Fake News
July 9, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Babylon Bee has competition. The Bee is famous for having its satirical posts “fact-checked,” and has even been banned from Twitter from time to time. Here, it is the Associated Press that brings its big fact-checking guns to bear on a joke, this time not from the Bee: Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan who was assassinated on Friday, did not tweet about Hillary Clinton the day
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July 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I wrote here about the sensational story of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion. The story, phoned into an Indiana newspaper by an abortionist who seems to spend most of her time promulgating pro-abortion propaganda in the press, spread around the world almost instantaneously. But there is little reason to believe it is true. No one, including Snopes, has been able
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July 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Over the last week, we have been barraged with stories about a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was unable to obtain an abortion in that state and had to cross the line into Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. If you Google “10 year old abortion Ohio,” you get 33,100,000 results. The story is everywhere, internationally. But did it happen? It turns out that the story originated with an abortionist
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June 21, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Recalling C.S. Lewis’s remark that people should only read the sports pages in newspapers because at least half of the news in the sports page would be true, let’s look at the latest in news fakery. No sooner does Biden fall off his bike than some wisenheimer creates this fake headline: Fortunately, as RedState reports, we had the all-self-important “fact checkers” on the job to make sure no one was
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June 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Only hours away from the start of the prime time televised Watergate January 6 Committee hearings (drinking game to come in a separate post) under the chairmanship of Sam Ervin Bennie Thompson (who?), we have news out of the Washington Post about the latest episode from the Millennial Power Struggle. This requires a preface. One of my favorite Monty Python sketches from 50 years ago ran with the idea of
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June 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Yesterday we pondered the thesis that radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin was recalled because San Francisco is just too darned conservative, dontchaknow. Today’s bubble-headed leftists are mad at the media, for saying that the recall is a “message to national Democrats.” Behold New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum: I’m worried about Rosenblum. He just might stumble on our greatest plot, which is our infiltration of the New York Times with
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May 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Today is offering a surfeit of feel-good news, but this one came in too late for the pervious post. The Washington Post is just up with the breaking story that the Biden Administration has decided to “pause” (but almost certainly shut down) the mis-named “Disinformation Governance Board”: Just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being “paused,” according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week
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May 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
This much: Rasmussen finds that “[e]ighty percent (80%) of voters believe ‘fake news’ is a serious problem in the media, including 56% who say the ‘fake news’ problem is Very Serious.” Not surprisingly, 89% of Republicans think fake news in the media is a serious problem, but 75% of Democrats also say that fake news in the media is at least a “somewhat serious” problem. Did Donald Trump ever say
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May 8, 2022 — Steven Hayward
A lot of people, including Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, think the person behind the leak of Justice Alito’s draft on Dobbs is going to be discovered or revealed very soon, apparently going on the assumption that the leak must have come from a clerk for one of the three liberal justices, and there are only 12 of them, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which one. I
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April 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The Russia collusion hoax was exposed long ago as a fraud, but these Rasmussen survey results suggest that it was one of the most effective fake news campaigns ever. Rasmussen asked: Hillary Clinton has said that “Russia succeeded” in influencing the 2016 presidential election. How likely is it that Russian interference changed the outcome of the 2016 election? The results: Democratic voters overwhelmingly agree with Hillary Clinton that Russia is
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April 19, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I don’t know Jared Rabel on Twitter, but he is my new spirit animal for this Tweet about the trauma of lifting the mask mandate mid-flight that has led to some comedy gold at the expense of the New York Times: And it’s legit—yet another New York Times reporter with a Harvard degree who is an idiot. Fake news indeed.
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April 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
This chart below from a YouGov poll essentially ratifies what everyone knows about major media these days—it has become partisan to the left. If the media weren’t biased, why would Democrats express so much more trust in the media than Republicans? The one interesting outlier here is the Wall Street Journal, which has the narrowest spread between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans like the editorial page (as they should), while Democrats
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April 11, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Daniel Schmidt is a University of Chicago freshman and senior editor at the Chicago Thinker. He is one of the Alinskyite gadflies who turned up at the Institute of Politics/Atlantic Disinformation Conference last week. Schmidt posed a good question to Anne Applebaum that turned the theme of the conference back on itself (tweet below). Schmidt now recounts his story in the Compact column “The question Anne Applebaum refused to answer.”
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April 9, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In its lead editorial this morning the Wall Street Journal turns its attention to President Obama’s performance at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics/Atlantic Disinformation Conference this week. The editorial is headlined “Barack Obama rewrites his Russia history.” It opens this way: “As somebody who grappled with the incursion into Crimea and the eastern portions of Ukraine, I have been encouraged by the European reaction [this time],” Mr. Obama
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April 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The students holding down the fort at the University of Chicago’s Chicago Thinker give us hope for the future. The Thinker’s motto is “Outthink the Mob.” In this case, the Mob includes the mainstream media bigwigs featured at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics/Atlantic Disinformation Conference this week. The Thinker’s Christopher Phillips posed a pointed question to CNN’s Brian Stelter. It stumped Stelter (video below). The Thinker covers it
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April 4, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Kinda sounds like a bottomless pit question, doesn’t it? Answer—this dumb: First is the PBS reporter who said to President Biden that he had more foreign policy experience “than any president who has ever held this office.” George H.W. Bush—former ambassador to China, UN ambassador, and head of the CIA before serving as Vice President for eight years, might have something to say about that. Not to mention John Quincy
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April 1, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Time was when a Democratic hack who moved from the White House to journalism would pretend to be objective, like George Snuffilupagus going from the Clinton Administration to ABC News, but now they don’t even pretend to any kind of objective, unbiased pretense: White House Press Secretary Psaki in Talks to Join MSNBC White House press secretary Jen Psaki plans to leave the administration this spring and is in exclusive
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