Washington journalists are rejoicing that celebrity glitz and glamour are returning with their self-celebrating soiree, the White House correspondents&#8217; dinner. They announced that longtime &#8220;Saturday Night Live&#8221; player Kenan Thompson will host the April event, and Muslim comedian Hasan Minhaj will perform the Republican-bashing &#8220;comedy&#8221; routine.
&#8220;The dinner has a serious message, but we also believe it is as important as ever to be able to laugh — at ourselves, as well as at the people we cover,&#8221; said White House Correspondents&#8217; Association President Jonathan Karl. &#8220;I&#8217;d argue that humor is more important now than ever.&#8221;
Liberals cling desperately to humor, &#8220;now more than ever,&#8221; just as The New York Times advertises by saying, &#8220;The truth is more important now than ever.&#8221;
The biggest joke of this dinner is Karl&#8217;s claim that it is &#8220;a nonpartisan event.&#8221; Just look at the last three presidents. Leftists like Stephen Colbert famously roasted President George W. Bush. But when Barack Obama became president, a series of comedians oozed their appreciation of the Almighty Barack, spelunking to the all-time low of Larry Wilmore, who proclaimed in 2016: &#8220;Yo, Barry. You did it, my n——!&#8221;
The &#8220;nonpartisan&#8221; newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC covered that event with 35 sound bites that celebrated Obama&#8217;s comedy routine and touted him as &#8220;the funniest president of all time,&#8221; compared with only two sound bites from Wilmore. One clip was a supine tribute to Obama, not even a joke.
Minhaj was hired for this gig in 2017, so we know Karl must be joking that this man is going to attempt to be nonpartisan. Back then, the association&#8217;s president, Jeff Mason of Reuters, claimed it would be unfair &#8220;to roast President Trump in absentia.&#8221; But it was inevitable.
Minhaj dribbled out lame jokes about President Donald Trump&#8217;s aides who were not in attendance including &#8220;Nazi Steve Bannon&#8221; and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who was &#8220;busy curating her collection of children&#8217;s tears.&#8221; Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was busy with a &#8220;pre-Civil-War reenactment.&#8221; Minhaj joked that Sessions said no to attending, and that &#8220;no&#8221; is &#8220;his second favorite N-word.&#8221;
Minhaj compared Trump to amoral, sadistic, inbred King Joffrey of &#8220;Game of Thrones&#8221; and joked: &#8220;The leader of our country is not here, and that&#8217;s because he lives in Moscow. &#8230; As for the other guy, I think he&#8217;s in Pennsylvania because he can&#8217;t take a joke.&#8221;
Then Minhaj mocked the media for criticizing Trump&#8217;s golfing habits, since any distraction prevents war with North Korea. He suggested that the headline should read, &#8220;Trump Golfing. Apocalypse Delayed. Take the W.&#8221;
Minhaj goaded the press to stay tough: &#8220;We are living in the golden age of lying &#8230; and Donald Trump is liar in chief! And remember you guys are public enemy No. 1. You are his biggest enemy. Journalists, ISIS, normal-length ties. And somehow, you&#8217;re the bad guys. That&#8217;s why you have to keep your foot on the gas.&#8221;
Jon Karl heard it all and clearly wants another heaping helping of this kind of &#8220;comedy.&#8221;
Last time around, Minhaj worried out loud saying that in the Trump era, &#8220;trust is more important than truth.&#8221; And many people don&#8217;t trust the press, which he equates with truth, just like The New York Times does.
These highly educated, well-read policy nerds somehow can&#8217;t imagine that a comedy routine like this mixed in with candid shots of Wolf Blitzer or Brian Stelter guffawing along isn&#8217;t helping the idea that the press is nonpartisan, that it doesn&#8217;t see itself as valiantly taking a side. They&#8217;re urged to keep their &#8220;foot on the gas&#8221; and excuse most of us for not daring to hitchhike.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Hasan Minhaj

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Another Corrosive Correspondents’ Dinner

