midterm election nears.  Meta, the corporate parent of Facebook, has announced its plans to control the flow of information on the site where most voters get their news.  You see, the public has to be protected from "misinformation" and the omniscient sages of Meta are just the folks to decude what is and isn't worthy of being shared with the public. [...] I am so old that I remember when the free flow of information was regarded as key to the democratic process.  But the ruling interests in the United States have decided otherwise, and as long as people default to using Facebook and Twitter for their communications, they will be sheep, herded by the oligarchs.

Trump-deranged media races again to tarnish ex-prez via unnamed sources.  In the wake of the FBI raid on ex-President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home, The Washington Post and New York Times are running breathless, anonymously sourced stories suggesting "grave" Trump misdeeds.  Have they learned nothing about crying wolf?  "Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought" in the raid, the WaPo reported, revealing nothing about the biases of its unnamed sources who have full license to distort or even lie — as similar anonymous sources did for years during the "Russiagate" fiasco.

Media is back to anonymous, one-source stories on Trump that we can't trust anymore.  It feels like old times.  In the wake of the FBI raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, the mainstream media are in a feeding frenzy the likes of which we haven't seen since he exited the White House.  The usual suspects, like The New York Times and Washington Post, which spent the four years of Trump's presidency consistently and spectacularly beclowning themselves, are at it again.  Dare we say that it has "all the hallmarks" of media incompetence?  Take The Washington Post:  Using its signature anonymous single-source style, it broke the alleged news that Trump was in possession of documents "related to nuclear weapons."  What exactly does that mean?  Honestly, based on Post's coverage of Russiagate, when so many "bombshells" fizzled when the details emerged, you have to wonder if it's the White House pastry chef's recipe for nuclear chocolate cake.

Stop calling them 'Asian' grooming gangs.  Last week's landmark report into grooming gangs in Telford made for truly horrifying reading.  It revealed that 1,000 mainly white girls had been subjected to horrific sexual abuse by groups of men of mainly Pakistani heritage since at least the 1980s.  Tom Crowther QC, who chaired the Telford inquiry, said that 'the overwhelming theme of the evidence has been the appalling suffering of generations of children caused by the utter cruelty of those who committed child sexual exploitation'. He then went on to say that the failure of the authorities to intervene was in part driven by 'a nervousness that investigating concerns against Asian men, in particular, would inflame racial tensions'.  'Asian' men?  This is an odd description of the perpetrators.  Crowther pulled almost no punches in his summing up.  But this was definitely one he did pull.  The members of the grooming gangs were not simply 'Asian' — by and large, they were Muslim men of Pakistani heritage.

Pulitzer Prize Board Stands by Awards Given to NYT, WaPo for Russia Hoax Reports.  The Pulitzer Prize Board on Monday [7/18/2022] announced it is standing by awards given to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reports on the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.  "In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign — submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize," the organization's statement reads.

That 10-Year-Old Abortion Story the President Ranted About Gets a Major Update.  In the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned, a viral story about a 10-year-old girl in Ohio being raped, impregnated, and unable to obtain an abortion spread like wildfire across the political sphere.  Major news networks covered it as truth despite the fact that it was a single-sourced account from an abortion doctor who provided zero corroborating details.  The story was then used as proof of how harmful Republican abortion bans are to the point that even Joe Biden got in on the act.  The president used the report to rail against pro-life laws, proclaiming "imagine being that little girl" while asserting that Ohio forces raped children to give birth.  Of course, not everyone was so gullible.

Gallup Poll:  Trust In News Outlets Hits a Historic Low.  The American people's trust in news outlets has hit a historic low, according to Gallup's annual survey on confidence in major U.S. institutions.  It's like they've discovered that "straight news" isn't their primary goal.  Both newspapers and television news have seen another drop in confidence over the past year, with each losing an average five percent of people who said they had a "great deal" of trust in such institutions.  Gallup has been measuring "confidence in institutions" since 1973, and annually since 1993.  Television news is now considered the second least-trusted institution in America, after Congress, with just 11 percent of respondents telling Gallup they have "quite a lot" of trust in television news.  Newspapers aren't much better at 16 percent.

This Is What Real Revolution Looks Like.  If you listen to the mainstream media you will know that from time to time spontaneous peaceful protests break out in the nation focused on various social issues.  You will also know that Antifa is largely a fiction of the 'delusional right' and that the real threat to the nation comes from a vast right-wing conspiracy driven by white supremacists.  In short, you will know nothing.

Media Melt Down over Roe v Wade being overturned.  Democrats and the Garbage Media are melting down and doing everything they can to spew lies and misinformation in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.  We'll start with Chuck Todd, who claims for the first time in his lifetime the Supreme Court has just taken away a 'right':  [Tweet]  Abortion was never a 'right' to begin with!  Our true rights come from God and that is what our Constitution seeks to protect.  It was 49 years ago that the Supreme Court wrongly concluded that abortion was a 'right' guaranteed by the Constitution.  The Supreme Court today didn't take away any 'right' to abortion, they pointed out that the 'right' never existed in the first place.  In fact, as Jan Crawford pointed out on CBS, another way of looking at it is that the right to life was given back to the unborn today, which was taken away 49 years ago:  [Tweet]

USA Today Reporter Resigns After Getting Caught Fabricating 23 Stories.  USA Today removed 23 of its articles from its site after an internal investigation revealed one of its reporters Gabriela Miranda had fabricated sources.  "After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda.  The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated.  The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified.  In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others" USA Today wrote in an editor's note published on its site on Thursday afternoon [6/16/2022].

USA Today removed 23 stories from website, other platforms following audit of reporter's work.  After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda.  The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated.  The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified.  In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.  As a result, USA TODAY removed 23 articles from its website and other platforms for not meeting our editorial standards.  The headlines of the articles are listed below.  Miranda has resigned as a reporter for USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network.

Truth is now in plain sight.  Post-injection death tolls have reached levels that are making it very difficult for the powers-that-be to keep the lambs sleeping and the vaxx zealots enthused.  Thus they are resorting to the oldest, tried-and-true tricks in the book, particularly the "if you tell a lie enough, it becomes the truth" method.  Politifact wrote the same, regurgitated article on April 6, 2022, declaring that mRNA and viral vector DNA injections are not the cause of countless sudden deaths in adults and kids.  The Poynter Institute, Politifact's parent organization, wrote nearly the exact same "fact check" article on September 24, 2021.  The effort has been persistent, consistent and coordinated among the monolithic mainstream media since the spring of 2021.  Pfizer-owned Reuters wrote a "fact-check" on April 29, 2021 entitled, "No evidence COVID-19 vaccines will cause an 'exponential rise' in deaths."  The next day, on April 30, 2021, USA Today wrote a "fact-check" entitled, "COVID-19 vaccines don't cause death, won't decimate world's population." FactCheck.org got into the mix on March 2, 2022, with an article entitled, "COVID-19 Vaccines Have Prevented Deaths, Contrary to Misleading Graphic on Social Media."

NYC man nabbed in subway slashings had just been freed after knife dispute with cops.  A Queens man was arrested over the weekend for two random subway slashings in as many days — crimes he allegedly committed after being picked up, then let go, for brandishing a knife at cops.  Donny Ubiera, 32, stabbed two straphangers — one in the face and the other in the neck — without provocation in separate incidents Friday and Saturday morning along the Flushing-to-Midtown No. 7 subway line, the NYPD said in a statement.  The accused serial slasher had just gotten out of jail Thursday — with a single night of "time served" — for allegedly refusing to put down a large knife when confronted by Queens officers on the street and then trying to flee with it the day before.

The Editor says...
The news media consistently uses the term "random" to conceal black-on-white hate crimes.

The dystopian state of our nation.  What to do?  Wake up!  Vote!  Get involved with an election integrity project or a precinct project.  Fight back.  Say no to medical mandates!  Vote out the RINOs like McConnell, Graham, Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger, etc. — all the fake conservatives who just want to be part of the swamp long enough to get very rich without offending anyone else in that swamp.  We know who they are; Trump exposed them all to the sunlight.  Don't believe a word uttered on CNN or MSNBC.  Like the networks, their talking heads get their talking points from the Democrat party, and they never deviate, which is why they sound like mindless mimics.  There is not a critical thinker among them.  They might as well all be Kardashian cut-outs.  They are all Alinskyites now.

A friendly reminder that many gun control groups routinely inflate school shooting numbers.  [Threat reader]  [Scroll down]  Are these all instances of gun violence?  Yes.  Are they all problematic in their own right?  Yes.  But packaging these as part of some "school shooting" epidemic is dishonest nonsense.  [Indeed], they literally count a cop who shot himself in his own vehicle vaguely near an elementary school.  Presumably overnight.  In mid-JULY. We've got a 25-year-old fatally shot [and I quote here] "near a school playground."  On a Sunday evening.  A 17-year-old fatally shot outside of an elementary school... on Veteran's Day, when school wasn't in session.  It doesn't get less absurd.  They include an instance where, after a night game for an adult league flag football league, a man fatally shot a member of the opposing team because of an on-field dispute... solely because it happened behind an elementary school. [...] We've got an instance where a stray bullet struck a window of an elementary school while no one was inside the building.  We've got "a couple shots fired near a middle school baseball field on a Friday evening while a 20 year old and friends were taking batting practice," apparently not directed at anyone associated with the school, and as far as anyone can tell there were no injuries.  There are bullets hitting the outside wall of a middle school gym in the early morning before anyone was on the campus, likely during an unrelated drive-by shooting.

BBC accused of altering alleged rape victim's quote to avoid 'misgendering' transgender male attacker.  The woke BBC is being accused of outrageously altering an alleged rape victim's quotes by replacing pronouns to be more inclusive in an effort to protect her transgender attacker from "misgendering."  The Times of London broke the story that the British media outlet previously quoted a woman who claimed she was raped by a transgender male and then altered her words to be politically correct.  Her quotes were part of a report from 2021 on lesbians who have been "coerced into sex with transgender women."  The story was published on Oct. 26, 2021.  It covered a lesbian campaign called "Get the L Out."  Gay women were candidly asked about their sexual relationships with transgender women.

There were WMDs in Iraq.  Despite evidence to the contrary, there is the continued belief that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.  Between the Democrats, the media who serve as their propagandist, and those who have an irrational hatred of George W. Bush, there has been a refusal to give up the lie that nothing was found in Iraq.  One of the reasons given by former President Bush for going into Iraq — beyond Hussein's government funding international terrorist activities that did target Americans — was weapons of mass destruction were in fact found.  In other words, the weapons were not the only reason, but also the financing of international terrorism.  A 'weapon of mass destruction' is not just nuclear, but other weaponry meant to harm a large number of people through unconventional means.

Daily Beast releases apology to Hunter Biden's laptop repairman.  The Daily Beast has issued an apology to the Delaware computer repairman who acquired Hunter Biden's laptop for wrongly claiming in a past story that the computer was "stolen."  The apology to John Paul Mac Isaac appeared in a Wednesday [5/25/2022] editor's note attached to a story the Daily Beast published in Dec. 2020 alleging the laptop was pilfered, Fox News reported.  "An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Hunter Biden's laptop as 'stolen.'  We have removed that word, and we apologize to Mr. Mac Isaac for the error," the editor's note reads.  Isaac, 45, was left with the infamous laptop after Hunter Biden abandoned it at his shop in 2019.  The repairman came to legally own the laptop after the president's son neglected to ever pick it up.

