Tag: mainstream media

New York Times Readers and Staffers Unable to Handle a Rare Brush with Objective Journalism

The New York Times is experiencing backlash among its staff and readers after it held New York City mayor candidate Zohran Mamdani to account on Thursday for apparently lying on his application to Columbia University by claiming he was black.

Law professor and legal commentator Jonathan Turley wrote about the incident on his website Sunday, detailing the drama unfolding at the paper of record.

“The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned,” Turley wrote. “Why? Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.”

The Times’ assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy, wrote a long thread on the social media site X that stated: “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times.”

Healy seemed like a hostage. He rattled off 11 tweets as if he was waving his hands in the air, screaming his defense. Ultimately, he bowed to the mob.

The Times couldn’t have pulled the story. That would’ve been professional suicide. But this step-by-step explainer was the next best thing. This is not a good look for American journalism.

“For liberals, it was an utter nightmare,” Turley continued. “For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react. The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.”

Turley also rightly pointed out that many people who patronize the Times are emotionally triggered. The legal scholar highlighted the “anger” felt by the far-left when this happens and compared it to how liberals on college campuses feel when opposing views are offered.

“The fact is that the Mamdani story was obvious news — and confirmed by the candidate himself,” Turley declared. “Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to the New York Times.”

The Times piece stated: “Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.”

“In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather ‘an American who was born in Africa,’” the story continued. “He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process.”

Mamdani cheated the system, and in the end, he didn’t even get accepted to Columbia. For someone who pushes “equality” at all costs, isn’t that significant? Doesn’t it prove he’s a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist?

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The BIZARRE reason why the ABC shielded the Mushroom Killer

A series of leaked internal emails has revealed that ABC News Editorial Policy Manager Mark Maley ordered journalists not to publish “unflattering” photos of Erin Patterson, a woman convicted of murdering three people, out of concern they might cause her emotional “distress”.

The taxpayer-funded images, captured in May by international agency Agence France-Presse, showed Patterson being led into Latrobe Valley court in Morwell. Legal restrictions had initially blocked their release, but those lapsed following Patterson’s conviction on Monday for the murders of her ex-husband’s parents, Don and Gail Patterson, and family friend Heather Wilkinson. She was also found guilty of attempting to murder Ian Wilkinson.

Despite the photos being taken legally in public, and made available to global media, Maley instructed ABC producers not to use them. “Gratuitous invasion on her distress/privacy,” he described them in an internal email, according to media reports.

ABC’s 7.30 executive producer Joel Tozer pushed back, arguing the images were vital for coverage of a highly significant, visually restricted case. “No one has been able to see (Patterson) for the past 10 weeks,” Tozer wrote.

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Former Trump Adviser to CNN: Epstein Memo Blowback ‘Ado About Nothing’

In 2023, current FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino himself admonished his audience, when he was a talk show host before whatever happened to him in office changed his tune, to “not let the story die.”

Now, according to an agency memo conspicuously leaked to Axios, the Epstein story is totally dead: there was no blackmail operation, no client list, N no prison murder.

Epstein was, if we’re to believe the FBI, a lone predator who made thousands of videos, which AG Pam Bondi has admitted exist and are in the agency’s custody, by himself, presumably of himself and no one else. There was no blackmail, and there weren’t even any clients to blackmail.

If you were wondering what The Most Trusted Name in News™ take on the Epstein “client list” cover-up — or, if you’re the more trusting type, lack thereof — is, it’s a doozy.

Here we go.

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Jessica Tarlov Shredded by Co-Hosts on ‘The Five’ for Suggesting ICE Detainees Are Being Sexually Abused by Federal Workers

Today on the popular FOX News panel show, The Five, liberal host Jessica Tarlov suggested that people being held in ICE detention centers are reporting sexual abuse by the workers at these facilities.

Co-host Greg Gutfeld actually jumped in to clarify her remarks, seemingly in disbelief that she would make such a claim. Jesse Watters then proceeded to shred Tarlov’s remarks.

Here’s a partial transcript:

Jessica Tarlov: There was a story about a San Antonio area ICE detention center, a huge spike in 911 calls from people who have been detained there, reporting increased suicide attempts and sexual abuse. What is going on with this immigration policy is not what people showed up on November 5th for. I know there are some people out there, there are pictures of those grannies that had those signs that say ‘mass deportation now’ but that’s…

Greg Gutfeld: Wait, what about… You bring up something as charged as sexual abuse. Who is causing the sexual abuse? Is it the people that run… So the people running the detention center are raping the detainees?

Jessica Tarlov: You’ve never heard of that happening?

Greg Gutfeld: So that’s… I want to be clear that that’s what you’re alluding to…

Jessica Tarlov: That’s what the report says…

Greg Gutfeld: So the people running the detainee center are sexually abusing…

Jessica Tarlov: I don’t have video of what was happening, I just know that they are seeing an increased amount of 911 calls saying that people…

At this point, Jesse Watters jumps in and reminds Jessica that the Biden administration was responsible for losing track of hundreds of thousands of children brought into the United States who may be getting sex trafficked right now and that her side said nothing about this.

