THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG:
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THERE IS SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T FIT THE LIBERAL NARRATIVE IN NEW MAGA HAT ASSAULT STORY:
Okay, what’s being left out is that the victim is a legal immigrant from Togo. Whether intentional or not, I’ll let y’all debate that, it’s just another example of how the Left’s narrative about the Trump coalition is wrong. People of color can and do support President Trump. They will do so again in 2020. Trump did better with black voters than Romney and I think he’ll do better with this bloc next year. The Daily Caller has more.
“Whether intentional or not, I’ll let y’all debate that.” Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FELLOW DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WHO POSSESS BYLINES: Although Trump Cut Taxes For Most Americans, Democrats Convinced The Public That They Paid More Taxes.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: WH Correspondents’ Association Hails CNN’s Kavanaugh Coverage.
IT WENT “POOF” BECAUSE IT WAS HURTING DEMOCRATS, AND THE MEDIA ARE BASICALLY DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: ‘‘It Just Went Poof’: The Strange Aftermath of Virginia’s Cascade of Political Scandals.
In the space of a week in early February, the public was stunned by revelations about each of the three highest statewide elected officials, all Democrats: the racist photo in the governor’s yearbook; accusations of sexual assault against the lieutenant governor; and the attorney general’s appearance in blackface at a party in college. Protesters and news crews swarmed the Statehouse. Calls for resignations came from fellow Virginia Democrats, Republicans and even 2020 presidential candidates.
And then? “It just went poof,” said Natalie Draper, a librarian sitting in the back of a coffeehouse last week in Richmond. “It’s like it never happened.”
Remember, kids:
JUST NBC THE BIAS: Reporter: The head of NBC News’s political coverage tried to bully me out of a scoop — on behalf of the DNC.
It must be noted up front that there’s no evidence that the DNC put her up to doing this. It may be that Dafna Linzer, former WaPo reporter and current managing editor of politics for NBC and MSNBC, simply took it upon herself to do the DNC a solid.
But even if so, that’s news too. Since when does the head of an allegedly independent news organization do a favor for a political party?
Early and often — just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense. NBC’s PR flack is apparently going with “no comment” at the moment, as NBC coordinates damage control. I wonder if Linzer’s fellow former and current Democratic Party operative Chuck Todd, who famously compared old media to sports referees in 2015, will be asked to spin his way out of this one?
Perhaps he meant pro wrestling refs, which would explain the surprise political success in 2016 by a former host of WrestleMania events who knows how to work them properly?
THIS ARTICLE HAS IT WRONG: TRUMP WON’T BE CAMPAIGNING ON THE MUELLER REPORT, HE’LL BE CAMPAIGNING AGAINST THE PRESS.
Trump allies see Barr’s letter as a kind of Swiss Army knife—a tool useful in all kinds of situations. Not only is it exculpatory, they say, but it also implicitly rebukes the press for its coverage of the Russia investigation, inoculating Trump from any future scandal that reporters might unearth. According to a source familiar with internal discussions at the Republican National Committee and the pro-Trump super PAC America First, both organizations are “geared up for any nonsense to come.”
They’re already prepared to attack reporters. “Any reporter who tries that will be hit with 30-second spots of all their ridiculous claims about collusion,” said the source, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to describe private conversations. “Their tweets have all been screencapped. It’s all ready to go.” (“It’s the same thing we’ve been doing the last two years. We’re going to hold the media accountable when we see fit,” an RNC official clarified, adding that this would include digital clips shared on social media.)
Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign previewed the in-your-face tactics they have in mind. A campaign official sent a letter to TV producers cautioning them against booking certain guests who had alleged that Trump colluded with Russia, including Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez.
“It’s not hard to figure where we’re going to go with this,” a current campaign official told The Atlantic. “We’re still in victory-lap mode, but it will turn into a message that [Democrats] will say or do anything to stop us from making America great again, including making up lies about the president and ruining a lot of people’s lives.”
Well, the nice thing about that argument is that it’s true. And Trump will treat the press like it’s made up of Democratic operatives with bylines, which is also true.
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN CNN STILL PRETENDED TO BE OBJECTIVE:
● Don Lemon tells Cory Booker ‘nice job’ in ‘hot mic’ moment during CNN town hall.
● Don Lemon Says He Texts Jussie Smollett Every Day Following Attack.
Last October, during the Kavanaugh hearings, when the Journolist decided that calling the violent left a mob was not permissible on DNC-MSM airwaves, the Daily Caller noted that “CNN host Don Lemon lost his cool with [right-leaning] network commentator Matt Lewis while discussing the ‘mob behavior’ of liberals versus conservatives Tuesday, telling him to ‘shut up’ while he made his point:”
Lewis tried to respond but Lemon wasn’t having it. “Will you let me finish, Matt, please, before you jump in? I’m making a point. Okay?,” he said. “I’m making a point. I can’t make it if you keep interrupting me.”
“You’re making a point. Are you the moderator or the host or arguing a liberal talking point,” Lewis shot back.
It’s the latter. Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
BRENT BOZELL: AFTER MUELLER REPORT, ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW CNN EVER RECOVERS.’
Predicting what will be coming, the MRC President [told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney], “I don’t know how CNN undoes the damage, because they not going to stop. They’re going to continue this. Are they going to say, ‘Oops! For two years we were wrong in our slandering of the President?’ They’re never going to do it.”
Exit quote:
“Half of me wants to burst out laughing. The other half of me wants to look seriously at American journalism and look at the damage these people have done to that institution. I don’t know how they repair it. I don’t know how some networks ever come back. I don’t know how Jim Acosta can ever be seen on television without people laughing at them. He’s ruined. Brian Stelter at CNN, Chuck Todd of NBC. These people are never going to be believed again.”
To be fair, I never thought CNN recovered from inviting young human shields to shill for Obamacare in 2009, serving cake on air in honor of the Obama stimulus in 2010, Candy Crowley sabotaging Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debate, or this “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” moment in 2008, which greatly helped to smooth Obama’s path to election:
Just think of CNN as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their actions all make sense.
TENN. CONGRESSMAN MARK GREEN: Democrats, Join Trump Against Russian Aggression: His administration has been tough on Moscow’s meddling, both in U.S. elections and abroad.
Mr. Mueller did indict 13 Russian nationals for offenses related to election meddling. We know Moscow spent money on Facebook ads designed to exploit America’s divisions, targeting voters on both sides of the aisle. And Mr. Trump and the Republicans have responded. Under legislation enacted by a Republican Congress, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and intelligence agencies.
Beyond the meddling, Mr. Trump has slammed Russia with bold moves designed to weaken Mr. Putin on the world’s stage. This administration imposed sanctions on Russia for violating nonproliferation laws by supporting weapons programs in Iran, Syria and North Korea. The Trump administration also issued more sanctions in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and its continuing occupation of Crimea. In 2017, the administration expelled 60 Russian intelligence officers and ordered multiple Russian consulates to close after Russia used a military-grade chemical weapon in the U.K. Mr. Trump even blocked Mr. Putin’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Russia if it goes ahead.
