Media
December 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
This past weekend Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish worked up a detailed Sunday morning special on the Biden family business: “James Biden’s dealmaking caught on FBI tapes in unrelated bribery probe.” Subhead: “While Joe Biden campaigned in Mississippi, his brother planned to build a powerful consulting business — a deal that brought him to the periphery of a federal case.” Kranish’s story on the Biden family business goes back to
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December 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
There is so much news out of Israel’s current war that one has to work hard to keep up. You don’t hear about the Israelis displaced from their homes because of the attacks by Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. For some reason or other, the world isn’t crying for them. You don’t hear about the IDF’s revelations of the Hamas way of war in contravention of
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December 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
IDF Lt. Colonel (reserve) Jonathan Conricus discusses the incredibly tragic death of the three Israeli hostages killed by IDF forces yesterday. He speaks in the seven-minute video below with a Sky News anchor with the attitude to which we have become accustomed. He finds this an opportune moment to put Conricus on the defensive. To say the same effect I also note that takes up the casualty figures disseminated by
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December 15, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Chris Cuomo has reappeared with his own show on NewsNation. Leland Vittert has his own show over there as well. When I met Leland in the lobby of our hotel in Tuscaloosa, I told him one of my friends appreciated his uncompromising view of the Israel-Hamas war. He told me in his engaging style that he sees it as a matter of right and wrong. I was impressed with the
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December 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The headline on the story above the fold at the center of the Wall Street Journal’s page one today reads: “Israel Faces Outcry as Photos Of Detainees in Gaza Emerge.” In the online version the headline reads: “Israel Detains Hundreds of Palestinian Men in Search for Hamas.” Well, what’s the problem? The subhead explains: “Videos online show Palestinian men detained in their underwear, sparking concern among human rights groups.” You
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December 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman made news at a House hearing last week. He alleged without a scrap of evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop hard drive might have been altered by Rudy Giuliani. According to Goldman, the hard drive “was not authenticated as real.” It’s as real as Goldman is fake. The episode reminded me of one of Alger Hiss’s claims of innocence following his conviction of perjury. According to
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December 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
On its news pages the Wall Street Journal’s more or less marches in lockstep with the rest of the braindead media on Israel’s response to the Hamas massacres. Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal. He wrote the Review section’s featured essay “Does the West Have a Double Standard for Ukraine and Gaza?” Beyond the ambit of the news section, it reflects some of the
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December 2, 2023 — John Hinderaker
This New York Times correction is one for the books. It raises, once again, two questions: 1) How dumb are today’s reporters? and 2) Does the Times actually employ any editors? Because it is hard to imagine that two people collaborated on this goof: An article on Page 36 this weekend about the recent antitrust actions against the chicken suppliers industry by the Justice Department misstates the profits that suppliers
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November 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Historian Richard Landes gave Pallywood its name. I excerpted his recent essay ”Jihadi journalism” on mainstream media photographers riding along with Hamas on the October 7 massacre. Professor Landes now returns with the Tablet essay “Pallywood’s latest blockbuster” to document the production featuring the Al-Ahli Hospital. A funny thing happened on the way from Pallywood. He concludes with these observations: Had it been merely an Islamic Jihad rocket that fell
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November 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
It’s increasingly obvious to me that President Biden intends to suppress Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas. I may be mistaken, but that’s the way the wind is blowing, isn’t it? You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows in the mainstream media. That much I can tell you. Author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (published by our friends at Encounter Books), Batya
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November 26, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Are journalists, as a group, the least intelligent of any profession? I think they may be, and the war between Israel and Gaza is bringing out the worst in them. Check out this exchange, in which a clueless reporter floats the theory that the ratio of terrorists to innocent hostages released under the recent agreement is evidence of Israeli racism: The first question that left me speechless (but only for
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November 26, 2023 — Scott Johnson
We followed the removal of the Ramirez “Human Shields” editorial cartoon depicting the Hamas way of war from the Washington Post’s site in “Ramirez on the record.” The cartoon is posted at Ramirez’s Substack site in “Free speech dies in darkness” with a collection of links to comments on the episode. I posted the cartoon here. We learned from the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson’s story that Washington Post opinion editor
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November 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Today comes word that Derek Chauvin has been attacked and seriously injured by another inmate in federal prison. John wrote about the stabbing and commented on the Chauvin case here earlier this morning. Something’s happening here. What it is is pretty clear. When Derek Chauvin filed an appeal of his conviction for the murder of George Floyd, a funny thing happened on the way to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
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November 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Mark Tapson covers the Candace Owens/Ben Shapiro controversy. Candace is apparently bidding to expand her market while otherwise exposing herself as something of an ignoramus. A cat has her tongue on precisely whom she was talking about in the tweet below. No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is
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November 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
It is just me, or did the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy pass yesterday with much less commemoration than usual? You’d think an anniversary of this sorry day ending in a zero would have merited special closing segments on the evening network news (NBC Evening News chose instead to run a closing puff piece on a Napa Valley winery), covers or special commemorative editions of the
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November 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The IDF has carefully overtaken and explored the tunnel system that converges on Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital. The IDF seeks to expose the Hamas way of war as inherently criminal — a point that has gotten lost in the media shuffle. Shifa Hospital director Muhammad Abu Salmiya was arrested yesterday along with several other hospital staff members while attempting to evacuate southward along the humanitarian corridor — i.e., the escape
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November 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Richard Landes is the medieval historian and author, most recently, of Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad. He taught at Boston University. His excellent site is The Augean Stables. He posts here on X/Twitter, where he specifies his areas of interest — “Medieval historian, apocalyptic thought, blog on lethal journalism & other follies of 21C intelligentsia” — as well as his preferred pronouns —
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