Barack Obama

Donald Trump

White House Correspondents’ Dinner

HBO is currently running a dark little miniseries called &#8220;The New Pope,&#8221; which is basically a reboot of the 2016 series &#8220;The Young Pope.&#8221; Both sprang from the mind of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, and both are scabrously anti-Catholic, which never hurts you when it comes to the elites in Manhattan and Hollywood.
&#8220;The Young Pope&#8221; starred Jude Law as the first American pope, painted as so doctrinaire that he wanted to end the sexual abuse problem in the Catholic Church by drumming all the homosexuals out of the priesthood. A cardinal protested saying: &#8220;It would be a war that would leave the ground littered with corpses, Holy Father. Do you want to know how many corpses would litter the ground?&#8221; The pontiff replied, &#8220;Two-thirds of the clergy.&#8221; Then they both compared the church to a Third World dictatorship.
&#8220;The New Pope&#8221; stars John Malkovich as an effete English pontiff who threatens to shred the Bible and open the church to same-sex marriage. The first show ended with the pope going into cardiac arrest. Now he&#8217;s in a coma, having had three failed heart transplants. In his place the cardinals elect a Franciscan named Francis II, but he proposes selling off all the church&#8217;s wealth, and he ends up dead. Then they turn to the Malkovich character, who chooses the name Pope John Paul III. This is a wicked little joke that suggests Pope John Paul I, who died 33 days into his papacy in 1978, was bumped off.
This new pope is enamored with American celebrities who are the opposite of Catholic such as rock singer Marilyn Manson. His 1996 album &#8220;Antichrist Superstar&#8221; included a song that mocks God with these lyrics: &#8220;&#8216;He is the maker/ He is the taker/ He is the savior/ He is the raper.&#8221;
Later on, Sharon Stone pleads for an end to the &#8220;pointless taboo&#8221; on gay marriage. &#8220;Can&#8217;t the Bible be upgraded?&#8221; she asks. He replies, &#8220;Alas, the Bible is not an iPhone.&#8221; And yet, at the end of this episode, HBO&#8217;s fantasy pope proclaims: &#8220;I intend to state that I am in favor of marriage for priests both gay and straight. We have to legitimize possible love so as to divert people from aberrant love, which is a form of violence. &#8230; A small step and hopefully less tears in the great ocean of human history.&#8221;
The TV critics are split. Hank Stuever of The Washington Post found the second miniseries quite inferior to the first, insulting it as &#8220;the longest Madonna video ever made.&#8221; He concluded that the show was so dull &#8220;even the most faithful watchers will have lapsed into their own comas.&#8221;
John Anderson at The Wall Street Journal touted it as &#8220;outrageous, audacious, seductive, sexy and byzantine, to say nothing of visually voluptuous.&#8221; He adores the &#8220;writing that is pure mischief.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not just Catholics in the crosshairs at HBO. Last year, it ran &#8220;The Righteous Gemstones,&#8221; centered on a greedy televangelist family who runs a megachurch. The patriarch is played by John Goodman. In the show&#8217;s first hour, the F-word was used 41 times, and the Lord&#8217;s name was taken in vain 28 times.
Speaking of &#8220;pure mischief,&#8221; imagine the possibilities of Bill Maher&#8217;s channel going off in a different direction with a mischievous miniseries called &#8220;The New Ayatollah.&#8221; Instead of uncorking wild and crazy conspiracy theories in Vatican City, it could be based in Tehran. Iran&#8217;s highest religious authorities could be shown to be corrupted by power and addicted to sex. Hollywood celebrities could drop by to demand a Quran upgrade.
Somehow, the Christians are always caricatured, and the Muslims are never touched. So how brave are these godless showrunners?
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Vatican