Seven Ways The Texas Tribune Is All-In On Climate Fearmongering.  A recent piece in The Texas Tribune lists seven alleged ways climate change is already impacting the state of Texas and its residents.  When not outright false, the listed claims are extremely misleading.  Real-world data indicates the state of Texas faces no severe imminent threat from climate change.  Two writers, María Méndez and Erin Douglas contributed to the article, "Seven ways climate change is already hitting Texans," which runs the gamut of common alarmist lines.  This isn't the first time Erin Douglas and The Texas Tribune have published false information about the impacts of climate change on Texas.

Man shot and killed on NYC subway in broad daylight, cops say.  A deranged gunman shot and killed a 48-year-old straphanger aboard a Manhattan subway train Sunday morning in what cops are calling an unprovoked attack.  The shooter, who was still on the loose Sunday afternoon, paced back and forth in the last car of the northbound Q train around 11:42 a.m. before he opened fire on the random victim seated inside, police and sources said.  "Completely random," one police source said.  The victim, whose name wasn't immediately released, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital where he was later pronounced dead, police said.

The Editor says...
The news media in New York is always very quick to excuse cold-blooded killers as "deranged" and the killings as "totally random" — especially when the shooter is black and the victim is not, which is almost always the case, and apparently was the case this time.  The newspapers' writers dare not suggest that blacks are racist or that they target white people just because they're white; but if the colors were reversed, hate crime accusations would fly.

Signs of a False Flag
 1.  Asks you to respond emotionally rather than intellectually.
 2.  Strips the event of context, such as the contemporary factual setting, geopolitical reality, or historical awareness.
 3.  Demands a rush to judgment before a diligent, independent inquiry occurs.
 4.  Collectivizes judgment, by taking an individual event, and demands you blame an entire culture, religion, race, ancestry, community or country for it.
 5.  The only explicable motive offered for the offending action is irrational evil or utterly stupid immorality, as it is against the rational interest of the offender to commit the act for the reasons alleged.

Congrats To The Media For Finally Finding A White Supremacist.  Assuming the gunman who shot up the Buffalo, New York, grocery store really was motivated by anti-black racism, let's do what the media do when faced with an Islamic terrorist who goes on a killing spree in America and just refer to him as a "lone wolf," a mentally unstable individual who in no way reflects any broader phenomenon or trend.  Except, unlike with violent Muslim extremism, that characterization in this case would be true.  Despite what the media, Democrats, leftists, and, of course, the permanent Washington bureaucracy say (over, and over, and over again), there is no imminent, large-scale threat from white nationalists.  It doesn't exist outside of Joe Biden's TelePrompter.

There was Another Mass Shooting in America.  You Didn't Hear About It Because the Suspect is a Chinese Communist.  [Scroll down]  The Orange County Sheriff's Department tweeted the known facts about the mass shooting on Monday.  "The Laguna Woods church shooting investigation has continued through the night.  Teams continue to process the scene," the sheriff's department said.  "The suspect in the Laguna Woods church shooting has been identified as David Chou, 68 years old, of Las Vegas, NV," the sheriff's department added. [...] Except there is a problem with the narrative:  The suspect isn't a 'white supremacist.'  Nor is he one of the many African-American assailants who have been charged and convicted for attacking Asian-Americans.  The suspect is a Chinese-born man named David Wenwei Chou, a 68-year-old resident of Las Vegas.  His motivation for the mass shooting was described in a hand-written note in Chinese left on a car dashboard, as was reported by the L.A. Times.  "David Wenwei Chou, 68, of Las Vegas, left notes in Chinese in his car stating he did not believe Taiwan should be independent from China, said Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes," the Times reported.

A Tale Of Two Mass Shootings.  In the span of one month, there were two mass shootings.  Both took place in New York.  Both were racially motivated.  Both shooters were violent extremists.  But the media tied only one of them to a mainstream political party.  Can you guess why?  Immediately after the identity of the alleged Buffalo shooter — initially charged with one murder and suspected of killing 10 — became known, the chattering class was insisting that he was not a "lone wolf" and pinned the blame for the massacre on "right-wing extremists" who "control the Republican party."  The Rolling Stone called the 18-year-old Payton Gendron "a mainstream Republican." [...] A Los Angeles Times op-ed declared that "The Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-right ecosystem that's gone mainstream."  New York Times weighed in with an article headlined:  "Replacement Theory, a Fringe Belief Fueled Online, Is Refashioned by G.O.P."

Guess how the Buffalo shooter identified himself politically.  The alleged supermarket killer is self-described as authoritarian left — so why isn't this being reported?  If the alleged Buffalo killer's "manifesto" is authentic, he was deep into communist ideology and now is an authoritarian leftist.  Why is this being kept under wraps?  The teenager accused of murdering ten people last Saturday in Buffalo, N.Y. also allegedly posted a 180-page "manifesto" online that the national media are selectively exploiting, leaving out key facts.

Press pumps up Joe Biden.  "History will be kind to me," Winston Churchill said, "because I intend to write it."  Britain's great statesman did as he promised, but Joe Biden has an even sweeter deal.  He doesn't need to put pen to paper because a cottage industry of so-called journalists is already twisting truth to make the failing president a victim, if not a hero.  It's as if somebody in an old newsroom called out, "Sweetheart, get me rewrite," and a thousand scribes raised their hands to volunteer to make Biden look like something other than the second coming of Jimmy Carter.  History, schmistory.  No need to wait — this is fiction on the fly!  "What Choice Does Biden Have?" The New Yorker magazine asked, before answering:  "With the impending evisceration of Roe v. Wade, partisanship is the only course for a President in our broken system."  See, the "system" is always "broken" when Democrats don't get their way.  Only when they win is America a real democracy.

The last people anyone should trust to tell or determine the truth are journalists and government officials.  There are many examples of where the media colluded with the Democrats to intentionally spread misinformation to the public.  Here is a small sample:  Democrats in Congress have repeatedly challenged elections where they lost yet they weren't called treasonous, weren't said to be against democracy, where we didn't have endless hearings, and they weren't silenced.  Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and others repeatedly lied to the public about Obamacare, but the media not only didn't silence them, but they also supported them.  Obama and Hillary concocted a lie about Benghazi, as Americans were killed, and the media never silenced them.  The Obama administration used the media to spread lies to get support for the Iran deal, yet the media never silenced them.  Most of the media still supports the deal that enriched Iran, which continues to spread terrorism and pledge death to America.  The media and others intentionally spread the lie of "Hands up Don't Shoot" that ginned up racial hate against cops.  How many cops have been killed and injured because of that intentional lie?  Yet, no one who spread the lie has been silenced.  The media, DNC, the Hillary campaign and government employees colluded to spread the lie about Russian collusion to destroy Trump and they have not been silenced.

Media Hoax:  No, Kevin McCarthy Did Not Say Trump Should Resign Over J6.  There they go again.  The left and NeverTrump infotainment propagandists are busily twisting and spinning their claims that then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wanted President Trump to resign after J6.  The implication being that he was so personally mortified by the "insurrection" (that wasn't) that he personally wanted the president to resign as a traitor.  Or something.  However, and completely unsurprisingly, if you listen to the audio they are touting as "evidence," you can clearly tell that he is discussing a particular circumstance:  Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans pursuing removal of Trump from office via the 25th Amendment.

Carter 2.0 — Media Runs Interference for Joe Just Like They Did for Jimmy.  Now that Joe Biden's approval rating has fallen — it's hovering in the low 40s, and it can't get up — the Main Stream Media have come up with a new line of defense for their man.  Okay, goes this new line, Biden isn't doing so well, but that's to be expected — because no president can do well.  That is, the problems are just too tough, the job is just too hard, the country is just too polarized, yada yada yada.  As we shall see, history suggests that the American people won't buy an argument based on hopelessness, which we can call the desperation defense.  After all, Americans tend to be optimistic and solution-oriented.  And so if an elected official can't solve the problem, throw him out and give someone else a chance.  That's the American Way.

Superhero Obama Fights 'Online Lies'?  The New York Times sounded a little giddy on the front page of its "Business" section April 21 with the headline "Obama Joins Fight to Curb Online Lies."  This spin strongly suggests former President Barack Obama never lies.  He's a valiant warrior against lies.  That came after a badly disguised press release at CNN.com on Obama "urgently throwing himself into the fight against disinformation."  As usual, they make it sound like a superhero has landed whenever Obama arrives on the scene.  Never mind PolitiFact giving Obama the "Lie of the Year" in 2013 for when he said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."  Never mind Obama's baldfaced lies in 2012 that the Benghazi consulate attack wasn't a terrorist thing; it was a protest of an Islamophobic YouTube video that got out of hand.  As if the Islamic radicals brought grenade launchers to a "protest."  This underlines why the liberal media should not be trusted in a "disinformation" fight.  They have a frustrating tendency to put themselves on the side of "information" and conservatives on the side of "disinformation."

No, Trump Did Not 'Storm Off the Set' of Piers Morgan's Interview Show.  On one level, the claim by media personality Piers Morgan that Donald Trump "stormed off" the set when he brought up the 2020 presidential election is just plain creepy.  But if the only side of the story you get is from Morgan trying to goose ratings for his new show — the side the mainstream media wants you to see — Trump comes off as an unhinged maniac.

Deceptive Edits:  Audio Contradicts Piers Morgan, Shows He Warped Trump Interview Ending in Promo.  Audio provided by former President Donald Trump's team to Breitbart News of the end of Trump's interview with Piers Morgan proves that Morgan and his team deceptively edited the interview to make it appear as though it was a contentious ending when it was not.  A 30-second promotional clip that Morgan released on Wednesday afternoon seemed to show Trump flying off the handle and walking out mid-interview as a righteous Morgan asked him tough questions about his views on the 2020 election.  But the full story seems to indicate that Morgan's team deceptively edited the clips together to make it as nasty as possible for Trump — and to drive up the ratings for Morgan's new show.  Morgan's new show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, launches next week on Talk TV, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers — If They're Not White.  Frank James, the man arrested for Tuesday's New York City subway shooting, is a black nationalist and outspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics.  A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that.  In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, James's race is not mentioned.  The same is true for the coverage offered up by Reuters; the Washington Post only mentioned James's race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for "low-income Black youths."  Media critics on the right say that the conspicuous omission of James's race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which deemphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders.  But is it a real pattern?  Yes.  A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders.  These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender's race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020 and the protests that followed.

Ten Steps to Totalitarianism.  Does anybody still think totalitarianism can't happen here?  Ask yourself how many of these steps we've already galloped past. [... #4] Control over Communication:  There is a reason Western governments have begun aggressively attacking free speech as "misinformation" or "disinformation": the power to communicate ideas to the broader public threatens governments' monopoly over "official" truths.  Traditional forms of mass communication — newspapers, radio broadcasts, and television shows — are operated by so few corporations that the State has no problem influencing, if not outright controlling, the information disseminated to the public.  In contrast, social media platforms and independent publishing sites permit citizens (in theory) to bypass State censors, regulators, and other information gatekeepers to communicate directly with large numbers of other citizens.  See why governments spend so much time targeting free speech as "hate speech" or "harmful information" that must be banned?

