By the Boston Herald
The left and its compliant media are willfully reporting false news to the American people. Whether it is a symptom of mass hysteria that is the genesis for this confirmation bias-style reporting or an intentional maneuver to spread anti-Trump propaganda, its effect is toxic and pernicious.
The report comes in the form of a tweet making its way through the Twitter-sphere in which a user named Mark Elliott has posted a video of Donald Trump who he contends is referring to migrants at the border as “animals.” Elliott, who has almost 20,000 followers added the comment, “@realDonaldTrump on people asking for asylum “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
In truth, the video is almost a year old. Last May, during a meeting with the president, Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County, Calif., explained to Trump that she was frustrated over Continue reading
By Charles Hurt • Washington Times
The job of newspapers was once to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Today, that job seems to be to give voice to liars and shout down the truth.
You really cannot blame Democrat voters in America for fleeing in droves the fetid airwaves of MSNBC and CNN, which have suffered a collapse in ratings last week as viewers learned they have been steadily and spectacularly lied to for the past two years by the so-called “mainstream” media about the so-called Russian collusion “story.”
Examples abound of pundits and reporters from once-respected newspapers and cable “news” outlets leveling outlandish charges about this twisted fantasy of collusion between President Trump and the Kremlin. Equally alarming are the endless examples of these same “news” outlets airing and publishing outright lies told by politicians hellbent on destroying Mr. Trump.
It is a sad fact in our broken world: politicians lie. The whole point of the so-called “Fourth Estate” — that unofficial, quasi-fourth branch of government — is to Continue reading
By Lance Morrow • Wall Street Journal
The Democratic National Committee will regret its decision to bar Fox News from hosting any of its 2020 presidential primary debates. Just as the game begins, the committee has planted the idea that the Democrats mean to run a rigged election—not a happy thought to encourage in view of the way the party’s leaders fiddled with the process in 2016 to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
The Democrats consider Fox a propaganda arm of the Trump administration, but they have their own propaganda arms. Most of the mainstream media manifest a deep affinity for progressive Democrats and their agenda. To exclude Fox smacks of Soviet one-party theatrics.
The journalists at CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times and, broadly speaking, the elected officials and paid operatives of the Democratic Party—almost all of these people agree on the issues of the day: women’s rights, abortion, gay marriage and other LGBTQ issues, Black Lives Matter, gun control, immigration, the border wall, family separation at the U.S.-Mexican border, Russian collusion, Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness and so on. They agree, above all, in opposing and loathing Donald Trump.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” unfolds each weekday morning as a relentless, ritualized denunciation of Mr. Trump and all his works. With almost hilarious single-mindedness, the program’s repertory company addresses itself to the work of discrediting and—they hope—one day ousting the president.
It will be fatal to Democrats’ chances in 2020 to encourage the suspicion they won’t tolerate points of view that differ from progressive orthodoxy. Unbiased viewers know that Fox employs many credible journalists: Bret Baier, Martha McCallum and Chris Wallace, for example.
Anyway, Fox journalists asking the questions would only sharpen the debate and increase the candidates’ credibility. The ideologues at the DNC don’t grasp the virtue of competing ideas. Jacobins rarely do.
True, Sean Hannity whispers in Mr. Trump’s ear. That is probably a bad idea, but it has abundant historical precedent. The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens of McClure’s Magazine, author of “The Shame of the Cities,” met often with President Theodore Roosevelt to advise him on progressive policy.
Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief and a columnist for the New York Times, was in the Kennedy family’s pocket for years. He wrote columns in the late 1930s pushing Joseph P. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, for president. The journalist had the sense to turn down the patriarch’s offer of a car one Christmas, considering the bribe too blatant. Krock used his influence on the Pulitzer board to engineer a 1957 prize for JFK’s “Profiles in Courage.”
Henry Luce, co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc., regarded his magazines as the voices of the American superego. He liked to tell his countrymen what to think, and presidents how to act. Presidents feared Luce and his ability to teach and preach to tens of millions of American voters every week. Luce had an especially proprietary sense of President Dwight Eisenhower, whom his magazines backed in 1952. Intellectuals damned Luce and envied him his vast readership and almost unique influence upon the American popular mind. Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, was an intimate adviser to Lyndon Johnson, notably at the 1960 Democratic convention, where LBJ sought the top spot on the ticket but settled for the second.
President Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, of Newsweek and later of the Washington Post, had a glamorous friendship that was close and, from a journalistic point of view, not quite ethical.
The DNC made a bad move. One or two of the declared Democratic candidates might distinguish themselves now by demanding that the committee reverse itself and invite Fox News—and its audience—back into the American electoral process.
By Christopher Jacobs • The Federalist
Researchers have raised legitimate questions about whether a policy change included in Obamacare actually increased death levels nationwide.
