Press Oracles Hope to Resurrect the Cronkite Age, When They Controlled the News

 Richard Fernandez (wretchard)

From this perspective, McCarthy's Ball of Collusion can also serve as the story of an attempt to restore the oracular nature of journalistic information to a level comparable to the Cronkite era. By creating a story dependent on leaked intelligence reports, hearings inside secure rooms, or sealed documents, the press appeared to have found a formula that could once again let them say "and that's the way it was." They would once again have an information monopoly and the world would revert back from the information firehose to the proper classified straw. And their inside knowledge, which they were confident would be borne out by the Mueller report, would show that Russia conspired with Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Patrick J. Buchanan: When Democracy Fails to Deliver...Because Elites Refuse To Accept Losing

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was right.

While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, [Brexit & Trump's election] often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.

In the 1975 book "Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed," this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.

Foremost among these was "the New Journalism."

"The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others," this writer wrote. "The press determines what 'people will talk and think about' because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington."

Among the reasons for Trump's political success, such as it is, is that today's conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.

Yet still, the left's power over America's character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.

What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.

In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.

We may have to have a second American revolution. 

The unfiltered President

The media always asked for an authentic politician who said what he thought. There's no more authentic president in modern American history than Donald Trump.

LEFTIES ALWAYS WANT TO SILENCE THEIR POLITICAL OPPONENTS: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Want the FCC to Revoke Sinclair’s Broadcast Licenses. For the crime of broadcasting-while-conservative.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai responds to demand for press censorship:

Dear Senator Cantwell:

Thank you for your letter requesting that the Commission investigate a broadcaster based on the content of its news coverage and promotion of that coverage. In light of my commitment to protecting the First Amendment and freedom of the press, I must respectfully decline.

A free media is vital to our democracy. That is why during my time at the Commission I have consistently opposed any effort to infringe upon the freedom of the press and have fought to eliminate regulations that impede the gathering and dissemination of news. Most relevant here, I have repeatedly made clear that the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.

I understand that you disliked or disagreed with the content of particular broadcasts, but I can hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast station because of disagreement with its news coverage or promotion of that coverage. Instead, I agree with Senator Markey that "[a]ny insinuation that elected officials could use the levers of government to control or sensor [sic] the news media would represent a startling degradation of the freedom of the press." I also take this opportunity to reaffirm the commitment I made to several members of the Senate Commerce Committee last year that the Commission under my leadership would "not act in a manner that violates the First Amendment and stifles or penalizes free speech by electronic media, directly or indirectly."

Thank you for your interest, and let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Ajit V. Pai

Read the whole thing.

FOX BUTTERFIELD, IS THAT YOU?

James Taranto has moved on from his daily online Best of the Web column and his recurring documentation of New York Timesthink under the catchphrase “Fox Butterfield, is that you?” Butterfield was the Times reporter endlessly befuddled by, or indignant over, high incarceration rates coupled with low crime rates. Invoking Butterfield, Taranto noted cases of reported contradiction where correlation was more like it.

CBS Minnesota affiliate WCCO introduces Pat Kessler’s story on gun ownership with this classic of the genre: “More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains relatively low.” Kessler himself reports: “Minnesota’s violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI. And in 2017, the state set a new record for firearms background checks.”

THE FBI HAS “GRAVE CONCERNS”? SO DO I

John Hinderaker: 
I’m so old, I can remember when liberals were in favor of revealing corruption in institutions like the FBI. 

Most of us are eagerly awaiting the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo on abuse of the FBI by the Obama administration. It should happen in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, the Bureau is worried, as always, about its public image. The Associated Press headlines: “FBI clashes with Trump, has ‘grave concerns’ on Russia memo.” I’m so old, I can remember when liberals were in favor of revealing corruption in institutions like the FBI. Those days, of course, are long gone.

In a remarkably public clash of wills with the White House, the FBI declared Wednesday it has “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a classified memo on the Russia election investigation that President Donald Trump wants released.

Yeah, well, you know what? I have grave concerns about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI under the Obama administration, which I have been writing about since 2010.

“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said.

If there are “material omissions of fact,” the Democrats’ responsive memo no doubt will reveal them. Good: let’s lay the cards on the table. The relevant fact here is that the FBI is no longer claiming that there is a national security problem with releasing the memo, only that it will put the FBI in a bad light.

Trey Gowdy, soon to depart the House, gets the last word:

The Justice Department had said in a letter last week that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release the memo without first giving the FBI and the department the chance to review it.