The Chicago Thinker Staged a Media Regime Takedown This Week.  This week, the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics (IOP) and The Atlantic magazine hosted a "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy" conference, and we have to hand it to IOP Director David Axlerod for bringing in true experts on the subject.  The conference featured some of America's greatest purveyors of disinformation, such as Barack Obama, Brian Stelter, Anne Applebaum, and a few token conservatives, including Jonah Goldberg and Adam Kinzinger.  The media, government, and academia elites speaking at the conference weren't expecting to be challenged as they self-righteously spewed more lies — but our team at the Chicago Thinker was prepared to hold them accountable.  Student journalists from the Chicago Thinker respectfully listened, asked honest questions, and reported.  Our efforts soon went viral, garnering millions of views on social media.  We successfully turned the IOP's "Disinformation Conference" on its head and sparked a national conversation about the corporate media's disinformation.

Has Biden become expendable?  [Scroll down]  Before the 2020 election, a story broke regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, which was abandoned at John Paul Mac Isaac's Delaware repair shop.  Along with reports that Biden's laptop contained disturbing images of a sexual nature, there were allegations that presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son had compromising financial dealings with Ukraine worth millions of dollars.  Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter, confirmed on Fox's The Tucker Carlson Show that Hunter's troubling emails were legitimate.  The New York Post confirmed the authenticity of the laptop and published articles regarding some of its shady contents.  That's when the formidable socialist propaganda apparatus went into full cover-up mode.  The New York Times and Washington Post dismissed the laptop story.  Democrats attacked anyone discussing the laptop and labeled the entire subject a Russian disinformation scheme.  Social media banned The New York Post from sharing the story, and countless bloggers sharing the story saw their social media accounts suspended.  Now, 18 months after Biden became president, the corrupt media have come out to say Hunter's laptop is genuine.

The Legacy Media Have Not Conceded the Laptop Reporting — And They Don't Deserve Credit.  In the last two weeks, the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post all came forward to admit that the Hunter Biden hard drive — which I originally reported a year and a half ago in the lead-up to the 2020 election and saw those outlets dismiss and smear the stories as "baroque mythology," "made up," "Soviet tradecraft," and "disparaging Biden" — was authentic.  However, despite initial admissions, the media are now stopping short of acknowledging the reporting on the information the hard drive contained — namely, that Joe Biden was a direct beneficiary of Hunter's deals.  Instead, they are inviting the people who come from the very institutions that outright lied and purposely misrepresented the laptop and its contents in the first place to continue lying and misrepresenting the laptop and its contents.

The media lies about Obamacare ... and everything else.  Now that Joe Biden's touting Obamacare and bringing President Obama along for the ride at the White House, the media still acts like Obamacare is great even though Obama and others continuously lied to get it passed and then lied about the results.  It's par for the course because they are such a dishonest crew.  The media also is a great supporter of Obama and Biden as they lied to get the deals done with Iran which continues to support terrorists and continues to pledge death to America[.]  The media acts like it is treasonous to oppose election results and that no one did it before Trump.  Yet they always support Democrats who challenged results in 2000, 2004, and 2016 in Congress.  The media and other Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president for four years.  They impeached him twice for pure garbage.  The media and others spread the lie that a white cop shot Michael Brown when his hands were up, and he was backing away.  How many cops have been injured and killed because of this intentional lie?

A World Gone Mad.  Governments everywhere, including here in the USA, have abandoned God, good government, law and order, common sense, and traditional Judeo-Christian values.  They have jumped in with both feet into the dark and shadow without bothering to look back at seeing what they have already wrought. [...] The political absurdity and hypocrisy has reached the highest level I have ever seen.  The 3.8% unemployment announced in February is an historic achievement, but the 3.6% unemployment rate during the Trump years is a crisis.

The Unanimously Liberal Tilt of the 'Fact Checkers'.  Now that the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings are complete, we have collected another fascinating exhibit of the leftist tilt of "independent fact checkers."  Just try and find a single fact check on anything Judge Jackson said.  Try and find a single evaluation of any statement by a Democratic politician touting Jackson — from Biden and Dick Durbin on down.  Checking liberals and Democrats is apparently not listed among their job duties.  On March 28, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates addressed Judge Jackson's qualifications.  Bates claimed what speaks to the strength of her public record "is the multitude of fact-checks from the press, from retired judges, and from former prosecutors who have dismantled attacks brought by a small group of GOP senators."  "Dismantling" Republican critiques is the job of the Fact Check community?  That's what it looks like.

The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020.  The left-wing news media didn't just poison the information environment with their incessantly negative coverage of President Trump going into the 2020 election.  They also refused to give airtime to important arguments of the Republican campaign — both pro-Trump and anti-Biden — which meant millions of voters cast their ballots knowing only what the media permitted them to know about the candidates.  To measure the true effect of the media's censorship on the election, the Media Research Center asked The Polling Company to survey 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), six of which (all but North Carolina) were called for Biden.  We tested these voters' knowledge of eight news stories — all important topics that our ongoing analysis had shown the liberal news media had failed to cover properly.  We found that a huge majority (82%) of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of these key items, with five percent saying they were unaware of all eight of the issues we tested.  This lack of information proved crucial:  One of every six Biden voters we surveyed (17%) said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories.  A shift of this magnitude would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden, and Donald Trump would have comfortably won a second term as president.

Flashback: MSNBC, CNN, CBS told viewers Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.  The New York Times last week confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's missing laptop, a story which was originally dismissed as Russian disinformation by many liberal media outlets leading up to the 2020 presidential election.  Television hosts, guests and journalists quickly took to the airwaves in October 2020, reassuring viewers that the laptop was "unverifiable," likely tied to the Kremlin, and the product of a smear campaign orchestrated by former President Trump and his allies.  "We start this hour with the tale of international espionage connected to a close confidante of the President of the United States," MSNBC's Ali Velshi said on Oct. 17, 2020.  "The president was reportedly warned that his personal attorney, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was the target of a Russian intelligence operation, a story that is unraveling to reveal allegations of disinformation, dirty tricks and a federal probe over Russian efforts to disparage Joe Biden."

15 Media Personalities Who Have Permanently Damaged Their Reputation by Peddling the Lie That the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was the Work of Russian Propagandists:.  MSNBC's executive producer Kyle Griffin; Publisher of the Ink Anand Giridharadas; Daily Beast reporter Wajahat Ali; Managing editor of Truthorfiction.com Brooke Binkowski; NBC News correspondent Heidi Przybyla; Writer Chip Franklin; MSNBC contributor Ben Rhodes; Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot; MSNBC's Naveed Jamali; Mother Jones Publication; CNN anchor and Humpty Dumpty cosplayer Brian Stelter; CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian; MSNBC Morning Joe's regular contributor Dave Aronberg; and CNN anchor Jim Sciutto.  Congratulations to you — dark marks all around!  For a little fun, we'll have to run this list against the list of folks who insisted Trump colluded with Russia (that's for another time).

The Press Has Lied To Drag The United States Into War Before.  Don't Think They Won't Again.  When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the "Ghost of Kyiv" to that Snake Island story to old photos taken years ago, you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it censors conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less).  It wouldn't be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war. [...] George Orwell, who fought alongside Republican forces, wrote in his memoir "Homage to Catalonia" that "for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie."  "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.  I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened," he recalled.  "I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.'"

Liberals, Conservatives, and Russia:  The Drama Triangle.  With friends like liberal media, who needs enemies?  Their virtue signaling and political spin over Ukraine is so revolting that if I didn't know better, I'd turn against Ukraine like so many conservative commentators already have.  But having lived in both Russia and Ukraine, I know better.  Just as revolting is seeing previously trusted conservative sites and TV hosts defending Russia and tarring Ukraine.  Children act like that when adults apply reverse psychology.  What's their excuse?  I'm not naming names because I'd like to believe they are acting in good faith and are simply misguided by crafty spinners.  Reading Russian and Ukrainian sources in the original, I know exactly who in this war is spinning lies and who is fighting for truth and freedom.  Believe me, not every enemy of the liberal media is our ally or deserves sympathy.  Sometimes the enemy of our enemy is an even bigger enemy.

Tucker Carlson Revisits the Media People Who Manipulated the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.  On his evening broadcast [3/17/2022] Fox news host Tucker Carlson took a historic look at how the media manipulated the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to protect Joe Biden as a candidate.  These same media personalities claim they are credible, and viciously attack anyone who points out their lies.  The example of the Biden laptop should forever dispatch any credibility they claim to hold.  [Video clip]  Not included in the Carlson review, but one of the most transparently biased segments on the Biden laptop issue, was the interview between CNN disinformation specialist Christiane Amanpour and Liz Harrington.  Given the recent revelations about the authenticity of the Biden laptop, watch this video of Amanpour trying to protect the regime.  [Video clip]

Why was the Hunter Biden laptop story covered up?  It's now a familiar pattern — a sensational news story is dismissed by serious journalists as bogus fake right-wing agitprop.  You'd have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to believe that.  You don't want to be one of those.  Then, a year or so later, the same important media organs, the same authorities who made you feel crazy for thinking that the story might be credible, turn around and tell you that, yep, it was true all along.  It was just politically awkward to say so at the time. [...] When the New York Post reported in October 2020 on Hunter's marvellous laptop — and the potentially incriminating documents on its hard drive — the New York Times, CNN and others went to great lengths to attack the Post's reporting:  it was, liberals insisted, a Trump-led hit job so therefore not credible.  Twitter and Facebook actually censored the story.  There was an election on and almost nobody wanted to be accused of doing anything that might stop Joe Biden kicking Trump out of the White House.  But the Hunter laptop story raises serious concerns about the Biden family and the role Joe Biden played as Vice President, especially in 2014 when he took the lead on the Ukraine crisis.  It's well-known that Hunter had a ludicrously well paid job at the Ukrainian mining company Burisma, despite having little qualifications for the role beyond his surname.

Another Round of Ukraine Hoaxes Discovered?  The propaganda out of the Ukraine/Hollywood association is continuing unabated.  In a Twitter video today, pushed by Buzzfeed Journalist Christopher Miller, the claim is, "President Zelensky walked to a hospital today to visit wounded Ukrainian soldiers and award them with state honors for their sacrifices."  [Tweet]  However, alert researchers noted the woman to Zelenskyy's left, in the video, is a physician named Inna Derusova.  She was reported to have died on February 26th.  [Tweet]  As we said from the outset, do not take anything at face value.  Question everything that is being presented.  The level of western propaganda to support the intents of the U.S./NATO and multinational community are extreme.

