Media Bias

How the media works: David Makovsky on the non-existent AIPAC 800-lb gorilla

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On my way into work today I was listening to an NPR promo spot with the catch phrase “no rant, no slant” — the implication being that NPR is above partisan wrangling that one sees on FOX News or MSNBC.  Well, that’s certainly refreshing.

The problem is that the programming then segued into an interview of David Makovsky by Renee Montagne. Makovsky is introduced simply as someone affiliated with the Washington Institute on Near East Policy. Unless the listener knows something about the 800-lb. gorilla of U.S. Middle East policy, he or she would not know that WINEP is a pillar of the Israel Lobby which is anything but even-handed when it comes to anything even remotely relevant to Israel. To say it is slanted would be to put it mildly.

As noted in my previous comment on the Israel Lobby and the Syria crisis,  WINEP has numerous articles advocating an aggressive posture on Syria aimed basically at regime change. I also mentioned an article co-authored by Makovsky on the website of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs—another pillar of the Israel Lobby. Makovsky’s JINSA article advocates a very destructive attack aimed at “sending a credible and menacing message” to the Syrian government. Not much question where he stands.

Makovsky was invited on to address this quote that appeared in the New York Times:

One administration official, who, like others, declined to be identified discussing White House strategy, called Aipac “the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” and said its allies in Congress had to be saying, “If the White House is not capable of enforcing this red line” against the catastrophic use of chemical weapons, “we’re in trouble.”

AIPAC an 800-lb gorilla? Definitely not news that’s fit to print (so the Times soon deleted it; see below). As an AIPAC lobbyist once noted, “A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” Best to keep AIPAC out of public consciousness. Read more

Opposition to Koch Brothers’ media ownership

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Recently I posted an optimistic article on non-Jewish media and would-be media owners. A centerpiece was that the Koch brothers, while far from ideal for those advocating White interests, were serious about buying the Los Angeles Times and several other high-profile newspapers (“Non-Jewish media owners: Hope for the future“). No surprise that the Koch brothers bid is getting quite a bit of opposition from the left, described in prominent articles in both the LA Times and the New York Times. The opposition is coming from public employee unions, from liberals in the California State Legislature, and a well-funded activist organization.

A letter from the unions to Bruce Karsh, the president of the company that is the largest present shareholder, stated that the Koch brothers were “”anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-public education and anti-immigrant.” As noted in the above article, there is no evidence that the Koch brothers are anti-immigrant, and aren’t all these issues open to more than one point of view?

Darrell Steinberg, President Pro Tem of the California State Senate said,   “I believe newspapers are a public trust. The Los Angeles Times has a long and respected tradition of community leadership and impartiality. The Koch brothers have a long and demonstrated history of a rigid political ideology.”

For anyone familiar with the LATimes, calling it impartial is ridiculous. It would be more accurate to label it far left, most notably for being completely on board with open borders, amnesty, and citizenship for anyone who wants to come to America.

The argument of the unions is just as far-fetched. Since they are public employee unions, none of their members would ever work for the LATimes. But public employee pension deals are well-known to be the major cause of California’s dire fiscal situation and these unions are very generous with political donations to all levels of California politics, so it’s nice to have liberals in charge of the media. The unions have threatened to remove pension funds from the financial management company that now owns the Times.

And of course there’s an activist movement called Courage Campaign headed by Rick Jacobs that takes out ads urging subscribers to cancel subscriptions.

But the good news is that there would likely be legal issues if a public company took a lower bid, since it would not be in the shareholders’ interests.

The bottom line is that the liberal bias of the media is far from an accident. Notice that there is no campaign against Rupert Murdoch, who is seen as a conservative and has also been mentioned as a possible buyer. Murdoch’s views on immigration and Israel apparently make him entirely acceptable to liberals. And rest assured that the bid from Eli Broad and Ron Burkle will not run into any problems at all from the activists.

