Tag: media

My editor trashed my inquiry into child sexual abuse. Now I know why

One morning, a fortnight ago, I checked the BBC headlines to find my old editor, Peter Wilby, peering out. He’d been exposed as a paedophile and convicted of possessing child sexual abuse images. I still feel sick at the discovery.

It would be disturbing enough to discover anyone you knew had done something so terrible – he was convicted of possessing images of children being raped since the 1990s. But Wilby wasn’t anyone. He was a pillar of the media establishment, an editor of the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman, and a Guardian columnist.

Journalists who had worked with Wilby were appalled at his crimes, while others raged at his “hypocrisy”, but what shocked me was the creeping realisation that he had used his position as an editor and columnist to create what the writer Beatrix Campbell has called a “hostile environment” for victims of abuse.

It dawned on me that he had applied that “hostile environment” to me at the outset of my career when I was a freelance reporter at the Independent on Sunday, and he was its news editor.

In April 1991, I learned of mental and physical abuse at Ty Mawr children’s home in Gwent, south Wales, where some residents had attempted suicide. The claims emerged in the wake of abuse claims at other children’s homes – the “Pindown” scandal in Staffordshire where staff used violent restraint on children, and sexual abuse by social worker Frank Beck at homes in Leicestershire. I thought Wilby would be excited at the prospect of a scoop, but he couldn’t have been less interested. I took it to the daily Independent, which put it on the front page and made a campaign of it.

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Tucker Carlson claims Barack Obama enjoyed smoking CRACK and having gay sex – but that nobody reported it ahead of 2008 election

Tucker Carlson has claimed Barack Obama was smoking crack and having sex with men – but the media failed to report it ahead of the 2008 presidential election.

The former Fox News host repeated the accusation of Larry Sinclair who alleged that Obama bought and smoked cocaine before they had sex in 1999. 

The allegation, which emerged while then-Senator Obama was gearing up for the presidential election, was roundly condemned as an attempted political hatchet-job.

But Carlson claimed Wednesday that it was ‘really clear’ that Obama had been having a gay affair. He claimed the media didn’t run the story because the Obama campaign team threatened to refuse access to the Democratic candidate.

Carlson, 54, speaking on the popular Adam Carolla Show, said: ‘In 2008, it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack.’

DailyMail.com has contacted Obama’s representatives for comment. 

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Associated Press Coverage of Courts, Climate Bankrolled by Dozens of Left-Wing Foundations

The Associated Press, the country’s top wire service, is now bankrolled in part by millions of dollars from left-wing foundations, including one founded by “1619 Project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The news organization last year announced a series of “partnerships” to subsidize reporters covering climate change, race, and democracy. A review of the donor roster shows that the vast majority fund left-wing political causes, while none are supporters of conservative initiatives.

The Ida B. Wells Society, founded by “1619 Project” lightning rod Hannah-Jones, has teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Hearthland Foundation, for example, to foster “more inclusive storytelling” at the Associated Press.

In some ways, it was a natural partnership: The AP’s global investigations editor, Ron Nixon, serves on the Ida B. Wells Society’s board of directors. In others, it may prove more problematic, given that Hannah-Jones’s own reporting has been disputed by historians, who have argued—among other things—that her account of the motivations of the American revolutionaries is factually inaccurate.

The funding, much of it from these sorts of overly political actors, will make it more challenging for the Associated Press to swat away accusations of political bias. In one high-profile example, critics blasted the organization for revising its style guide to instruct reporters to avoid the use of terms like “the French,” which the AP indicated was “dehumanizing.”

AllSides, a group that tracks media bias across the industry, last year changed its rating for the AP from “center” to “leans left,” citing what it said was an increase in “word choice bias” and “bias by omission of views” in its coverage. AllSides says it closely monitors the Associated Press’s content because the AP’s content is “broad and far-reaching.”

The Associated Press is also taking nonprofit money to fund coverage of race and climate. The organization’s “democracy journalism initiative,” a division whose reporters cover “the intersection of race and voting,” is bankrolled by nonprofits such as the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. That organization also funds Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project and the left-wing activist group Take Back the Court, which advocates for expanding the Supreme Court.