Some may recall that two years ago, liberals engaged in no small amount of hyperbolic rhetoric insisting that repealing Obamacare would kill Americans. They viewed that fact as a virtual certainty, and spent more time arguing over precisely how many individuals would die under the law’s repeal.
Somehow, however, the media that breathlessly covered claims about how repealing Obamacare would kill Americans hasn’t exactly rushed to highlight claims that the law could have increased the death rate. Continue reading
The mainstream liberal press may have had a “slobbering love affair” with President Obama (as CBS News veteran Bernard Goldberg once aptly put it). But they’re absolutely obsessed with President Trump. Data compiled by Real Clear Politics shows just how bad this Trump obsession is.
A fascinating article, “Measuring the Media’s Obsession With Trump,” looked at the percentage of airtime the three main cable networks — CNN, MSNBC and Fox News — devoted each day to stories about Trump.
The author, Kalev Leetaru, then compared that to the share devoted to Obama over the past nine years. Continue reading
By Victor Davis Hanson • American Greatness
Donald Trump on occasion can talk recklessly. He is certainly trying to “fundamentally transform” the United States in exactly the opposite direction from which Barack Obama promised to do the same sort of massive recalibration. According to polls (such as they are), half the country fears Trump. The media despises him. Yet Trump poses no threat to the U.S. Constitution. Those who since 2016 have tried to destroy his candidacy and then his presidency most certainly do.
When, and if, we ever lose our freedoms, it will not likely be due to a boisterous Donald Trump, damning “fake news” at popular rallies, or even by being greeted with jarring “lock her up” chants—Trump, whom the popular culture loves to hate and whose every gesture and, indeed, every inch of his body, is now analyzed, critiqued, caricatured, and damned on the national news.
In general, free societies more often become unfree with a whimper, not a bang—and usually due to self-righteous pious movements that always claim the higher moral ground, and justify their extreme means by their self-sacrificing struggle for supposedly noble ends of social justice, equality, and fairness. Continue reading
By Bill Zeiser • Real Clear Politics
We at RealClearPolitics’ Fact Check Review are making an earnest effort to better understand how fact checkers work — and to share our findings with the public. We are doing so because much is unknown about the fact-checking process. What is clear, however, is that fact checkers are becoming increasingly influential — even to the point of being able to censor what you read.
The core of our project is hosting a site where you can view and search the data we are collecting about fact checks and the organizations that publish them. But to provide context beyond the numbers, we have also been regularly writing about observations we make while assessing the fact checks.
Since our only agenda is to better understand, we do this with no partisan or institutional bias. That means we offer praise and criticism as appropriate. For the fact-checking site Snopes, one of the longest running in the business, we have done both.
by John Nolte • Daily Wire
Barack Obama trafficked guns to Mexican drug lords, secretly delivered pallets filled with billions in cash to Iran’s America/Jew-hating mullahs, left four Americans to die in Benghazi and then lied about it, allowed his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to exchange government favors for hundreds of millions of dollars slushed into the Clinton Foundation, sic’d his IRS on everyday, law-abiding Americans, and used a trillion dollars in “stimulus” funds to pay off his cronies, like those behind a boondoggle called Solyndra.
And all along, over eight terrible years, our media did a whole lot more than just let Obama get away with it. They wholeheartedly colluded. They allowed Obama to persecute them through the Department of Justice and to lie to our face (remember: I just now read about it in the newspaper, the IRS did nothing wrong, you can keep your insurance). Continue reading
By Onan Coca And Jeff Dunetz • The Lid
Regular readers of The Lid know that while I sometimes disagree with him, I am a fan of CNN’s Jake Tapper, IMHO he is the only one at CNN who tries to play it down the middle. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Jake Tapper admitted what most Republicans already knew – the media had allowed Obama to lie with impunity because they were more supportive of his administration.
If you can remember back to the Obama era, Tapper was a thorn in the side of the administration and conservatives lauded him as the one voice at CNN sometimes willing to hold the Obama team’s feet to the fire.
Now that the Obama era is over, Tapper has set his sights on the new seat of power and the Trump administration. This switch has many Trump supporters upset and lumping (unfairly) Tapper in with the rest of the partisan hacks at CNN. Continue reading
by Warner Todd Huston • Breitbart
Back in 2009, Politico had a much less sensational headline when reporting on all the Bush-era U.S. attorneys that Obama fired.
For its March 10 article on the Trump administration’s decision to ask for resignation letters from 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys — an action fully within Trump’s legal right and one many other presidents also executed — Politico chose a headline that clearly cast Trump’s actions in a negative light.
