Fake News
January 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In 2017, the New York Times editorial board viciously libeled Sarah Palin by asserting, as a fact, that she incited Jared Loughner to commit multiple murders. The Times editorial was particularly outrageous since the paper itself had already reported in news stories that this claim was untrue. Palin sued the Times for defamation; I wrote about the case here and embedded her complaint, and again here. I commend those posts
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January 20, 2022 — John Hinderaker
One signal aspect of the current historical moment is that prominent liberal news sources–the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and, here, National Public Radio–no longer make any pretense of being objective journalists. They are left-wing activists, and proud of it. When they are shown to be wrong on the facts–the Russia collusion hoax is perhaps the most notorious instance, although just one of many–they are unapologetic. They served
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January 17, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The media consults “experts.” And then get the story completely wrong. There’s a deeper story at work right now, and it is simply this: all the action on constitutional interpretation now is on the right—the reverse of circumstances of the Warren Court era in the 1960s, when elaborate new liberal theories beloved of the “living Constitutionalists” were spinning forth from law schools every day. Today’s reversal is not merely because
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December 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
As Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle asked in Taxi Driver, “You talkin’ to me?” That’s the question that comes to my mind in connection with Dan Rather’s tweet below. If Rather isn’t the godfather of fake news, he may be its most notable practitioner. John and I took up Rathergate for dummies in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.” BizPac Review takes up Rather’a “analysis” of “Let’s go, Brandon” here.
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December 18, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about participating in the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend last month. I was on a panel on the media with The Hill’s Joe Concha, moderated by Daniel Greenfield. I thought our readers might be interested in my comments, so I typed up the notes for my talk in narrative form. Here they are: The issue of media bias has evolved considerably over the last 20 years,
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November 25, 2021 — Steven Hayward
This pair of Washington Post tweets perfectly conveys why the mainstream news media are a bunch of contemptible twits: So, it was the SUV’s fault? Maybe it was one of them self-driving SUVs from Silicon Valley! We need sensible SUV control! Look what killers they are. No doubt responding to the thousands of sensible people who told the Post what fools they are, the tweet was deleted: As for their
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November 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post is doing a little house cleaning in the form of correcting two stories, one from 2017 and the other from 2019, that peddled false allegations against then-President Trump regarding the fabricated Steele dossier. The New York Times may follow suit. But Roger Simon poses this excellent question: When will the Post and the Times return their 2018 Pulitzer prizes for their reporting of the false Russia collusion
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November 10, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post has an excellent editorial “Anatomy of a media hit job — how press pushed Clinton’s lies against Trump.” The editorial identifies the players, traces the whisper campaign that planted the Russia hoax in the press, and follows the states of the story from hysteria to the current silence and revisionism. The Washington Post was of course a key “player” in the media lineup. Post media critic
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October 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The Washington Post‘s “fact checker” (use your best Austin Powers scare quotes pronunciation here) Glenn Kessler has his knickers in a wad today about the “increasingly vulgar taunts” being delivered at Resident Biden: During the 2020 presidential campaign, one of Biden’s political superpowers was his sheer inoffensiveness, the way he often managed to embody — even to those who didn’t like him — the innocuous grandfather, the bumbling uncle, the
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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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