Victory for Netanyahu Is a Defeat for The New York Times: Ira Stoll, Al
lgemeiner, Apr. 10, 2019— The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election is a defeat for the New York Times.
The New York Times Owes Americans a Big, Fat Apology: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, March 25, 2019 — Now that President Trump has been vindicated and the Fat Lady is singing, it’s high time we hear from another matriarch– the Gray Lady.
Nolte: Top 51 Fake News ‘Bombshells’ the Media Spread About RussiaGate: John Nolte,Breitbart, Apr. 22, 2019 — Since the release of the Mueller Report last week, which — despite two years, $30 million, and a team of rabidly partisan left-wing investigators — found exactly zero crimes of Russia collusion or obstruction associated with President Trump and his campaign, one of the most bizarre results has been watching the media pat themselves on the back for the stories they believe they got correct.
Can the Media Survive Mueller?: Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., WSJ, Apr. 16, 2019 — The Mueller report may add tidbits about Donald Trump’s business or personal associates that excite a certain type of journalist: the kind who thinks that when one accusation against Mr. Trump has been debunked, the answer is to find another.
On Topic Links
Nathan Thrall’s Propaganda Welcomed at the New York Times: Alex Safian, Jewish Press, Apr. 1, 2019 — That the New York Times chose to publish Nathan Thrall’s How the Battle Over Israel and Antisemitism Is Fracturing American Politics is not surprising: Thrall can be counted on to produce, on demand, the usual anti-Israel screed that has long been norm at the Times.
New York Times Suggests “Terrorist” Label for Israel: Gilead Ini, CAMERA, Apr. 12, 2019 — This week’s New York Times story “Terrorist Label for Iran Force” is, as the title suggests, about the U.S. decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror organization.
‘Edelweiss’ and the Media: Steve Cortes, RealClearPolitics, Apr. 22, 2019 — On Thursday after the release of the Mueller Report, New York Post reporter Nikki Schwab noted that the Marine Corp musicians at a White House event played “Edelweiss.”
Here’s Why I Didn’t Fall for The Russia-Trump Conspiracy: Margaret Hemingway, The Federalist, Apr. 1, 2019 — An outlandish theory that Donald Trump was a traitor who had conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election gripped much of the nation’s media for more than two years. Countless “bombshells” in support of this theory were published and broadcast.
VICTORY FOR NETANYAHU IS A DEFEAT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ira Stoll
Algemeiner, Apr. 10, 2019
The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election is a defeat for the New York Times.
The Times threw everything it had against Netanyahu.
The Times’ tone was set in a March 1 column by Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer prize-winning former editor of The Jerusalem Post whose hiring by the Times in April 2017 was interpreted as an attempt by the Times to bolster its faltering credibility among pro-Israel readers. “Time for Netanyahu To Go” was the headline over the Stephens column, describing Netanyahu as “toxically flawed.”
The same column described Netanyahu as “a man for whom no moral consideration comes before political interest and whose chief political interest is himself. He is a cynic wrapped in an ideology inside a scheme.” Stephens wrote, “To have an Israeli prime minister lend credence to the slur that Zionism is a form of racism by prospectively bringing undoubted racists into his coalition is simply unforgivable.” Somehow more than a million Israeli voters disagreed.
Stephens doubled down with an April 5 column whose sub-headline was “Why Netanyahu’s challenger deserves to win.” It was based on an interview with Benny Gantz of the Blue and White Party.
Nor was Stephens the only Times columnist openly campaigning against Netanyahu. Bari Weiss, who, like Stephens, joined the Times from the Wall Street Journal editorial page and was well known as a Zionist voice, weighed in with a March 19 dispatch from Tel Aviv. It was sub-headlined, “Yair Lapid, Israel’s consummate centrist, explains why his party can unseat Israel’s prime minister.” Weiss wrote, “Over a week, I met many voters who say they will cast their ballot on April 9 for the centrists. Why? To a person, the answer boiled down to two words: Not Bibi.”
“To a person”! Good for Weiss for getting over to Israel and interviewing “many voters,” but either they were misleading her, or she somehow chose an unrepresentative sample. Her column went on to complain about Bibi and gush about Lapid:
While Mr. Netanyahu’s message is one of division, Blue and White speaks about unity. And while Bibi has forged an alliance with the explicitly anti-Arab party Otzma Yehudit, Mr. Lapid said that a “racist” party “cannot be a part of a government in this country.” … It is when Mr. Lapid talks about Jewish values and Jewish history that he is the most compelling.
Not “compelling” enough, though, to win the election.
As if Israeli voters hadn’t gotten the message from the two Stephens columns and from Weiss,Times columnist Roger Cohen piled on with his own Blue and White endorsement column, sub-headlined, “Prolonging the Netanyahu era would undermine Israeli democracy and bury any last hope of a two-state peace. It’s time for Benny Gantz.” It called Gantz “an Israeli hero straight out of Central Casting … son of a Holocaust survivor, born and raised in an agricultural cooperative, paratrooper, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, with his candid blue-eyed gaze.”