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Politico Deeply Disappointed That Democrats Are ‘Retreating’ on Climate Change – Especially in California

The liberal outlet Politico is deeply disappointed that Democrats seem to be ‘retreating’ on the issue of climate change, especially in deep blue California.

This completely ignores the fact that over the last six months, we have seen leftists set electric vehicles and dealerships on fire, not to mention the car fires in the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles. Politico realizes that people saw these things happen, don’t they?

How can anyone take the left seriously on their pet issue of climate change ever again? Their concerns obviously go right out the window the moment they want to start burning cars to make a political point.

From Politico:

Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts’

SACRAMENTO, California — Donald Trump is coming for California’s signature climate policies — and so is California.

Stung by the party’s sweeping losses in November and desperate to win back working-class voters, the Democratic Party is in retreat on climate change. Nowhere is that retrenchment more jarring than in the nation’s most populous state, a longtime bastion of progressive politics on the environment.

In the past two weeks alone, California Democrats have retrenched on environmental reviews for construction projects, a cap on oil industry profits and clean fuel mandates. Elected officials are warning that ambitious laws and mandates are driving up the state’s onerous cost of living, echoing longstanding Republican arguments and frustrating some allies who say Democrats are capitulating to political pressure.

“California was the vocal climate leader during the first Trump administration,” said Chris Chavez, deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air. “It’s questionable whether or not that leadership is still there.”

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Reuters Forced to Retract After Blaming GHF for Gaza Relocation Plan

The Reuters news agency was forced to issue a correction Monday after falsely attributing a plan for the relocation of Palestinians in Gaza to the Trump administration-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The article originally claimed in its headline: “Exclusive: US-backed aid group proposed ‘Human Transit Areas’ for Palestinians in Gaza.”

It claimed, further:

A controversial U.S.-backed aid group proposed building camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside – and possibly outside – Gaza to house the Palestinian population, according to a proposal reviewed by Reuters, outlining its vision of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza.”

The $2 billion plan, created sometime after February 11 for the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, was submitted to the Trump administration and recently discussed in the White House, according to a source familiar with the matter.

There was no basis or the story — the latest in a series of mainstream media efforts to smear the GHF, which is replacing the United Nations and undermining Hamas’s control over the delivery of aid in Gaza.

Reuters later published a corrected version, “Exclusive: Proposal outlines large-scale ‘Humanitarian Transit Areas’ for Palestinians in Gaza.”

At the end of the story, it added: “(This story has been corrected to remove ‘U.S.-backed aid group’ in the headline, and to reflect that while the document bears the name of the Global Humanitarian Foundation, it could not be determined who created or submitted it, in paragraphs 1 and 2).”

It could not even report the name of the group correctly in the correction.

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The Media Deploy A Cadre Of ‘Experts’ And ‘Advocates’ To Lie About Medicaid

At 11:56 a.m. last Tuesday, the United States Senate voted to pass its version of the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill, sending it back to the House. Exactly 30 minutes later, this headline appeared: “Senate megabill marks biggest Medicaid cuts in history.”

I have already explained how the Medicaid provisions in budget reconciliation do NOT represent a “cut.” In reality, Medicaid will continue to grow over the coming decade — by roughly $1 trillion, in fact.

But it’s worth examining this article in The Hill in detail to examine the various tricks of the trade that the media use to try and, well, trick people into accepting the leftist perspective. It may not surprise readers to realize that what the media don’t write about is as important as what they do.

One-Sided Coverage

For starters, I emailed the reporter, Nathaniel Weixel, asking him a simple question: “Did you or any of your colleagues write on CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] increasing its Medicaid baseline by $817 billion — or 12 percent — in January compared to just last June?”

Weixel did not respond to my request for comment. He similarly did not respond two years ago, when I asked him why he used one set of terminology (i.e., “vouchers”) for policy proposals put forward by Republicans and another term when Democrats put forth the same proposal.

But at the risk of answering my own question, I recall not a single article in The Hill — or any other publication, for that matter — noting the massive increase in projected Medicaid spending announced in January, which came largely as a result of administrative actions by the Biden administration. So when projected spending goes up by nearly $1 trillion in a short period, it’s a non-issue, rather than an unsustainable explosion of federal taxpayer dollars, a potential massive increase in fraud, and so forth. But when projected spending goes down by roughly the same amount, then it’s “historic cuts.” Bias, anyone?

Partisan Terminology

But the bias doesn’t end there. Weixel’s Medicaid story includes all manner of cues designed to tilt a reader’s bias toward the leftist perspective.