These tough actions have had an effect. Between January and July 2018, the Russian ruble declined 9% against the U.S. dollar. Russia’s Economic Development Ministry expects its economy to grow only 1.3% in 2019. The U.S. economy grew 2.9% in 2018 and is headed for another strong year.
In 2017, Mr. Trump supplied Ukraine with weapons so it could defend itself against Russian attacks. Remember, it was President Obama who stood idly as Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has also engaged in hard-fought battles with Russian mercenaries in Syria.
In a sense, Russia succeeded in its mission to stoke division and fear within America. Some top Democrats have played right into Moscow’s hands by pursuing endless partisan investigations. If Democrats care about thwarting Russian meddling and aggression, they will disavow their conspiracy theory that our president is Mr. Putin’s puppet, and stop wasting taxpayer money peddling disproved collusion narratives. Instead, they can support this administration’s efforts to stand tall against the consistent threat Russia poses to America’s national security.
As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally IranThat Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.
Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and no particular loyalty to the country’s best interests, and you won’t go far wrong.
But remember while America’s political class is focused on Russia, Chinese influence is running wild. That’s not an accident.
Think of them as Democratic party operatives with bylines — and no concern for the welfare of their country — and you won’t go far wrong.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON JOURNALISM’S TRUMP/CHARLOTTESVILLE LIE: “I suspect that they keep repeating the falsehood because they are so clearly wrong that they can’t find any way to back down. And I also think they’ve seen the effectiveness of this attack on Trump. It has worked as propaganda, so why stop now? The hit to their credibility has already occurred, so why not keep manipulating minds?”
Think of them as Democratic Party political operatives with bylines and you won’t be far wrong.
CNN WINS CRONKITE AWARD FOR THAT GARBAGE GUN-CONTROL TOWN HALL IT HELD AFTER PARKLAND:
Dana Loesch was suckered into attending in the belief that this would be some sort of civil moderated discussion about the pros and cons of gun control. As it was, she was jeered for noting that some rape victims wished they had a gun during their attack, had people shout “murderer” at her, and allegedly needed a security detail to exit the event safely. Loesch reminisced about the magical evening she had earlier today on Twitter:
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It was embarrassing all the way through, less town hall than mob catharsis, and of course they’re being rewarded for it by industry watchdogs rather than reprimanded. If you wonder why big media is frequently so terrible, this is a small part of the answer: They’re incentivized to be that way by their own gatekeepers.
As long as it’s remembered that Cronkite himself, far from being the Mr. “And that’s the way it is,” was one of the original Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and would have loved CNN’s hard left coverage, then it’s an absolutely appropriately named award for CNN’s train wreck.
Related: ‘Go be a company man’! Dana Loesch calls out Jake Tapper for pulling this after she told truth about CNN’s Parkland ‘town hall.’ As Glenn posted earlier, Tapper unfollowed Dana — and also her husband Chris, “for pointing out what a sham this award is. Dana presented the facts and truth on that stage which were subsequently proven correct,” as Chris tweets.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “How Reuters uncovered Beto O’Rourke’s teenage hacking days…Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As always. . . .
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND THEIR SILENCE MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Newsrooms that went wild when David Duke endorsed Laura Ingraham suddenly silent when he did the same for Rep. Omar.
NBC ENTERING RERUN SEASON EARLY THIS YEAR: Days before his death, Wallace Broecker, “the ‘grandfather’ of climate science,” urged scientists to consider deploying a last-ditch solar shield to stop global warming:
It was time for humankind and the world’s scientific community to begin to seriously study more extreme solutions to the climate crisis, Broecker said. That included creating a massive solar shield in the Earth’s atmosphere, a tactic known variously as “geoengineering,” “the sulfur solution,” “solar radiation management” and the “Pinatubo Strategy.”
Funny, that’s what John Holdren, former President Obama’s “science” “czar” urged in April of 2009:
In a November 2008 cover story, Time magazine described Mr. Obama’s incoming administration, which was obsessed with radical environmentalism (at least a vehicle for crony corporatism) as “the New New Deal.” It was dubbed the “Green New Deal” by the EU Observer in March of 2009. That year, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Given all of the talk a decade later in 2019 of this year’s “Green New Deal,” will anyone ask former members of Obama’s administration why they had such a failure of nerve, when environmentalists were using the same grim talk about mankind’s future – or the lack thereof – as today? (We know that no current Democrat be reminded of all of the earlier doomsday prognostications — just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their feigned amnesia makes perfect sense.)
UNEXPECTEDLY: America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s.
The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it’s the 1980s is the city assessor’s office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk. City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can’t be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can’t display all the basic information for a given property on one screen. The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup “doesn’t reflect business needs now,” says the city’s assessor, Carmen Chu.
San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology*, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.
Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.
As Kevin Williamson wrote during the disastrous Obamacare rollout, “We choose not between Marx and Adam Smith but between the DMV and the Apple store:”
I can walk out of the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, which sees more visitors per day than any DMV office, with a couple thousand dollars’ worth of electronics without ever having to stand in line, much less fill out paperwork. When I found myself in need of an unexpectedly large sum of cash while out of the country a couple of years ago, one telephone call to American Express, lasting less than ten minutes, was all it took. Services such as Seamless and OpenTable have greatly simplified all sorts of commercial transactions, and services such as Uber have begun to disrupt longstanding cartels and monopolies on taxi services and other conveniences. Some services even make dealing with the government easier, such as the concealed-carry apps that use GPS to let you know whether you’re legally packing.
And Leviathan is not happy about that.
Fortunately, beginning in 2016, Democratic operatives with bylines advised out of work coalminers to learn to code, before receiving similar advice from former readers in more recent times. Hopefully all of the efforts of these nascent software engineers will eventually begin to pay off to bring urban governmental software into the 1990s.
* Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump As Tragic Hero.
I tried to use as many examples as I could of the classic Western, whether it was “Shane” or “High Noon” or “The Magnificent Seven.” They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos. So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves the problem, and they declare to him, whether it is Gary Cooper in “High Noon” or Alan Ladd in “Shane,” “I think it’s better you leave. We don’t need you anymore. We feel dirty that we ever had to call you in.” I think that is what is awaiting Trump…
Still not tired of winning yet. Plus, Neo comments:
The article is interesting for what it presents of Hanson’s thoughts on the matter. But it’s also interesting because of the subtext, which is a cat-and-mouse game the interview believes he’s playing with Hanson. In the latter game, I’m not sure who wins, but I am pretty sure it depends on the bias of who is reading.
When I read the article, Chotiner’s lead-in descriptions of Hanson leapt out at me as being a debunking of the opinions of the man he is set to interview (supposedly respectfully). He can’t do away with Hanson’s obvious academic achievements and honors, but he distorts Hanson’s record outside of academia in a way that is meant to discredit Hanson in the reader’s mind before even reading any of Hanson’s words in the interview.
