Tag: media

Factcheckers? AP Issues Correction After Saying Last Week It Interviewed Radio Host … Who Died In 2020

Everybody gets something wrong every once in a while.

Even the Associated Press. But the international wire service is often considered the arbiter of truth and has a website that features “fact-checking, accountability journalism and misinformation coverage from AP journalists around the globe.”

The AP published a piece on Thursday about a new group led by prominent liberals buying up Spanish-speaking radio stations.

“The Latino Media Network, a startup founded by two political strategists who worked for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, reached a $60 million deal to acquire 18 AM and FM stations in ten U.S. cities from Televisa/Univision,” the AP reported. “The agreement announced June 3 still needs Federal Communications Commission approval.”

In the piece, the reporter claimed to interview one prominent Hispanic, Martha Flores, who served for years as a host of a show on Radio Mambi.

The only problem is Flores died in 2020.

In one correction, the AP wrote: “This story was first published on June 9, 2022. It was updated on June 11, 2022 to remove comments erroneously attributed to Martha Flores, former host of a show on Radio Mambi in Miami, one of the stations in the proposed deal. Flores died in 2020. The comments were made by another woman. This version of the story removes those comments.”

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Joe Biden’s Submissive — and Highly Revealing — Embrace of Saudi Despots

In 2018, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming the U.S.’s long-standing relationship with the Saudi royal family on the ground that this partnership serves America’s “national interests.” Trump specifically cited the fact that “Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world” and has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers. Trump’s statement was issued in the wake of widespread demands in Washington that Trump reduce or even sever ties with the Saudi regime due to the likely role played by its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

What made these Trump-era demands somewhat odd was that the Khashoggi murder was not exactly the first time the Saudi regime violated human rights and committed atrocities of virtually every type. For decades, the arbitrary imprisonment and murder of Saudi dissidents, journalists, and activists have been commonplace, to say nothing of the U.S./UK-supported devastation of Yemen which began during the Obama years. All of that took place as American presidents in the post-World War II order made the deep and close partnership between Washington and the tyrants of Riyadh a staple of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Yet, as was typical for the Trump years, political and media commentators treated Trump’s decision to maintain relations with the Saudis as if it were some unprecedented aberration of evil which he alone pioneered — some radical departure of long-standing, bipartisan American values — rather than what it was: namely, the continuation of standard bipartisan U.S. policy for decades. In an indignant editorial following Trump’s statement, The New York Times exclaimed that Trump was making the world “more [dangerous] by emboldening despots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere,” specifically blaming “Mr. Trump’s view that all relationships are transactional, and that moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive understanding of American national interests.”

The life-long Eurocrat, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, lamented what he described as Trump’s worldview: “if you buy US weapons and if you are against Iran – then you can kill and repress as much as you want.” CNN published an analysis by the network’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson— under the headline: “Trump’s Saudi support highlights brutality of ‘America First’ doctrine” — which thundered: “Refusing to break with Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman over the killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump effectively told global despots that if they side with him, Washington will turn a blind eye to actions that infringe traditional US values.” Trump’s willingness to do business with the Saudis, argued Collinson, “represented another blow to the international rule of law and global accountability, concepts Trump has shown little desire to enforce in nearly two years in office.”

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CNN op-ed calls for repeal of the Second Amendment: ‘Let’s just get rid of it’

Longtime liberal radio host Bill Press wrote an op-ed Thursday calling for the Second Amendment to be outright repealed. 

“The only effective way to deal with the Second Amendment is to repeal it — and then replace it with something that makes sense in a civilized society,” Press wrote for CNN in an article titled “There’s no way to fix the Second Amendment. Let’s just get rid of it.”

“I’m hardly the first person to say that the Second Amendment has been a disaster for this country. In fact, two Supreme Court justices — justices appointed by Republican presidents — have said as much,” he added. 

Press cited former Chief Justice Warren Burger, who in 1991 told PBS that “If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment.” 

Burger, who also presided over Roe v. Wade, is quoted as calling the Second Amendment “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” in American history. 

Press reiterated the claim and expounded on it. He wrote, “Indeed, you only have to read the Second Amendment to see what a fraud it’s become.”

He claimed that “there’s no way you can logically leap” from the text of the Second Amendment “to the unfettered right of any citizen to buy as many guns — and any kind of gun — that they want, without the government being able to do anything about it.”

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WaPo: Black Americans May Need to ‘Flee’ U.S. Due to ‘Crazy White People’

Black Americans may need to “flee the country” in the face of an apparently growing population of “crazy White people” who are “not to be trifled with,” according to a recent Washington Post piece.

In an essay published in the Post on Tuesday titled, “Why Black people are afraid of ‘crazy’ White people,” columnist and associate editor Jonathan Capehart begins by letting readers in on a “little secret” — “black people” don’t fear typical white people, but rather “crazy” ones.

“Things felt so dicey during the Trump years, I half-joked that my husband and I might have to reenact that scene from ‘The Sound of Music’ and flee the country,” he said. 

