Media Bias

The Lying Press looks Inward

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Fact

Articles from one day, August 16, in the Washington Post daily email. Included are all articles related to the election. There were no articles with Hillary in the headline included in the email.

There has been some introspection among a few mainstream journalists, who have stepped back and asked themselves, have we gone over the top in our media campaign against Donald Trump? We should be cautious in attributing this to integrity, something we haven’t seen too much of in the media.  But every now and again we get some nuggets of truth, even from the least likely sources; ironically, those whose job it is to bring us the truth: journalists.

As one of the self-reflective articles from The Week points out, there is apparently a collective decision on behalf of the media that “any pretense of covering the campaign dispassionately deserves to be thrown out the window.”  I would suggest that this is provoked by the prospect of Trump representing the interests of Whites, who thus far have been content to be exploited as a tax-cow for the benefit of foreign and domestic parasites. The anti-Trump media offensive was described on Fash the Nation recently as a “saturation bombing,” which is an apt metaphor, as this feels like a war.

It has come to the point where one questions whether we actually have a democracy if public opinion is molded with such a heavy hand, and with such sinister coordination. Rush Limbaugh, who for whatever his limitations, is quite deft at parsing media bias, opined about the campaign, “It is one-sided like we’ve never seen before, and I don’t know how to overcome it.” I had a friend from work text me this summer asking if Trump were dropping out of the race (one of the disinformation campaigns from Clinton/media), which confirmed that these smears are all too effective.  We may seethe at the transparent agenda, but ordinary working people who don’t care too much about politics likely take what they see on TV at face value, and that is a little concerning to say the least.   Read more

Liberal Media Bias and How to Counteract it: Examples from Brexit and Benghazi

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Liberal bias is well known to exist within the mainstream media, including network news shows of CBS, ABC, and NBC, cable channels CNN, MSNBC, major newspapers, news-wires, especially CBS News, Newsweek, and the New York Times. In support of the notion of liberal bias of the major networks is the finding that the Democratic Party received a total donation of $1,020,816, given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), while the Republican Party received only $142,863 via 193 donations. Both of these figures represent donations made in 2008. I suspect that numbers for the 2016 election will dwarf these figures that already are weighted over 10:1 in favor of Democratic support.

Another more direct, but equally convincing means of assessing media bias is by canvasing media outlets immediately after an important politically charged event like the Leave-Remain vote for Brexit. The morning after the vote, I spent most of the day canvasing several liberal media depictions on TV (BBC, PBS, CBS) and via  the internet (NYT) and just one counterpoint on FOX resulting in unbelievable contrasts!

I was particularly struck with the rather extreme media bias of PBS which today appears to be the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. Their staff interviewed lots of traumatized professional journalists. What impressed me was 1) the fact that every single commentator was completely negative; 2) only one view was represented, with no opposing commentary; and 3) the negative viewpoint expressed was somewhat hysterical and absurdly extreme. Like Chicken Little, these journalists were clearly upset by the democratic referendum in Britain and conjured up catastrophic cascades likely to follow it using terms like “dire, dark and disturbing,” with years of steep economic decline. The British majority were characterized unabashedly as old, angry, stupid and white — out to build walls instead of allowing free borders, a backlash against the more enlightened policy of globalization. There was literally no commentator who mentioned any other possible motive for the majority other than racism. Nobody expressed any notion that voters simply want back their freedom to elect their own officials and determine their own future. Read more

Spotlight on double standards at the Boston Globe

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Boston GlobeWhen sex scandals involving Woody Allan, Roman Polanski and various Hollywood child stars bubbled to the surface again recently it was almost a certainty that they would quickly die away with nothing resolved.  Outside the briefest news reports there seems to be a total lack of will for investigating these subjects thoroughly.

But there are some stories of institutional child abuse for which there seems no lack of enthusiasm, such as by Catholic priests.  And you don’t have to be Catholic to wonder why this is.

The announcement of Best Picture at the 2015 Oscar ceremony caused a huge surprise — for the winner was Spotlight, a slow newspaper procedural  which had been a poor box-office performer compared to the joint favourites, The Revenant and The Big Short.

