Fake News
October 20, 2021 — Scott Johnson
PJ Media’s VodkaPundit post on the purported banning of the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” under the auspices of an arm of the Canadian government seems to have been deleted without notice or comment. John Hinderaker relied on the Vodkapundit post — it used to be here — in passing on what turns out to be fake news, according to this Reuters Fact Check and several other sources. The memo on
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October 18, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Well, it appears Nicole Hannah-Jones, the impresario of the New York Times‘s egregiously awful 1619 Project, is at it again. No stealth corrections? How, then, does she explain these changes? Was the Times hacked? Move along, nothing to see here. (Hat tip: Phil Magness.) Chaser from the Times today: Jefferson Statue May Be Removed After More Than 100 Years at City Hall Black, Latino and Asian City Council members who
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October 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Katie Couric is out with a memoir from her Morning Show days that apparently dishes on everyone. I have no idea because I haven’t read it and I’m not going to. But the indispensable New York Post has a scandalous story today containing an excerpt from Couric about how she suppressed a comment by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes kneeling for the National Anthem because it ran
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October 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
John wrote here about a video in which Kamala Harris welcomed a group of school children to the vice president’s residence, the Naval Observatory in Washington, to talk with them about NASA. John noted that Harris’ affect was “weird and inappropriate.” The word fake came to mind. Now, the Washington Examiner is reporting that the first installment of Harris’ YouTube Originals space series featured child actors who auditioned for their
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October 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I’m going to have a long piece up here later today or over the weekend with a novel theory explaining the vindictiveness of the left today, but for the moment, let’s take up a sidebar about collapsing public approval of President Biden, Democrats, and the news media. First, the Quinnipiac Poll that reports Biden’s public approval rating collapsing to 38 percent, with respondents finding Biden “not competent.” I can’t remember
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September 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
My old mentor Stan Evans (bio coming next spring!) liked to quip that “Whenever there is a pressing public policy issue, I want to know what celebrities think. It is important for our lawmakers to hear from Bono.” Behold CNN: But wait—there’s more! Scientific American offers us this commentary on the problematic aspects of Star Wars: The acronym “JEDI” has become a popular term for branding academic committees and labeling
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September 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It was seven years ago that Rolling Stone magazine ran the 9,000-word cover story on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia that turned out to be a complete hoax. (File it next to Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard story.) Well, it looks like Rolling Stone has done it again. I don’t know what’s up with the controversy over the use of ivermectin, normally a drug treatment for
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August 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It is not news that Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a charter member of “The Squad,” traffics in anti-Semitic tropes. The Washington Post points this out today: On Aug. 1, Tlaib announced that she had identified how Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land “really interacts” with the treatment of Black Americans. “Cutting people off from water is violence. And they do it from Gaza to Detroit,” she explained to the Democratic Socialists of
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July 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
News out just now that Michael Avenatti has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for attempting to extort $20 million from Nike. What’s his problem: doesn’t he understand that that kind of thing is a job for Hunter Biden? Anyway, keep in mind that Avenatti was only famous because the media made him famous—a perfect example of what Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event,” or perhaps the media
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June 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One of the most elementary lessons of economics is that incentives matter. You’d hardly think this needs demonstrating, but apparently even the Wall Street Journal‘s news pages struggle with basic economics. Today the Journal reports that—lo and behold!—job growth is rising faster in states that have ended lavish unemployment bonus payments. I love the “gee whiz” language of this story: The number of unemployment-benefit recipients is falling at a faster
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June 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
For the past twelve months, the mainstream media has been peddling the view that President Trump had the U.S. Park Police use tear gas to disperse protesters in Lafayette Park so that he could have a photo-op in front of a church on the other side of the park. I never accepted this version of events because I never accept on faith the truth of anything the mainstream media says
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June 9, 2021 — Steven Hayward
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen what a complete shambles the mainstream media have become. First up, someone at the New York Times was formatting a fake story about watermelons on Mars—perhaps this was a training exercise for a new employee?—but somehow managed to press the “publish” button, and this appeared on the Times website: Now, I could go a long time on the idea of “fruit aliens.” Wouldn’t
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May 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I have never seen a movie in which Johnny Depp appeared, and I know that he was once married to Amber Heard, an actress otherwise unknown to me, only because of my ceaseless scanning of internet headlines. But it turns out that there is an interesting story behind the Depp-Heard divorce drama–a story that may illustrate widespread corruption among big-buck nonprofits. The Daily Mail reports: A bitter defamation lawsuit is
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May 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
If I may borrow Glenn Reynolds’s formulation, I would like to say that we’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hellworld in which Glenn Greenwald is the voice of reason. In his observations on what he calls “corporate journalism,” he is also the voice of fairness and responsibility. Over the weekend I wrote about the Giuliani corrections served up by the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC. In
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May 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
For a long time I have believed that the New York Times is America’s worst newspaper, with the Washington Post close behind. Sadly, news coverage in the Wall Street Journal, while not in that dismal league, has declined. If it weren’t for the editorial page, one wonders whether the Journal would be worth subscribing to. Its news coverage is liberal, and in these days, largely “woke.” A case in point
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May 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Needless to say, Power Line has a history with “60 Minutes.” Hence I thought it worth passing along a note from Robert P. George to “60 Minutes” this week. Prof. George—”Robby” to his friends—is the McCormick Professor at Princeton, the chair originally created for Woodrow Wilson, and subsequently filled by Edward Corwin and now by Robby. He is renowned for his genial nature (as you might expect from a proficient
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April 28, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I took the New York Post cover story by Laura Italiano that ran with the tabloid headline “Kam on in” at face value. I have treated the Post as a trusted source, but it turns out that this story appears to be fake news. The following correction is now appended both to Italiano’s original story and to a follow-up story by Mark Moore: Editor’s note: The original version of this
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