BOZELL & GRAHAM: HBO: Vicious To Christians, Silent On Muslims

Christianity

Hollywood

Islam

Under President Donald Trump, the State of the Union address has become the Super Bowl for the left-leaning &#8220;fact-checkers.&#8221; It doesn&#8217;t matter if Republicans and independents enjoyed it immensely. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, these journalists want to rip his speech to pieces because it somehow overflows with &#8220;untruths.&#8221;
But these supposedly &#8220;independent&#8221; guardians are failures at fact-checking the Democratic Party response, offered this year by Gretchen Whitmer, who was elected governor of Michigan in 2018. Let&#8217;s do a quick roundup of the &#8220;fact-checker&#8221; focus.
— The Associated Press, as usual, obsessed only about the POTUS under the headline &#8220;Trump&#8217;s exaggerated &#8216;great American comeback.'&#8221; They offered nine checks on Trump&#8217;s veracity and zero fact checks on Whitmer.
— The Washington Post — under fact-checker extraordinaire Glenn Kessler, who insists he has a running count of more than 16,200 &#8220;false or misleading claims&#8221; by President Trump — offered 31 checks of Trump and zero of Whitmer.
— PolitiFact offered 21 evaluations of Trump&#8217;s speech and nothing on Whitmer. In fact, PolitiFact has no page on Whitmer. It has never evaluated her. (It does have a page for &#8220;Snooki&#8221; of MTV&#8217;s &#8220;Jersey Shore.&#8221;)
— FactCheck.org offered 14 checks of Trump and one sentence on how Whitmer was wrong to say that wages &#8220;stagnated&#8221; under Trump.
— The New York Times stacked up 36 evaluations of Trump&#8217;s speech and then offered two on Whitmer, one of which included the wage-stagnation garbage.
Somehow these last two outlets get to look more &#8220;fair and balanced&#8221; by merely bowing to the notion that the Democratic response isn&#8217;t a perfectly shaped bouquet of truth. Add up all these evaluations and Trump had 111 fact checks to Whitmer&#8217;s three.
Trump loves to boast and exaggerate, so it&#8217;s easy to throw out little &#8220;Pinocchio&#8221; ratings when Trump claims we have the lowest black unemployment rate in American history, since it&#8217;s only been measured since 1972. But it&#8217;s literally the lowest ever measured in American history. What the fact-checkers are doing is littering achievements with asterisks, trying to distract from the undeniable fact that unemployment is at record lows for blacks, Hispanics, women, the disabled and undoubtedly other groups Democrats claim to champion.
David Harsanyi at National Review offered a terrific article just taking apart The Washington Post fact check, calling these fact-checkers &#8220;janissaries of the Obama legacy.&#8221; (Buckley hat tip for the $10 word.) Harsanyi noted that The Post &#8220;mentions Obama 13 times in a piece about Trump&#8217;s speech.&#8221; What resulted was &#8220;a litany of partisan arguments masquerading as factual correctives.&#8221;
The best part was Harsanyi&#8217;s amazement at The Post&#8217;s evaluation of this Trump statement: &#8220;Thanks to our bold regulatory-reduction campaign, the United States has become the number-one producer of oil and natural gas in the world, by far.&#8221; It&#8217;s true that America became No. 1 in former President Obama&#8217;s second term. But does Obama deserve credit?
Obama ran for president promising to inhibit energy production, coal and oil. A Republican Congress and the Supreme Court foiled his plans. Harsanyi observes: &#8220;It&#8217;s quite the trick to not only censure Trump for bragging about oil and gas production but then, in the same fact check, confer on all the credit on Obama, who did everything in his power — including banning drilling on most public lands — to inhibit exploration and production.&#8221;
Did these Obama defenders gear up to attack Obama&#8217;s State of the Union addresses? A quick peek at Obama&#8217;s speech in 2012, his reelection year, found PolitiFact could only muster three fact checks of Obama — and two of Sen. Marco Rubio&#8217;s Republican rebuttal — compared with its 21-0 smacking of Trump.
Someone should fact-check PolitiFact boss Angie Drobnic Holan every time she claims, &#8220;PolitiFact seeks to present true facts, unaffected by agenda or biases.&#8221; That deserves a &#8220;Pants on Fire.&#8221;
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

SOTU.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Attack Of The ‘Fact-Checking’ Clones

New York Times

PolitiFact

State of the Union

The national narrators of our politics love brandishing the word &#8220;historic&#8221; to describe the Trump impeachment process. But by now it feels unexceptional, more like Chapter 27 of the Same Old Saga. In their overdramatic Trump narrative, the president is always a democracy-killing villain who is about to get his comeuppance.
Month after month, network evening-news coverage of Donald Trump&#8217;s presidency has been notable mostly for its perpetual negativity. The Senate impeachment trial isn&#8217;t the slightest bit different. They spent more than two years &#8220;reporting&#8221; that a Russian collusion conspiracy would be exposed and prematurely end the Trump presidency. Now we&#8217;re nine months from Election Day, and Trump is still in charge &#8230; which means the beatings must continue.
Nicholas Fondacaro of the Media Research Center reported that in the first week of trial coverage, the anchors and reporters of ABC, CBS and NBC offered 34 statements on the merits of the pro-Trump and anti-Trump sides. Twenty of the 21 statements made about the Democratic House managers were positive. All 13 evaluations of Trump&#8217;s defense team were negative.
The editorializing is all in the adjectives and adverbs. On Jan. 23, NBC anchorman Lester Holt touted the &#8220;Democratic prosecutors&#8221; who are &#8220;painting a damning portrait of the president, who they say abused his power.&#8221; NBC&#8217;s Peter Alexander robotically added, &#8220;House prosecutors strongly defended the actions of both Joe and Hunter Biden, saying they did nothing wrong.&#8221;
They think Trump&#8217;s calling his conversation with the Ukrainian president &#8220;perfect&#8221; is ludicrous bombast but that claiming Joe and Hunter Biden &#8220;did nothing wrong&#8221; is stone-cold-sober analysis.
On Jan. 26, ABC reporter Kyra Phillips sounded upset. &#8220;Tonight, President Trump&#8217;s legal team didn&#8217;t even warm up, opening their defense straight to the point,&#8221; she announced, &#8220;even getting personal, attacking lead House manager Adam Schiff, going after his summary of the president&#8217;s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky at the center of it all.&#8221;
Wait. Schiff and the Democrats can&#8217;t be described as &#8220;getting personal&#8221; as they seek to get Trump fired? Why is it somehow treacherous and objectionable for Trump&#8217;s defenders to attempt to take apart Schiff&#8217;s case? This is how the dominant media talk.
Then there&#8217;s the complete imbalance in time allotted. The networks reported on the Democratic managers for nearly 25 minutes and gave Trump&#8217;s defense team 11 and a half minutes. &#8220;CBS Evening News&#8221; was the most imbalanced, giving 7 minutes and 42 seconds to Democrats and skimping on the Trump team with 2 minutes and 26 seconds, a difference of more than 3 to 1. NBC&#8217;s gap was more than 2 to 1.
This overwhelming tilt is only the bias demonstrated during the traditional evening-news hours. Spread that notion across hours of live coverage, unspooling it on broadcast news and cable news, and the unfairness multiplies.
The American people should point and laugh at the idea that the networks would argue it is essential for the Senate jurors to be nonpartisan in their weighing of the evidence. Our media elites are never objective. The stakes are always too high for evenhandedness. The damsel of democracy is always tied to the railroad tracks, and it would be irresponsible not to do everything to save her from her distress.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

