Fake News
September 27, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Liberals love to talk about misinformation. They also love to disseminate it. A case in point is New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. She grotesquely exaggerated the impact of covid on children, apparently for the purpose of supporting school shutdowns, one of the worst policy fiascos of modern times. And her claims were not, remotely, in the ballpark: Reporter who wrote in NYT that 900,000 children had
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September 21, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Dave Portnoy is the founder of Barstool Sports, a popular sports blog. For some reason the Washington Post decided to do a hit piece on Portnoy and assigned one of its totally biased young hack “reporters,” Emily Heil, to do the piece. Portnoy got wind of the story in the works from one of his advertisers that Heil contacted, and decided to pre-empt the story by calling Heil on the
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September 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Michael Tomasky, nowadays the editor of The New Republic (a former magazine), attempts to explain why the awesome Joe Biden isn’t getting sufficient credit from the American people for all his awesome achievements, and his general all-around awesomeness. The main culprit is—right-wing domination of the news media! I. Am. Not. Making. This. Up. In fact, the right-wing media might finally be bigger [than mainstream media]. Mainstream media audiences and newsrooms
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September 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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August 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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August 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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.
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August 14, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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August 10, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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July 16, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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May 24, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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May 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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May 16, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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May 5, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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April 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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April 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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January 9, 2023 — Steven Hayward
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
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December 17, 2022 — John Hinderaker
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
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