"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
If you want to win a bet,
Go against truth in the NYeT:
Pravda-on-the-Hudson likes it wrong. (1/2)— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017
Facts always seem to hide,
From their lyin' Commie pride,
Like talent from a wretched hip-hop song. (2/2)— IGotOverMachoGrande (@smitty_one_each) September 2, 2017
Retweet these to Stick It To The Man.
Testifying at a hearing in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, suggested that it was an accident — rhetorical clumsiness — which led him to falsely blame Palin for “political incitement” in a 2011 mass murder:
“What I wasn’t trying to say was that there was a direct causal link between this map and the shooting,” Bennet said. “What I was concerned about was the overall climate of political incitement.”
He continued: “I didn’t mean to suggest that Loughner wasn’t responsible. … I did not think that Jared Loughner was acting because of this map.”
Bennet testified that he had not, in advance of publication, read specific pieces of reporting in the Times about a potential connection between the PAC ad and the shooting, and said he did not know at the time of publication whether Loughner had seen the map. He also said that he had not personally seen the map. “I was not reporting the editorial, your honor, I was editing it,” Bennet said.
Hot Air’s John Sexton quotes the editorial in question and, even if Bennet’s testimony can protect the Times from an “actual malice” finding, he’s more or less confessed to “reckless disregard for truth.” An editor is responsible for the changes he makes to copy and, if his changes result in the publication of a factual error, the distinction between reporting and editing is of no consequence in a libel case. The New York Times cannot claim that it was impossible for Bennet to know Jared Loughner’s motive, because this subject was extensively covered — by me, in a January 2011 article for American Spectator:
The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” — parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
The Zeitgeist connection may be the most crucial clue to understanding the bizarre ideas that seemed to crowd Loughner’s disordered mind in months leading up to the Jan. 8 shootings that left six dead and 12 wounded in Arizona. . . .
You can read the whole thing. Jared Loughner wasn’t motivated by anything Sarah Palin did. Nor, contrary to James Bennet’s testimony, was the gunman motivated by an “overall climate of political incitement.” He was motivated by his own psychosis and by an anti-Christian conspiracy theory video that had no connection at all to Sarah Palin.
While I spent dozens of hours researching Zeitgeist, and the weird cult the video spawned, apparently no one at the New York Times cared enough about the truth to bother discovering Loughner’s actual motives. They’re not journalists, they are Democrat Party propagandists, which was why they published the libelous claim that the “target” map in a political ad had some connection to Loughner’s crime, six years after this propaganda claim had been conclusively proven false.
(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)
A correction published Sunday by the New York Times:
An article on March 5 about the Department of Justice included outdated statistics. It is not the case that non-Muslim extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans as radical Muslims since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the New America Foundation. That was true until the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla. Radical Muslims have now killed nearly twice as many Americans as non-Muslim extremists.
John Hinderaker at Powerline points out that the false statistic appeared in an article in which a “prominent theme is that Republicans don’t care about truth” — but the online version of the article has now been “airbrushed,” so that you can’t tell where the change was made.
Faking the fakery, and then fakely unfaking it, as it were.
(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)
Notice the adjectives and adverbs in this “news” article:
Staff members on Capitol Hill recall Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House adviser behind many of President Trump’s most contentious executive orders, as the guy from Jeff Sessions’s office who made their inboxes cry for mercy.
As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”
The ascent of Mr. Miller from far-right gadfly with little policy experience to the president’s senior policy adviser came as a shock to many of the staff members who knew him from his seven years in the Senate. A man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers is now shaping the Trump administration’s core domestic policies with his economic nationalism and hard-line positions on immigration.
But his unlikely rise is emblematic of a White House where unconventional résumés rule — where the chief strategist is Stephen K. Bannon, until recently the head of the flame-throwing right-wing website Breitbart News, and the president himself is a former reality television star who before winning the nation’s highest office had never shown much interest in the arcana of governing.
Yet all three men are bound by a belief in an America-first economic policy that has suddenly moved from the fringes of American politics to the Oval Office.