President Trump.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Turn the Page On Impeachment

Impeachment

Media Bias

Our media elites arrogantly lecture about our democracy being undermined by robotic propaganda, but do they ever listen to themselves talk about the Democrats? Somehow, they think their robotic propaganda is just the &#8220;truth.&#8221; The press came to witness the Senate impeachment trial, and Rep. Adam Schiff had them at hello.
No member of Congress has been more dramatically partisan in this war on the Trump presidency than Schiff. Did you know he&#8217;s the second coming of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg? Check out this list of the media&#8217;s responses to his opening statement at the trial.
1.&#8221;I think it&#8217;ll go down as one of the great performances &#8230; He just shreds the other side every time he gets up,&#8221; claimed MSNBC&#8217;s Jonathan Alter.
2. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer declared it was &#8220;a very, very powerful and forceful speech &#8230; a very, very strong case from Adam Schiff.&#8221;
3. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it &#8220;dazzling &#8230; really remarkable&#8221; and said, &#8220;It was the second-best courtroom address, since it&#8217;s like a courtroom, that I ever heard.&#8221;
4. On Twitter, Washington Post reporter Greg Miller oozed, &#8220;the way he has handled impeachment will leave a mark on history, exceeding nearly all contemporaries.&#8221;
5. Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin wrote a valentine to Schiff&#8217;s &#8220;grand slam&#8221; with the headline &#8220;Adam Schiff&#8217;s Brilliant Presentation Is Knocking Down Excuses to Acquit.&#8221;
6. ABC&#8217;s Terry Moran said: &#8220;It was meticulous and well-organized. It was grounded in evidence, which he recited and arranged &#8230; in a comprehensive narrative. At times, he tried to rise to a level of eloquence and stir a sense of responsibility for the Senate.&#8221;
7. MSNBC&#8217;s Jason Johnson insisted Schiff wasn&#8217;t just talking to senators: &#8220;He was speaking to 100 years in the future. This is a speech that kids are going to be giving in 2060 &#8230; at university projects.&#8221;
8. CNN&#8217;s Paul Begala seconded that emotion: &#8220;I believe what Adam Schiff said yesterday is going to be studied 40 or 50 years from now.&#8221;
9. MSNBC lovebirds Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski echoed each other in adoring Schiff&#8217;s &#8220;virtuoso performance.&#8221;
Then these people wonder why Americans watch Fox News instead! To love Schiff&#8217;s case, you have to believe that a single phone call from the president to the Ukrainian president is somehow an impeachable offense on the level of abuse of power and obstruction of the House.
What&#8217;s entirely missing from this tsunami of saccharine sentiments is an important counterargument. Schiff has lied and manipulated this entire process. Schiff&#8217;s staff was working with the &#8220;whistleblower&#8221; in August, before his complaint was filed. But then Schiff lied shamelessly on MSNBC on Sept. 17, saying, &#8220;We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.&#8221; Two days later, he lied again when he thanked Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, without whom he &#8220;might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint.&#8221;
The &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; actually tagged Schiff on this, but how serious was their evaluation? Consider this: PolitiFact was founded in 2007, and this was the first time it has ever found an error in his statements. Since 2012, Sen. Ted Cruz has been subjected to 143 fact-checks, while Schiff has two.
The dishonesty of Schiff emerged again during the trial, as when he mischaracterized text messages from Ukraine-scandal figure Lev Parnas to Trump&#8217;s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. As usual, the Schiff-adoring networks skipped right over his lies.
But they lecture us about the integrity of democracy.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rep. Adam Schiff.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Adam Schiff’s Avalanche Of Accolades

