“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.
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.
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!
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 13, 2019 at 12:15 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 05, 2019 at 8:22 pm Link
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.™
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jan 26, 2019 at 5:51 pm Link
No, Beto O’Rourke did not live-stream his teeth cleaning on Instagram — any more than Al Gore ever actually claimed to have invented the internet. But if you were under the impression that O’Rourke did precisely that, you’re not alone — we did, too!
This is how online myths start.
It certainly is. But what actually happened, you see, was that Beto was live-streaming an interview with his dental hygienist, as a sort of slice-of-life-on-the-Mexican-border thing. And as part of that interview, he, um… well, okay, sure, he literally live-streamed his teeth cleaning. That is exactly, precisely what he did. That’s why there’s footage of it, which Beto took himself, intentionally, and which will never go away now. He did that. But it’s a myth that he did that, because… er…
C’mon, look, just forget he did that, okay? It makes him look silly and dumb, which might hurt him with voters, so let’s just pretend it never happened.
This is how the next two years are gonna go, everybody. The Dems will wave away every single one of this guy’s gaffes and oopsies, no matter how minor. We will be gaslighted. Beto says the Constitution sucks now? Whatever. He says that a border wall is literally Death itself? Big deal. If they’re willing to overlook the time he got in a drunken car wreck and fled the scene, nothing else he does is going to deter them. They’ve got an election to win. They’ve got an orange demon to beat.
For a party obsessed with reducing fossil fuels, Democrats and their media operatives with bylines sure believe in maximum gaslighting.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jan 16, 2019 at 9:14 pm Link
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.
As a sidenote, I was disappointed to see the Knoxville News-Sentinel pushing this bogus story on Facebook.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 15, 2019 at 7:05 am Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 13, 2019 at 10:20 pm Link
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 Timespublished 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.™
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 29, 2018 at 1:05 pm Link
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?
“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.”
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27, 2018 at 10:24 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Aug 12, 2018 at 1:22 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Aug 10, 2018 at 2:14 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25, 2018 at 1:44 pm Link
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.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 23, 2018 at 12:14 pm Link
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?”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 16, 2018 at 12:44 pm Link
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.™
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 14, 2018 at 5:44 pm Link
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.
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?”
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.
Posted at by Stephen Green on May 07, 2018 at 10:09 am Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on May 02, 2018 at 8:41 am Link
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.”
Posted at by Stephen Green on Apr 05, 2018 at 12:07 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 04, 2018 at 5:44 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jan 17, 2018 at 4:47 pm Link
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:
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).
NBC’s late-night jokesters, Meyers included, were curiously slow to make jokes about Weinstein when the scandal initially broke October 5. Winfrey — whose kiss of Weinstein at a Globes-style awards show a couple of years ago went viral as she spoke, and who worked for Weinstein on his 2013 movie, Lee Daniels’s The Butler — appears also to have been used as starlet-bait by the reprehensible producer. Only via Hollyweird logic could she be cast as the anti-Weinstein or the anti-Trump: The world’s leading proponent of the concept “your truth,” a phrase she used again in her speech, is not the antidote to Trumpian deceit.
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.
Read the whole thing. Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines desperate to keep Obama’s Iran deal alive and prevent Trump from having a key international victory occur on his watch (and fearing he’ll take full credit for it), and their de facto working for the mullahs all makes sense.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jan 04, 2018 at 10:59 am Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 22, 2017 at 7:23 am Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 22, 2017 at 7:00 am Link
Nearly a year into the Trump presidency, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos says he’s experiencing “the worst moment I’ve had in the 34 years I’ve been living in the United States.”
“With Donald Trump there, I have never been treated so badly. I have never been insulted so much. We’ve never been attacked so much, nor have they tried to run us out as much as now,” Ramos vented in an interview with the Spanish radio network Cadena SER.
Ramos, who proclaimed himself “if not an enemy, an opponent” of Trump in the interview, complained about the massive blowback he has received since deciding to use his media platforms to openly oppose the choice of over 62 million American voters in last year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Now the social media networks are terrible,” Ramos told his Spanish radio interviewer, Javier del Pino. “Before if someone wanted to insult you, they had to do it in person or by sending you an anonymous letter. Now they do it through the social media networks and the daily insults – you can enter my Facebook or Twitter and they are there all the time,” lamented Ramos.
How dare you peons speak with me – I’m a reporter!
At a recent National Press Club panel on the current state of the U.S. news media, the fireworks really erupted when Ramos objected to a statement made by Tur, in which she basically exhorted journalists to uphold core journalistic standards.
