Media
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 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Who says the mainstream media only report bad news. There’s some very heartwarming and cheering stories out right now. • Let’s start with the New York Times today: With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels
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May 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We have reached a grim milestone in grim milestones. A Google search on the term “grim milestone” now returns more than 6,000,000 results. It is a “grim milestone” in the unstoppable progress of a brain-killing media cliché. The “grim milestones” retailed by the media always seem to have a political twist and the political twist always seems to be detrimental to Republicans. If it can’t be given a twist detrimental
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May 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We posted the video of Justice Thomas’s interview with John Yoo here in its entirety over the weekend. The interview was conducted Friday evening conference at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution in Dallas. Now Townhall has clipped the video below from the interview. Justice Thomas’s concise comment on the performance of the press can stand alone as an eternal verity
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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 13, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Ahmed Nur Said Elmi moved from London to join other members of his family including his sister Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis. My Somali sources have explained to me that Omar’s father wanted Elmi in town with the family to rescue him from the flagrantly homosexual lifestyle he was living in London. As I understand, Omar was to lend a hand in taking him from what their father saw as a
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May 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Liz Collin’s Alpha News story exposing the fraudulent story retailed by Toshira Garraway about the death of her fiancé, Justin Teigen — supposedly beaten to death by the St. Paul police in 2009 — deserves the clichéd appellation “bombshell.” Liz quotes Garraway in a local media interview: “They caught him. They beat him to death. They threw him in the garbage…” Etc., etc., rinse, wash, and repeat. Liz reports: “Teigen’s
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May 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Alpha News story by assistant editor Rose Williams flags some of the perceptive work by Ministry of Truth czar Nina Jankowicz. The story embeds the edited video below showing Madam Minitrue declaring stories that Ilhan Omar married her brother and Kamala Harris slept her way to the top forms of “domestic Russian disinformation.” Looking around on online, I take it that the video is edited from Jankowicz’s April 2021
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May 11, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In terms of sales, the rollout of the biography of the eminent Dr. Jill Biden by AP reporters Julie Pace and Darlene Superville was not impressive. Despite supportive press, the book sold only 250 copies nationwide in its first week. The crushing news was buried in an otherwise lame Politico story about covering the Biden presidency, as Andrew Stiles pointed out in a story for the Washington Free Beacon. Six
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May 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I wrote a set of critical notes on the April 27 Minnesota Department of Human Rights charge (a/k/a “report”) finding probable cause against the Minneapolis Police Department in “Who will speak for the MPD?” The charge has received enormous publicity in the Minnesota press, yet it is at the least problematic. I wrote in my notes on the charge: “The report cites supporting materials including some 480,000 pages of documents,
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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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May 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post debuts an excerpt of John Paul Mac Isaac’s memoir American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth. The Post has published the excerpt under the headline “The night I met Hunter Biden: Mac Shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac recounts fateful encounter in exclusive excerpt.” It is the story the Post reported before the 2020 presidential election, but it is the story that could not be
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May 3, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Commenting on the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs necessarily involves drawing inferences that go beyond the facts. My comments restate Steve Hayward’s observations in the adjacent post. These are the facts and inferences as I see them: • Justice Alito’s opinion was leaked to Politico’s Josh Gerstein. Alexander Ward’s byline is also on the Politico story, but Gerstein is the name I look to. He is a
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May 2, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Tucker Carlson must be the most important populist conservative in the United States. I infer his importance from the three-part New York Times series on Tucker by Nicholas Confessore assisted by the usual cast of thousands. Reporting for part 1, for example, was contributed by Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, Ben Decker, Barbara Harvey, Candice Reed, Michael D. Shear and Karen Yourish. Julie Tate contributed research. The Times has pulled out
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May 1, 2022 — John Hinderaker
…please. Last night was the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It isn’t worth talking about in detail. I just want to ask the question: how dumb are these people? Do they seriously not understand that the White House press corps is one of the most widely despised institutions in our country? And that their annual dinner serves mostly to remind the rest of us how pathetic and corrupt they are?
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April 27, 2022 — Scott Johnson
At FOX Business Bradford Betz takes up the concern expressed by Jeff Bezos about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. Given Tesla’s reliance on China’s for car sales and lithium batteries, Bezos worries that China may influence (i.e, “gain a bit of leverage”) on Twitter. Betz gives us this tu quoque: Bezos’ commentary on Tesla’s relationship with China is peculiar given a Reuters investigation in December [accessible online here] that found
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April 27, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In the immediate aftermath of the Twitter board’s acceptance of Elon Musk’s buyout offer, Twitter management held a company-wide call that lasted around 45 minutes yesterday. Project Veritas has posted an edited version of a leaked recording (below). During the call Twitter employees questioned board member Bret Taylor and CEO Parag Agrawal about the company’s direction and about Musk’s motives for buying the platform. One can sense the heartbreak and
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