by Victor Davis Hanson The current “media” – loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and…
Read More
Here is what we’re talking about when we talk about the media “Narrative.”
A 10-year-old girl in Ohio was raped and impregnated. According to the doctor who performed the girl’s abortion in nearby Indiana, the girl could not obtain the procedure in her home state because of a law that cuts off abortions after six weeks. The girl, supposedly, was three days too late to have an abortion in the Buckeye State.
It sounds like the perfect story for the post-Roe era, which is why practically every news outlet on the planet picked it up. See! See, Americans! This is what your Christofascist Supreme Court has done! Are you happy now?
Read More
The Washington Post has had a rough week.
On Monday, the Post suspended one of its reporters, Dave Weigel, for a month without pay after he retweeted a joke last week that some of his colleagues thought was sexist.
Read More
The FBI decision to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser hinged on an unsubstantiated rumor from a Clinton campaign-paid dossier that the Washington Post’s Moscow sources had quickly shot down as “b******t” and “impossible,” according to emails disclosed last week to a D.C. court hearing the criminal case of a Clinton lawyer accused of lying to the FBI.
Though the FBI presumably had access to better sources than the newspaper, agents did little to verify the rumor that Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page had secretly met with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow. Instead, the bureau pounced on the dossier report the day it received it, immediately plugging the rumor into an application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap Page as a suspected Russian agent.
Read More
Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz exposed the identity behind the “Libs Of TikTok” Twitter account in an article that widely characterized exposure of questionable school policy and problematic teacher-student interactions as “anti-LGBT.”
Rather than grapple with the issues the account brought to light — some of which resulted in discipline of teachers — Lorenz drew on interviews from left-wing activists at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the left-wing organization Media Matters, who predictably supported the narrative that exposing controversial classroom instruction to the public at large essentially amounts to bigotry for the transgender and gay community.
Read More
Back before the 2020 election, when Democrats and their allies in the corporate media were still claiming the Hunter Biden story was a conspiracy theory or Russian disinformation, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson released an open letter to America posing questions to then-candidate Joe Biden.
Like most Biden scandals at the time, it mostly got ignored or ridiculed. But the questions were rooted in facts and evidence gathered over two years by investigators on Johnson’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Read More
The Washington Post made headlines last week when it corrected and removed significant parts of its own reporting on the now-discredited Steele Dossier.
The august newspaper reported that it “could no longer stand by the accuracy” of some of their reporting
Read More
Former President Donald Trump asked the Pulitzer Prize committee on Sunday to strip awards to The Washington Post and The New York Times, arguing their award-winning stories in 2016 and 2017 alleging Russia collusion lacked “any credible evidence “
The newspapers’ reporting was “based on the false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign. The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce,” Trump wrote in a letter to interim Pulitzer administrator Bud Kliment.
Trump noted that multiple investigations have dismissed any notion of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin and that a recent indictment by Special Prosecutor John Durham traced some of the key allegations to people tied to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Read More
The corporate press spent much of the pandemic dismissing the theory that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology because former President Donald Trump talked about it, according to Washington Post senior reporter Aaron Blake.
“It has become evident that some corners of the mainstream media overcorrected when it came to one particular theory from Trump and his allies: that the coronavirus emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than naturally,” Blake wrote in an analysis piece published Monday. “It’s also true that many criticisms of the coverage are overwrought and that Trump’s and his allies’ claims invited and deserved skepticism.”
Blake explained that the media was justified in being skeptical of the lab leak theory because Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had leaned in “hard” to the theory without providing “even piecemeal evidence” to support their claims.
Read More
After four years of relentless fact checks of statements by President Trump, many wondered whether fact-checkers would apply similar scrutiny to President Biden.
Responding to right-leaning critics who “have been urging fact checks of ‘Biden lies,’” Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, tweeted, “We have no plans to start a Biden false or misleading claims tracker, just as we had no plans at this point to start a Trump tracker. The constant tweeting of falsehoods forced our hand. But we have an open mind and if the need arises we will consider one.”
Some remained skeptical. “We have no plans to hold Biden accountable the way we did the previous administration,” tweeted journalist Stephen Miller, mockingly interpreting Kessler’s statement. “Glenn, I for one thank you for this refreshing bit of honesty.”
Read More
The Georgia Secretary of State investigator who was the anonymous source for a Washington Post story about former U.S. President Donald Trump — that people now discredit — said Tuesday the paper got the story correct. This, aside from a few minor mistakes, said Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, the anonymous source.
Read More
The Washington Post editorial board came out Sunday in support of abolishing the electoral college.
“The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy,” The Post’s editorial board wrote.
Read More
A recent Washington Post article lamented the fact that biology textbooks contain a disproportionate number of mentions of “white men.”
The article’s author, Bethany Brookshire, begins by referencing three of the most recognized contributors to modern biology, Charles Darwin, Carolus Linnaeus, and Gregor Mendel.
We live in an age in which information is far more accessible than ever before in human history. However, so is misinformation. How can we sort out one from other?
Well, some people who call themselves “fact checkers” claim to have the answer. They say, “Trust us.” But all-too-often, they fail to get even basic facts correct. Let’s look at three prime examples. See if you notice a common thread between them.
Read More
President Trump’s campaign filed a multimillion-dollar libel lawsuit against The Washington Post on Tuesday alleging defamation in two opinion articles published last year that it said falsely claimed the Trump presidential campaign conspired with Russia according to The Hill.
Read More
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan recently opined that journalists should not be preoccupied with objectivity with their reporting as the country enters the “Trump Unbound” era. In doing so, Sullivan bolstered and further legitimized the president’s continued battle against what he calls the “Fake News Media.”
Read More
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced Friday night that he is suing the Washington Post, accusing the paper of publishing “demonstrably false” “garbage” about him.
Read More
America’s leading newspapers are aiding China’s communist regime by running the oppressive government’s propaganda, respected watchdog organization Freedom House reported.
Read More
In the thick catalog of media players responsible for promoting the phony Russia collusion storyline, the Washington Post occupies a marquee spot. The Post arguably inflicted the most damage on the first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency by pushing the concocted collusion drama even before Inauguration Day.
Read More
A federal judge reversed his ruling Monday and announced that the family of Kentucky teenager Nick Sandmann can sue The Washington Post for libel over its coverage of the teenager.
Read More
The Washington Post ran an obituary Sunday morning for ISIS leader and serial rapist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who killed himself and at least three of his own children Saturday night during a U.S. military raid.
Read More
Katherine Kersten, a popular conservative writer and senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, was lied about and smeared in the pages of The Washington Post this week.
Read More
This week, the New York Times published an article that gives credence to a fiction that stoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked the “Black Lives Matter“ movement, and provoked murders of police officers.
Read More
by Henry I. Miller I spent nearly a week in June in the flyover part of the country—Topeka, Kansas, to be exact—and found it to be a refreshing change. There’s noticeably less snark, whining, self-entitlement, and virtue signaling there than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live…
Read More