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A Dozen Media Outlets that Fell for Fake News on Mar-a-Lago

Several media outlets, both mainstream and left-wing, fell for the fake news Friday that former President Donald Trump had sold or transferred ownership of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to his son, Donald Trump Jr.

The story originated in a mistaken report on the Zillow real estate website. But it was “to good to check” for many websites:

Breitbart News reported exclusively that the story was fake before Zillow confirmed the information was wrong.

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It Isn’t ‘Divisive Rhetoric’ That Kills People

A gunman carrying a rifle emblazoned with a swastika killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday before taking his own life.

The shooter, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmete, was white. All of his victims—52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr, 19-year-old Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., and 29-year-old Jerrald Gallion—were black. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters has said that the murder spree was racially motivated and Palmete specifically targeted black people. The sheriff also noted that the guns Palmete was carrying were legally purchased.

As is so often the case with crimes like these, people are casting about for someone other than one racist psychopath—or “deranged scumbag,” as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it—to blame. Some have settled on “divisive rhetoric” as the culprit.

“When we have this kind of divisive rhetoric, this is exactly what happens,” journalism professor and Jacksonville councilmember Rahman Johnson told MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend. He mentioned Florida’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, African-American studies programs in schools, and transgender people.

“The division has to stop, the hate has to stop, the rhetoric has to stop,” Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan said.

An op-ed in the Florida Times-Union blamed the city’s reaction to antisemitic banners and light displays, saying the response wasn’t “forceful enough.” Those “public demonstrations look like terrible harbingers of what was to come,” wrote columnist Nate Monroe.

Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon blamed attacks on “wokeness,” which she called “a dog whistle. That wokeness that they want to die is Black people, and it was evident yesterday by what happened,” Nixon said.

Needless to say, plenty of people hear the same rhetoric Palmete may have heard about diversity trainings, wokeness, and so on but don’t go on to commit atrocities. And openly bigoted speech, as represented by those antisemitic banners, is much less common now than at most points in U.S. history past.

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BBC Publishes Pedo Report, Then EDITS to Remove Pride, Drag History.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been caught repeatedly doctoring a report about a man convicted for attempting to have sex with a 14-year-old boy, scrubbing it of references to the fact the suspect is a Pride organizer and drag queen.

Sixty-one-year-old Andrew Way of Clwyd Wen in Wrexham, Wales, was described as an “ex-drag queen” in the original post from the publicly-funded broadcaster. The National Pulse confirmed, however, that when readers clicked through to the article, the headline changed from ‘Ex-drag queen caught in paedophile hunters’ sting operation’ to ‘Man caught in paedophile hunters’ sting operation’.

The text of the article also no longer contained any reference to Way being a drag queen, although it did confirm the pedophile “had also been organising the first-ever gay Pride event for Welshpool, Powys.” Hours later, The National Pulse observed that this, too, had been “stealth-edited” out of the article, with no editor’s notes informing readers of the changes.

The BBC press office has been asked who ordered the article to be doctored to remove these details, and why, but had issued no response as of the time of publication.

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Western press fetishizes Ukrainian amputees as limb loss epidemic grows

With Ukrainian forces reportedly suffering a level of amputations reminiscent of WWI, a New York Times proxy war propagandist is spinning amputees as sex symbols and painting their gruesome injuries as “magical.”

After 18 months of devastating proxy warfare, the scale of the depletion of the Ukrainian military is so extensive that even mainstream sources have been forced to concede the cruel reality. On August 1, The Wall Street Journal reported that “between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians” have “lost one or more limbs since the start of the war.” What’s more, the outlet notes, “the actual figure could be higher” because “it takes time to register patients after they undergo the procedure.”

By comparison, around 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons underwent amputations during the entire four-year span of the First World War. The publication quotes the head of a group of former military surgeons who train Ukrainian military medics who maintained that “Western military surgeons haven’t seen injuries on this scale since World War II.”