Media Outlets Continue To Portray Pro-Biden Lincoln Project as 'Republican' Organization.  The Lincoln Project is a scandal-plagued super PAC dedicated to supporting President Joe Biden and helping Democrats win elections.  In October 2021, for example, Lincoln Project operatives dressed as neo-Nazis crashed a Glenn Youngkin campaign event in a misguided effort to besmirch the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.  (It didn't work.)  Nevertheless, mainstream media outlets continue to portray the Lincoln Project and its senior members as "Republicans" or "right-of-center" pundits whose opinions actually matter, or are substantively different from those of a generic liberal pundit.  (They aren't; they don't; they aren't.)  Last month, the Hill published an article about how "Republicans are reveling in their hatred of Joe Biden."  It includes several quotes from Lincoln Project adviser Stuart Stevens, who is described as a "prominent GOP consultant."  Stevens, who wrote a book renouncing his former party, does not even consider himself a Republican.  He has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and Republican politicians to the genocidal maniac's Nazi enablers.

The Six Biggest "Fake News" Stories About The Russia-Ukraine Conflict.  [Scroll down]  Before I start making points about the fake news being shoved down our throats with Ukraine, I first must make my high-level opinion clear:  Russia's behavior has been horrific, they are the cause of the war, and I strongly support Ukraine with the conflict, particularly the Ukrainian people.  Meanwhile it is also obvious that there is a concerted effort being conducted by the left and their media to mischaracterize the realities on the ground.  The photographs I reference — which include the picture that is featured in this article — have been plastered everywhere, particularly on social media platforms and have been misrepresented by scores of blue check mark buffoons on Twitter.  The truth is, these images show President Volodymyr Zelensky during military exercises last October in the disputed Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine, months before Russia's invasion.

Be skeptical about media coverage of Ukraine.  If you have been monitoring the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, it is amply clear that a narrative is being pushed.  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is being compared to Winston Churchill during World War II; he is leading his people during perilous times to become an inspiring figure.  He refused a safe passage offer from the U.S. with the quip:  "I need ammunition, not a ride".  He streams videos from the deserted streets of Ukraine and posts photos with his cabinet.  Photos of Zelenskyy surface in military gear on the battlefront.  To sum it up, Zelensky is being portrayed as Churchill, Rambo and social media influencers all rolled into one. [...] It is all so poignant and inspiring until you fact-check the images.  The photos of Zelensky in military gear were from February 11, 2021, and April 9, 2021.  The photo of the Russian soldier holding Ukrainian girls at gunpoint was a 2005 photo from the West Bank.  Neither the first lady of Ukraine nor the former Miss Ukraine is joining the armed forces.  The teary farewell of Ukrainian soldiers amidst the invasion was actually a photo of the happy homecoming moment of U.S. Marines.

'Fact Checkers' Silent as Lyin' Joe Biden Perpetuates Disgusting Capitol Riot Whopper.  In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, it became very clear that the mainstream media and Democrats were going to milk the incident for all it was worth.  Initial reports talked of Capitol police officers being "murdered" by Trump-supporting rioters as they broke through glass doorways and breached the Capitol building.  It was those early false stories that were in part used by Democrats to make their impeachment "case" against then-President Donald Trump.  Within a few days, that narrative along with others began to implode.  But it took a few weeks before we saw the first major signs that the media was trying to correct itself.

The Right 'Loves Putin' And Other Lies The Media Tell About Trump And Russia.  What is it about Russia and Vladimir Putin that forces the American national media to lie, make things up, and blurt out statements that have no basis in reality?  The latest fiction is that Republicans and conservatives have a newfound affinity for Putin.  If you only watched MSNBC or read The New York Times, you'd be forgiven for holding the impression that all of Fox News and the Republican party have draped themselves in Russian flags and set up GoFundMes for the invasion of Ukraine.  The Times on Sunday [2/27/2022] ran the headline, "How the American Right Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Russia," by Emily Tamkin. [...] Her argument might have been a little stronger if she included more searing examples of praise for Putin, like the time Trump called him a "master tactician."  Wait, sorry.  That was actually how The New York Times itself described the Russian president in mid-February.  And also in October 2020.

Facebook's Election Fact-Checker Spreads Fake Footage Of Artillery Impacts In A Populated Area In Ukraine.  When Russia launched an attack on Ukraine earlier this week, people around the world watched in shock and horror as airstrikes hit the country and tanks began rolling in.  "The prayers of the world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces," wrote President Joe Biden in a tweet Wednesday night.  But in the last few days, it's become clear that while some of the footage and images being disseminated across social media are depicting the tragic beginnings of a new war, some are not actually what they appear.  Some of the photos and footage being shared on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok appear to be fake, some are from previous conflicts years ago, explosions in other countries, or even from video games.

A New Age of Barbarism.  Political leaders in the US, Canada, Germany, and France — all NATO countries — got back on script yesterday. [...] The part we do not see is that many of these people — together with media organs and administrators of many deep-state bureaucracies — are absolutely thrilled to start a new season.  Away with the appalling mismanagement of the pathogen.  Away with public anger toward the lockdowns and mandates.  Forget the collapse in children's literacy, the rise in cancer, the waves of depression, the trucker protests, the collapsing polls of many elected leaders, and forget too the inflation, the federal debt, supply-chain snarls and goods shortages.  Forget all the astonishing botches of everything.  Life was never as good in living memory as when we had a solid foreign enemy named Russia with a leader with a name and a face.  Everything wrong with the world could be personalized, and with storybook thematics:  good vs evil, freedom vs despotism, democracy vs dictatorship.  This great struggle was so good for both sides that they made it last 40 years.

Cops, convoys, conservatives, and tyranny.  The Mainstream Media inform us that Canadian authorities have "cleared out" the truckers who had the temerity to think they could peacefully protest their government's COVID vaccination-and-quarantine mandates.  Note the choice of terminology:  "Cleared out," as one would clear out an infestation of vermin.  In the propaganda game, words must be chosen carefully and deliberately, and the propaganda-meisters of today (who not only "manage" the news, but frequently just invent it) make the infamous Dr. Goebbels look like a mere tyro. [...] Anyone who's spent time on America's highways and observed big trucks knows that the Confederate battle flag (the "Stars'n'Bars") is an emblem frequently displayed on such trucks, and not just in the South, in numbers far in excess of those few that were seen on Canadian trucks.  But the handful of such flags seen on the Canadian trucks were enough for "journalists" to declare that such flags were proof that the Freedom Convoy was in reality a rally of "white supremacists."

Why They're So Afraid of the Truckers.  [Scroll down]  Claims linking the Canadian truckers' convoy to Nazis appeared in the Guardian, Vox, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, the (ironically-named) Independent, NBC, Reuters, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and many more.  Each of those 10 sources contains a line similar to this, "The truckers have been joined by various groups, including some displaying Nazi symbols and damaging public monuments."  None contained one picture or video to support the smear.  The smears remind us of the recent effort to associate the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia with fascists.  In that incident, anti-Republican activists, including the Lincoln Project, donned costumes to pose as racist supporters of the candidate.  We're also reminded of the recent criminal conviction of Jussie Smollett for staging a fake hate crime to smear Trump supporters.  We're also reminded of the many successful lawsuits by Nick Sandmann who the media falsely accused of hate crimes.  A more responsible media would have provided proof before coordinating yet another smear against a political movement.

The absurd 'Russiagate' Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post.  "For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest," the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, "that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."  Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by the Washington Post and the New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.  It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy that we now know never existed.  Oh, it was "deeply sourced," in that deep-state Democratic bureaucrats, furious that Trump had won the White House, were falling over themselves to talk anonymously to reporters.

Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake Destroys Fake News Media.  Trump-endorsed Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake's first television campaign advertisement will air.  Her ad will only run during news shows on news stations across Arizona.  Lake has a history of exposing fake news [...] and she is doing it now with a commercial that they must play.  The video, titled "Rigged Elections Have Consequences" calls out the fake news media for their silence on the 2020 election and lists the terrible consequences we face, including our weak southern border.

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations.  One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government's criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann.  That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann's waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts.  In doing so, it revealed that "enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to intelligence agencies hoping to frame Trump as a Russia-connected stooge."

Axios Tries, and Fails, to Spin the Bad Economy.  At Axios, Dan Primack tries to wave away the terrible polling on the state of the economy by pretending that it is the inevitable "byproduct of a politics in which the economy is reflexively disparaged by those out of power."  It's not.  It's the "byproduct" of an economy that isn't good.

All the Lies That Are Fit to Print.  Ashley Rindberg's [new book] exposes the New York Times and its longstanding ideological roots.  Rindberg offers an illuminating historical study of how the Times repeatedly has engaged in spreading lies about National Socialism, Communism, and other authoritarian regimes and various political situations around the world.  This has been a clear pattern for decades, claims Rindsberg, and it's not difficult to see what he means.  During World War II, for example, the Times refused to acknowledge the gravity of Hitler's regime, and the correspondents would often, quite literally and openly, use Nazi propaganda points in their articles.  Was it denial of the reality that Hitler's regime brought about or actual antisemitic support for the regime?  In 1935, Frederick Birchall, one of the Times' journalists, wrote an article about the Olympics that were then taking place in Berlin.  The anti-Jewish riots were happening during the athletic event yet Birchall decided to minimize them and focus on the glory of the Olympics.

Why Newspapers Refuse to Correct Errors.  Many iconic U.S. newspapers sport slogans that seek to explain their mission — and self-image.  "All the News That's Fit to Print" has been called "the seven most famous words in American journalism."  "Democracy Dies in Darkness" was an overtly partisan call to arms.  But the most telling section of a newspaper's true values is its "Corrections" page.  That's where journalism distinguishes itself from just about every other profession, routinely and straightforwardly admitting its mistakes.  Who else does that?  It is a soul-crushing enterprise.  A single misspelled name is all it takes to ruin an otherwise stellar article.  We reporters may forget the topic of the piece we wrote last week, while the error five years ago is seared into our memories.  But it is also crucial:  Reader trust is the lifeblood of journalism.  If you can't believe what you read, why bother?

Avenatti and the Media Swindlers.  If you want to feed on fake news, be bombarded by endless praise-filled coverage of scoundrels whose fame is undeserved, and listen to just plain idiocy, keep watching television news.  With the latest conviction of former media star Michael Avenatti, I've made my case.  Not only does the story of his rise and fall illustrate my point, but the failure of the media that gave him so much praise and coverage is not the end of it.  Their lack of curiosity about his funding, even to this day, further condemns them as mere propagandists for the Left.

American Truckers Organizing Freedom Convoy to DC but Here Come the Censors.  The Freedom Convoy that made it across Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa is now occupying the streets in front of Parliament and is being supported by people in their efforts against vaccine mandates. [...] American truckers are now trying to follow in the footsteps of their Northern brethren — organizing a similar convoy from California to Washington, D.C., to stand against government overreach.  But Facebook is trying to stop them, removing the page from which they were organizing the effort.  Facebook claimed that the page was violating policies around QAnon.  Just as there was an effort to smear the Canadian effort by Justin Trudeau and some in liberal media, even claiming it was somehow associated with Russia, it looks like they're going after the U.S. effort.