Well, think of journalists as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Democratic Virginia Scandals Evaporate from ABC, CBS, NBC.
Flashback: “Jim Geraghty of NRO estimated that in 2006, the Washington Post ran ‘approximately 100 articles, op-eds, [and] editorials’ spotlighting Republican George Allen’s moronic ‘macaca’ gaffe involving his botched effort at calling out a mohawk-wearing video tagger hired by his opponent, Democrat Jim Webb, to stalk the Allen campaign,” and then repeated the same playbook (this time unsuccessfully) three years later when Republican Bob McDonnell ran for the governship of Virginia.
As for the Virginia Democrats’ current racism and #metoo-related scandals being tossed down the memory hole, just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon: The worst part about Smollett hoax will be all the conservative pouncing, you know.
“Sean Hannity is going to eat Jussie Smollett’s lunch every single second. Tucker Carlson is going to eat Jussie Smollett’s lunch every single second. The President of the United States is going to eat his lunch.”
As Ed Morrissey writes:
Sorry. Mr. Lemon. The media earned every bit of ridicule and criticism it earned by going all-in on Smollett’s weird claim from the get-go. They earned every bit of criticism for doing the same thing with the Covington Catholic High School kids for the same purpose — to pounce, if you will, all over conservatives, pro-lifers, and anyone who might have a little sympathy for Donald Trump.
At least in some corners of the industry, they haven’t learned a damn thing from either failure. Expect more to come.
“Don Lemon completely gives the game away of why CNN won’t simply own up to this and other failings. Because they are paid to act like opposition. Smollet, Parkland, Covington, list goes on… they believe they are political opposition. Not journalists,” Stephen Miller adds on Twitter.
Back in 20s, H.L. Mencken wrote, “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.” If only old media had gotten that message instead of becoming Democratic Party operatives with bylines.
Flashback: Don Lemon Says He Texts Jussie Smollett Every Day Following Attack.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Fangirls? TV Reporters from CBS, CNN and NBC Help Kamala Harris Pick Out ‘Amazing’ Coat.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Fail: WaPo & Vox Journos Get Northam Abortion Position Wrong, Accuse Trump of “Inciting Violence.”
The problem with what both Rupar and Gibson asserted regarding Trump “lying” about Northam’s stance on late term abortion? They’re both wrong. Trump got it right.
Here’s Northam’s actual quote from that WTOP interview, with bolded emphasis added:
When we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of the physician. More than one physician, by the way. And its done in case where there may be severe deformities, where there may be a fetus that is non-viable.
So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
Gaslighting. It’s not just for the Green New Deal anymore!
WAPO HELPS ELIZABETH WARREN WITH A PRE-SOTU DOCUMENT DUMP:
Using an open records request during a general inquiry, for example, The Post obtained Warren’s registration card for the State Bar of Texas, providing a previously undisclosed example of Warren identifying as an “American Indian.”
Warren filled out the card by hand in neat blue ink and signed it. Dated April 1986, it is the first document to surface showing Warren making the claim in her own handwriting. Her office didn’t dispute its authenticity.
This tidbit (click over for the photo of her Texas bar card) was buried eight paragraphs into a Washington Post story innocuously titled “Elizabeth Warren apologizes for calling herself Native American.” Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and the Post burying the lede makes perfect sense.
UPDATE: Heh — “Governor Northam should call on Senator Warren to resign,” Charles C.W. Cooke jokes on Twitter.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE:
THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Ocasio-Cortez’s Media Attacks Are Constructive Criticism, Trump’s a Dire Attack on Our Democracy.
BAD, PRESS: How the media fail.
To watch Stelter’s show, Reliable Sources, after a reporting debacle is to watch a master class in whataboutism and faux-persecution, followed by the insistence that even the most egregious lapses in judgment or professionalism are to be expected from time to time and that we should actually be worrying about the real victim here: the media’s reputation. This, suffice it to say, is not helpful. Were a football commentator to worry aloud that a team’s ten straight losses might lead some to think they weren’t any good — and then to cast any criticisms as an attack on sports per se — he would be laughed out of the announcers’ box.
* * * * * * * *
Sometimes consciously, but most often unwittingly, journalists treat Democrats as normal and Republicans as abnormal and proceed accordingly in their coverage. Once one understands the rules, the whole setup becomes rather amusing. When a headline reads “Lawmaker Involved in Scandal,” one can immediately deduce that the lawmaker is a Democrat. Why? Because if he were a Republican, the story would make that clear in the headline. Without fail, stories that begin with “Republicans pounce” are actually about bad things that Democrats have done or said, while stories about bad things that Republicans have done or said begin with “Republican does or says a bad thing” and proceed to a dry recitation of the facts. A variation on this rule is “Republicans say,” which is used when a Republican says something that is so self-evidently true that, had a Democrat said it, it would have been reported straight. For a neat illustration of how farcical things have become, take a look at the Washington Post’s most recent “fact check,” which helpfully informs its readers that the claimed “one thousand burgers” President Trump bought for the Clemson football team were not, in fact, “piled up a mile high” because, “at two inches each, a thousand burgers would not reach one mile high.”
Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.
It’s not at all “unwittingly.” Just think of the media as Democratic party operatives with bylines, and you won’t go wrong.™
CNN’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY:
● Shot: CNN Does Not Know How To Question Ilhan Omar’s Conspiracy Theories And Anti-Semitism.
—The Federalist, yesterday.
● Chaser: CNN’s John King: Should Pence Family’s Christianity Disqualify Them from Secret Service Protection?
—NewsBusters, yesterday.
● Hangover: ‘You fail your profession’: Chris Cuomo says ‘Mueller didn’t do the media any favors tonight.’
—Twitchy, yesterday.
● The D.T.s: “‘The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it,’ [CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin says of BuzzFeed]. ‘And I don’t think that’s true.’”
—The Washington Free Beacon, yesterday.
Narrator voice: It’s very much true. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and yesterday’s meltdown all makes sense.
Some media outlets and activists are suggesting that Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is guilty of hypocrisy because he will travel to Canada for surgery related to his 2017 assault at the hands of a neighbor. Paul, after all, has warned loudly against adopting the Canadian health care system.
“Rand Paul, enemy of socialized medicine, will go to Canada for surgery,” tweeted Talking Points Memo. The tweet includes a link to a Courier-Journal story that reminds readers that “Paul has called universal health care and nationalized options ‘slavery.'” Newsweek went a similar route. . . .
Checkmate, libertarians? Nope.
Those who chuckled at this supposed irony missed a major detail, even though it was noted in the press coverage: Paul’s surgery will take place at the Shouldice Hernia Hospital in Thornhill, Ontario. The clinic is private, and run for profit; The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, who is from Thornhill, notes that it was “grandfathered in to Ontario’s socialized health system.”