And that’s just the editorial and opinion pages. It doesn’t even get into the news columns, which likewise have been cheerleading for Gantz. One Times news profile described him as “a strong, silent type, someone whose hooded eyes themselves convey war-weary experience, whose entire career has been spent not in partisan backstabbing but in Israel’s most unifying institution: the army.” Another Times news article gushed that Gantz “has a reputation as uncorrupt and refined.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
THE NEW YORK TIMES OWES AMERICANS A BIG, FAT APOLOGY
Michael Goodwin
New York Post, March 25, 2019
Now that President Trump has been vindicated and the Fat Lady is singing, it’s high time we hear from another matriarch– the Gray Lady. The New York Times should apologize for misleading America — again.
Back in 2016, three days after Trump turned the world upside down with his election victory, the publisher and the editor of the Times wrote to subscribers. Their remarkable letter was in large part an apology for failing to understand the Trump phenomenon and for missing the signs that he could win. “After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions,” then publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and editor Dean Baquet wrote. “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”
While they also defended themselves, saying the paper “reported on both candidates fairly,” they promised to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor.”
As I wrote then, “Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.” And now, as Yogi Berra once said, “it’s deja vu all over again.”
Because it didn’t keep the promise to report “without fear or favor,” the paper is facing a new storm of criticism. This time, of course, the topic is RussiaGate. And once again, the Times is accused of accepting and spreading fake news, and of missing the truth.
We don’t need a trial. Guilty as charged. The Times was way out front, along with the Washington Post, in peddling the Russia collusion hoax. And because of its prominence and the power of its news service, the vast bulk of the media followed the Times’ lead. It is the bell cow, and it led the media over the cliff by getting the big story wrong.
And not just one or two or even three times, but for more than two years, the paper of record acted like a prosecutor making the case that Trump was at least compromised by Russia, and maybe even conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the election.
In doing so, it effectively swallowed hook, line and sinker the Big Lie that Hillary Clinton was selling — that Trump was the illegitimate president. There was almost no difference in what she said and what the Times said about Trump and Putin.
Now that special counsel Robert Mueller, whose integrity the Times praised for two years, has declared Clinton’s claims false, that truth needs to be accepted by the hate Trump media. And nobody in the print media, with the exception of the Washington Post, hates Trump like the New York Times hates him.
Front page to last, news stories, columns and editorials. Coverage of culture, education, foreign governments — most of it expresses views of someone who personally and politically detests the president of the United States. Tyrants in Asia and dictators in Latin America have it easy compared to the blistering coverage Trump gets.
In short, nothing has changed since 2016. And in both cases, the results were the same: The Timesmissed the story. Just as reporters and editors believed Trump couldn’t win in 2016 because they didn’t want him to, they believed the Russia collusion story because they wanted it to be true.
The episodes are linked by a cause — the collapse of standards at the paper. Executive editor Baquet, in the summer of 2016, decided that Trump was not fit to be president, a decision that opened the floodgates. Day after day, page after page, so-called news stories started to read like editorials. Reporters were now free to give their opinion, and surprise, surprise — they all expressed the party line. Over and over, Trump bad, Clinton good. She was dubbed “normal,” he was called “abnormal.” No bias there.
The Times’ newsroom was a giant bubble, and, like all bubbles, group think dominated. Nobody inside realized how unfair the coverage was because they all agreed with it. Those who didn’t — and there must have been some — were either intimidated or marginalized. The paper says it believes in diversity, but hating Trump seems to be a litmus test
Naturally, there were many signs over the last two years that the paper had not changed its stripes. Despite its promise after missing Trump’s rise, it almost instantly fell back into the same position of hostility once he became president. The fixation on RussiaGate — for which it shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize with the Washington Post — stands out, but it was far from the only example of biased coverage. Virtually everything Trump said and did sparked an avalanche of thunderous denunciation from reporters and opinion writers alike…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
NOLTE: TOP 51 FAKE NEWS ‘BOMBSHELLS’ THE MEDIA SPREAD ABOUT RUSSIAGATE
John Nolte
Breitbart, Apr. 22, 2019
Since the release of the Mueller Report last week, which — despite two years, $30 million, and a team of rabidly partisan left-wing investigators — found exactly zero crimes of Russia collusion or obstruction associated with President Trump and his campaign, one of the most bizarre results has been watching the media pat themselves on the back for the stories they believe they got correct.
Imagine that. Imagine your industry is so broken and corrupt that all you have left is to point to what you believe you did right. This is like watching an airline pilot brag about the times he didn’t crash, a district attorney point to the people he prosecuted who were not innocent — or in the words of comedian Chris Rock, a parent boast about taking care of his kids.
While a list of what the media might have gotten correct is fairly easy to put together, no one will ever be able to grasp the tsunami of fake news Americans were buried under for over two years. The list below of 51 might sound like a lot, but it is a drop in the ocean when you recall the thousands and thousands of hours CNN, MSNBC, Meet the Press, This Week, PBS NewsHour, State of the Union, Good Morning America, Reliable Sources, and the Today Show devoted to anchors and pundits pushing the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia. Not to mention, millions and millions of establishment media tweets and Facebook posts. Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Shepard Smith, Andrew Napolitano, Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Chris Matthews, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter, Erin Burnett, et al., are alone responsible for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of lies and conspiracy-mongering.