Spotlight told the story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative reporter team  exposed how the Catholic Church in Boston had been covering up for child abusing priests for decades. The long series of articles began on January 6, 2002.  The resulting newspaper campaign was one of the biggest in American journalism in recent years, averaging out at two and a half items per day. Read more

Project Syndicate: Judeo-Globalism in a Nutshell

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Project Syndicate is a prominent op-ed syndication service based in Prague. Its contributors are almost invariably prestigious, including “45 Nobel laureates, 111 heads of state,” and many other influential opinion leaders. I find Project Syndicate a very useful bellwether of global establishment opinion (on a par with The Economist).

Project Syndicate’s influence is difficult to measure, although it claims to reach 476 media outlets in 154 countries. Its stated objective is to spread Western establishment op-eds into the developing world, notably Central and Eastern Europe:

News organizations in developed countries provide financial contributions for the rights to Project Syndicate commentaries, which enables us to offer these rights for free, or at subsidized rates, to newspapers and other media in the developing world. Because no publication is turned down solely on the basis of its inability to pay, Project Syndicate has cultivated strong partnerships with the most respected news media in every country in which it operates. This, in turn, has made Project Syndicate an even more attractive outlet for the world’s most eminent authors, for whom a truly global audience simply is not available elsewhere.

The prominent Jewish “explainer” pundit Ezra Klein, who now heads Vox, once promoted Project Syndicate calling it “The World’s Smartest Op-Ed Page”:

[Project Syndicate is] not just well-intentioned. It’s really, really good. [. . .] Like Tribune Media Services or the Creators Syndicate Group, it syndicates columnists. But within that, it has a sort of unique model: It syndicates experts. Rather than Mark Shields and From Harrop, it’s got Brad DeLong and Nouriel Roubini and Joschka Fischer and Lucian Bebchuk. And it adds new experts on topics relevant to the issues of the day (Bebchuk and Roubini, for instance, are both finance experts who were recently added to Project Syndicate’s ranks). Best of all, you can read it online. For free. It’s like the world’s smartest op-ed page.

Read more

Cultural Bolsheviks in the Media Manipulate the English Language: Comment on “How America’s dying white supremacist movement is seizing on Donald Trump’s appeal”

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Editor’s note: Dr. Tom Sunic sent this letter in reply to “How America’s dying white supremacist movement is seizing on Donald Trump’s appeal” by Peter Holley and Sarah Larimer which appeared in The Washington Post on Dec. 21. One might comment on the wishful thinking apparent in the title (by all accounts we are growing) and its use of the SPLC’s favorite label, “White supremacist,” as a sure-fire to get the juices flowing in its target audience. But the point of the article is once again to link its real target, Donald Trump, with White advocates, thereby associating Trump with ideas that are abhorrent to the ruling class, the Washington Post readership, and Social Justice Warriors everywhere. The comments attributed to me were taken from the TOO annual fundraising note.

Dear Mr. Holley dear Ms. Larimer,

Let me congratulate you on your relatively well written piece on “white supremacists and Donald Trump’s appeal.” At least the quotes by some of my colleagues and friends (Richard Spencer, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, etc.) seem to be embedded in a dispassionate and larger framework of your description of would-be or real Donald Trump supporters.  It would be commendable, indeed, if yourself, or other Washington Post correspondents, could provide an additional piece on lexical manipulation and semantic derivatives of such grandstanding words and expression as “white supremacists,” “racists,” or “white nationalists.” What is the true meaning of these words today?  In fact, these expressions, so common by now in the US, are hardly ever used in the mainstream media in the EU.  Not for freedom of speech sake — far from it — but simply due to their cumbersome, polysyllabic character which does not allow them to be substituted into the standard version of the French or German translations. The expressions “white supremacists,” or “white nationalists,” sound pretty odd in France or Germany — notwithstanding the draconian, repressive, freedom-curbing laws in these two countries respectively.  This may be a good enough reason why Trump is likable to many people, including many self-censored academics and journalists in the USA and EU who, at long last, found a big man voicing aloud their suppressed political feelings.