Adam Schiff

Just 10 months ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that an impeachment of President Donald Trump would not happen unless there was &#8220;something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.&#8221; The House vote to impeach Trump was the dictionary definition of partisan — not a single Republican voted yes. There is nothing compelling and overwhelming here.
But our pro-impeachment media are investing as much moral authority in Pelosi&#8217;s putsch as they can muster. During live coverage of the vote on Dec. 18, MSNBC&#8217;s Andrea Mitchell gushed over Pelosi&#8217;s black outfit. &#8220;She&#8217;s certainly always well-appointed, beautifully arrayed, if you will,&#8221; she said. &#8220;She&#8217;s wearing black today. And that is a symbolic expression of how somberly they are taking this.&#8221; Chris Matthews added: &#8220;It&#8217;s sacramental. &#8230; It&#8217;s sacramental.&#8221;
Sacramental? Matthews returned to this ridiculous concept on Jan. 15 when the House Democrats made a dramatic show for the cameras by marching their articles of impeachment to the Senate. Matthews told Chuck Todd: &#8220;There&#8217;s a sacramental quality to this. There&#8217;s a ritual.&#8221;
MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake affirmed this, adding: &#8220;I&#8217;m so glad Chris used the word &#8216;ritual&#8217; because that&#8217;s the word that has been stuck in my head about this all day today. It&#8217;s beyond formality. &#8230; There is something almost religious to it.&#8221;
A few minutes later, Matthews suggested, &#8220;there&#8217;s an excommunication aspect to this thing.&#8221; Todd replied: &#8220;you are really taking this Catholic metaphor and going at it! Run, Chris, run!&#8221; Matthews then added, &#8220;the Lincoln Memorial is basically a church.&#8221;
As Speaker Pelosi was shown on screen about to sign the impeachment articles, Matthews returned to churchy metaphors, and things were getting truly wacky. He said: &#8220;Well, there&#8217;s a sacramental statement for life — like a priest for life. It&#8217;s a perfect statement of what she is. I think she is very reverential. I mean, she&#8217;s one tough politician, but she&#8217;s got another part of her, which is very respectful of hierarchy, in terms of who — true moral authority. The Democratic elected officials have true moral authority to run the country.&#8221;
All of these mangled metaphors ignore Pelosi&#8217;s crusades for abortion on demand and punitive LGBT &#8220;anti-discrimination&#8221; measures to crush religious liberty, all of which are in direct conflict with Catholic teaching. Her political career has been a war with her alleged religious affiliation.
This praise is goofball stuff, and at least one celebrated liberal Catholic was having fun with all the Pelosi parades. On CBS&#8217; &#8220;Late Show,&#8221; Stephen Colbert put on dramatic lighting and joked: &#8220;First, each member of Congress steps forward to seal the text with a single drop of blood. Then, the sacred runes are drawn from beneath Jerrold Nadler&#8217;s jowls, and lo, a snow-white ram is brought forth to pluck the maidenhead of Adam Schiff.&#8221;
(Then, as expected, he mocked Sen. Mitch McConnell as a hideous demon to keep it acceptable to his fans.)
Impeachment is in no way a sacred act, and it carries no moral authority. But our pro-impeachment media are employing every sappy metaphor to achieve their fervent desire: dragging President Trump out of the White House and throwing him into the pyre.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Impeachment Is Now Sacred?