Canadian Media Claims Russia is Behind the Truckers Freedom Protest.  As if the media can't get anymore desperate to brush aside the fact their own citizens are adamantly opposed to the vax mandates, this fake news host just claimed the entire thing is due to Russia.  Once again proving the leftist media will do anything to make up a news story in order to fit their current agenda, which currently appears to be start a war with Russia to deflect everyones attention away from the fact people are openly rebelling against them.  If a war does start, make no mistake, the government will try to round up people who have zero to do with Russia and everything to do with not complying with the leftist globalist agenda.  [Video clip]

When Will People Finally See the Obvious?  Consider the number of things the Left has been willing to lie to the American people about in recent years.  The short list includes:  COVID, suppressing its origins and effective means of treatment; January 6, 2021, touted as worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined and jailing Capitol trespassers for over a year without trial dates; Hunter Biden's laptop, immediately and roundly dismissed as "Russian disinformation"; destructive and deadly riots blithely labeled "mostly peaceful protests"; and parents at school board meetings protesting critical race theory viciously defamed and treated as would-be "domestic terrorists."  But between all of these (and so many more) major news stories, Americans en masse have begun to wake up and search for the truth outside what's being spoon-fed (and in some cases shovel-fed) to them by the corporate left-wing media. [...] So why has this leap of faithlessness not jumped over to the obvious facts of the 2020 election?  Those currently in power have a clear track record of covering up the truth on major news stories, but we're somehow supposed to believe what they say about the 2020 election?

Is This 'Leaked' Video Real Or Staged?  The Khaki-clad Patriot Front group was out protesting again today — This time at the March for Life in Washington DC.  Two weeks ago this mysterious khaki-clad group showed up at the Chicago March for Life for some reason. [...] In spite of all that there seems to be little media interest in digging deep to find out what's really going on with this group and who its members are.  There is, however, plenty of interest in videos that purport to show Patriot Front members using Nazi language and gestures.  One that is said to have been leaked is making the rounds.  Does this seem staged, or authentic?  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
Ask yourself:  Who would benefit if it's genuine?  Nobody.  Who would benefit if it's fake but believable?  The Democrats.

Gorsuch, Sotomayor Push Back On NPR Story Claiming He Refused To Wear A Mask Despite Request.  Associate Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor put out a joint statement on Wednesday denying a recent report that Gorsuch refused to wear a mask during oral arguments, forcing Sotomayor to participate in proceedings remotely.  National Public Radio legal correspondent Nina Totenberg claimed in a Tuesday column that Gorsuch refused a request from Chief Justice John Roberts that all justices wear masks during oral arguments as a result of Sotomayor's fears about the Omicron variant.  Sotomayor, who has diabetes, "has not attended the justices' weekly conference in person, joining instead by telephone" as a result of Gorsuch's refusal, Totenberg wrote.  "Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us.  It is false.  While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends," the two justices said.

NPR's Story About a SCOTUS Spat over Justices Wearing Masks Looks Like a Massive Pile of Fake News.  It seems even the most prestigious legal institution in the land is not immune to COVID, that is the politics of it all.  The Court did strike down the employer-based COVID vaccine mandate the Biden administration was pushing that was going to be enforced by OSHA. Yet, it didn't come before we all saw how wrong the liberal wing of the Court was on the issue.  I'm not talking about legal differences.  I'm talking about facts.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed that 100,000 kids were hospitalized with COVID and on ventilators.  She also said Omicron was just as deadly as Delta.  Not true.  This is what happens when you only watch CNN or MSNBC all day.  These people are deciding the fate of millions in the workforce and four of them consumed, digested, and believed in pure science fiction.  Luckily, that OSHA mandate was struck down 6-3.  Yet, the COVID antics have not stopped.  There are reports that Chief Justice John Roberts ordered all members to wear a mask at oral arguments.  Justice Gorsuch refused which forced Justice Sotomayor to work remotely.  Now, here's where the red flag comes in — it's an NPR story.

More about NPR.

Conspiracies as Realities, Realities as Conspiracies.  Consider that the Trump election of 2016, the transition, and the first two years of the Trump presidency were undermined by a media-progressive generated hoax of "Russian collusion."  The "bombshell" and "walls are closing in" mythologies dominated the network news and cable outlets.  It took five years to expose them as rank agit-prop.  Robert Mueller and his "dream team" consumed $40 million of Americans' money and 22 months of our time — to find the nothingburger that most of the country already knew was nothing.  Yet the subtext of the 2018 Democratic takeover of the House was the media narrative that Trump, as Hillary Clinton put it, was an "illegitimate" president, due to Russian collusion.  Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed on national television that Trump was a "Russian asset."  Former CIA head John Brennan assured the nation that the president was "treasonous," due to his supposed "lies to the American people."  All sorts of politicians, retired military, and news anchors echoed the charges.  The lies and myths of has-been British spy Christopher Steele made him a leftist hero.  They were repeated ad nauseam as truth.

Is the tide finally turning?  On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business "skin-backs."  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that's particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.  I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.  So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

Fact Check:  Fact-Checkers Falsely Claim They Are Fact-Checkers.  Defending the ruling regime in Washington is a tough job with a lot of moving parts.  To keep everyone on message and to make sure that only the regime's message is the controlling one in the public square, you need committed politicians, woke multinational corporations, corporate media, and devoutly loyal followers who will echo that message far and wide.  Not all of these echo chambers are created equal.  For example, in the corporate media, some get to host to the fancy nighttime cable shows and make massive salaries while others have to handle the less glamorous and talent-demanding work, like pumping out endless "fact checks."  These lower-level operatives serve their purpose in service of the regime, however.  They supply the committed masses with clickbait that can be amplified by those eager to believe that the regime's message is not only preferable but is the absolute and only truth.  They exist to make us believe that to be on the side of the regime's message is to be on the side of the facts.

January 6 and the real 'Big Lie'.  [Scroll down]  The real Big Lie has been — and is still being — aided, abetted, and promoted by the Big Liars in the mainstream media.  No longer lie-detectors, they are lie-projectors, smear merchants, enemies of the people so full of it that industrial-sized enemas couldn't clean them out.  Bizarrely binary, they are nothing more than Deep State-approved mouth organs of the Democrat party, essentially state-run organizations when Democrats are in power and sworn enemies of the state when Republicans hold office.  They are Merchants of Menace.  The clowns at MSNBC, the Lolita-lovers at CNN, the "ladies" on The View, and the partisan pseudo-journalist hacks at fish-wrap factories like The New York Times and The Washington Post all routinely say the same things... in the same way.  They consistently beclown themselves but are not open-minded enough to realize it.

Top five media lies of 2021.  [#2] Ma'Khia Bryant was murdered by a racist police officer:  In April, a police officer shot Ma'Khia Bryant, a black teenager in Columbus, Ohio, as she was trying to stab another girl.  The footage from the officer's body camera made it very clear that the shooting was justified and the officer acted to save the woman's life.  The corporate media ran with the story that Ma'Khia Bryant had been murdered by a police officer because of her race.  Many outlets, such as the New York Times and The Daily Beast, even claimed she was unarmed at the moment of the shooting.

Pandemic Response Will Be Used As Model for "Climate Crisis" Response.  Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have assured worried populations that their policies would contain the virus, prevent infections, and save lives.  After two weeks of shutting down the country and sealing ourselves off, we would "flatten the curve" and then proceed with our lives as normal.  As we round out the second year of the "two weeks," I also recall that Biden's COVID advisor Dr. Anthony Facui assured us that once we hit 70% vaccination rates, we would no longer see surges in coronavirus cases. [...] One of the advantages about living through this pandemic is that we have the ability to see scientific "experts" fail in their projections in real time.  We have also observed politically connected bureaucrats stifle robust and essential scientific debate, as they colluded with the media to silence well qualified opposition to the latest pet theories and policies.  For example, Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email to Facui concerned about the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement developed by Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns.  The two organized a media smear campaign to paint these scientists as "fringe".

A Myth is Born:  How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies That Outlives The Truth.  When a Texas cattleman, seventy-nine, died last September in New Mexico after contracting covid, his family never anticipated the worldwide headlines that would ensue.  In a ballyhooed press conference, New Mexico Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase, the state's top health chief, announced New Mexico's first ivermectin "overdose," soon adding a second fatality allegedly from "ivermectin toxicity."  Now, Scrase has acknowledged that his repeated, what he called "offhand," assertions were groundless.  Two deaths were not caused by ivermectin, a long-used generic drug that was emerging as a covid treatment.  Instead, he said that the pair died because they "actually just delayed their care with covid."  That is a big difference.  Scrase backpedaled on December 1 in a little-noticed online press briefing and only after we pressed his agency to provide evidence for its claims of so-called "ivermectin deaths."  Officials had repeatedly said they were awaiting a toxicology report on the cattleman's death.  Yet we learned that the report was never even ordered or done, and, moreover, the man's death was ruled by the state's coroner as being from "natural" causes.

In 2021, Media Did More to Erode Trust Than to Repair It.  The case of actor Jussie Smollett's fake hate crime came to a conclusion this month, revealing that media outlets still are eager to pounce on a racially divisive story and cast blame, but reluctant to examine themselves when the story falls apart. [...] Earlier this month, Smollett was convicted of five of six counts of disorderly conduct, all stemming from his lies to Chicago police about the "hate crime" he staged with the help of others.  And how did the media react to this outcome?  Not well, and in some cases, not at all.  ABC News, which had featured Smollett and allowed the actor to elaborate on the hoax in 2019, failed to tell viewers that his trial was underway.  When Smollett's guilty verdicts were announced, the entire prime-time lineup on MSNBC completely ignored the news, despite the fact that the network was one of the principal promoters of Smollett's original claims.  An incredible headline on CNN muttered:  "Jussie Smollett guilty on some charges," blatantly downplaying the multiple verdicts.  It would have been more accurate to say "most charges," or even better, the precisely accurate "five of six."  And finally, some wondered why we were talking about the Smollett verdicts at all.

Glenn Greenwald Points To The One Moment That Changed The Pandemic And Destroyed Trust In Media.  Journalist Glenn Greenwald said in a Tuesday [12/28/2021] Twitter thread that there was one single moment that changed media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic — and that when it "flipped overnight," it destroyed trust in media.  The death of George Floyd — at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — and the massive protests it inspired prompted a near-180 turn from multiple media outlets that had just spent the previous weeks telling Americans that the only patriotic thing to do was stay home to stop the spread of the virus.  "This was a pivotal moment in the pandemic's history," Greenwald began.  "For 4 months, the message was clear and unrelenting:  everyone must stay home.  Those who leave — even to go to a deserted beach — are reckless sociopaths.  It flipped overnight to endorse a mass protest movement liberals liked." [...] "That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they'd politicize their expertise when convenient," Greenwald continued, referencing experts who had joined media broadcasts to argue that systemic racism and police brutality posed greater health risks than the rapidly-spreading virus.  "Corporate media celebrated a [...] lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests."

Biden's Approval Ratings Are Inflated.  There has been a lot of publicity around Joe Biden's poor approval ratings, but I think his actual standing with the electorate is worse than they indicate.  Take, for example, the Rasmussen survey, which I think is valuable because 1) unlike other polls, it samples likely voters, and 2) it polls constantly, publishing a three-day rolling average.  Thus, whether the numbers are "right" or not, they are a good indicator of trends.  In Joe Biden's case, the trend has been obvious:  his approval rating quickly dropped to around 42%, and there it sits.  But I don't believe that 40+% of voters, surveying the wreckage of the last year, actually think that Biden is doing a good job.  Some of them are lying to the pollster, out of party loyalty.  We saw the same thing during the Obama administration.  It is more revealing to see how voters assess a president's performance on specific issues.