Only Leftist “Experts” Consulted: The story quoted analysts from the Center for American Progress, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. While Weixel described CAP as “Democratic-aligned,” he neglected to mention that the other two foundations also have a leftward slant; while not as outwardly partisan as CAP, they definitely have an ideology behind them. Of course, he didn’t quote any policy experts who support Medicaid reform.

Politicians versus “Experts:” Rather than quoting conservative analysts who can speak to the merits of reforming Medicaid, Weixel instead used a generic quote about the legislation from President Trump, followed by a quick rebuttal that “experts … say … the legislation would enact an unprecedented reduction” in Medicaid. Of course, only some “experts” take the view that said reduction will cause harm — but Weixel didn’t bother to quote any who disagree. A variation on this trick has the reporter describing one side’s position — “Republicans argue that …” — allowing him or her to characterize, or mischaracterize, policy views without giving voice to any of the people who hold them.

“Advocacy” Bias: In addition to using the term “experts” to describe the leftists claiming the legislation will harm Medicaid, Weixel also trots out a similarly loaded term: “advocates.” The left and the media (but I repeat myself) use this term frequently. One will almost never hear the term used to describe someone conservative, who “advocates” for less spending — or protecting the unborn, for instance. Instead, the media invariably apply the term to someone promoting more taxes, more spending, and more welfare — more government control, in other words.

The bias, and the contrast, are practically self-evident: “Advocates” care — they just want to help people — and the people who oppose these “advocates” don’t. As Ronald Reagan might say, they’re from the government and they’re here to help!

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The NYT’s Flip-Flop On Illegal Alien Gang Takeovers Proves They’re Just Propagandists For Dems

Less than two months before the presidential election, The New York Times’ (NYT) Jonathan Weisman tried to protect Vice President Kamala Harris’ open-border agenda by mocking then-candidate Donald Trump for pointing out that illegal alien gangs had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado.

“How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump,” Weisman wrote.

“Caught in the middle are a number of migrants, living in dilapidated apartments that Aurora officials now call squalor, amid ‘criminal elements,’ not widespread gang activity, and unable to find or afford better,” the story read.

If you only read Weisman’s report, you’d have believed the real problem was just an “out-of-state landlord” who didn’t feel like fixing up a few units. As Weisman put it, the landlord “offered a new argument for why it couldn’t repair the buildings: Venezuelan gangs had taken over, and the property managers had been forced to flee.”

Weisman begrudgingly acknowledged the viral video showing Tren de Aragua gang members parading around the complex with weapons drawn but only long enough to couch it by arguing “documentation was scarce.”

But don’t worry, nothing to see here! And what you were seeing from Trump was nearly “fear-mongering, exaggerations, and outright lies …” according to Weisman.

Fast forward ten months, and the NYT’s Ted Conover is spreading those same “outright lies.”

“Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem,” Conover wrote. “The Truth Is Complicated.”

“The presence of young men with guns in the apartment complex, called the Edge at Lowry, was not a rarity,” Conover wrote, detailing gruesome details of the gang violence plaguing the complex. Conover reports what The Times pretended was “false” before: illegal aliens in gangs seen by residents carrying pistols and an assault rifle in the hallways.

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Pulitzer Follies: Trump lawsuit exposes uncomfortable truths about journalism’s highest award

President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board is forcing into the public eye uncomfortable revelations about how the news industry’s top prize giver handled the unraveling of Russia collusion allegations, exposing conflicts in testimony and an admission that people other than Trump complained about its 2018 awards to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of the now-discredited scandal.

While the litigation in an Okeechobee County, Florida courthouse makes its way to the Florida Supreme Court, new admissions by the intelligence community have undercut the factual basis underlying some of the stories that won the two newspapers the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting.

One of those stories was a December 2017 report by The Washington Post that accused Trump of ignoring or trying to downplay U.S. intelligence claims that Putin tried to help him win the 2016 election. “Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House,” the Post’s award-winning story declared.

While there remains widespread consensus inside U.S. spy agencies that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton, the narrative the news stories spawned — namely, that Russia’s intent was to help Trump win the election — is disputed.

The claim that Putin was specifically trying to help Trump was included in a December 2016 Obama administration intelligence community assessment (ICA), but in fact there were concerns about that claim and the way that review was done inside the intelligence community, according to new evidence made public this month.

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‘MS-13 Clique’: Is ABC News for Real?

The mainstream media has often been out with some pretty outrageous takes, including and especially when it comes to President Donald Trump’s best issue, immigration. ABC News may have truly outdone themselves this week, though, with their framing of dangerous MS-13 gangs. 

In an article about a violent MS-13 gang member leader, who was facing federal racketeering case involving eight murders, as well as a post shared over X about the article, ABC News used the term “MS-13 clique.”

“The leader of an MS-13 gang clique in the New York City suburbs is facing sentencing in a federal racketeering case involving eight murders, including the 2016 killings of two high school girls on Long Island,” read the article’s subheadline, with the post over X using similar language, adding how those murders “focused the nation’s attention on the violent gang.”

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