Aside from being or not being enamored with Trump, it would be commendable to avoid using generic and highly loaded words such as “racists,” and “white supremacists.”  They have become meaningless by now, precisely because of their all too frequent usage.  They all bear striking similarities to the shut-up words  “fascists,”  “anti-Semites”,  “enemies of the people,”  which made up a standard vernacular in the former communist  Eastern Europe. As a young boy in ex-communist Yugoslavia, each time after attending Sunday school I was reprimanded by my teachers of my “deviant,” “clero-fascist,” “Ustashi ” behavior.  Subsequently, those denominations lost their original meaning — only to become a badge of honor for many nationalists in Croatia and Europe today.

Of course, I’d be happy to provide you with a comparative study of communist vs. liberal verbal treasure trove, and how a number of law-abiding White intellectuals and politicians in the USA and EU are being relegated to the realm of demonology. Demons, of course, being no humans, cannot have human rights.

Sincerely,

Tomislav (Tom) Sunic, PhD
www.tomsunic.com
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/author/tomsunic/
http://american3rdposition.com/?cat=1019

Zagreb, Croatia

Ban Muslim Immigration? Damn Right!

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Also posted at the website of the Council of European Canadians.

CNN is pulling out all stops to discredit Donald Trump, even acknowledging the bias of elite media:

With Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, several of the nation’s most esteemed journalists and influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance and given themselves license to label the Republican front-runner a liar, a demagogue, a racist and worse.

So much for journalistic integrity. That joke of a reporter, Chris Cuomo—the son of the ultra-liberal Democratic Governor of New York—was raving out of control in his “interview” with Trump. But he wasn’t the only one. A series of interviews with other anti-Trump figures followed, plus innumerable panel discussions that were stacked against Trump.

One panelist, an African-American pastor, stood up from Trump’s call for a ban on all Muslim immigration. He said that when Ebola broke out in West Africa a couple of years ago, the US government placed a ban on all travel from the region. They did so because, at that point, the outbreak was not contained and authorities still did not have a handle on it. The US government did the prudent and necessary thing to protect its citizens. To those who were not infected, it may have seemed like an arbitrary thing to do. No doubt those who are subject to a quarantine feel the same way. “I’m not infected, so why stop me from leaving?” It seems to some like an unfair, blanket, shotgun approach. Tough.

It should also be added that countries like Australia take similar precautions regarding boat people. They have them quarantined on an island where authorities have the time to sift through applications. In other words, Australia has “banned” boat people from entering Australian society. Is this not wise? Read more

Report from Sweden: Under siege — from media propaganda on migration

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The propaganda here is so extreme right now that I have never seen anything like it before, and in Sweden that says a lot. It started just a couple days after a poll where the Sweden Democrats (SD) got so much support that the front page of Metro, our most read newspaper blared “Now the Sweden Democrats is the biggest party in Sweden.” After that it took four days, and then the propaganda onslaught started. From the fifth day until now the Metro has had big emotional photos and texts about the ”refugees” on the front page on 9 out of 12 covers. Today they even ignored all other news — and the whole paper is only about the ”refugees.” How you can help, good people. Scads of articles on how desperate the situation is for all the refugees, and so on.. And its not only in the papers, it’s on the radio several times per hour (independent on which channel you listen to), and of course on television…
It will be really interesting to see how this campaign will affect the support for the Sweden Democrats. But it have an effect. For example, we have had several really brutal murders here during the summer  by immigrants, and there has been a shift in the debate where more and more people have been talking about the problems with immigration. During this time it has been almost impossible for a big city like Gothenburg to find families that would like to take a refugee ”child” to their home and let it live together with them. (Almost everyone claims that they are below 18 years old and from Somalia or Afghanistan so they can get a permanent residence permit in Sweden. This has led to an avalanche of bearded ”children” coming here. So to make room for them, people get paid by the government to take care of them.) Today they said on state radio that so many people are calling right now to get a ”child” to their home in Gothenburg that the administration can’t even answer all the calls! So the recent propaganda have effect.
I guess that the good side of this is that Sweden will become an even more polarized society. More and more people see the propaganda for what it is  and get really mad about it. That will make a needed changes easier — if only we can get the majority on the side of the Swedish people.