Fake News

Things that go Bump in the day

Featured image James Taranto observed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal apropos of the Dem/media assault on Justice Thomas that “[o]ne reason Americans don’t trust the media is that politically biased reporters routinely adulterate the news with tendentious language and prepackaged opinions. The result is crude propaganda—lousy opinion writing and unreliable information rolled into one and deceptively packaged as straight news.” Take the case of the Washington Post and Post “national columnist” Philip »

NY Times Lets the Mask Slip

Featured image The late Tom Bethell used to point out in his American Spectator columns how denizens of Washington DC—people we now regard as the shock troops of the administrative state—regarded elections as a nuisance, because the results could interfere with their plans to extend expert control over everyone and everything, especially if those icky Republicans won (though usually not for long). Well, the New York Times has sort of come around »

The Politics of Weather

Featured image The Washington Post can’t understand why Republicans won’t get with the global warming program: Nearly 150 million Americans were under heat alerts Tuesday, after July marked the planet’s hottest month on record. Devastating downpours dumped two months of rain on Vermont in two days. Smoke from Canadian wildfires choked East Coast skies, causing the worst air quality on record for some locations. And Hawaii is reeling from the deadliest U.S. »

For Pete’s Sake: The Funniest Thing You’ll Read All Year

Featured image Just caught up with the issue of Wired magazine that carries an interview with our wonderboy secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg. And here’s the long introduction to the Q & A portion, and by god this should be read aloud at cocktail parties for the rest of the year as it is comedy gold: THE CURIOUS MIND of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he »

Today in Kamala Komedy

Featured image The New York Times is apparently trying to pass off satire as “news” with its latest feature about the awesome Veep Kamala Harris. The story is “Kamala Harris Takes On a Forceful New Role in 2024 Campaign.” The fake news begins with the subhed: “The vice president is trying to reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House »

At WaPo, an Epic Blunder

Featured image Jennifer Rubin is a left-wing columnist for the Washington Post. So, naturally, she hates Ron DeSantis. On Friday, she published a column arguing that DeSantis’s conservative policies endanger Florida’s economy. The headline was, “Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism.” Just another objective day at the office at WaPo! Unfortunately, her entire column was based on a grotesque factual error. The Washington Post has had to post a correction »

A New Low for the Left

Featured image When I first saw this headline appear on Twitter, I assumed it was fake. But no—it is real. Take a bow, Vanity Fair: The author of this trenchant piece is Bess Levin, whom I have never heard of either, but Vanity Fair describes her as “An essential voice of our current tragicomedy, she is an incisive, hilarious daily narrator of the horrors that never seem to stop. If you need »

Americans: Right About Some Things, Wrong About Others

Featured image Two sets of current poll data are of interest. First, Americans hate the news media. Nothing new here, but if anything the feeling has intensified. Good. Rasmussen reports: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 30% of Likely U.S. voters say they trust the political news they’re getting – down from 37% in July 2021 – while 52% say they don’t trust political news, and »

Will There By Any Media Accountability?

Featured image Kudos due to Jake Tapper for saying on CNN that the Durham Report completely vindicates Donald Trump: CNN'S Jake Tapper says the Durham report — which found the Russian collusion probe should've never been launched — is "devastating to the FBI" pic.twitter.com/HXxSOssuN4 — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 15, 2023 Will there be any accountability for the media for their part in this travesty? Will the Washington Post or New York »

The Ruling Class at Play

Featured image In an amazing coincidence of scheduling, the annual White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) and the Met Gala occurred within 48 hours of each other. One of Trump’s best moves in office was giving the middle finger to the WHCD, and the less said about the Met Gala the better, except for noting that Alexandria Occasional-Cortex didn’t attend this year since she violated House ethics rules last year by accepting free »

Jerry Springer, Free Speech Champion?

Featured image Like most people, I always thought of Jerry Springer as a carnival barker, though that is an insult to carnies everywhere, since real carnival personalities provide some entertainment, while Springer mostly provided degrading spectacle. Or so it seemed from the only 20 seconds of his show that I ever watched. But he did local news commentary on a TV station in Cincinnati, and one of them, recalled by our friends »

A Twitter Files footnote (18)

Featured image If you’ve been following our coverage of the Twitter Files, or following the Twitter Files themselves on your own, you know that Hamilton 68 was an offshoot or tributary of the Russia hoax. Here is a contemporaneous 2017 Reuters story on the launch of the Hamilton 68 site. It may seem obscure, but Matt Taibbi has just posted the useful video companion below depicting MSNBC repeating Hamilton 68 lies 279 »

Mainstream Media Confesses Russia Hoax At Last

Featured image The Washington Post, today: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning. The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics »

Accountability In Journalism

Featured image For many years I have followed, off and on, the New York Times Corrections section. In years past, there were some doozies. You could search our site for many, many instances. This is a personal favorite from 2002, when Power Line was new: An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea »

Time for an Artificial Intelligence Press Secretary?

Featured image There’s been a lot of news in the last few weeks about how artificial intelligence bots are on the cusp of being able to write prose, poetry, and music as well as or better than humans. Color me skeptical—art is not chess—but there’s one instance I can think of where even a primitive AI system would be better than the current human being attempting the job: President Biden’s press secretary »

The real fake news

Featured image Earlier this week Axios reported on the Democrats’ real fake news gambit: “Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states[.]” It’s an interesting and well-researched story written up in the dumbed down Axios form by Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley. They found that David Brock was a key »

Racism at the New York Times

Featured image One popular theory about the left’s obsession with racism is that they are the largest practitioners of it themselves. To wit, this report from National Public Radio: People of color at ‘New York Times’ get lower ratings in job reviews, union says An analysis of comprehensive data for roughly 1,000 The New York Times employees conducted by members of the union that represents its newsroom found that Black and Latino »