Get beaten nearly to death by a Democrat, go for medical care, get mocked by Democratic Party operatives with bylines. And the press wonders why people hate it.
Related: Rand Paul’s attacker: ‘I lost it and became irate.’
Plus:
● Hillary: ‘You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.’
● Former Attorney General Eric Holder: “Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them.”
● Politico: After failing to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Democrats wonder if it’s time to be more ruthless.
● Democrat Doxxer Threatened To Reveal Senators’ Children’s Health Information.
● DC restaurant: We’ve received death threats after Ted Cruz, wife forced out by protesters.
● Networks Silent On Attempted Stabbing of GOP Candidate By Anti-Trump Attacker.
● Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’
As a sidenote, I was disappointed to see the Knoxville News-Sentinel pushing this bogus story on Facebook.
WE, THE PRESS: “Frank Bruni, formerly the New York Times’s White House reporter and now a columnist for the paper, has a long, long op-ed that is unintentionally revealing. It is headlined, ‘Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?’ As though the press were pro-Trump in 2016! ‘We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.’ A second chance to help a Democrat beat Donald Trump.”
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines grooming the next Obama, and it all makes sense.
THE DNC-MSM MORPHED INTO YASSER ARAFAT SO SLOWLY, I NEVER EVEN NOTICED: How Should We Read the American Press? In Arabic, Lee Smith writes at Tablet:
Other former U.S. intelligence officials who have joined the anti-Salman campaign, include ex-CIA director John Brennan, who suggested the United States freeze arms sales to Riyadh, ex-deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, and former CIA official Ned Price. All three are MSNBC analysts, along with other former agency officers. One upside of the Khashoggi operation is that it has helped illuminate another part of the map of the new U.S. media—MSNBC appears to be a destination of choice for CIA leaks.
Blurring the lines between journalists/analysts and officials/operatives is not simply a matter of convenient nomenclature. It’s part of a conscious strategy to legitimize the nature and structure of information operations by obscuring their political character. How dare Trump strip John Brennan’s security clearance! He’s infringing on the former CIA director’s free speech rights—as a journalist.
Branding political operatives and intelligence officials as “press” is also intended to shield these newly minted “analysts” from possible prosecution. Evidence of their crimes and abuses may be found in the steady stream of classified intelligence illegally leaked to a complicit press corps for the purpose of marketing the Russia collusion narrative. By relabeling government officials as “journalists,” the media is protecting both its clandestine confederates and itself.
An analysis of Russiagate coverage also seems to suggest that the Federal Bureau of Investigation tends to favor The New York Times as a delivery mechanism while the Department of Justice prefers The Washington Post. Last month, the Times published a story sourced to memos written by FBI officials, including former deputy director Andrew McCabe, portraying Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as a conspirator plotting to bring down Trump. According to the account, Rosenstein told FBI officials that he’d wear a wire to record the president and gather evidence to remove him from office. When it was time for Rosenstein and allies at the DOJ to do damage control, their story went to the Post, published hours after the Times piece, explaining that Rosenstein was being sarcastic about spying on Trump, those FBI guys can’t take a joke!
Read the whole thing. Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
Flashback: “Lee Smith was fired very shortly after simply offering an article about Fusion GPS to the Weekly Standard. He merely offered it to them. And then the Weekly Standard suddenly decided things aren’t working out between themselves and Smith.”
(Classical allusion in headline.)
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: In 1998, Journalists Hated the Idea of Impeaching a President.
1973, 1987, 2006, 2018, not so much.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: What Are You Guys Doing?! AP Offers Tasteless Obituary of George H.W. Bush.
QUESTION ASKED:
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
MONICA LEWINSKY: “If you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesn’t want to answer.”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: MSM Claims, Without Evidence, That White House Acosta Tape Was ‘Doctored.’
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Why did nobody mention that Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s wife is a billionaire heiress?
As Jim Treacher has said:
Update: Leftists Lose Their Minds, Bash The New York Times After Beto O’Rourke Exposé.
NEW JERSEY STAR LEDGER EDITORIAL HEADLINE: Choke it down, and vote for Menendez.
Found via Dan McLaughlin, who tweets, “The level of moral compromise involved in supporting Menendez is pretty well illustrated by this headline.”
That the paper’s online slogan is “True Jersey” is a nice added touch. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: NBC Knew That Third Kavanaugh Accuser’s Claim Was Trash In September.
Related: “Oh cool — TIME sat on that Avenatti ‘white male’ quote since June 25.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC Reporter Gushes to Beto: ‘You’re a Rock Star!’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: When CNN’s Don Lemon melts down over what his fellow CNN anchor dubbed “the m-word,” the Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis responds, “You’re making a point. Are you the moderator or the host or arguing a liberal talking point?”
It’s the latter. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
THE MEDIA & THE MOB: Responding to a Washington Post reporter, who as Twitchy notes, “does the Republicans pounce angle on the out-of-control Kavanaugh mob,” Rod Dreher writes:
Here’s the thing: though there is no question that the GOP, like Democrats, play to the anxieties of its base — this is normal politics — there really were, and are, mobs out to get conservatives.
Conservatives didn’t just imagine the anti-Kavanaugh protesters filling the halls of Congress, harassing GOP senators. Conservatives aren’t imagining campus mobs shouting down conservatives. Republican political consultants didn’t invent the mob at Middlebury College last year that chased Charles Murray off of campus, and physically injured a (liberal) professor who was his host. Nor did the GOP conjure the Yale mob that abused the Christakises over Halloween costumes in 2016.
And on and on. More to the point, Republicans did not invent the mob-like behavior of the news media in the Kavanaugh affair. In the last 24 hours, I’ve heard from three friends — two Democrats, and one anti-Republican independent — who have written to express profound concern about this political moment, and the behavior of the liberal mob. One of the Democrats — no fan of Trump or Kavanaugh — told me that her party has lost her over all this. The independent told me he hasn’t voted GOP in 30 years, but that may change this November, because of the “malice” (his word) on the left. And the third remains a devoted Democrat, but he is agonizing over the demons now taking over his political side, and worries if they can ever be reined in.
In “After Kavanaugh,” Kevin Williamson adds, “The Democrats have created an environment that will render ordinary political discourse almost impossible for years to come:”
This has been shameful, and there should be a reckoning.
That reckoning will not come from the New York Times or from the faculty of the Yale Law School. And it will not come from mind-killed partisans who will believe — or at least pretend to believe — anything that justifies and facilitates their pursuit of power. “She sounded credible to me!” they say. People who are telling us what we want to hear often do. That isn’t good enough — and this cynical smear campaign cannot be allowed to go unanswered. Everybody likes to think that they would have had the good sense and spine to stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy or the House Un-American Activities Committee.
