Tag: media

NBC News Fails Miserably in Getting ‘It’s the Whites Beating Asians’ Narrative Going Again

‘Stop Asian hate’ tried to get resurrected by NBC News. After weeks of dying due to not fitting the narrative, there’s some brand-new study saying that most perpetrators of anti-Asian violence are white. The headline itself is a doozy and the data is even shoddier (via NBC News):

Janelle Wong, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, released analysis last week that drew on previously published studies on anti-Asian bias. She found official crime statistics and other studies revealed more than three-quarters of offenders of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents, from both before and during the pandemic, have been white, contrary to many of the images circulating online.

Wong told NBC Asian America that such dangerous misconceptions about who perpetrates anti-Asian hate incidents can have “long-term consequences for racial solidarity.”

“The way that the media is covering and the way that people are understanding anti-Asian hate at this moment, in some ways, draws attention to these long-standing anti-Asian biases in U.S. society,” Wong said. “But the racist kind of tropes that come along with it — especially that it’s predominantly Black people attacking Asian Americans who are elderly — there’s not really an empirical basis in that.”

[…]

Other studies confirm the findings, Wong wrote. She pointed to separate research from the University of Michigan Virulent Hate Project, which examined media reports about anti-Asian incidents last year and found that upward of 75 percent of news stories identified perpetrators as male and white in instances of physical or verbal assault and harassment when the race of the perpetrator was confirmed. Wong said the numbers could even be an underestimate.

Wait, what?! First, this joke of a story says that we’re not really seeing black people physically assault Asians. There’s no “empirical basis,” and now the reason for this shoddy narrative revival exercise is because…the media says the perpetrators are white. The same media that’s been wrong about everything for years? Also, did you catch the real meaning behind this article? If we don’t do anything, racial solidarity could be at risk. So, lie your ass off about who’s committing Asian hate crimes so we can manufacture a false reality to make us feel better about race in America. That’s not healthy. 

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A Who’s Who Of Left-Wing Hacks: Behind The Aspen Institute’s Upcoming Report On Silencing Dissent

Most people haven’t heard of the Aspen Institute. Others maybe recall some mention of their annual Aspen Ideas Festival. A few more might somewhat remember a minor political dust-up from 2020 when Michael Bloomberg, who was blowing money on a doomed bid for president at the time, had to grovel and beg forgiveness for simply stating the facts on crime at an Aspen conference five years prior.

The “festival,” which The Economist called a “mountain retreat for the liberal elite” and “a corporate Never-Never Land,” refused to release the video; it’s a safe space for the right types of people, and liberal billionaire technocrats are precisely the right type of people.

And you better believe “the right types of people” are sitting on the institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Behind the psychiatric name, the commission is a group of liberal activists, donors, journalists and tech executives, a disgraced foreign royal, and even a corporate “senior vice president of social impact,” who must be in charge of all the junior corporate vice presidents for diversity. For the past six months, this liberal Dream Team has been hard at work on their big report to help the federal government work with corporations to squash news they call “disinformation.”

So what will this “disinformation” be? A look at the commissioners hints strongly that it will be you, me, and anyone else who disagrees with Katie Couric and her left-wing friends.

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Ivory Hecker Says Fox Corp Censored Bitcoin, Hydroxychloroquine, and Free Speech Stories

“There’s a narrative. Yes, it is unspoken. But if you accidentally step outside the narrative, if you don’t sense what that narrative is and go with it, there will be grave consequences for you… Fox came at my throat for standing up against censorship.” Hecker claimed in the bombshell interview. 

Other revelations in the video include audio of Fox 26’s Vice President and News Director, Susan Schiller, telling Hecker to “cease and desist posting about Hydroxychloroquine” on social media, and that she “failed as a reporter” for reporting about the drug. Schiller then mentioned a study from the New England Journal of Medicine to justify why she was not allowing Hecker to report on Hydroxychloroquine. 

The video also included an audio clip of a Fox official saying “it’s not just about the viewers, It’s about what our CEO reads.” 

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Shaming Private Ryan

NPR, man. It used to be good, though liberal, until it was taken over by woke fanatics. Now NPR’s TV critic, Eric Deggans, is attacking Tom Hanks for not being woke enough. Deggans, who is black, praised Hanks for his recent op-ed about the Tulsa race massacre, and calling on Hollywood to tell more stories like it. But now Deggans wants Hanks to do penance for having made movies about white people. I kid you not. From Deggans’s essay:

[I]t’s wonderful that Hanks stepped forward to advocate for teaching about a race-based massacre – indirectly pushing back against all the hyperventilating about critical race theory that’s too often more about silencing such lessons on America’s darkest chapters.

But it is not enough.

After many years of speaking out about race and media in America, I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.