While the implications of the Journal’s report have largely been studiously ignored by Western media, at least one mainstream journalist has displayed a keen interest in Kiev’s amputees. The New York Times’ columnist and ardent liberal interventionist Nicholas Kristof practically fetishized the mass disfigurement of Ukrainian combat veterans in the name of Washington’s war du jour. 

In a July 8 op-ed titled “They’re Ready to Fight Again, on Artificial Legs,” Kristof insisted that rather than resenting being used as cannon fodder, Ukraine’s newly-disabled veterans “carry their stumps with pride.”

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The narcissism of queer theory

The museum dedicated to conserving and displaying Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, published a blog post this week about ‘queering the Mary Rose’s collection’. It promised to understand the items recovered from this 16th-century wreck, from nit combs to gold rings and paternosters, through a ‘queer lens’.

The results are ridiculous. The connections between these items and ‘queerness’ are a figment of the curators’ imaginations. Take the Mary Rose Museum’s description of a salvaged wooden mirror frame:

‘Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people. For queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.’

This tells us nothing about the nature of the mirror frame or the role and significance of mirrors in 16th-century England. It is an expression of contemporary identity politics.

There is no good reason for wanting to ‘queer’ this collection. The artefacts on display at the Mary Rose Museum belong to the Tudor era. They provide insight into that specific world. Indeed, the sheer difference between then and now is precisely what makes the study of history so exciting. I was living just miles from where the Mary Rose wreck was discovered in the Solent in 1971. I remember how, aged 11, my friends and I all became (fleetingly) obsessed with Tudor history. We wanted to know about the fashions, the wars and Henry’s wives. In my case, it resulted in a rather gruesome school project on torture and punishment in the 16th century. This demonstrated the truth of LP Hartley’s observation that ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

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Washington Post quietly ‘updates’ Hunter Biden laptop story after Devon Archer testimony

The Washington Post’s fact-checking department has yet again quietly updated — rather than corrected — its most-read story, which contained glaring errors about first son Hunter Biden’s laptop and an infamous dinner involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi.

Glenn Kessler, the paper’s chief fact-checker, has made six updates and authored an entirely new article about The Post’s bombshell reports in October 2020 and May 2021 that revealed Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi at Café Milano in Georgetown months after joining the natural gas firm’s board.

The initial fact check relied on statements from Andrew Bates — then a spokesman for the Biden campaign and now deputy White House press secretary — and Michael Carpenter, a former Biden foreign policy adviser and now a permanent US representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

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Claims that ‘Global Boiling’ Led to “Shocking” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet are Nonsense – the Ice Sheet is Currently Bigger Than Normal

The new era of ‘global boiling’ has brought a return of the much loved climate scare story featuring the imminent demise of the Greenland ice sheet. The Daily Mail recently ran a headline noting the ‘Impact of Global Boiling‘, saying it has “shocking” photos showing how much the ice sheet has melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth”. Snow melt is said to be higher than the 1981-2010 average.

But, alas, those who strive for accuracy in these matters are likely to quibble. The Earth is not “boiling” – that is the unhinged raving of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – the claim about July comes from a computer model, while “ever” refers to data of varying quality going back barely 150 years. Furthermore, the surface balance of ice on the Greenland ice sheet is higher than the 1981-2010 average, and could improve on last’s year performance, when there was little or no loss of the surface mass after the brief summer melting season.

If the Mail is “shocked” by how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year, it probably didn’t consult the polar portal site run by Danish meteorologists, which updates an accurate record on a daily basis. Both graphs above show the effect of a cold June where the ice loss was considerably lower than the previous year. Warmer weather arrived from the south in late June in time for the peak summer melt season.

As the second graph shows, the accumulation of surface ice on Greenland is more than the 1981-2010 average, and a big improvement on a decade ago. But as the Daily Sceptic noted recently, the current improvement can be seen in an even better light. A number of scientific institutions still use a decadal 1981-2010 average for comparison purposes, despite data to 2020 being available. The cynical might note that the ice sheet lost just 51 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s, compared to an annual loss of 244 gts in the 2010s. Updating the average figure would greatly amplify the recent, and continuing, recovery in the surface ice mass.

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