But as the Democrats in rodential retreat go slinking sideways away from this failed attempt at character assassination, what will we do? Not only in November, but after? They would very much like to make this election about Donald Trump, but this has very little to do with the president. They tried to do the same thing to Mitt Romney that they tried with Brett Kavanaugh, and they would have done the same thing if it had been President Romney naming a new justice.
If you don’t punish a political party for this, what do you punish one for?
Indeed. And how does the media recover from their role in the anti-Kavanaugh debacle? The Washington Free Beacon notes that Joe Scarborough(!) “issued a pointed challenge to editors across the country:”
“I challenge New York Times reporters this morning — not reporters, editors — I challenge Washington Post editors, I challenge Wall Street Journal editors, I challenge editors across America, write that story. What happened with Dr. Ford’s agreement with a congresswoman, with Dianne Feinstein? Why did they leak that story? And more importantly, look at yourself and ask yourself the question, why didn’t we report on this in real time when you sure as hell would have reported on it if [Sen. Chuck] Grassley (R., Iowa) and his office had done the same thing?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense — or as “Comfortably Smug” tweets, “Journalists are the most insidious of paid protesters.”
UPDATE: Forget ‘boobs’! CNN’s Brooke Baldwin now clutching her pearls over ‘the M word.’
ASSOCIATED PRESS COMPARES KAVANAUGH-FORD HEARING TO 9/11, JFK ASSASSINATION.
Curious historic omission, however:
As Jim Treacher has said:
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
THEY’RE NEVER THIS CURIOUS ABOUT DEMOCRATS — SEE, E.G., KEITH ELLISON. Media, ABC, PBS use Facebook to beg other Kavanaugh accusers to talk, ‘Truth will emerge.’ But remember when the NYT crowdsourced people to go through Sarah Palin’s hacked emails? Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
UPDATE: Ellison accuser releases 2017 medical document saying she feared ‘retribution.’
News media: Who?
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: After Dismissing Potential Bias as a ‘Conspiracy Theory,’ CNN Doesn’t Cover Leaked Google Tape.
It’s the “news they kept to themselves,” to coin a phrase.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Byron York: New York Times profile of Bruce Ohr looks a lot like a well timed defense brief.
It’s like in The Verdict, where James Mason’s “Prince of Darkness” character arranges favorable newspaper and TV profiles for the doctors who basically killed Paul Newman’s client, just before the case goes to trial.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: CBS News Changes Robert “Beto” O’Rourke NFL Player Protest Headline After Backlash.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: The Liberal Media Narrative Is Immune to Facts.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JOURNALISM: Media Ignores Fact That Cops And NBC Reporter Were Attacked At Charlottesville.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the silence makes perfect sense.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Nancy Pelosi on MSNBC: One of NBC’s Priorities Is to ‘Undermine My Prospects as Speaker.’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and the subtext of her statement — that because she’s a Democrat, NBC should be acting as her PR agents — makes perfect sense.
MARC THIESSEN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Explain the Chinese spy, Sen. Feinstein.
Imagine if it emerged that the Republican chairman of the House or Senate intelligence committee had a Russian spy working on their staff. Think it would cause a political firestorm? Well, this month we learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for about 20 years, was listed as an “office director” on payroll records and served as her driver when she was in San Francisco, all while reporting to China’s Ministry of State Security through China’s San Francisco Consulate. The reaction of the mainstream media? Barely a peep.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the silence makes perfect sense.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Media glosses over Dianne Feinstein’s Chinese spy.
THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF ASKING CATS NOT TO BE OBSESSED WITH LASER POINTERS: Please, Please, Please Stop Reporting on Viral Receipt Stories.
Readers of these stories aren’t looking for evidence that some guy is an open bigot. They’re looking for evidence that millions of people are secret bigots, people who live in places like Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, small-town New Jersey, etc.
Media outlets that fall for receipt stories don’t just misinform their audience, they do so in a way that damages our nation’s social cohesion.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll understand why they view this as a feature, not a bug. As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
And with the exception of a few brief time-outs in the culture war for pesky interludes such as WWII and 9/11, it has been ever thus.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: New York Daily News Announces Mass Layoffs To Staff Via Email, Ashe Schow writes at the Daily Wire:
Tronc, which owns NYDN, sent an email to staff Monday morning announcing it would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by the Daily Beast’s Max Tani.
“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email said.
* * * * * * * *
The biggest cut was editor-in-chief Jim Rich, who foreshadowed the layoffs in an ominous tweet Monday morning.
Rich tweeted, “If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.”
No, there is another option. It’s entirely possible to believe that journalists should be a watchdog on politicians, without resorting to material such as this:
UPDATE: It’s easy enough already to think of the Daily News as Democratic operatives with bylines, but Andrew Cuomo wants to make it official: Cuomo Offers to Bail Out Daily News with State Money. Pardon the pun, but this is the money quote: “These layoffs were made without notifying the State or asking for assistance.”
“Notifying the state.”
SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” STUMBLES: The future of the Democratic Party has no idea what “occupation of Palestine” means, but certainly likes using it.
That puts Democrats who are rushing to get behind [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez in a bind, however. Will the news media start asking them about the “occupation of Palestine” in places like Indiana, West Virginia, and Ohio? Or how about even in New York, where Kirsten Gillibrand practically sprained an ankle attempting to embrace Democratic Socialism after Ocasio-Cortez’ surprise win? Does the Akin Rule apply to anyone else other than Republicans?
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll know the answer is, “No. Next question?”
FAKE NEWS: Nikki Haley compels Washington Post reporter to take down tweets, add correction.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misattributed a statement to Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, that no more than 250,000 Americans are in “extreme poverty.” The statement was made by the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.
“But as so many have pointed out,” Twitchy adds, “isn’t it strange that when a reporter gets something wrong, it’s always something intended to make the Trump administration look bad, uninformed, or uncaring? Why is it that mistakes in reporting never go the other direction?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES DOING BATTLEFIELD PREP FOR NOVEMBER, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Associated Press Provably on a Mission to Slander Trump Administration.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Freaked Out Americans Desperately Seek to Escape the News.
Just think of the news as being produced by desperate freaked out Democratic operatives with bylines, and the above headline from Bloomberg Media makes perfect sense.
(Classical reference in headline.)
I do think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it does all make sense.
LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT HYSTERIA: A Census Bureau memo warns that the inclusion of a citizenship question will hurt the “quality” of the 2020 count.
Just think of the media as being Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
JUST THINK OF OLD MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND THEIR ANGER MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Media Melts Down After Trump Calls On The Daily Caller.
VIRGINIA DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN AD: After 9/11 The Greatest Threat To America Lived In A Cave. Now He Lives In The White House. “If the party roles were reversed here, this is a three-day firestorm. As it is, it’s more of a curio for the media. Which makes sense, since many of them doubtless agree with Dan Helmer’s point.”
You know what? I do think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it does all make sense.
ONCE AGAIN OBAMA CLAIMS ‘I DIDN’T HAVE SCANDALS:’ Why is the media still not challenging Obama’s absurd claims of being “scandal-free?”