Those Irish-American racists

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NYT has a recent  article complaining about ethnic solidarity of Jewish communities in New York and their connections to Israel.

Complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Borough Park and Williamsburg are the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride. The consul general of  Israel said he and others had made special efforts to avoid the impression of “the Jews looking after their own.”

Actually, I made some substitutions. The article is actually about Breezy Point, an Irish enclave in New York City receiving aid from Ireland following Hurricane Sandy. The article refers darkly to Breezy Point being “the whitest area of the city,” its “extreme insularity,” its “entrenched xenophobia,” and its ethnic pride.

The critics who are supposedly making these accusations are unnamed, but it’s noteworthy that the author of the artcle is Sarah Maslin Nir. Mondoweiss points out that Nir, has strong connections to the Israeli far right. 

She surely knows about the problems of ethnic solidarity. Her father went from being an Israeli to being American. As we reported a couple years ago:

Nir’s father Yehuda served in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and after moving on to the U.S., sought to rejoin the Israeli army in ’67 and ’73. “I had to fight our enemies and rejoin the Israeli army,” he writes  of the second war in his autobiography. Huh; I wonder how Sarah Maslin Nir feels about Israel…

I bet Sarah Maslin Nir knows a lot about the xenophobia of ethnic pride, the racism inherent in trans-national ethnic claims. Maybe one day she’ll write about the American Jewish relationship to Israel. [See here.] 

Orthodox neighborhoods in New York are notoriously insular, ethnocentric, and strongly connected to Israel. JTA notes (“As N.Y. haredi Orthodox population surges, battles over city neighborhoods ensue“)  “the explosive growth of the Orthodox Jewish population in America’s most Jewish city,” bringing Jews into conflict with Blacks and Latinos as their neighborhoods expand.

The haredi migration can be tracked by the new construction, which often has specifically Orthodox amenities, such as staggered balconies that allow residents to build sukkahs during the fall harvest holiday with unobstructed views of the sky. … the Broadway Triangle Coalition — a group that includes blacks, Latinos and UJCare — is suing to block the plan, claiming that large apartments deliberately favor Jews over other groups that have, on average, smaller families. They also argue that haredi developers deliberately limit construction to eight stories because some Chasidic Jews will not ride in an elevator on the Sabbath. 

In the case of these Jewish neighborhoods, their insularity can even be seen in the architecture. But the point is that I rather doubt that Sarah Maslin Nir would find that the concentration of haredi Orthodox in particular neighborhoods, their ethnocentrism and their insularity to be worth nothing in a NYTimes article. And surely any critic of the insularity and ethnocentrism apparent in these neighborhoods would be labled a raving anti-Semite.

As noted many times on TOO, Whites are the only group whose ethnocentrism is a problem in the eyes of the elite media.

 

 

 

The media drumbeat: The West is evil

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A major theme at TOO has been Jewish influence on the media and that the media reflects the attitudes of the wider Jewish community hostile to the traditional people and culture of the West (e.g., Media images of Whites; Media bias). (Relatedly, Frank Salter exhaustively shows that the media in Australia is hostile to the traditional people and culture of Australia.)

It’s a pervasive phenomenon. The first paragraphs of Andrew Joyce’s recent TOO article emphasize the many reviews in the elite media of Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora. While there are some make minor criticisms, the book is taken seriously, and the general conclusion — that the English have had a pathological hatred toward Jews for nearly a millennium — is not challenged. The reviews typically lavish praise on an execrable book—execrable at least partly because it ignores data that fail to confirm its thesis.  The main function of the book and the reviews is to add to the constant condemnatory chorus from the media: the traditional people and culture of the West are evil.

