Tag: mainstream media

Did the White House Get Caught Colluding with Fact Checkers Again?

It will come as no surprise to conservatives or anyone willing to think critically and fairly that the Biden White House enjoys a cozier relationship with the mainstream media than the Trump administration did. Fawning coverage of the White House’s new cat that distracted attention from Biden’s crises is a great case in point. The way in which mainstream outlets go after Biden’s critics is another example, and one that we at Townhall have experienced and watched unfold in real-time — as we reported. 

But thanks to a late-breaking story from POLITICO on Wednesday, it looks like there are even more symbiotic relationships at play between the White House press shop and supposedly independent fact-checkers or unbiased mainstream outlets.

Here’s what Alex Thompson and Max Tani reported:

Over the past month, the White House’s press shop has repeatedly promoted stories from The New York Times’ fact-checker, LINDA QIU.

Biden cited a Qiu piece himself earlier this month when he addressed House Democrats in Philadelphia. “Headline fact checker in the New York Times: “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” he said, reading the headline of the piece. “And it goes on to explain why gas prices are so high.”

Many members of the president’s press team have also become Qiu content boosters in recent weeks.

On March 10, deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES tweeted out the same Qiu fact check on why “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” adding a touch of his own commentary. “The only way to be straight with readers is to include this context,” Bates noted.

Press secretary JEN PSAKI shared the same piece, noting “FACT CHECK on GOP.” 

On Monday, Bates shared another story by Qiu. “@nytimes Fact Check: ‘Attacks on Judge Jackson’s Record on Child Sexual Abuse Cases Are Misleading’ Hawley and Blackburn ‘have taken the judge’s remarks and sentencing decisions out of context, distorting her record,’” he tweeted.

POLITICO does note that “Not all of Qiu’s fact checks have been heralded by the White House,” as seen in her piece: “Biden’s Inaccurate Claims in Defending Afghanistan Withdrawal,” but that was last August, apparently before Qiu decided to play nice with the White House and go from supposedly independent fact-checker to a Biden clean-up crew member.

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A Brief History of Pundits Encouraging Nuclear War

There is an active, influential, and well-paid minority of pundits and politicians in America who apparently believe that escalating conflict between nuclear powers—and even nuclear war itself—is not really that big a deal. 

These, of course, are the sorts of people who fancy themselves “the adults in the room,” while people who proceed with prudence, caution, and regard for the rule of law are to be regarded as traitors, cowards, or Russian agents. 

Consider, for example, Sean Hannity’s March 2 suggestion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—which really means the United States—should attack a Russian tank column with “some of [NATO’s] fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy.” For Hannity, this would not count as escalation because NATO could elect to not tell the Russians who carried out the attack, and then Moscow “won’t know who to hit back.” 

Meanwhile, support for a “no-fly zone” has been one of the more dangerous avenues to escalation, since a no-fly zone would be a de facto declaration of war on Russia. Sen. Roger Wicker, for example, has said the US should “seriously consider” a no-fly zone. Florida congresswoman Maria Salazar supports a no-fly zone for the very profound reason that “freedom isn’t free.” (Fortunately, most members of Congress appear to recognize that a no-fly zone would mean World War III.) 

And then there are the pundits who have outright treated the gravity of nuclear war with a lot of hand-waving. NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, in an apparent reference to nuclear war, implied the US should risk everything in order to destroy a Russian convoy.

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Misinformation, disinformation, and the 1619 Project

Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

More recently, CNN denounced “misinformation” that blamed high gas prices and inflation on the Biden administration. Media outlets have accused Joe Rogan of “spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 and the vaccine because… he dared to ask scientific experts questions on these topics. Other examples of ideas that the legacy media has alternately labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” include assertions that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; the idea that there was some orchestrated manipulation of procedures to favor Biden in the 2020 election; that Hunter Biden’s laptop offered evidence that the Biden family had been enriched by various forms of international corruption; and that powerful NGOs and world governments are leveraging the pandemic to facilitate a “Great Reset” of the global economy. The campaign to ban these claims – most which are demonstrably true – indicates not a dangerous spread of “disinformation,” but a dangerous weaponization of the concept of disinformation in order to insulate the institutional left from criticism and opposition.

It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.

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CNN Masturbator Toobin Says Kiddie Porn Laws Are TOO STRICT

Amid the questioning of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dubious record of light sentencing for child porn offenders, CNN brought on an ‘expert’ in Chief Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin who declared that he thinks the laws are too harsh.

Toobin, who was infamously temporarily suspended for masturbating on a Zoom call, appeared on the network Tuesday to discuss the matter, and concluded that the line of questioning on pedophilia by Republicans is part of an appeal to right wing conspiracy theorists.

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How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

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