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and the logic is plain.
WHAT DID OBAMA KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? Obama spied on Trump’s campaign. Where’s the outrage?
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.
Related: Clapper: It’s ‘A Good Thing’ FBI Was Spying On Trump Campaign.
THE SHAMEFUL, UNETHICAL SMEARING OF JORDAN PETERSON: The psychologist and intellectual might be controversial, but he’s not ‘enabling Jew hatred.’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Astonishingly, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is still #1 most read on Amazon.
Think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
STEPHANOPOULOS GOTTA STEPHANOPOULOS. Stephanopoulos to Brokaw Accuser: You ‘Angered’ a Colleague I ‘Admired.’
George Stephanopoulos is still working hard to defend powerful men accused of sexually harassing women. The former Bill Clinton operative turned Good Morning America co-host on Thursday interrogated Linda Vester, the woman who accused Brokaw of unwanted sexual advances and groping. Stephanopoulos, who stood by Clinton as numerous women accused him, lectured Vester: “Tom Brokaw is pretty angry.”
He then questioned her honesty in relating the accusations: “[Brokaw] describes you as a colleague who has trouble with the truth. Are you absolutely convinced that everything you remember about that incident, those incidents with Tom Brokaw are what happened?”
Stephanopoulos seriously wondered why Vester didn’t trust NBC to investigate what NBC new about Brokaw.
The guild always protects its own, just as Brokaw and the later Peter Jennings defended Dan Rather in October of 2004. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives* with bylines, and it all makes sense.
* To be fair, Stephanopoulos makes that comparison extremely easy.
DAILY CALLER EXCLUSIVE: How Buzzfeed’s ‘Data-Monster’ Leveraged User Data To Fuel Super PACs, Target Voters.
BuzzFeed partnered closely with multiple Democratic and anti-Trump super PACs in 2016 to target its own users with dozens of political advertisements that were not in accordance with its own policies, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.
Former BuzzFeed Vice President Rena Shapiro, who led the website’s native political advertising team during the 2016 election, described candidly in a pair of unearthed interviews how she partnered closely with political groups to create ads that harnessed the data BuzzFeed collects on its audience of over 650 million people to solve their “ultimate need, which is to get elected, to get their message out there, or to canvas people together to create impact around a cause.”
Plus:
BuzzFeed raised eyebrows in June 2016 when it announced it had canceled a $1.3 million advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee due to disagreements with then-candidate Donald Trump’s “offensive statements.”
Doing business with any group that supports Trump, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said after canceling the RNC ad buy, would be “hazardous to our health.”
And:
BuzzFeed’s advertising business demonstrated in 2016 that by refusing to work with pro-Trump political groups it had skin in the political game. But Smith, the website’s editor-in-chief, insists that its news coverage of the president is rooted in the facts. He said in January that the website would have treated a Hillary Clinton presidency the same way they’re treating Trump’s.
But juxtaposing BuzzFeed’s critical coverage of Trump to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, suggests otherwise.
BuzzFeed’s coverage of Obama was “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic,” according to a 2016 analysis by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group.
At this point I probably don’t have to remind you to think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: AP Shamed Into Naming One Dem’s Party in DC Anti-Semitism Controversy.
EXCESSIVE DRINKING CAN LEAD TO BLACKOUTS. OR IN SOME RARE CASES, MEDIA BLACKOUTS. Oh My: National Review Finally Asks, “Does Hillary Clinton Drink Too Much Alcohol? And Did the Media Cover This Up?”
That’s also from the Washington Post, which treated this “meme” like swamp-fever conspiracy theorizing.
Despite a reporter covering her letting us know she likes to drink, and despite an email from Palmieri instructing the staff to “sober her up.”
No one in the media asked the obvious follow-up questions or treated this as anything more than a silly internet conspiracy theory meme.
Combine that quote, and all the pictures of Hillary enjoying a cocktail or five (see below) with what didn’t get reported, and you have a genuine scandal — only partly about Hillary’s level of alcohol consumption.
Mostly, it’s about what the press knew but decided to hide from the public.
I know I’m writing this in a humorous way, but this is actually a question I’ve had for two years, and I’ve never seen the media touch it.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
ANALYSIS: CORRECT. Thank God You Don’t Live in the Mind of a Journalist!
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their need to generate chaos starts to make sense.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Newspapers Care Much More About Bashing Sinclair Than Criticizing an Unconstitutional Attack on Free Speech.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Reminder: The press blamed Christian conservatives for the Pulse nightclub shooting. It was a vicious smear.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt Is Trump’s Biggest Asset. That’s Why The Left Wants Him Gone.
Mollie Hemingway:
There are poor ways, average ways, and shrewd ways to tackle the constitutional problems that arise from the administrative state. Many Republicans either don’t realize the problems of an unelected bureaucracy’s power, or fail to combat those problems effectively. Pruitt is in the final category, demonstrating competency and a devotion to rule of law. And he has the courage that so many of his GOP peers lack, not being intimidated by the normal media frenzy that intimidates other Republican appointees.
Recently, a coordinated attempt to oust him has taken shape, as this liberal TV producer notes:
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and… you know the rest.
The most charming of which might have been Bill Kristol, about whom Hemingway notes, “this week tweeted his desire for Michelle Obama to run and defeat Donald Trump, said Pruitt was a parody of sycophancy for supporting a conservative deregulatory agenda.”
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Journalism is Dead.
Journalists weren’t interested in that, or anything else associated with the memo. They, like McMullin, couldn’t care less about government abusing its power as long as it does it against people they don’t like. We saw this play out with the IRS scandal during the Obama administration – the media ignored it as long as they could, talked about it for a quick minute, then returned to repeating the lie that Obama’s tenure was “scandal-free.”
Were Trump not President, were the Oval Office occupied by any of the other candidates who ran in 2016, the story would be nearly the same. There might not be the personal ferocity or sense of urgency, but the simmering contempt would still be there and it would still dominate the actions of these people.
They don’t care. Journalism is dead. It didn’t die of natural causes, it was murdered by its practitioners in the name of attacking Republicans, in particular Donald Trump.
Huh — seems like it was just last month that half the MSM were telling us all to go see Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Post.
SARAH HOYT: CNN is a Trump-hate-aholic and it’s Time for an Intervention.
Just think of CNN as Democratic operatives with bylines and it..nahh, they’re waaay too crazy for it to all make sense.
UPDATE: As appropriate for anything CNN-related, the link was initially an epic fail. It should be working now.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: The Media Has a Very Different Attitude Toward Donald Trump’s Health Than Hillary Clinton’s (Video).
HEY, IF THE DNC-MSM CAN REHAB DAN RATHER, WHY NOT KATIE? Katie Couric’s Return to Broadcasting Proves that Lying Is Okay If You’re Lying About the Right Thing:
I want to believe this one-off appearance for the Olympics is the last time we’ll see Couric, but that would make little sense. To me, this feels like more of a trial run to see how well she’s received by the public. I refuse to believe they couldn’t find anyone else to report on the Olympics. Someone with a much cleaner record.