This list of 51 doesn’t count the half-million — half-MILLION — Russia collusion stories published over the past two years, almost all of which were premised on the idea that Trump did, indeed, collude with a foreign power to steal the 2016 presidential election.
This list cannot begin to count the countless times these 51 fake stories were repeated as fact throughout other news outlets, social media, and thousands upon thousands of cumulative broadcast hours. What’s more, this list of 51 can’t begin to count the countless examples of fake news launched against Trump that have nothing to do with Russia — desperate and deliberate lies involving fish food and ice cream scoops…
Before we begin, credit where it’s due. This list would not have been possible without the lists already compiled by Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greenwald, and Sohrab Ahmari…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
CAN THE MEDIA SURVIVE MUELLER?
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
WSJ, Apr. 16, 2019
The Mueller report may add tidbits about Donald Trump’s business or personal associates that excite a certain type of journalist: the kind who thinks that when one accusation against Mr. Trump has been debunked, the answer is to find another.
Still, to anyone who didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and enter the news business, every tendril senses which way the Trump-Russia story now will be trending until the final chapter is written.
A casual conversation between a lowly campaign associate and a dubious London professor over whether the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton is not going to sprout new and deeper significance. The phantom sources of Christopher Steele are not about to gain flesh and walk among us.
Big-story dynamics go from unpredictable to predictable at some point. Unless a Russian spy turned himself in to Mr. Mueller, much of what he learned comes from existing U.S. intelligence collection, which long ago failed to establish collusion or anything else of interest that hasn’t leaked by now, either from Mr. Trump’s enemies or from the Trump camp itself trying to get ahead of a story.
The actual words of the Justice Department special-prosecutor rules require the existence of a crime, which there appears never to have been. John Dowd, the president’s former lawyer, says Mr. Mueller should have refused the assignment because the basic predicate was not met. Mr. Dowd’s point may be irresistible by the time we’re done.
For many of the country’s most prestigious news organizations, the question becomes whether they have sewn themselves into a moral straitjacket and now must abdicate coverage of the biggest story of the next two years to upstart rivals on the right.
Let’s go back to the beginning. Journalists were not wrong in being open to Christopher Steele (a paid advocate) and his handlers (also paid advocates), but they were wrong not to notice that the one incontestable fact Mr. Steele had put before them had nothing to do with Mr. Trump and Russia.
The one incontestable fact was that a paid advocate who was trading on his previous profession as a British intelligence agent, in the middle of a presidential election, was being shepherded around Washington by a notorious PR schemer and promoting allegations whose truth he was unwilling to vouch for and whose source he was unwilling to reveal.
Unless you are an exceptionally dim journalist, whenever somebody peddles a salacious story to you, a question naturally and unbidden leaps to mind: Is the real story the one I’m being peddled? Or is the real story the fact that I’m being peddled it?
To a reporter, one documented fact is more valuable than any number of unsupported claims. Indeed, a bunch of unsupported and unsourced allegations smacks of an attempt to gull him into the “Where there’s smoke, there must be fire” fallacy. Or, insultingly, bespeaks a belief that he’s the type who will circulate unsupported claims without challenging the motives of those promoting them. I describe here, of course, David Corn of Mother Jones in the initial instance, but also the hole that much of the mainstream press has dug for itself as a result of its hardly inexplicable distaste for Mr. Trump.
By now, self-respecting reporters should have written off sources like Rep. Adam Schiff, who serially misled them. They should have noticed that the Trump Tower and George Papadopoulos episodes they cling to actually demonstrate the opposite of a conspiracy between Mr. Trump and the Kremlin.
They should have realized that it was neither necessary nor useful for Vladimir Putin to coordinate with Mr. Trump if he wanted to promote a Trump presidency. They should have noticed the ludicrous overkill of the Paul Manafort and Roger Stone raids and suspected this was the special counsel’s way of buying some credibility for the disappointing no-collusion finding he knew he would be delivering.
They should have noticed that none of his indictments and plea deals with Trump associates for lying and other offenses included any attempt to establish collusion-related crimes. An alert press by now might even be asking if the collusion-investigation circus was ever necessary or justified in the first place.
The desperation with which so many news organizations misread the evidence the world kept putting in front of them, first of all, is a testament to the enduring applicability of the allegory of the emperor’s new clothes. Secondly, it represents a relentless reiteration of the original mistake, asking “What if the Steele allegations are true?” but not “What if they are false and have been knowingly and recklessly promoted to us?”
From the moment Mr. Steele surfaced, the latter was a logical possibility and a major potential story. Their failure to treat it as such is hardly a testament to the courage or fitness for their jobs of the people who run some of our prominent news organizations.
The CIJR wishes all our friends and supporters a HAPPY PASSOVER. Due to the holidays, we will not be publishing our Friday Briefing tomorrow. Next week, we will return to our regular schedule.