Nancy Pelosi

Ricky Gervais, the perpetually snarky British comedian, set social media on fire after he mocked arrogant Hollywood in his opening monologue when hosting the Golden Globes.
&#8220;So if you do win an award tonight, don&#8217;t use it as a platform to make a political speech, right?&#8221; he said. &#8220;You&#8217;re in no position to lecture the public — about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.&#8221;
Uh-oh. Gervais explained that his approach was to mock the &#8220;privileged egos in the room&#8221; as if he were &#8220;the bloke sitting at home who shouldn&#8217;t have been invited.&#8221; It was too accurate to be funny. It stung. Los Angeles Times TV critic Lorraine Ali spoke for the Tinseltown crowd when she wrote, &#8220;The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s what Ali doesn&#8217;t get. It&#8217;s not that celebrities are dumber than average, though so many undoubtedly are. But being an actor or a director doesn&#8217;t make you smarter. No one tends to look up celebrities&#8217; level of education when they pontificate — or, as would be more appropriate, their level of expertise on whatever issue is floating their boat.
Add to that the arrogance they internalize for being an &#8220;artist&#8221; with the added &#8220;humanity&#8221; of pretending to be all kinds of different people. Their &#8220;compassion&#8221; is expected to overrule any question about their knowledge.
Of course, Gervais couldn&#8217;t stop the inevitable pompous political speeches. Most notable was actress Michelle Williams&#8217; insisting she never would have arrived at her high station in Hollywood life without the ability to get an abortion.
Surprise, surprise! Williams stopped going to school at 15 — a nearly exact match for Gervais&#8217; Greta Thunberg joke.
The other passionate speaker of the night was Patricia Arquette, who decried our nation being &#8220;on the brink of war&#8221; with &#8220;a president tweeting out a threat of 52 bombs including cultural sites, young people risking their lives traveling across the world, people not knowing if bombs are going to drop on their kids&#8217; heads.&#8221; She urged everyone to vote (Democrat) in 2020.
Arquette ran away from home at 14 and never went to college. She has no expertise on foreign policy, national defense or geopolitical thought.
Everything that followed the Gervais comedy routine underlined his critique. Embarrassed by the Americans&#8217; taking out Iranian terrorist mastermind Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Michael Moore obsequiously apologized to Iran — in Farsi.
Moore dropped out of the University of Michigan, Flint after his freshman year. One safely assumes his knowledge of Farsi doesn&#8217;t go beyond those words.
In the same week, Moore spoke on his podcast to actress and model Emily Ratajkowski, and they both professed their support for Bernie Sanders for president because capitalism is the &#8220;enemy.&#8221;
Ratajkowski attended the University of California, Los Angeles for one year and then decided to model full time.
When President Donald Trump spoke to the nation about taking out Soleimani, comedian Kathy Griffin mocked him for mispronouncing the word &#8220;tolerated.&#8221; She tweeted: &#8220;This should be an exhibit in one of the articles of impeachment. They should just quietly add it as, y&#8217;know &#8216;exhibit 1958542785&#8217; or something. #Trump #SniffyMcAdderall.&#8221; Trump isn&#8217;t just dumb; he&#8217;s on drugs.
Griffin never went to college. Her parents wanted her to go. She wanted to be famous instead.
Rosie O&#8217;Donnell tweeted, with no capital letters or basic punctuation: &#8220;wake me in november — its just too much — cant Americans see he is high AF — cant pronounce 5th grade words &#8230; #RemoveAndIndictTrumpNOW.&#8221;
Rosie O&#8217;Donnell washed out of two colleges.
We&#8217;re not saying everyone who didn&#8217;t finish college is a dummy. We are saying that these famous entertainers who act like America&#8217;s smartest should keep in mind how the joke can be turned around on them — as it was by Ricky Gervais.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Ricky Gervais.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Hollywood Gets An Education