Either way, it would appear journalistic integrity means little to the mainstream media. If you touch a woman inappropriately you’re gone — at least that’s how it is now that it’s a hot issue — but flat out lie about innocent people in order to push your agenda, and you’re still camera-worthy.
Just think of the media as Democratic party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
#METOO: A TAINTED NBC DRAWS SCRUTINY WITH ITS ILL-ADVISED OPRAH WINFREY TWEET.
Media and political circles are excited Monday following a barnburner of a speech this weekend from Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul most responsible for amplifying anti-vaccination theories, mainstreaming self-help “spiritualism” and launching the careers of infamous quacks Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
President Trump has proven already that even carnival barkers can be elected President of the United States, so the 2020 presidential buzz coming off of Winfrey’s address Sunday evening at the 75th Golden Globes isn’t that insane.
NBC, however, stepped in it even before the noted media proprietor delivered her prepared remarks.
“Nothing but respect for OUR future president,” the network’s official Twitter account said in a since-deleted tweet that referred both to a joke told by Golden Globes host Seth Meyers and a separate pro-Trump tweet that went viral last year.
No reason to merely think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines when they’re tweeting out stuff like this:
As Kyle Smith writes in an article today titled, “Golden Globes Fiasco: Hypocrisy, Preening, No Self-Awareness:”
NBC, Oprah: The juxtaposition of those two brands is too perfect to pass without notice. If your memory stretches back even three months, you’ll recall that it was NBC that quashed a series of blockbuster scoops by its correspondent Ronan Farrow that, when he finally was forced to take them to The New Yorker, reported that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist. By coincidence, the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, moonlights as a screenwriter who wrote Jackie — the kind of arty, Oscar-bait fare that Weinstein often produced and shepherded to Oscar glory (or at least Golden Globes semi-glory).
Of course, we’ve seen such rabid boosterism from NBC and the rest of the DNC-MSM for a tyro presidential candidate before:
I assume the combination of NBC’s tweet, Oprah’s award speech, and the DNC’s tweet earlier on Sunday night praising nothing but women candidates was all more or less coordinated as part of her official kickoff, or at the least testing the waters, of her presidential bid. But as I said earlier today, it seems like a poor branding decision for Oprah to associate herself so closely with Hollywood’s Weinstein fiasco.
Speaking of which: “Juanita Broaddrick To Oprah: ‘Funny, I’ve Never Heard You Mention My Name.’”
Ouch.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: The Sudden Hazing of Lindsey Graham: The media loved him when he rebuked Trump. Not so much now, when he questions the DOJ’s and FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: A deafening media silence on the Obama-Hezbollah scandal.
Politico published a jaw-dropping, meticulously sourced investigative piece this week detailing how the Obama administration had secretly undermined US law-enforcement agency efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah. The effort was part of a wider push by the administration to placate Iran and ensure the signing of the nuclear deal.
Now swap out “Trump” for “Obama” and “Russia” for “Iran” and imagine the eruption these revelations would generate. Because, by any conceivable journalistic standard, this scandal should’ve triggered widespread coverage and been plastered on front pages across the country. By any historic standard, the scandal should elicit outrage regarding the corrosion of governing norms from pundits and editorial boards.
Yet, as it turns out, there’s an exceptionally good chance most of your neighbors and colleagues haven’t heard anything about it.
Days after the news broke, in fact, neither NBC News, ABC News nor CBS News — whose shows can boast a collective 20 million viewers — had been able to find the time to relay the story to its sizeable audiences. Other than Fox News, cable news largely ignored the revelations, as well.
Most major newspapers, which have been sanctimoniously patting themselves on the back for the past year, couldn’t shoehorn into their pages a story about potential collusion between the former president and a terror-supporting state.
Democracy dies in darkness.
BOB CORKER ON THE MEDIA: I Have Empathy for Trump Now.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Thursday he has a “newfound empathy” for President Trump’s criticism of the media after a report that he’d benefit from a provision in the final GOP tax bill went viral.
“I told (Trump) that I’d had a healthy respect for the media and I deal with them all the time, and, you know, to attack the media has not been something I’ve done,” Corker said on Fox News.
“I’ve never ever in my life used the work ‘fake news’ until today. I actually understand what it is the president has been dealing with,” he continued.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Deceitful Bias in The New York Times.
John Stossel’s latest video for Reason TV:
Just think of the Times as being almost entirely staffed by Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
COKIE ROBERTS: OH, WE ALL KNEW TO AVOID GETTING IN AN ELEVATOR WITH REP. CONYERS. “Speaking on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ Cokie Roberts made a startling admission: ‘every female in the press corps knew’ to avoid being in an elevator with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), and has apparently known about this ‘for years.’ Conyers has been accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has stepped down from the House Judiciary Committee.”
Naturally, the press (in this case, the House of Stephanopoulos) covered for Conyers “for years.” Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
QUESTIONS THAT NOBODY* IS ASKING: Why Have Liberals Been Such Horrendous Hypocrites on Women’s Rights?, asks Roger Simon.
* Well, at least nobody at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among numerous others. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their omertàs all make sense.
BYRON YORK: How pundits got key part of Trump-Russia story all wrong.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.™
GLENN GREENWALD: Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That are False.
Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.
On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.
The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.
The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement.
I used to think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and that did make everything make more sense. But now I just think of them as fake newsies.
LARRY O’CONNOR: Why Won’t Media Demand Dems Condemn Antifa?
Democrats have been all over cable and network news over the past several weeks as they participate in the tag team pile-on of any Republican who dares to show the slightest support of President Trump. Where are Wolf and Mika and Don and Anderson and George and Chuck and all the rest confronting these Democrats, boxing them in and challenging them to condemn, in no uncertain terms, the Antifa thugs once and for all?
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines providing cover for Democratic operatives with baseball bats, and it all makes sense. Although to be fair, more Democrats (the kind with D after their names) are coming around to condemning Antifa all own their own.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is ‘identity liberalism’ killing the Democratic party?
Humanities professor Mark Lilla has a new book out titled “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics”… If you want a sense of how the left is responding to this thesis, you can turn to this contentious interview at Slate. Author Isaac Chotiner seems to be doing his best to undermine Lilla’s argument and, more specifically, to make the case that everything comes down to racism. Lilla’s position is that this assumption is blinding Democrats to seeing a more nuanced view of the problem:
John Sexton of Hot Air goes on to quote a wide swatch of Lilla’s interview, but I want to drill down to this moment, which sums up just how unreceptive Lilla’s intended audience of fellow leftists will be to his message:
[Lilla:] When you ask them about identity issues, the people who are not voting for us, and ask them about what they perceive as political correctness, they respond. You only have to look at polls about this, and it’s a great recruiting tool for the right. Now, unless you assume that all of white America is racist and lost and cannot be saved—
Chotiner: Only about half, yeah.