After those complaints, Wray reviewed the memo over the weekend. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was with him when he reviewed the memo, said the FBI director did not raise any national security concerns. Gowdy said the memo doesn’t reveal any intelligence methods but does reveal “one source.”

Heh. Christopher Steele, I presume. It’s time for some transparency. Let’s get to the bottom of the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Bureau needs, at a minimum, to be reformed via a thorough housecleaning of senior bureaucrats.

I'm so old that I remember when the news media wanted to get the story out. 

Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.

20 Years Ago Today

The arrival of real news.

Daily Beast Reporter Resigns After Blatantly Plagiarizing Article

They called her a "veteran reporter."

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

Michael Crichton

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

[DRUDGE] Media working overtime to become the shittiest in the world

Trump asking the important questions: 

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

MEDIA GO WILD!

McAuliffe Says He'd Slug Trump: 'You'd Have To Pick Him Up off Floor'...

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PEW: American media bias worst in world...

If the Left And The Press Were Hostile Aliens ... [how would you know?]

If we were invaded by aliens who hated all of humanity, anything promising prosperity and advancement to the human race, and bore a particular hatred for the United States of America and its prosperity and well-being, how would we be able to tell?

More importantly, how would we be able to tell we haven't been?

I’m old enough that I remember when the economic boom of the 80s got transformed by the press into “a decade of greed” of which we were all supposed to repent, as though a rising tide that lifted all boats after the morass of the seventies were a bad thing, for which we should somehow feel guilty.

But that was long ago, and some of you might not remember it, just like you might not remember that the supposed coming global cooling they taught in the seventies had the exact same origin – bad, polluting humans, and lots of them – and the same cure – send everyone back to the dark ages and kill most of the world population – as the supposed global warming doom.

However, it should not have escaped anyone’s notice that the press seems to be against anything that ensures the peace and prosperity of the US.

Take for instance the tax bill that caused fits and histrionics among all my friends. They screamed and threatened to hold their breaths because, horror of horrors, the government might not take as much of our money as it has the last several years.

I fail to see the problem with this, and no, I don’t believe the crazy idea that people will be dying on the streets because they’re no longer forced to pay towards the Obamacare boondoggle.

But what really astonished me were the claims that the President is very bad at foreign policy, because … other nations aren’t happy with our tax bill.....

It’s almost as though everything the left and the press – yes, redundant again – warns us against are things that are to our benefit, and the things that they push us towards are things that would hurt us. (Which incidentally explains the Obama years.)

In fact, if the left and the press had been taken over by aliens hostile to the US which is the last best hope of humankind, how could we tell the difference from the current state of affairs?

I don’t know. And I bet neither do you.

"It's a purely Soviet procedure. Make accusations and then end things by locking someone up in a psychiatric facility."

Does this remind you of the Democrats' attempt to declare Donald Trump unfit because he's literally insane?  HERE  HERE  HERE  HERE  HERE

It should.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian historian whose exposure of Soviet leader Josef Stalin's crimes angered state officials is due to begin enforced psychiatric testing this week amid fears he will be falsely declared insane, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing "the main elements of" a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor.

Some of Russia's leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin's crimes - he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator's Great Terror in the 1930s - jars with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.

It's a classic for the Communist Left ... in Russia and in the U.S.

"Perhaps if they can't convict him (of child pornography) they need to declare him insane," the lawyer said. "It's a purely Soviet procedure. Make accusations and then end things by locking someone up in a psychiatric facility."

WOLFF ADMITS: DIDN’T INTERVIEW ANY WH CABINET OFFICIALS FOR ANTI-TRUMP BOOK

Author Michael Wolff admitted he didn’t interview any of President Trump’s Cabinet members for his anti-Trump book Fire & Fury.

Wolff made the admission on Monday in an interview on “CBS This Morning.”

Yet he quotes them in his book.

Prosecutors ask FBI agents for info on Uranium One deal

Note the NBC implication that this is a partisan act.

On the orders of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Justice Department prosecutors have begun asking FBI agents to explain the evidence they found in a now dormant criminal investigation into a controversial uranium deal that critics have linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton, multiple law enforcement officials told NBC News.

If this were done by a Democrat administration we would read a story about the FBI and DOJ investigating the sale of 20% of America's uranium reserves to Putin in return for a $150 million bribe to the Clintons.   

Steyn on Sweden

Why Trump is right that the press is the enemy of the people.