KATY TUR, CORRESPONDENT, NBC NEWS: Continue to report on the facts. Be as fair as you possibly can be. Be partial to the truth, and don’t be alarmist when it’s unnecessary.
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: May I, uh, disagree?
After interrupting Tur for apparently advocating a much too orthodox approach to the practice of the profession, Ramos proceeded to urge the attendees at the National Press Club event to favor instead his ‘holy war’ approach to covering Trump.
JORGE RAMOS, SENIOR NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is gonna do it? It’s an uncomfortable position…
BRIAN STELTER, HOST, CNN’S RELIABLE SOURCES: You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.
Just think of the Times as being almost entirely staffed by Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Dec 06, 2017 at 8:44 am Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Nov 28, 2017 at 7:14 am Link
* 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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Nov 21, 2017 at 10:59 am Link
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.
Posted at by Stephen Green on Nov 06, 2017 at 2:11 pm Link
I did what I could to answer Ben Strauss’ questions as well as I could, while still producing, occasionally popping on air when Clay asked me a question, and handling the phone calls. This was by no means me sitting in front of an interviewer, but Strauss relentlessly grilled me on all aspects of Outkick, my politics, and Clay’s brand of entertainment.
If you read the Politico article, you’ll notice he quoted me several times in the roughly 4500 word piece. I probably spoke over ten thousand to him myself, but he picked about six sentences. Before I discuss those, let me explain how the interview went down. I can’t accurately describe how many times I was asked some variation of this question:
So, did Clay Travis make a conscious decision to appeal to the right for monetary and celebrity purposes?
It wouldn’t just come as a question, as it would also include something like, “I mean you guys know what you’re doing, and it’s clearly working for you, but this was intentional, right?” That’s paraphrasing, but he felt the need to make up quotes and insinuations from me, so I’ll do the same to him. But, I’ll be courteous enough to admit it, and also won’t take him out of context, as he did to me.
I refused to give him the answer he walked in the door craving. This guy had an agenda, he had his title picked out, he had his “gotcha” piece scripted out in his head before he ever shook hands with either one of us this past Monday morning. To call this article biased and littered with manipulation would be a massive understatement.
Strauss would then ask the same question again, but with variance in the selected words, hoping I wasn’t educated enough to see what he was doing.
Didn’t you record your own copy of the interview? As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in 2008 after ABC edited a mashed-up video ransom note version of Sarah Palin being “interviewed” by Charlie Gibson, always bring your own video camera (or at least a digital audio recorder) to an interview. Just ask the folks who Katie Couric tried to gotcha last year.
And speaking of blasts from the past, Outkick’s Jason Martin writes:
Clay Travis isn’t alt-right in the least. I suggested to Strauss that I felt Donald Trump gave that incredibly small fringe movement a “wink and a gun” because he needed their support, and because he has no principles, merely interests. Correction, he has one interest, and it has five letters in its last name. The last four are “RUMP.”
Clay didn’t vote for Trump, and despite our many disagreements, he and I shared that in common. Never for a second did I consider Trump, and in fact as soon as he was the clear nominee, I officially registered as an Independent and removed the “R” from my name permanently. None of that matters to “journalists” like Ben Strauss, however. I’m alt-right because he and I wouldn’t necessarily vote the same way. I’m convinced most of the people that toss out “alt-right” like it’s a bodily function have no clue what it actually means.
Alt-right – for the media, it’s this decade’s version of calling everyone on the right “neocons,” ironically enough.
Exit quote:
Clay and I gave this man access, we answered his questions, we tried to ensure he had all the information he needed to write an article worthy of his time. He interviewed me, he interviewed Clay’s wife (and asked her some RIDICULOUS, uncomfortable questions about the family now being on the wrong side of history), and he even spoke to Bobby freaking Bones about Clay.
This is the behind the scenes account of how one writer came in not to learn anything, not to be objective, and not to write an intriguing portrait of a controversial public figure, but to try and find a punchline for his bad joke.
After reading the article, the punchline is actually the byline. Go figure.
Just think of Politico as being largely staffed by Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29, 2017 at 11:18 pm Link
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 29, 2017 at 10:11 am Link
JUST NBC THE HYPOCRISY:
● Shot: “Former FEMA head Michael Brown remembers Hurricane Katrina ten years later, calling President George W. Bush’s decision to flyover New Orleans to view the aftermath and not land was a huge mistake.”