Jewish readers are confirmed in their sense of innocent victimhood; they are once again assured that hostility toward to the people and culture of traditional English society and the West generally is entirely justified.   Read more

The Perfect Media Storm: Speilberg’s Lincoln, Ken Burns, David Brooks, and Al Sharpton on Race Relations in the Age of Obama

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Last Sunday’s “roundtable discussion” on “Meet the Press” contained the “perfect storm” of guests to match the topics under discussion in the show’s final segment. Speilberg’s Lincoln, that fountain of historical accuracy from Jewish gay screenwriter Tony Kushner, and Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five, a “documentary” on the highly publicized Central Park “wilding” rape case, were just some of the featured racial topics chatted about in this “post-racial,” post-reelection era of Obama. Weighing in on all of this was that insightful bastion of wisdom: the Rev. Al Sharpton. (Where the hell was Doris Kearns Goodwin, the show’s resident “historian/expert” on Lincoln when you need her?) The segment wouldn’t be balanced without the input of resident “conservative” New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Members of the so-called “hive” (media and political elites in the words of the late Joe Sobran) seem to have flocked to movie theaters this past weekend to sponge-up the Speilberg/Kushner production of Lincoln as if this fictional portrayal is historically flawless. Between Lincoln and The Central Park Five, at least “progressives” had something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving weekend! Read more

Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” resurfaces

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In an argument about Jewish domination of the media, once you get your opponent to admit that yes, Jews do run the media, the usual fall back line is to say that it really doesn’t make any difference. Jews are Americans like everyone else, so we really couldn’t expect anything different no matter who was in charge.

I thought about this reading an LATimes article on the 40th anniversary of Norman Lear’s All in the Family (“Norman Lear Recalls ‘All in the Family’s’ Beginning“). The article begins with Lear recounting how proud he is of getting “a reference to sex that would be considered tame today” into the first episode  The show was wildly successful: “The series was brilliant, daring, funny and poignant. Over the seasons, “All in the Family” explored racism, homosexuality, women’s liberation, menopause, impotence, the Vietnam War and the loss of faith. It was the No. 1 series for five years, won 22 Emmys including four for comedy series…”

I remember reading an article about Carroll O’Connor, who played the main character, Archie Bunker, being wildly applauded whenever he went out in public during the height of the show’s popularity. The show was indeed brilliant—brilliant propaganda because it managed to identify ingrain in the American mind the idea that illiberal thinking was a sure sign of being an uneducated buffoon.

It is repeatedly brought out that the main character, Archie Bunker, is uneducated and none too smart—constantly mispronouncing even ordinary words and lacking a basic understanding of geography or history—Lincoln signed the Declaration of Independence, Denmark is the capital of Colorado, and Florida is on the West Coast. But this TV show still shapes current attitudes about people who have a problem with multiculturalism. I found the following posted online by a fan of the show:

This is definitely my favorite show and I am glad that there are re-runs on Nick-At-Nite. One of my favorite episodes is when Archie gets locked in the cellar and is finally “rescued” by a repair man, but Archie is drunk, and he thinks that the repair man is God; little does he now, that the repair man is black! (Not that it matters, but to Archie?!) And when Archie bows down to him and lifts his head to see his “God” the audience roared in laughter as did I. . . . I hope this show remains  on the air for a long time, because I could never get sick of watching All in the Family! (see here) Read more

Denzel Washington in “Safe House” and “Flight”

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The gala premiere of Denzel Washington’s latest film, Flight, was held last week at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. Washington plays the leading role of airline pilot “Whip Whitaker,” who saves his plane from certain disaster. According to the trailer, however, he might be in trouble because of his drinking problem. We regular Americans will have a chance to find out this Friday, Nov. 2nd, when the film opens nation-wide in theaters.

I’m intensely curious about how African American Washington will be portrayed. What I am hoping is that TOO readers who see the movie will discuss it here at the TOO site in the comments section. I’ve already written about the background to the film in the racial context we have in America (seehere), so we don’t have to start from scratch.

Still, since I suspect some surprises, I will further lay out ideas on what it means to have Washington appear as yet another heroic figure, particularly when he is cast completely against reality. Here are my thoughts. Read more