People Demand Rachel Maddow, MSNBC Apologize for False COVID Comments.  [Scroll down]  But Fauci wasn't the only one facing criticism today.  The other person was Rachel Maddow.  However, it wasn't for anything that she said recently; it was for comments that she made back in March that people were now calling into question.  Viewers were demanding an apology from Maddow and MSNBC for this video from March 29, in which she claimed that if you were vaccinated, it would stop the virus in its tracks and prevent transmission. [Tweet with video clip]  Maddow said, "Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person."  "A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she continued.  "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people."  Maddow stated that vaccines "would get us to the end of this," meaning the end of the pandemic.  This is just untrue.  While the transmission is allegedly less likely, vaccinated people can still get the virus and spread it.

The Covid fear factory is trembling.  [Scroll down]  At this point the question naturally arises:  Why is it that the public health establishment and the media are working hard to generate a tide of public hysteria around Omicron? [...] It's not by chance that the media is obsessing about case count.  Case counts are one of the most deceptive measures of pandemic severity when symptoms are mild to non-existent in the majority of the infected.

What do the UK Vaccine Surveillance Reports tell us?  [Scroll down]  Each time when we've heard "The pandemic of the unvaccinated" from the media and politicians, we can be reasonably sure that they are not talking about the actual health of those people, for whatever reason, do not take the vaccine.  Instead, they have actually been concerned about "Overwhelming the healthcare system" with unvaccinated people.  However, the raw data from the UK health systems shows that more vaccinated people than unvaccinated ones were using the healthcare system.  There is no such "raw data" available in the U.S. All we can find is some kind of rate.  CDC once had a CDC MMWR report that was based on the data from 13 U.S. jurisdictions.  That report stated that, once Delta appeared, vaccinated people reduced their risk of infection by five times, and both their risk of hospitalization and risk of death by more than ten times.  The report acknowledges that the data from 13 jurisdictions "might not be generalizable," and that's true.  It's nonsense.  Nevertheless, the Mainstream Media and politicians immediately started to propagandize based on that report.

Here There Be Monsters.  Tech company oligarchs, media conglomerates, and pharmaceutical companies have collaborated with the federal government to encapsulate Americans in a fantasy of incomplete, misleading, false, and contrived information.  Unlike the federal government, the predominant social media are not constrained in disregarding the First Amendment, and routinely engage in outright censorship and speech suppression.  As long as it serves the government's purposes, curtailing its opponents' free speech is fine.  All U.S. "mainstream" media are owned and controlled by six corporations.  Those corporations call the shots on what does and does not get news coverage, how that coverage is fashioned, and its content.  To believe the U.S. "mainstream" media represent a free press is more an act of faith than believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.  Acts of outrageous media hypocrisy occur on a daily basis, always favoring the Left/government's preferences.  News censorship and content control are hallmarks of totalitarian government, and the U.S. checks both boxes today.

Here is the Mainstream Media in Israel Fabricating a Story.  If you wanted to see how corrupt the mainsteam media outlets are across the planet, here is several Israeli news organizations working together to fabricate the entire pandemic fraud that has swept the world.  They even recorded themselves setting the entire thing up, luckily, it allows us to see just how far they're going to setup these stories about hospitals being overwhelmed, mass deaths, etc.  [Video clip]

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Pravda.  Interesting short segment from Sky News interviewing the smiling U.K. Health Minister Gillian Keegan about the intense U.K. response to the Omicron variant and the new restrictions announced by government officials.  Great Britain is preparing for hundreds-of-thousands of Omicron cases.  [Video clip]

The High Price of Bidenomics.  American humorist Edgar Wilson Nye famously observed, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."  Recently, the White House and its numerous allies in the "news" media have been telling an increasingly skeptical electorate a similarly self-refuting tale about the Biden economy.  Typical of the stories that have appeared in major news outlets is this howler from CNN's Julian Zelizer, who insists that there is "a huge disconnect between the economic data and the way voters are feeling."  Anyone naïve enough to believe such balderdash will be disabused of their illusions by reading Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that the consumer price index (CPI) has risen by 6.8 percent during the 12-month period ending in November.

Liberal Media Pushes Bonkers Conspiracy Theory About Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is moving to create a civilian corps in his state to help when natural disasters like hurricanes hit.  Twenty-two other states already have the exact same thing, but the media is portraying it as a private militia to do DeSantis' personal bidding.  This is the same media that is constantly accusing others of spreading conspiracy theories.

Willie Horton and the Democratic Party's Greatest Fear.  [Scroll down]  Fast-forward to November 21, 2021. In the tranquil suburban community of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a vicious bigot named Darrell Brooks — free on bail with multiple pending felonies, one being his recent attempt to run over his onetime girlfriend with his SUV — allegedly drove through a Christmas parade, running down as many innocent people as he could, killing at least five, injuring some sixty more.  Media-watchers have already begun to comment on how relatively little detailed coverage there has been.  We have noticed blatant photo-editing techniques used to lighten the perpetrator's skin in media photos.  We have seen a surprising lack of MSM interest in both the man's history and his apparent motive.  We have seen, if anything, a textbook case in how to all but bury a story too big to dismiss.

Why Jussie Smollett deserves to be punished for his shameful hoax.  On January 29, 2019, African American actor Jussie Smollett who is gay claimed that two masked men wearing MAGA hats hurled racist and homophobic abuses at him.  He claims that they proceeded to punch him, pour a chemical substance over him, put a rope around his neck and berate him with "this is MAGA country."  He also claimed that he had received a hate mail consisting of a barrage of racist invectives.  The US mainstream media gleefully carried and amplified the story because it fits their narrative of far-right Trump supporters persecuting a gay man of color.  Instances such as these explain why very few in the US trust their news media.

The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the "White Supremacist" Label.  Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a "white supremacist."  Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact.  Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist" was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one's own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).  Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true.  This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event:  a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation.  Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.

It was an act of intentional, race-based, black-on-white, vehicular homicide.  It was not accidental.
Waukesha Parade Attack:  Debra Messing Blasts Media For Downplaying Massacre As An 'Accident'.  Actress Debra Messing took aim at the media for "minimizing" the attack that occurred at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  Darrell Brooks has been charged with intentional homicide after driving his SUV through a crowded street commemorating the holiday season, resulting in the deaths of six people ages 8 to 81 and injuring dozens more.  However, many media outlets had been referring to the attack as a "parade crash," downplaying the intent prosecutors have leveled against the career criminal.

Everything the Media Told You About Kyle Rittenhouse Was Wrong.  Last week's acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with the murder of two men in Kenosha, Wis., likely came as a shock to millions of Americans who had relied on the media to inform their understanding of the case.  From the time Rittenhouse killed two men on the streets of Kenosha last August, media characterizations of the event suggested his conviction was a foregone conclusion.  He was a troubled kid, "a high school dropout who viewed law enforcement as his personal heroes" and had "an affinity for guns."  Many took pains to point out that he had attended a rally for then-president Donald Trump.  A New York Times report found that he "showed strong support for officers."  The Daily Beast referred to him as a "fanatic."  The men Rittenhouse shot in self-defense quickly became sympathetic figures.  Anthony Huber, who attacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard, died doing something "heroic," according to CNN — which was quoting Huber's girlfriend.  In a piece that has since been edited, the network described Joseph Rosenbaum, a convicted child rapist, as somebody who would "make you laugh out of nowhere."

It's time to revisit the coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse.  [Thread reader]  With the news that he has been acquitted on all counts, don't forget the ways that Dems and the corporate press came together to craft a false narrative in his case. [...] We need to start with the media coverage that framed this case in the public mind.  To the press, Rittenhouse was as good as guilty when the news broke.  So naturally, to @CNN, the people he shot in self defense were heroes & those defending him had "justified murder."  [Tweets]  This wasn't just limited to CNN.  [The New York Times] put out what amounts to a hit piece on Rittenhouse because his "social media accounts showed strong support for officers."  They even put out a piece about how right-wingers attacking protestors was some sort of phenomenon.  [Tweets]  Never to be outdone, @MSNBC said the shooting was white supremacy and then went on to blame — who else — President Trump for "fueling violence," sowing "chaos and disorder" and "encouraging vigilante justice"[.]

How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison?  Let Us Count the Ways.  Americans, already disgusted by the FBI, manufactured Trump Russia scandals, and counterintelligence investigations into concerned parents like they're members of Al Qaeda, closely watched this case and were repulsed by the chicanery used to prosecute Rittenhouse.  They're supposed to be the justice guys, right?  It's a wonder that Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all counts.  You can blame Leftist propagandists or your laziness if you believed that Rittenhouse's assailants were black, or that his gun was illegal, or that he brought it "across state lines," or that he was a "chaos tourist" and a "vigilante."  But there's a special Mike Nifong-sized ring of hell for prosecutors who introduce these slanders into a courtroom, knowing that their subterfuge might put a kid away for the rest of his life.  Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus did this in many ways, by invoking lies — that they knew were lies — into pre-trial bail hearings, motions, and then ultimately into the courtroom itself in the trial.  All of these lies were dutifully transcribed by friendly journalists.

The Rittenhouse trial:  Our corporate media and big tech are truly sinister.  Nothing more conclusively proves the depraved nature of the American media than the Rittenhouse trial.  The then-seventeen-year-old, as numerous videos of the event proved, was clearly under attack by the three men who chased him and he subsequently shot in self-defense.  There is simply no doubt about that.  There was no racial aspect to what happened.  The two men who died were criminals.  Jacob Rosenbaum had just served fifteen years in prison for anally raping five boys, ages 9 [to] 11.  That night he set a dumpster on fire, was swinging a heavy chain around and screaming the n-word.  Huber, the man who had hit Rittenhouse with a skateboard, also had a criminal record for domestic abuse.  So did Grosskreutz who admitted under oath to pointing a gun at Rittenhouse's head before Rittenhouse pulled the trigger injuring his arm.  Jacob Blake, the thug whose shooting by police got the riot going thanks to the media, was a rapist as well.  He was in the act of kidnapping a child and threatening the police with a knife when he was shot. [...] There are people today, even after the verdict, who think Rittenhouse shot Black men, that Rittenhouse was there, in the city his father lives in, to purposefully engage with BLM rioters, that his gun was illegal.  None of that is true.

Goal Of Rittenhouse Prosecution and Media Manipulation Is To Render "Citizens Not Being Able To Defend Themselves".  [Scroll down]  So the narrative is Kyle Rittenhouse is a militia member who crossed state lines with a weapon to shoot peaceful protest is protestors.  None of those things are true, other than he did cross the state line.  Like that's some big deal nowadays, but he wasn't carrying a weapon.  The weapon was already in Wisconsin.  He was lawfully able to possess it in Wisconsin.  That's why the judge threw out the charge of being a minor in possession.  He wasn't in an militia.  Remember there's certainly no evidence introduced to that.  And he didn't shoot peaceful protestors.  He shoot shot three extremely violent people who tried to kill him.  So that media narrative is out there.  It will never go away.  And that has framed the case for political purposes, that this is white supremacy on trial here.  So you have Black Lives Matter protesters out there claiming racism for a white kid who shot three white people.  This has nothing to do with race yet.  That's what it's turned into.