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.
Posted at by Stephen Green on Aug 30, 2017 at 10:12 am Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Aug 25, 2017 at 4:55 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 23, 2017 at 2:48 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 22, 2017 at 1:27 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Stephen Green on Aug 21, 2017 at 10:52 am Link
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.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Aug 20, 2017 at 8:32 pm Link
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 04, 2017 at 8:27 pm Link
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. . . .
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 31, 2017 at 8:33 am Link
When a computer expert who worked for congressional Democrats was accused of stealing computers and data systems in February, members of Congress cut him loose within days, leaving Imran Awan with no supporters five months later.
Except for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The Weston Democrat has not explained in detail why she continued to employ Awan until Tuesday when she fired him — after he was arrested on bank-fraud charges at Dulles International Airport in Virginia attempting to board a flight to Pakistan.
And she has not elaborated on what work Awan did for her after he lost access to the House computer network.
Which of course, is why, with the notable exception of DWS’s hometown paper, the DNC-MSM can’t run away fast enough from story, and/or switch into “Republican overreach” mode.
As Iowahawk likes to say, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 29, 2017 at 5:44 pm Link
“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.
Posted at by Stephen Green on Jul 26, 2017 at 10:45 am Link
Lest you think this is entirely a new attitude amongst the left, recall this New Yorker flashback to the Vietnam War era. “Punch” Sulzberger, who had published the Times from 1963 through 1992, and whose family has controlled the New York Times since the late 19th century, served with distinction as a Marine in the Pacific Theater in WWII and as an officer during the Korean War. His son on the other hand…
[Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr.] had been something of a political activist in high school—he had been suspended briefly from Browning for trying to organize a shutdown of the school following the National Guard’s shooting of students at Kent State—and at Tufts he eagerly embraced the antiwar movement. His first arrest for civil disobedience took place outside the Raytheon Company, a defense and space contractor: there, dressed in an old Marine jacket of Punch’s, he joined other demonstrators who were blocking the entrance to the company’s gates. He was soon arrested again, in an antiwar sit-in at the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston.
Punch had showed little reaction after the first arrest, but when he got word of the second one he flew to Boston. Over dinner, he asked his son why he was involved in the protests and what kind of behavior the family might expect from him in the future. Arthur assured his father that he was not planning on a career of getting himself arrested. After dinner, as the two men walked in the Boston Common, Punch asked what his son later characterized as “the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life”: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” Arthur answered, “I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country; we shouldn’t be there.” To the elder Sulzberger, this bordered on traitor’s talk. “How can you say that?” he yelled. Years later, Arthur said of the incident, “It’s the closest he’s ever come to hitting me.”
Pinch and the rest of the MSM haven’t exactly matured much since the Woodstock era. As Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon wrote of the Times in a 2014 piece titled “Fast Times at Eighth Avenue High,” “The next time our reporters and producers and anchors and bloggers affect an air of moral or social superiority, the next time they pretend to know the answers to every political and economic and cultural question, remember this: They are basically teenagers.”
And regarding their adolescent rage, and that of the non-media wing of the Democrat Party, as Glenn has written, “Trump, as I keep saying, is a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 25, 2017 at 10:00 pm Link
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.
Posted at by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 17, 2017 at 10:36 am Link
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS. ABC’s Outrageous Anti-Christian Smear: “Jeff Sessions addresses ‘anti-LGBT hate group,’ but DOJ won’t release his remarks,” ran an ABC headline yesterday, screencapped by Rod Dreher, who writes:
This is genuinely shocking to read. I went to the same annual ADF meeting last summer. It was a normal gathering of religious conservative lawyers and others, who talked about various challenges to religious liberty. Yet those scamming trolls at the Southern Poverty Law Center tagged them a “hate group,” and ABC News repeats that slur. What ABC says is technically true. SPLC does in fact call ADF a “hate group.” The shocking thing is that ABC News takes that incredible charge for granted, and uses it to trash both ADF and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Here’s a link to a PDF file from ADF that gives you the basic facts about the organization. Does this look like the moral equivalent of a neo-Nazi outfit to you?
Here’s the link to the SPLC page explaining why they labeled ADF a “hate group.” You should be aware that if they say this about ADF, they must also say it about any church that upholds orthodox Christian teaching on sexuality. SPLC calls it “hate” — and again, ABC News repeats that vicious smear, because no doubt they think it’s true.
Just think of ABC News as Democrat operatives with bylines (and in some cases booster seats), and it all makes sense.