“Now, an alarming new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] shows that my ‘Operation von Trapp’ might need to go live,” he added. “The ranks of ‘crazy’ White people appear to be growing — and the rest of us don’t know what to do about it.”

Capehart defines “crazy” as one who “believes any aspect of the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy.” 

“This is the noxious idea that liberals are deliberately replacing White people with non-Whites and immigrants,” he said, claiming it “allegedly drove an 18-year-old man to target Black people in Buffalo, killing 10 and wounding three.”

He called the fact that the “twisted belief” is so widely held, “terrifying,” as he cited a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll allegedly revealing the “present-day Black fear of White violence.”

He also argued that the “right to self-protection, let alone the right to bear arms, doesn’t exactly apply to Black people.”

“Imagine I get a gun for self-protection (not that I ever would, but stay with me). A situation arises in which I use it to protect myself. But then the cops arrive, see a gun, ‘fear for their lives,’ and, well, the rest writes itself,” he said. 

“Remember Philando Castile?” he asked in reference to a black man who was fatally shot in 2016 by a Minnesota police officer in an incident that was live-streamed in a widely shared Facebook video. “We can’t win.”

Though Capehart “won’t be getting a gun. Ever,” he considers the decision to “leave the country for my own protection.”

“It’s a question many people of color have been pondering the past several years,” he wrote, highlighting Daily Beast reporter Wajahat Ali’s latest column, “Is It Time for Me to Leave America?”

However, according to Capehart, the decision to leave is not due solely to “race,” but also to issues surrounding gender, LGBTQ, and abortion.

“The SPLC report notes a correlation between the obsession with ethnic ‘replacement’ and a fixation on gender identity,” he wrote. “And look: More than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed this year alone, many of them targeting trans children and their families.” 

“This is not to mention the threat to abortion access or to other rights (such as my marriage) that could fall like dominoes,” he added.

Though citizens can and must “vote and organize, and change hearts and minds and all that,” Capehart demands that “marginalized people” not be blamed for “being scared.”

“The warnings of a potential loss of freedom, liberty and life are omnipresent and unrelenting, like being in the middle of Times Square with every sign flashing ‘You in danger!’” he wrote.

Capehart attributes all the aforementioned “threats” to a supposed rise in “crazy” white Americans.

“And it’s all because the number of ‘crazy’ White people in America fearing ‘replacement’ appears to be growing — and they seem ready to do whatever it takes to stay at the pinnacle of American life,” he wrote.

“I’m not sure they will succeed in getting me to leave my country,” he added. “But ‘Operation von Trapp’ is ready. ‘Crazy’ White people are not to be trifled with.”

The Post essay comes as many on the left continue to depict America as a systemically racist country.

Last month, a Washington Post essay called on Black Americans “tired” of American hostility to consider relocating to Ghana to be “free from White America’s psychic violence.”

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The NYT Acknowledges the CIA’s Big Lie for Gina Haspel

The  New York Times has finally acknowledged Gina Haspel’s direct involvement in the Central Intelligence Agency’s policy of torture and abuse.  On June 4, 2022, an article provided details of Haspel’s role as chief of the CIA base twenty years ago that was known for conducting the most sadistic acts of torture and abuse.  At her confirmation hearings to become CIA director in 2018, Haspel refused to answer any direct questions about her role in the policy of torture and abuse, which included the waterboarding of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.  The CIA stopped me from writing about Haspel’s role in my 2018 memoir, “Whistleblower at the CIA.”

As a result of CIA’s censorship, I joined a lawsuit with four former federal employees to end the government’s suppression of our writings on national security issues.  Last month, the Supreme Court allowed to stand a court ruling that denied our case, which had been presented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union.  The government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide secrets, but the CIA’s review system is opaque, exceeding legitimate security boundaries, and compromising free speech.  The Haspel case exposes the dangers of government censorship; the failures of the Senate’s confirmation process; and the CIA’s ability to avoid accountability for its transgressions.

At the closing of Haspel’s hearing, the chairman of the intelligence committee, Richard Burr (R/NC), told her that “you have acted morally, ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”  Surely the members of the committee knew of Haspel’s role in torture and abuse.  This would be particularly true for the senior Democrat on the committee, Diane Feinstein, who led the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.

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NPR Misleads Viewers With Claim Of ‘Over 240 Mass Shootings’ Halfway Into 2022

Do American citizens still believe that NPR is truly an “unbiased” news organization? A new report by the taxpayer-funded public radio recently raised alarm bells for Americans across the country after it announced that there have been “over 240 mass shootings” in the United States since the beginning of 2022.

According to the article, the United States endured  “at least 246 [mass shootings] in just over 22 weeks,” for an average of “just over 11 a week.”

Such a number was reached without looking at the FBI’s traditional definition of a mass shooting, which necessitates that 4 or more people other than the gunman are killed during the incident. NPR instead elected to utilize the Gun Violence Archive of four or more people being shot, regardless of survival.

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