“So Lilla is saying people on the right are responding to the left’s obvious contempt for them and Chotiner’s reply is to label half of them are racist, which is sort of making Lilla’s point,” Sexton adds after quoting more of the interview.
Slate is the last journalistic redoubt of the Graham family, who owned the Washington Post and Newsweek for decades, before offloading, in recent years, the latter for $1 and the former in return for Jeff Bezos’ pocket change. One of the reasons why their publications managed to turn a large investment into a smaller one is the smugness of their journalists, one of whom wore a “Yeah, I’m in the Media, Screw You!” button to the GOP’s 1992 convention.
And if anything, the smug cloud over both the DNC and its operatives with bylines has grown much, much larger. As William Voegeli concludes in his review of Lilla’s book at City Journal (titled “Liberals, Shipwrecked,” which is also well worth your time to read in full), “Lilla’s hope for a future liberalism that will forge ahead and surmount identity politics seems naïve.”
And how.
I THINK THEY’VE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD WITH THAT ONE: 47% say media blocking Trump’s agenda, helped Obama.
The public appears to agree with President Trump that the media is out to get him and stop his agenda.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey on the day Trump was railing against the media found that 47 percent believe the media is blocking his administration from scoring successes.
The public appears to agree with President Trump that the media is out to get him and stop his agenda.
A new Rasmussen Reports survey on the day Trump was railing against the media found that 47 percent believe the media is blocking his administration from scoring successes.
More and more people are realizing that if you think of the press as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, it explains nearly everything.
JOURNALISM AS NARRATIVE CONTROL: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
We’ve been hearing a lot about “right-wing violence” lately. If we’re to believe our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters, there’s a Klansman on every street corner and a Nazi under every bed. There’s nothing more terrifying than a “white nationalist” who lives in his mom’s basement, which is why it’s okay for feral Antifa children to beat these guys up and drench them with balloons filled with piss. It’s “self-defense.”
But what happens when an act of violence is irrefutably motivated by left-wing ideology? What happens if, for example, a Bernie Bro named James T. Hodgkinson shoots at a bunch of congressmen for the explicit reason that he hates Republicans and wants them dead? How do we fit that into the preferred narrative?
We can’t. There’s no way. So we just leave it out entirely.
Well, for certain values of “we.” But it’s sad to see this even from the WSJ. Plus:
If James T. Hodgkinson had been a Trump supporter who shot and almost killed a Democratic congressman for political reasons, he’d be the most infamous man in America. But now, just two months after his attempt to murder a group of Republican lawmakers, he’s not even worth mentioning.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think the press is sad that Hodgkinson didn’t succeed.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong. Even at the WSJ, it seems.
THE ROT RUNS DEEP: The Ever-Burgeoning House Democrat IT Scandal.
Had it been the RNC that had allowed this mess, it would be the front-page story, day after day. Instead we’re talking about statues and false charges of racism.
“Democratic operatives with bylines,” indeed.
TRUMP AND THE MEDIA LOVE MUD WRESTLING:
Trump is right to complain about how he never gets any credit for doing the right thing because the media and the rest of his critics are always waiting to pounce on him for doing the wrong thing.
All I could think was: The media have lost their collective mind. They used to be content to just tell us what to think. Now, in the era of Trump, they go further and tell us not to trust what we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears.
Trump does a superb job of getting in his own way, and turning every policy disagreement into a junior high school fistfight.
Still, the last few days have been excruciating for me. Not because I have any affection for Trump or neo-Nazis or white supremacists. I don’t. The country would be better off without the lot of them. However, I have become quite fond of journalism.
I sure miss it.
Me too. Note that this syndicated column by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is running in the San Francisco Chronicle, which buried its editors’ videotaped interview with Obama in January of 2008 in which he vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, instead of putting his words in giant 72 point type on its front page the next day. A serious presidential candidate vowing to wipe a major industry should be major news no matter what your political leanings or your views on environmentalism. Its omission by the Chronicle served as a stark reminder that long ago, old media morphed into Democratic operatives with bylines, who merely produce content as a side function of their main goal of keeping their team in power and accumulating more of it.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Emails show Washington Post, New York Times reporters unenthusiastic about covering Clinton-Lynch meeting.
SHOCKER: One Year Later, Journalists Exposed By WikiLeaks Carry On As Before. “One year after WikiLeaks began publishing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that exposed prominent journalists as partisans, many of those journalists are continuing their careers without, it seems, any serious consequences.” Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines.
Their bosses do. . . .
DAVID HARSANYI: So-Called Fact Checkers Keep Butchering The Facts About Obamacare.
“Fact checking” has evolved from an occasionally useful medium to an exercise in revisionism and diversion. Take The Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler’s recent article titled “President Trump’s mangled ‘facts’ about Obamacare.” Headline readers might assume it’s just Trump doing what Trump does most of the time. I almost passed myself. Yet it turns out that all these supposedly “mangled” contentions about Obamacare are, at the very least, debatable assertions.
Kessler, for example, doesn’t approve of this Donald Trump statement: “Americans were told that premiums would go down by $2,500 per year. And instead, their premiums went up to levels that nobody thought even possible.” Other than the hyperbole (“nobody thought even possible”), this statement is substantively true.
Kessler’s ostensive debunking of the “premiums are soaring” claim is really just a confirmation that premiums have indeed risen, augmented by an argument that it wasn’t Obamacare’s fault. Kessler blames the vagaries of modern life and demographics—because these things apparently didn’t exist when Democrats were making their big unrealistic promises in 2009.
Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll have it exactly right.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: How The Press Ignored Bill Clinton’s Foreign-Donation Scandal. “I’m glad the news media is pursuing the Trump–Russia scandal, but let’s not forget the differences between how they are covering Russia compared with how they reported a similar story — this one involving Communist China — that developed during Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. . . . Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked — in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the Trump–Russia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money.”
They were in the tank for Bill Clinton nearly as much as they were in the tank for Obama and Hillary.
NEW FORMULA: Want instant clicks or buzz around your article or stage production? Play to the groundlings and cast Trump as the villain: “George Orwell Saw Donald Trump Coming: Review of ‘1984’. I don’t know how old this Daily Beast writer is, but I suspect he was still in high school when this was happening:
In 2011, Obama signed a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, specifically, provisions allowing roaming wiretaps and government searches of business records. Obama argued that the renewal was needed to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. However, the renewal was criticized by several members of Congress who argued that the provisions did not do enough to curtail excessive searches.
I know, research is hard, and it would have been too much work to find out that mass-spying was commonplace under the previous administration. At least, not when there’s a click-bait narrative to promulgate. Democratic operatives with bylines, indeed.
**UPDATE: I should have linked to this Obama ad using 1984 as a metaphor for Hillary.