You see that what is being discussed here — the “bipartisan” immigration bill of 2013 — is the corrupt “Gang of Eight” amnesty, in which Rubio betrayed the Tea Party conservatives who had helped him get elected to the Senate in 2010. Enforcing our immigration laws is, according to this New York Times editorial masquerading as a “news” article, a “far-right” fringe idea. Only “hard-line” “right-wing” people believe that immigrants should obey the laws of the United States. This piling-on of tendentious phrases does not inform the reader, but rather serves the propaganda function of demonizing Stephen Miller. Let the question be asked: When did the New York Times ever refer to any member of the Obama administration as “left-wing,” “far left” or “fringe”? The New York Times does not even acknowledge the existence of any “fringe” ideas or “extreme” people in the Democrat Party. Everything the Democrat Party does is “mainstream,” according to the New York Times, and everything Republicans do is wrong. The New York Times is partisan propaganda.
Is Breitbart News a “flame-throwing right-wing website”? OK, then ask yourself, when has the New York Times acknowledged in a news article the existence of any “flame-throwing left-wing website”? This they have never done, of course. Whatever the Left wants, the editors of the New York Times will endorse, and its reporters will publicize and promote.
They’ve gone full SJW. Never go full SJW.
Everybody wants to play pundit nowadays. The New York Times unleashed its arts writers on the most over-analyzed election in history:
“I was called a whore and a witch,” Madonna said on Friday in a searing speech about the sexism and bullying that women face in the music industry and the culture at large.
“Such a nasty woman,” Donald J. Trump interjected in October as Hillary Clinton pointed out holes in his Social Security plan during their final presidential debate.
Madonna and Mrs. Clinton: both trailblazers, both polarizing figures, and both attacked for actions, choices and behavior that are broadly accepted — even applauded — when done by their male peers. Madonna herself made a connection between the two women before her speech Friday, saying it was “really important to make a stand and speak my mind” about women’s rights after Mrs. Clinton’s loss in November.
Our pop music editor, Caryn Ganz, and deputy Culture editor and former political correspondent Patrick Healy looked at how Madonna and her speech put Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy in fresh perspective. . . .
Go read the whole thing and ask yourself: Why?
Why does every liberal with access to a computer feel the need to share their “perspective” on this topic? Why do we care what Madonna says?
Isn’t the purpose of this kind of “journalism” essentially therapeutic?
Aren’t these New York Times writers basically grieving in public, and inviting their fellow liberals to console themselves about Hillary’s loss by saying, “All great women suffer the slings and arrows of misogyny”? By putting the whole election into “perspective” — a perspective where even millionaire pop stars and powerful politicians can think of themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression — the New York Times invites their affluent liberal readers to share in the sense of communal victimhood. Is the entire staff of the New York Times gobbling Prozac and Paxil? Are there any emotionally stable journalists employed there, or is the entire staff just one big group therapy session for depressed neurotics?
So says Jazz Shaw of Hot Air in addressing the “October surprise” of the New York Times report on Donald Trump’s taxes. What the Times seems to have done is to extrapolate from the documents it mysteriously obtained to guess about what might be found in documents it does not have. They assert that, because Trump reported major losses of business income in one year, therefore Trump could have avoided income taxes in subsequent years. This may be true, but we don’t know.
Donald Trump Tax Records Show He
Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly
Two Decades, The Times Found
— New York Times
As news of Trump’s taxes broke, he goes
off script at a rally in Pennsylvania
— Washington Post
Some comments on the New York Times
story about Donald Trump’s tax returns
— Bronte Capital
Donald Trump Tax Returns Reportedly
Show $916 Million Loss in 1995
— ABC News
The New York Times Paid No Taxes in 2014
— Breitbart
The New York Times risked legal trouble
to publish Donald Trump’s tax return
— Washington Post
Those are today’s headlines at Memeorandum, and CNN’s going wall-to-wall on it, as if Trump were a cop who shot an unarmed black man. The unmistakable pro-Clinton cheerleading at CNN is the tip of a massive iceberg of liberal media bias in this campaign, which is arguably the secret of Trump’s success so far. Trump appeals directly to voters who don’t trust the media, so that whenever the media report something negative about Trump, his basic answer is always, “See? Media bias!”