Once more with feeling!  Media coverage of the Rittenhouse case was hot garbage.  We covered this territory during the trial but now that it's over it's worth remembering that the media's coverage of this case was terrible from the moment it happened.  Today, Drew Holden put together a thread hitting some of the lowlights: [...]

10 Media Myths Exploded During the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial.  [#1] "White supremacist":  There was never any evidence that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist," even by the time Biden made that false claim last September.  The prosecution confirmed that fact during the trial when it failed to produce evidence of any kind that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist" or had racial motivations.  The owners of the car dealership who asked Rittenhouse and others for help were Indian-American. [...] [#7] Rittenhouse "crossed state lines":  It is true that Rittenhouse is from Antioch, Illinois.  But he was working last summer as a lifeguard in Wisconsin, and his father lives in Kenosha — a fact that tripped the prosecution when they tried to portray Rittenhouse as a kind of outsider, a "chaos tourist" who neither cared about nor was familiar with the local community.

Kyle Rittenhouse and the False Narrative.  The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is an important moment in American culture, because this isn't just about Kyle Rittenhouse. [...] For me, the unacknowledged heroes of the Rittenhouse case are the intrepid videographers who were on the scene recording what was taking place on the street.  Without them, Rittenhouse would probably be facing a real risk of being convicted for double murder.  Why?  Because he's dealing with a dishonest prosecutor, who doesn't hesitate to say things he knows are misleading; dishonest detectives, who don't hesitate to twist the truth; and a dishonest media, which has been brazenly lying about what happened between Rittenhouse and his combatants for a whole year. [...] If you read media accounts of the confrontation, you would get the clear impression that it was Rittenhouse who was chasing Rosenbaum, not the other way around.  For anyone reading these accounts, it would seem that the men were minding their own business when Rittenhouse decided on his own to hunt and gun them down.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's all about the narrative — facts [notwithstanding].  Jussie Smollett was not attacked by MAGA-hatted white thugs; the media treated his initial story with complete credulity.  Christine Blasey Ford provided no supporting evidence for her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh; the media treated her as a groundbreaking heroine.  The high schoolers of Covington Catholic did not mock a Native American man; the media treated them as evil white supremacists.  Jacob Blake was not wrongfully shot by police; the media treated his shooting as a case of systemic police racism.  No evidence was ever presented that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd based on race; his case nonetheless became the point of the spear in our "national conversation" about racism.  How many facts will die at the hands of media-crafted narratives?  As many as need to die in order to achieve political utopia for the left.

Retract Every Russian Collusion Story and Fire Everyone Who Wrote Them.  [Scroll down]  But the [Washington] Post should not just unapologetically correct the phony stories on Millian; every single article, column, and video that supports the now-debunked Russian collusion hoax should be retracted with a lengthy explanation.  Tom Hamburger, who was in cahoots with Simpson from the start and met with Simpson and Christopher Steele in September 2016 to accelerate the narrative weeks before the presidential election, should be fired.  Immediately.  So, too, should Helderman.  And Post editors should force the pair to return the Pulitzer Prize they won, along with several New York Times reporters, in 2018 for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."  This unfolding scandal is not only about how inaccurately the media covered Sergei Millian or the bogus Steele dossier.  There was no collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians.  Period.  And everyone knew it at the time.  Tom Hamburger knew it, Rosalind Helderman, everyone at MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and more knew it was fabricated garbage peddled by a well-known paid smear merchant who was disguising another paid political operative as a "western intelligence officer."

Trump Dossier Coverage 'One of the Most Egregious Journalistic Errors' in History, Admits Corporate Media.  Axios, one of the leading D.C.-based corporate media outlets, has admitted that reporting surrounding the now infamous Trump-Steele dossier was "one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history," in an article slamming news-media colleagues for the years of fake news reporting.  "...[T]he media's response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid," wrote Sara Fischer on Sunday morning, as it becomes increasingly clear to the nation's journalistic class that not only were they willingly duped for years, but that they have made almost no efforts to correct their outright falsehoods.

The Russia hoax was the journalism version of check kiting.  The Russia hoax, as President Trump correctly called it, is turning out to be a legal problem for some and a credibility collapse for journalism. [...] In the real world, the victims of check kiting end up in the courts, trying to get their money.  In the media world, they click the channel off or cancel their subscriptions.  Can anyone read a story based on sources close to the information and take it seriously anymore?  I don't.  I take those stories as seriously as I do those polls based on "adults."  Let's hope Mr. Durham understands how important his task is.  He owes the country an explanation for how something like this could happen.

When Liberal Media Narratives Blow Up.  Today it's Kyle Rittenhouse.  Not long ago it was young Nicholas Sandmann.  And, of course, for four years or so it was the Trump-Russia collusion business.  What do these three episodes have in common?  That would be the fact of a wildly untrue liberal media narrative. [...] So what do we have here?  What we have is a crystal clear pattern of the media substituting liberal bias for the facts of a given story.  The center of the story of the moment could be Kyle Rittenhouse or Nicholas Sandmann or Trump-Russia collusion.  It could be, heaven knows, all manner of other news stories.  But the one constant in each is that the liberals at these liberal media outlets deliberately — say again deliberately — report the facts of a case with a far left bias.  Now the liberal narrative of Kyle Rittenhouse seems to be falling apart in a court of law.  The question is, will the liberal media learn from this?  Will it finally learn that in reporting the news it's the facts, not the political bias of a liberal narrative, that should rule?  Don't bet the ranch.

Joe Biden Calls Satchel Paige "The Great Negro" — Media Immediately Says Biden Did Not Say What You Saw Him Say.  Comrades, the ministry of truth does not want you to misunderstand what Joe Biden is saying in these prepared remarks.  Do not believe your eyes and ears, Joe Biden is not saying:  ..."You know, I've adopted the attitude of the great negro at the time, pitcher in the negro leagues went on to become a great pitcher in the pros, into the, major league baseball after Jackie Robinson, his name was Satchel Paige".  Joe Biden is NOT saying this, according to U.S. media immediately afterward.  [Video clip]

A Deeper Divide.  After the George Floyd death the mainstream media covered BLM in expected flattering terms.  So much so that Main Street believes that in a typical year police kill anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 unarmed black men.  The real figure last year was eighteen.  The U.S. Crime Victimization Study also reveals a different story:  In a normal year like 2019, among violent crimes involving a white perp and a black victim or a black perp and a white victim, 70 to 90 percent of such incidents are black-on-white crimes.  True statistics aside, American society's generators like universities, media, entertainment, and Big Tech continue to spread the view that oppressors rule the nation and that slavery defines American history.

Turley: The media oddly missed the "crash and burn" of Rittenhouse prosecutors this week.  They didn't miss it at all — national media outlets just tried their best to report around it.  We have covered the errors and outright violations committed by Kenosha prosecutors in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and so our readers are aware of what Jonathan Turley describes as the "crash and burn" of the murder case over the past week.  Most media consumers have instead been fed a narrative of judicial bias and bizarre attempts to inject race into a case where the accused, the alleged victims, and most of the witnesses are all white.

The Leftist Media Lied Through Their Teeth about Kyle Rittenhouse.  One clip after another shows just how many lies the liberal media was willing to concoct in order to pain Kyle Rittenhouse as the bad guy.  Now, that the case has been seen and viewed publicly, most intelligent people are realizing all of the lies the liberal media told, i.e.  "A white supremacist," who was "looking to murder protesters."  Is just that, more lies from a media who makes the story up as they go.

How did we get here?  Can this mess be fixed?  [Scroll down]  Long ago, there was a day, we are told (because none of us was around to witness it), when most people believed what they read in a newspaper.  Gradually, that myth faded.  We learned that journalists weren't always truthful.  Today, a scant 14% trust what the media, press, or journalists have to say.  That's part of the price we pay for undermining truth.  Lying, conniving, and propagandizing journalists get a fair share of the blame.  But few people understood journalism's function even in the good old days.  Journalists do not tell the truth.  They tell what people tell them.  If a reporter or commentator limited his published words to "the truth," he would publish little with certainty apart from the date.  I've yet to meet a journalist, and I've met thousands, capable of ferreting out "the truth" in complex issues.  Some do better than others by compiling an array of evidence and testimony.  But in the end, it's the same story: "so-and-so says so."  It's unavoidable, a hazard of the genre.

Media Reveals Just How Misleading They Can Be When It Comes to Rittenhouse Coverage.  We've written before about how the prosecution seems to have been imploding its own case in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.  There was the opening statement where the prosecutor, Thomas Binger, claimed that Rittenhouse was chasing Joseph Rosenbaum rather than the truth that it was the other way around. [...] Today was perhaps the capper of them all that completely blew up the case.  The defense was questioning Gaige Grosskreutz — the third man Rittenhouse shot.  Grosskreutz admitted that he advanced on Rittenhouse and pointed the gun at him and it was only after that, that Rittenhouse shot him. [...] We see how media is portraying the trial today so we can see just how misleading it is because we know what happened at the trial.  We can't always see all the facts in a story that the media reports on in the way we did here.  Yet, this is how they are casting the trial?  Are they kidding?  And they wonder why Americans no longer trust them?  This is a perfect example of why.

3 points about the news media.  [Thread reader]  The vast majority of disinformation, propaganda and lies that flooded the country over the last 5 years did not come from MAGA boomers on Facebook or 4Chan teenagers but the largest and most influential liberal corporate media outlets.  These are not cases where media outlets erred.  They deliberately lied.  The way to know that is they refuse to acknowledge evidence proving they lied.

Never Trumpers and Black Lives Matter Have the Same Backer.  The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories.  A group of "principled" Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.  The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical.  And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out.  Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans "whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts."  Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.  The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin and his running mate Mindy Finn.  Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media's writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign.  Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up.  The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic.  The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.  And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.

Our mostly complicit, compliant, sycophant press has no concern about facts, only Democrat power.  What happened to Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond dwarfed Watergate.  Most of the media not only didn't care about the corruption of the Democrats, but were also major participants in seeking to destroy a candidate, and later president, they didn't like.  Special counsel John Durham has started to hit paydirt with three arrests so far, the tip of the iceberg, and the story is essentially buried because the media don't care, and they don't want the public to know the truth.  If the public learns the truth, they will see how dishonest, corrupt, and dangerous the media are.  They will set out to destroy anyone they don't want in elective office.  The truth and evidence are never necessary when they are campaigning for Democrats.