AT THE WASHINGTON POST, IF IT MISLEADS, IT LEADS

Powerline:

The lead headline on the Washington Post’s web page right now is: “Putin thanks Trump for CIA intel that foiled a planned terrorist attack in Russia.” The story isn’t earth-shattering but has the virtue of enabling the Post to write a lead headline that includes “Putin” and “Trump.”

Post reporter David Filipov characterizes Putin’s call as “unusual.” He says “countries share intelligence all the time, but presidents rarely publicly thank one another for it.”

In this case, though, the intelligence the U.S. supplied enabled the Russians to thwart a terrorist attack. Seven members of an Islamic State cell reportedly had planned a suicide bombing this weekend at Kazan Cathedral, a St. Petersburg landmark located on Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main thoroughfare.

Putin told Trump that the information provided by the CIA allowed Russian law enforcement agencies to capture the terrorists just before the planned attack. Lives were saved as a result.

Is it unusual for the leader of one country to thank the leader of another country in these circumstances? Probably not. Filipov provides no evidence that it is.

Filipov notes that this was the second conversation between Trump and Putin in the last few days. Filipov says that during the first call, Trump thanked Putin for remarks he made “acknowledging America’s strong economic performance.”

The reader is left with the impression that this is what the call was about. In fact, though, Trump and Putin also discussed the small matter of North Korea and its nukes. Russia’s state-run Kremlin news service reported that there was “an emphasis placed on settling the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.” The White House said the two sides “discussed working together to resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea.”

The dishonest Washington Post keeps its readers in the dark (or should I say darkness?) about this important fact.

There is no reason why Trump and Putin shouldn’t be talking. There is no reason why they shouldn’t talk about North Korea, which probably poses the greatest threat to America’s security right now. There is no reason why Putin shouldn’t thank Trump for information that likely saved Russian lives and preserved a national treasure.

There is no reason, other than raw hatred of Trump, why the Washington Post should treat Putin’s latest call to Trump as “unusual” or provide a misleading account of Trump’s latest call to Putin.

When it comes to President Trump, if it misleads it leads at the Washington Post.

The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

Glen Greenwald (a Leftist) says that the US press is so unhinged about Trump that is is in the process of destroying itself.  And he's right!

Excerpt:

Just last week, the Washington Post decided – to great applause (including mine) – to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well established principle of journalism – one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in DC – that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public....

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened – what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” – it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

The Left has absolutely no sense of humor.

The Left has absolutely no sense of humor.  Here is how the NY Times reported Trump’s wisecrack about Hillary’s deleted emails:

“Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, and encouraged them to publish whatever they may have stolen, essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Mr. Trump’s call was another bizarre moment in the mystery of whether Vladimir V. Putin’s government has been seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.

They took his joke at Hillary’s expense as an honest-to-God call for Putin to hack Hillary’s server via a public speech.  This is moronic.  This is Forrest Gump stupid.

The entire rest of the MSM took the same approach: NPR, Politico, NBC, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, Time, NBC, ABC, Fortune .... the list is endless and you can check for yourself.  Google Donald Trump calls for Putin to locate Hillary's emails

We all know that Trump had already asked Putin to steal Hillary’s emails by secretly sending George Bush to the Kremlin in a SR-71 so he could be back in time for dinner and grope a CNN cutie.  

Much worse than Watergate

The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Deserve Our Respect or Our Trust

It's not just the obnoxious and lying asshole Brian Ross.

The mainstream liberal media is primarily composed of stumblebum leftist jerks who want all the glory and respect due a caste of objective, moral truth-seekers, yet who don’t want to do the hard work of actually being objective or moral or seeking the truth. “I can’t pass, and I can’t tackle, and practice is really a hassle, but I’m wearing a sportsball jersey so I want your adulation and a Super Bowl ring!”

Nah. They think we owe them respect and trust when all they’ve earned is our contempt.

You have Matt Lauer, probably America’s most highly-paid journalist, who “everyone” knew was a skeevy weirdo who’d probably creep out Woody Allen. Well, everyone did know, except us, the media’s audience. Our media overlords didn’t think we needed to know that little bit of information. Some obscure Texas congressmen sends texts of his ancient junk to a girlfriend and, after he dumps her, she gets mad and puts them up on the web? Oh, that’s news – America must know that vital info. But when the flagship anchor of the flagship show on the flagship broadcast network uses his powers to basically build a sex dungeon in 30 Rock – nope, not news. Shhhhh. Matt’s just bein’ Matt. Move along. Nothing to see here. For gosh sakes, look at how much he hates the NRA!