Whether or not this will be enough for Trump to win the election, however, is the important question. The latest Fox News poll has Clinton leading by 5 points, 49%-44%, and the Real Clear Politics average of national polls show Clinton expanding her lead from a virtual dead heat on Sept. 19 (when it was Clinton 44.9%, Trump 44.0%) to 2.5 points (47.5%-45.0%) now. How much faith we can put in polls is always a matter of dispute, but the closer we get to Election Day, the more likely the polls actually do predict the vote. What the polls cannot predict, however, is whether some event between now and Nov. 8 — for example, a major terrorist attack — might cause voters to shift toward Trump. There are limits to how far media bias can help Democrats, and this election may yet demonstrate that fact. We shall wait and see . . .
What is the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health and why should Americans trust the media to tell us the truth? This was a question raised last month by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in an interview on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream:
“She has an entire media empire that…fails to point out several signs of illness by her. All you got to do is go online.”
Bream countered that Clinton’s campaign has vehemently denied the unsubstantiated claims she is in poor health, releasing medical records last year to prove her fitness.
“Go online and put down, ‘Hillary Clinton illness,’ and take a look at the videos yourself,” Giuliani responded. . . .
Giuliani’s comments on Sunday came after a week in which Trump himself questioned Clinton’s “physical and mental stamina.”
The Democratic nominee’s campaign has accused Trump and his team of “peddling deranged conspiracy theories in a desperate attempt to change the subject – this time with absurd and debunked claims about Hillary Clinton’s health.”
In response, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times took to Twitter to advocate that search results for videos about Hillary’s health should be suppressed: “Google should fix this. It shouldn’t give quarter to conspiracy theorists.” Is it Farhad Manjoo’s job to help elect Democrats?
Well, yes — yes it is. This is why New York Times pays his salary, because electing Democrats is what the New York Times is about. Sure, Farhad Manjoo is supposed to be writing about technology, but if you check his online archive at the New York Times, you find that this is very light work — he published exactly eight bylined articles during the month of August, and writing two articles a week isn’t what I’d call a full-time job. So what does Farhad Manjoo do with all his spare time? Check out his Twitter feed, and you’ll find an incessant barrage of anti-Trump, pro-Hillary messages. Basically, Farhad Manjoo’s actual job these days is to crank out Hillary Clinton campaign propaganda on social media, while occasionally contributing a tech article to the New York Times.
So, three weeks after Farhad Manjoo called for the suppression of “conspiracy theorists” who claimed Hillary Clinton has serious health problems, we now know for a fact that Hillary Clinton has serious health problems. Does anyone expect the New York Times to discipline Farhad Manjoo for this behavior? Of course not. This is his job, you see — everybody employed by the New York Times is expected to do everything they can to elect Hillary Clinton president. Citing Farhad Manjoo’s tweet, former CBS News reporter Cheryl Attkisson wrote:
Rather than reporting the facts, many in the media have taken it upon themselves to shout down the questions and to controversialize those asking them. . . .
[Farhad Manjoo] was advocating that a conspiracy be committed to stop people from researching Clinton’s health, which he labeled a conspiracy. Many others in the media also chimed in using the “conspiracy theory” moniker. It’s designed to convince the public to tune out the discussion, in much the same way as other common astroturf terms such as “debunked,” “bonkers,” “tin-foil hat,” “shoddy,” “discredited,” “quack,” “bogus,” “denier,” and “crank.”