Politico reporter Josh Gerstein’s piece reporting on the president’s move was sharply titled, “Trump team ousts Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys.” Continue reading
by Matt Vespa • Townhall
Senate Democrats are trying to cast Republicans as being remiss in their constitutional duty to consider Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court (they’re not). And the mainstream media, by and large, would support that false narrative. The truth is Senate Republicans are acting no differently with these nominations concerning the politics of it all. Furthermore, The New York Times editorial board didn’t seem so aghast at Republican opposition back in the 1980s, where they openly said that Senate Democrats have “every right to resist” Robert Bork’s nomination:
…[T]he President [Reagan] chose Robert Bork and thus chose angry confrontation. For Judge Bork is not merely a conservative. He has long been a flamboyant provocateur, with a lifetime of writings to prove it. As a result, Mr. Reagan got the rancorous political battle he asked for. Appointment to the Court is a political act yet the Court’s authority depends in large measure on public confidence in its fairness and aloofness from the political cockpit. There’s something to lose when a nomination battle turns brutally partisan. Continue reading
By L. Brent Bozell III • CNSNews.com
President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a transfer of remains ceremony Sept. 14, 2012, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., marking the return to the United States of the remains of four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya. (AP Photo)
Our news media are so overwhelmingly obsequious to the Democrats that Hillary Clinton can imply the relatives of the Americans killed in Benghazi are liars on national TV, and no one in the press blinks an eye or finds it newsworthy.
ABC is about to host another one of those hide-and-seek Saturday night Democrat debates. There is something very ironic here: It was on this network where she made that outrageous statement.
Clinton lied to her former employee (and donor) George Stephanopoulos on his ABC program “This Week” on Dec. 6. In his toughest question of the day, George told his pal, “Some GOP rivals and family members of the Benghazi victims are saying you lied to them in the hearing. They point to emails that you sent the night of Benghazi attack, one to your daughter, Chelsea Clinton, saying… ‘Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al-Qaida-like group.'” He added that she had told the Egyptian prime minister on a phone call on Sept. 12, 2012, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.” Continue reading
Now that we know she edited the emails before turning them over, the entire record is suspect.
by Kimberley A. Strassel • Wall Street Journal 
Clinton scandals have a way of bumping and rolling along to a point where nobody can remember why there was any outrage to begin with. So in the interest of clarity, let’s take the latest news in the Hillary email escapade, and distill it into its basic pieces:
• Nothing Mrs. Clinton has said so far on the subject is correct. The Democratic presidential aspirant on March 10 held a press conference pitched as her first and last word on the revelation that she’d used a private email server while secretary of state. She told reporters that she’d turned over to the State Department “all my emails that could possibly be work-related.” And she insisted that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
Not true and not true. The State Department has now admitted that it is aware of at least 15 work-related emails that Mrs. Clinton fully or partially withheld. Continue reading
The media has by and large given President Obama’s failed Afghanistan policy a pass—just as it has his larger foreign policy missteps.
by Walter Russell Mead • The American Interest
Once again, be very glad we don’t have a Republican president right now. If we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding, night-and-day, on the series of strategic failures, mistakes and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009. We’d be getting constant reminders of how the President, who repeatedly said that this was a just war that America had to win, and who told us that we should vote for him because he wouldn’t let anything distract him from the vital task of winning said war, hasn’t managed to win it, or even end it, after six long years. Continue reading
BILL O’REILLY: Obamacare. Now you heard the MIT guy [Jonathan] Gruber saying, you know what? We conned everybody. They weren’t paying attention. They don’t really care. And it’s not what it was sold as. And you say?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This is exactly what conservatives have been saying for four years, what we’re hearing now is the true voice of liberal arrogance. They believe this. They believe that the voters are stupid, as he said. And they believe that they know the right way, they have to lead the masses to the promised land and they can only do it by deception. And that’s what he said openly. We wanted to get the bill. We didn’t care about how we did it so we lied about everything. We lied about if you can keep the plan knowing that you can’t keep your plan. We lied about the fact that this would be a transfer of wealth, a massive transfer of wealth because, as Gruber said, had they known that, it would never have passed. They lied about every aspect of this. And I think that is what has been charged all along and it is a scandal of the media that this has to be discovered in the sixth year of the presidency rather than talked about at the time when it was obvious they were lying about all this. The idea of it being a transfer of wealth was known from the beginning, but they got away with it.
O’REILLY: But really they didn’t get away with it because the new Congress is going to gut the bill, and if there’s a new president who is a Republican — and I even think if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they’ll have to redo Obamacare because they’re going to tie it around her neck, particularly in a debate situation, around Mrs. Clinton’s neck. Are you supporting this? Would you change it? Tell us how. So I don’t thing Obamacare is going to last a long time in this country, Charles.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I don’t either. I do think probably the fatal blow will come from the Supreme Court. That’s the key thing. In June we will get a ruling on whether the government is allowed to offer subsidies from the federal Obamacare exchange. Without that, it collapses.