Ricky Gervais

Hollywood loves taking apart conservatives. So when presented with the idea of men in the highest reaches of the conservative media sexually harassing women at the office, it was manna from heaven.
You&#8217;ll not find a TV dramatization of Harvey Weinstein&#8217;s predations ripped from the headlines. There&#8217;s no movie on the alleged sexual misconduct by Matt Lauer at his hellish NBC offices, or Charlie Rose&#8217;s at CBS. There is only &#8220;Bombshell,&#8221; a fictionalized account of the hostile, sexist atmosphere at Fox News.
The filmmaker on this one is Jay Roach, who has made a series of comically leftist movies for HBO, such as one on Al Gore being denied the presidency (&#8220;Recount&#8221;) and one on Sarah Palin&#8217;s losing turn as vice presidential nominee (&#8220;Game Change&#8221;). Roach&#8217;s idea of a hero movie was &#8220;Trumbo,&#8221; based on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who, in the &#8217;40s, slavishly plopped Stalinist talking points into movies and belonged to the Communist Party USA, for which he was blacklisted.
Woe is anyone who goes to these movies expecting a faithful recounting of history. What you get instead is rampant editorializing and fiction. Characters are made up out of whole cloth and placed into real events. In &#8220;Bombshell,&#8221; Fake Megyn Kelly and Fake Gretchen Carlson are digitized into actual Fox News footage. Two other central characters in this anti-Fox hit job — an evangelical Christian beauty and a snarky, Hillary Clinton-loving lesbian Fox staffer — are pure inventions.
The lesbian staffer describes the Fox ethos in this way: &#8220;You have to adopt the mentality of an Irish street cop. The world is a bad place. People are lazy morons. Minorities are criminals. Sex is sick but interesting. &#8230; Ask yourself, &#8216;What would scare my grandmother or piss off my grandfather?&#8217; And that&#8217;s a Fox story.&#8221;
Virtually everyone, and this includes Fox employees, has no idea what here is actually true and what is entirely made up. The media suggest the details aren&#8217;t that important. What&#8217;s important is &#8220;starting a conversation.&#8221;
So long as that conversation isn&#8217;t about liberal predators.
To his credit, CNN&#8217;s Brian Stelter asked Roach: &#8220;I&#8217;m thinking myself, where&#8217;s the — where&#8217;s the Matt Lauer movie? Where&#8217;s the Les Moonves? Are those coming? I&#8217;m serious.&#8221; Roach insisted there&#8217;s a Harvey Weinstein documentary coming, and that someone will make a film about Ronan Farrow&#8217;s struggles with NBC News in reporting on Weinstein&#8217;s abuses.
&#8220;I would happily make that movie,&#8221; he claimed. Don&#8217;t bet a nickel on it.
Oh, how they objected to the concept of composite characters in movies based on real events when the subject was Clint Eastwood&#8217;s &#8220;Richard Jewell,&#8221; where it&#8217;s implied that an actual Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter (now deceased) offered sex for information from a fictional FBI agent. But these voices are silent when it comes to the Fox News-bashing movie.
The same thing is happening with &#8220;The Two Popes,&#8221; a Netflix film spinning a tale about the relationship between crusty, traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI and his forward-looking successor, Pope Francis. Entire conversations are manufactured to dramatize the differences between conservative and liberal takes on the Catholic Church.
Catholic journalist Raymond Arroyo was poignant in saying: &#8220;It&#8217;s a nicely acted fantasia, unmoored from fact, that misses the true character of both men. It is slanderous toward 1 Pope and overly fawning toward the other, serving neither the audience nor history.&#8221;
If you&#8217;re looking for historical truth in Hollywood, you&#8217;re looking in the wrong spot.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Vintage Hollywood.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Never Trust Hollywood With History

Conservatism

Leftism

As we end another year, our popular culture still revolves around President Donald Trump, and our news and entertainment conglomerates continue to be outraged that conservative Christians stick with him, so much so they are summarily ignored. Support him as, say, Franklin Graham and a vast majority of evangelicals have done and &#8230; crickets. But what happens when evangelicals don&#8217;t?
Happy days are here again. The left has lunged to promote an editorial by Christianity Today magazine that insists Trump must be removed from office. What the left understands — and some on the right still ignore — is that the cultural is far more powerful than the political. Thus, whenever a force on the cultural left flaps its wings, it is saluted. In the rare occasion that the entity advances the cultural right, it&#8217;s slammed, or ignored.
But that&#8217;s not necessarily how America sees it, thanks to social media that has done an end run around the press and told the truth. The left still dominates in the cultural space, but it no longer enjoys a monopoly.
Let&#8217;s look at the cultural winners and losers of 2019:
Loser: Jussie Smollett, the &#8220;Empire&#8221; actor and Hollywood race hoaxer who cost the taxpayers of Chicago more than $130,000 for all the time it took police to look for a nonexistent hate crime. Nothing says viral like a black gay celebrity claiming he was beaten by red-hatted Trumpster thugs. For two weeks, the left went nuts. Celebrities, politicians and the &#8220;news&#8221; media convicted Trump World for what it had allegedly caused. And it never happened. And now all of America knows it.
Winners: the students of Covington Catholic High School. Speaking of viral sensations of &#8220;fake news&#8221; around Trump hats, these high school kids were smeared relentlessly for several days for allegedly making evil smirks at a Native American activist. But the Diocese of Covington launched an investigation and found &#8220;no evidence of offensive or racist statements.&#8221; Again it was social media that spread the word to tens of millions across the country about the wrong done to the students. They were vindicated in the court of public opinion.
Winner: &#8220;Unplanned,&#8221; the movie about Abby Johnson, who converted from Planned Parenthood clinic director to conservative Catholic activist. Major music labels refused to license songs for it. Cable-news channels refused to run ads for it. Newspaper film critics refused to review it. And yet the little film became the talk of social media. What Pure Flix delivered has done more to advance the pro-life cause than the National Right to Life Committee has accomplished in the past three decades.
Loser: the abortion industry. In September, the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Guttmacher Institute estimated that there were about 862,000 abortions in 2017, nearly 200,000 fewer than in 2011. The abortion rate — the number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — dropped to 13.5 in 2017, the lowest rate since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973.
Loser: Gillette. In January, NPR touted a Gillette ad that attacked its own consumers. &#8220;The first half of the ad portrays males as boorish, sexually harassing women, mansplaining and bullying,&#8221; NPR reported. It probably saw the ad as an anti-Trump message. The second half of the ad insisted men must change. The ad went viral. Then, Gillette dug in deeper. Shortly before Father&#8217;s Day, the company launched an ad about a dad teaching his &#8220;son&#8221; — a biological girl — how to shave. Sales tanked. But the company claimed it wasn&#8217;t the ads. It blamed &#8220;lower shaving frequency.&#8221;
Loser: The Walt Disney Studios. It dominated the top-grossing movies, but superhero flicks like &#8220;Avengers: Endgame&#8221; and &#8220;Captain Marvel&#8221; pandered aerobically to feminists. And for all that energy, leftist sites like Slate still bashed the movies for being &#8220;too patronizing, too late.&#8221; Why bother messing with superheroes?
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Captain Marvel.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Cultural Winners And Losers Of 2019