Democrats Traipsing Through Strawberry Fields.  Start with critical race theory, one of the major issues in school board elections nationwide and in the Virginia gubernatorial race.  Former Bush Republican, now a Trump-hating liberal Democrat, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace declared that critical race theory "isn't real."  Her strawberry fields analysis of a Republican sweep in Virginia, the GOP winning the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general positions was, "So, I think that the real ominous thing, is that critical race theory, which isn't real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection-endorsed Republican."  Maybe in the cocooned studios of MSNBC, critical race theory is some QAnon or white supremacist conspiracy theory, but to voters it was quite real, and concerning.  If critical race theory is not real, someone should tell Amazon as they offer numerous books on the subject, in education and mathematics, how to teach it in school and how to respond to "microaggressions," meaning any viewpoint that challenges the CRT agenda.  Defeated gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe told fellow Democrat Chuck Todd shortly before the election that critical race theory has "never been taught" in the state's public schools and that the fight to ban the theory from school curricula is a "racist dog whistle."  McAuliffe also claimed that eventual gubernatorial victor Glenn Youngkin "wants to ban critical race theory."  Chuck Todd missed the obvious follow up question of why something that doesn't exist or isn't taught would need to be banned?

7 Insane Things I Just Learned About How U.S. Elections Are 'Rigged'.  [#6] It's No Longer Media Bias, It's Media Lies:  As my opening to this essay explains, I'm aware media bias has been transcended by outright propaganda.  In her book, however, Mollie [Hemingway] makes an excellent point about this after detailing other cases proving this shift.  She makes it in relation to what I'd call a relatively minor offense — The New York Times publishing a Trump-smearing piece from an anonymous author it described as a "senior administration official," meaning "someone in the upper echelon of an administration."  Of course, it turned out this person wasn't any such thing.  He was just a mid-level bureaucrat.

McAuliffe buys 'fake news' ads in effort to sway voters, Fox News investigation finds.  Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe has spent nearly $100,000 advertising "fake news" websites on Facebook during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, Fox News can reveal.  The Democrat's advertisements, which have been viewed up to 3.5 million times so far, are hidden on a Facebook page with a similar name to a local news website.  The ads link to third-party websites that ostensibly publish local news, but exist to promote Democratic candidates.  The websites have been widely described as disinformation and "partisan propaganda."

Axios Blames American Consumers, Not Bad Policy for Labor Shortages.  Blame the American consumer!  That's the approach liberal outlet Axios used to explain away the atrocious labor shortages affecting the U.S. economy, and not President Joe Biden's economic policies.  Axios published a snobbish piece headlined, "Unruly customers threaten economic recovery."  The outlet's asinine argument was that "increasingly violent and combative customers," angry about "long wait times and mask mandates," were causing workers to quit, hamstringing a recovery that hinges in part on employees "returning to work."  But unlike Axios, The Wall Street Journal editorial board didn't hesitate to pin the labor shortage blame on the proper culprit:  "Bidenomics."  The Journal suggested two specific sources for what has been causing the worker shortage.  The sources it mentioned were: "government and employer vaccine mandates that set ultimatums for workers" and Democrats making "quitting an easier economic option" through a litany of federal unemployment benefits.

Age-Adjusted Mortality Is at 2004 Levels.  Yet They Tell Us Covid Is Worse Than the 1918 Flu..  Last week, the media again tried to ratchet up the public's fear over covid-19 by labeling it more deadly than the 1918 flu epidemic.  "COVID-19 Is Now the Deadliest Disease in U.S. History," reads one headline from an NBC TV affiliate.  Considering the realities of cancer and heart disease, that headline is absurdly false.  Perhaps the author meant "communicable disease."  A TIME headline was at least arguably factual, declaring, "COVID-19 Is Now the Deadliest Pandemic in American History."  But even the TIME headline is only arguably true if stripped of all context.  If we actually look at disease mortality proportionally to the population, the 1918 epidemic was far worse than covid.  Considering that the US population in 1918 was one-third its current size, we find that deaths per million from the flu epidemic totaled about sixty-five hundred per million.  Covid, by comparison currently comes in — in the official numbers — around twenty-two hundred per million.  But this is all part of a larger pattern — one well embraced by the media — of presenting information with as little context as possible.

Gallup: Trust In The Media Sinks to 36 Percent, Second Lowest Ever.  Can the mistrust of the media get much greater?  Gallup pollsters reported on Thursday [10/7/2021] that American trust in the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36 percent, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."  Overall, just seven percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29 percent "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32 percent record low in 2016, during the Donald Trump vs.  Hillary Clinton battle.  More than half of respondents sound fed up:  29 percent of the public currently registers "not very much" trust and 34 percent say they have "none at all."

What the press is leaving out about the Arizona election audit.  The ethical corruption of our national new media has extended to a degree that once would have seemed unimaginable.  We were exposed to yet another remarkable example with the reporting on the long-awaited audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona. [...] While the audit did find that a hand-recount of all of the original ballots did widen Joe Biden's margin by several hundred votes, the press deliberately and steadfastly ignored and left unreported the most critical results of the draft audit.  Included among those original ballots, the most comprehensive election audit ever conducted established the following:
  •   More than 23,000 mail-in votes were cast under voter IDs from people who should not have received their ballots by mail because they had moved.
  •   More than 10,000 voters cast ballots in more than one county.
  •   More than 9,000 mail-in ballots were returned and counted than had been mailed out of registered voters.
  •   Thousands of official results did not match those who voted, and thousands more were cast in-person in the name of those who had moved out of state.
  •   Logs and data files related to the election had been deliberately erased from the Election Management System (EMS) server, in violation of the law.
  •   Thousands of original ballots were duplicated more than once.
  •   Auditors were never provided with the required chain-of-custody documentation for the ballots, causing increased ambiguity regarding the accuracy of the election results.
  •   None of the various systems related to the election had numbers that would balance and agree with one another.
  •   Maricopa County officials actively interfered with the audit, withheld subpoena items, and refused to answer questions that are normally standard in such audits.

Outlets That Poured Gas on Phony Border Patrol Story Forced to Correct Their Fake News.  Mainstream media outlets are, with egg on their face, issuing clarifications and corrections to their stories that falsely smeared Border Patrol agents who were defending America's southern border for actions they didn't take using equipment they don't have.  The timing makes sense as attention strays again from the U.S.-Mexico border following an influx of some 15,000 illegal immigrants — many of them Haitians who'd previously fled to South America — who set up a makeshift "Bidenville" under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas.  Despite the half-hearted mea culpas, their mission to distract from the border crisis by creating a new boogeyman has already done its damage.  The El Paso Times, one of the original propagators of the phony story, issued a meek "clarification," rather than a correction or retraction which would have been more suited to the literal fake news that launched a national firestorm and triggered condemnation from the White House that caused an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Activist Media Has Done an Exemplary Job of Deceiving the American People on COVID-19.  When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, the activist media has performed masterfully. [...] Ever since it became apparent that the COVID-19 outbreak would be a serious issue, the Democrats and their close friends and allies in the activist media have been trying to convince us that we're all gonna die slow, painful deaths after being infected.  The press has been on a full-on crusade to terrify the American people into abiding by lockdown orders and mask mandates.  They used fear to make us more amenable to government encroaching on our lives. [...] Since the government wants to push mandatory vaccines and use the pandemic as an excuse to impose intrusive measures to control the populace, the activist media seeks to persuade the public that this is all for their own good.  It launched a whole persuasion campaign specifically designed to confuse and terrify people into complying with the government.

Look past the hand-waving, and you'll see a wide open Mexican border.  Soon after Bill Melugin of Fox News began beaming drone footage of the many thousands of Haitians gathered under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, Biden's open borders zealot in charge of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, ordered two nearby border checkpoints abandoned.  The reason given was to redirect those personnel to help process the Haitians.  The media reported that those checkpoints had been "closed," leading the viewer to believe that traffic had been rerouted.  But that was not the case.  The fifty thousand vehicles those checkpoints inspect during an average week continued to move through, only now no one was checking them for drugs or trafficked humans.  This happened while Mayorkas was giving a news conference under the Del Rio bridge, insisting that the U.S. border was definitely "not open."  In fact, the border in the Del Rio sector was wide open.

Russiagate, More Like Watergate.  CNN Chief Media Reporter Brian Stelter hopped on the set of Reliable Sources last weekend, and offered his take on Special Counsel John Durham's recent indictment of former Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann, calling Durham's probe a "total bust."  This was in the context of accusing other networks like Fox and OAN of a pattern of "lie, rinse, repeat." [...] A long list of press figures — from Stelter's own CNN colleague and shameless intelligence community spokesclown Natasha Bertrand, to reporters from The New Yorker, Time, MSNBC, Fortune, the Financial Times, and especially Slate and The Atlantic — were witting or unwitting pawns in a scheme to sell the public on a transparently moronic hoax, i.e. that Donald Trump's campaign was communicating mysterious digital treason to Russia's Alfa Bank via a secret computer server.  The story sounded absurd from the start, and was instantly challenged by experts.

What the New CDC Report on Unvaccinated Left Out.  A newly published CDC study prompted the MSM to run headlines like "New study finds unvaccinated are 11 times more likely to die from Covid, CDC says," "Unvaccinated people were 11 times more likely to die of covid-19, CDC report finds," and "Unvaccinated People Are 11 Times More Likely To Die Of COVID-19, New Research Finds."  It surely looks scary if you read only those headlines.  I was curious about what the report actually says, and doesn't say.  Below is what I found.  [#1] The purpose of the report is for propaganda:  The report admits in its Discussion section that "the data assessed from 13 jurisdictions accounted for 25% of the U.S. population, and therefore might not be generalizable."  But it still suggests that "[t]he data might be helpful in communicating the real-time impact of vaccines (e.g., persons not fully vaccinated having >10 times higher COVID-19 mortality risk) and guiding prevention strategies, such as vaccination and nonpharmacologic interventions."  No wonder the MSM outlets quickly spread this message around.

Sensational headline alert:  There has been ONE CASE of measles reported.  This is hardly worth reporting.
Army base hit with highly contagious disease as thousands of Afghan refugees flood into America.  A case of measles has been identified at Fort McCoy Army Base in Wisconsin as thousands of Afghan refugees are housed there temporarily while they await resettlement in the United States.  Fox News was able to view an internal government email on Sunday [9/5/2021] that confirms a case of measles at Fort McCoy.  "All those who had been in contact with the infected person at base have been isolated, and post-exposure prophylaxis and inoculations are in process," the email stated.

The Masked Ball of Cowardice.  What's transpired since has been a predictable spiral into the abyss, aided and abetted at virtually every stage by a media apparatus that has perpetuated the fraudulent lockdown narrative.  The Chinese government has financial stakes in almost every top media outlet and friends in corporations, universities, and governments.  Preexisting financial relationships with China led institutions to trust information from China, endorse the CCP's narrative, and ultimately advocate for the global adoption of the CCP's policies.  Owing to this combination of naivete, groupthink, and outright corruption, scientists and journalists have been incorporating information from China into their work as true, when in fact nearly every bit of information that has come from China with regard to the virus has been a lie.

Tamarius Davis
Shooter opened fire on Miami Beach tourist, danced over body: witness.  A Georgia man "randomly" shot and killed a tourist in a Miami Beach restaurant and danced over his body as the man tried to protect his 1-year-old baby from the gunman, reports said.  Tamarius Blair Davis, 22, of Norcross, Georgia, was allegedly high on psychedelic mushrooms when he opened fire on 21-year-old Dustin Wakefield at close range before he danced over his body in view of horrified onlookers dining outdoors at La Cerveceria de Barrio on Miami Beach's famous Oce