But in Hanks’ case, he is no average American. Or average Hollywood star, for that matter.

Over the years, he has starred in a lot of big movies about historical events, including Saving Private Ryan, Greyhound, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Bridge of Spies and News of the World. He has served as a producer or executive producer on even more films and TV shows based on American history, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon. He was an executive producer of documentaries such as The Assassination of President Kennedy and The Sixties on CNN.

In other words, he is a baby boomer star who has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men “doing the right thing.” He even played a former Confederate soldier in one of his latest films, News of the World, standing up for a blond, white girl who had been kidnapped and raised by a Native American tribe.

He’s not alone. Superstar director Steven Spielberg has a similar pedigree (notwithstanding occasional projects such as The Color Purple and Amistad). And fellow director Ron Howard. These stories of white Americans smashing the Nazi war machine or riding rockets into space are important. But they often leave out how Black soldiers returned home from fighting in World War II to find they weren’t allowed to use the GI Bill to secure home loans in certain neighborhoods or were cheated out of claiming benefits at all.

They don’t describe how Black people were excluded from participating in space missions as astronauts early in America’s space program. As the book and film Hidden Figures notes, even brilliant Black and female mathematicians faced discrimination in the space program during the 1950s and 1960s. If given better opportunities, perhaps they could have helped us get to the moon sooner, by putting our best minds on the problem, regardless of race.

Deggans is angry because these artists didn’t make the films he thought they should have made.

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Wikipedia’s Quiet, Big-Tech-Funded Grip On Internet Knowledge Gives It Too Much Power

Wikipedia’s quiet dominance over internet knowledge and close ties to authoritarian big tech companies is giving the online encyclopedia site too much unchecked power.

In one recent example, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is under federal and state investigation for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and growing list of scandals, is described on his Wikipedia page in a positive light while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential GOP frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, is painted as a partisan hack who ignored the science.

Anyone who searches for information about both of these governors’ pandemic responses will be given this information that isn’t necessarily true, and Wikipedia doesn’t seem to do anything about it. As a matter of fact, any user who wanted to manipulate a page to fit his agenda could as long as it slipped through Wikipedia’s editing process. That happened seven years ago when a Wikipedia user overlooked The Federalist’s long list of “featured-in” publications and important interviews to try to delete our publication’s entry because, according to the user, it “does not pass the threshold for notability.”

Wikipedia’s move to the left, especially when echoing narratives found in corporate media, is not a sudden one. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is just one of the many people who recently called attention to Wikipedia slowly but surely kissing its neutrality goodbye. In an interview in February, Sanger said the 20-year-old website’s shift towards the left is “disheartening” and “troubling.”

“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” Sanger said.

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The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda

On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood: namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus. The evidence is definitive and conclusive that this is false — Mateen, like so many others who committed similar acts of violence, was motivated by rage over President Obama’s bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and chose PULSE at random without even knowing it was a gay club — yet this media-consecrated lie continues to fester.

On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an “unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +). These false claims were compiled by the gay socialist activist Matt Thomas, who correctly objected: “the shooter literally picked PULSE at random from Google after security was too tight at the mall he went to first,” adding that while LGBT groups “are hopeless of course,” too much money and power is at stake for them to give up this self-serving fiction. But he asked, “Shouldn’t the bar be a little higher for senators?”

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More media lies about Donald Trump and Bill Barr debunked

Insisting that President Donald Trump had politicized the Department of Justice was a regular part of the media assault on him, yet a host of recent developments proves it was all in the press’ fevered, hyperpartisan imagination.

The big one, of course, is the Interior Department inspector general report on the Lafayette Park incident: The IG thoroughly vindicated Trump and then-Attorney General Bill Barr, saying the federal Park Police had decided all on their own last June to clear protesters out of the area to install fencing after several nights of violence and vandalism. It was indeed sheer coincidence that Trump went to the area later that day for a photo op.

Then and since, outlets from CNN and MSNBC to The New York Times and Washington Post repeatedly reported as fact the claim that Trump had demanded the protesters be cleared out of his way.

Some headline samples: “Officers fire tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear the way for Trump’s photo op” (Vox); “Analysis: How the clearing of Lafayette Square made the White House look a bit more like the Kremlin” (Washington Post); “The day police charged a peaceful protest for Trump’s photo-op” (CNN). Heck, a Washington Post “fact checker” is still trying to insist the IG’s report doesn’t really debunk the months of misreporting.

But that’s not the only Trump vindication. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is standing with the Trump DOJ on a couple of high-profile controversies. It’s gone to court to continue blocking access to internal government documents relating to the Trump International Hotel in DC and to keep secret most of a memo sent to then-AG Barr arguing that Trump should be cleared of obstruction-of-justice charges after the Mueller report refused to take a position on the issue.

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