Left-wing apparatus Vox chimed in with an article titled: “The bonkers conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton’s health.” The pro-Hillary Clinton smear machine, Media Matters, chided NBC News for “mainstreaming conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health.” Vice picked up the theme writing, “How conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health went mainstream.” CNN published an article “Debunking conspiracy theories” about her health. CNN media critic Brian Stelter urged the media: “Do Not Give Oxygen To ‘Conspiracy Theories’ That Hillary Clinton Is ‘Secretly Ill’.” HuffPost wrote, “Let’s call the conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health what they are…” ThinkProgress joined in with, “Trump campaign embraces conspiracy theory…” From MSNBC: “Trump, allies push conspiracy theory about Clinton’s health.” NPR: “Trump adds fuel to conspiracy theory about Clinton’s health.” You get the idea. Everybody’s on the same page.
Whatever the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health may be, the truth about the mainstream media is that they are partisan Democrats, and that their “news” coverage is actually Democrat Party propaganda, so that they are essentially being paid to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Maybe the reason videos by “conspiracy theorists” are popular is because journalists are so blinded by partisan bias that they can’t be trusted to do honest reporting.
This is why journalists get scooped by guys with cell-phone videos:
Video from the 9/11 ceremony, uploaded to Twitter on Sunday morning, appeared to show the Democratic presidential candidate being helped into a black van by aides and US Secret Service agents. The man who filmed the video, New Jersey resident Zdenek Gazda, 50, told BuzzFeed News he was at the memorial when he spotted Clinton being led away.
“I take two pictures before she passed me,” said Gazda, who said he moved to the US 24 years ago from what was then Czechoslovakia and is a Clinton supporter. “She looked like everything was fine and everything was good.”
“I just saw the secretary waiting for the van and the van came and she can’t walk inside and she gets helped,” he said. “She lost her shoe and everything.”
Campaign staff initially refused to tell reporters traveling with the Democratic presidential candidate what had prompted the early departure, after Fox News reported that Clinton had experienced a “medical episode.”
She arrived at the memorial at 8:18 a.m. and left unexpectedly after about an hour and a half, according to pool reports.
Zdenek Gazda has better news judgment than most reporters covering the campaign, who are apparently willing to write whatever Clinton staff tell them to write. If the Clinton campaign staff denounce questions about Hillary’s health as “conspiracy theories,” then we can expect a dozen headlines repeating that label, and no one in the press corps will bother to ask serious questions about Hillary’s health, because to do so would be to join the “conspiracy theorists.” If Hillary was suffering periodic seizures and episodes of delirium, so that she was only able to get through the day with the help of a doctor treating her with ibogaine, the one thing we know is that the New York Times would never report this news.
Find a love that looks at you the way the press looks at Hillary. pic.twitter.com/KxPXNpWl5n
— Razor (@hale_razor) September 6, 2016
(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Good news! “Progress” is “stalling”:
Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly. . . .
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before. . . .
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.” . . .
(Yeah, this makes sense. When you need someone to explain economics, the expert you want to call is a sociology professor.)
Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way . . .
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Emily Liner attended Georgetown University (annual tuition $48,611) where she majored in history and French. A former staffer for a Democrat congressmen, Liner worked five years for a Democrat Party fundraising consultant, before going back to get her MBA at the University of North Carolina. She is now a “policy advisor” for Third Way, a tax-exempt organization which in 2013 had a budget of nearly $10 million, and paid its eight top officers a combined total of $1.7 million, led by president Jonathan Cowan’s $336,000 compensation. (Of the eight officers listed on Third Way’s IRS Form 990, only two are women. But maybe “gender bias sneaks into those decisions,” eh?) Cowan, who worked for Democrat congressmen and served in the Clinton administration, then started a gun-control organization (Americans for Gun Safety) that after the 2004 election became Third Way.
All of which is to say that this “news article” — published on the front page of the business section of the Sunday New York Times — is really just a regurgitated press release from a Democrat propaganda operation. This article is clearly intended to support the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign’s claim that the “gender gap” in pay is a real thing, which economists have repeatedly shown it is not. Controlling for various factors, including hours worked per week, women make about 95 cents for every dollar men earn, rather than the 77 cents claimed by feminists, whose answer to every policy issue is always the same: Vote Democrat!
Don’t be deceived by partisan propaganda disguised as “news.” To quote Christina Hoff Sommers, “this is a massively discredited factoid.”