Abortion

Covington Catholic High School

Disney

Jussie Smollett

Marvel

When The Washington Post infamously posted the motto &#8220;Democracy Dies in Darkness&#8221; on its masthead after Donald Trump was elected, it was implicit — The Post will deny it — that Trump is the enemy of democracy, and of &#8220;light&#8221; or transparency. So it was sadly poetic that after the House Democrats rammed through such an incredibly partisan impeachment vote — without a single Republican voting aye — Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade posted a photograph on Twitter of her and her colleagues celebrating with beers.
Bade tweeted: &#8220;Merry Impeachmas from the WaPo team! @pkcapitol is buying.&#8221; After it became controversial, Bade deleted it, claiming it had been misunderstood.
With all their tweets and all their angry, opinionated segments on CNN and MSNBC, these journalists cannot be misunderstood. This was a message of &#8220;mission accomplished.&#8221; The Post and all its brethren in the Trump-hating media have been seeking this vote since before President Trump was even inaugurated. It&#8217;s hard to tell whether the Democrats or the media have been more ardent in seeking Trump&#8217;s removal from office. It&#8217;s difficult to discern the slightest difference in partisan aggression between the Democrats and the press.
Our only question is: Who are the leaders, and who are the followers? Are the ideologues in the media forcing their will on the Democrats, or the other way around?
After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s crackpot impeachment vote came her declaration that she would withhold the articles of impeachment from the Senate. &#8220;So far, we haven&#8217;t seen anything that looks fair to us, so hopefully it will be fairer, and when we see what that is, we&#8217;ll send our managers,&#8221; she shamelessly proclaimed. As if the Democrats and their media allies have been fair to Team Trump all along. She called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a &#8220;rogue leader&#8221; for failing to bend to her will.
NBC located &#8220;a source familiar with the administration&#8217;s reaction&#8221; who asked, &#8220;How can these people be taken seriously?&#8221;
Mark Levin took it very seriously, tweeting: &#8220;So she&#8217;s unilaterally sitting on the impeachment. This is another brazen unconstitutional act.&#8221; He argued the impeachment should be declared &#8220;null and void&#8221; by the Senate and added, &#8220;Her effort to cripple the presidency &amp; blackmail the Senate must be defeated.&#8221; The founders didn&#8217;t set up this system so the House speaker could make demands of the Senate until it cries uncle.
This is where the media&#8217;s bowing to and scraping for Democrats and their strategists warps our system. They&#8217;re not part of the checks and balances. They have no balance, and they never check the Democrats. The media paint everything Team Chuck &amp; Nancy does as &#8220;historic&#8221; and &#8220;solemn,&#8221; and the Republican reactions as &#8220;diatribes&#8221; and &#8220;onslaughts.&#8221;
During the Clinton impeachment in 1998, TV reporters also sounded hopelessly devoted to the Democratic party line. They emotionally announced that special counsel Kenneth Starr&#8217;s report was a truck bomb and compared the entire process to a Puritan big brother obsessing over Bill Clinton&#8217;s sex life as if we all lived in George Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984.&#8221;
Perjury? Who cares about perjury?
The morning after the Trump impeachment vote, ABC &#8220;news&#8221; man George Stephanopoulos grimly implied Trump will have an &#8220;indelible mark on his record.&#8221; Indelible? This from the &#8220;journalists&#8221; who blatantly campaigned in 2016 to put Clinton back in the White House as first gentleman.
The media cannot credibly lecture anyone on the erosion of &#8220;democratic norms&#8221; under this president. They have eroded every journalistic norm in their crusade to remove Trump and are now stenographers for undoing constitutional norms. They are the ones casting a dark shadow over our democracy. And no one gets to remove these unelected, permanent politicians from their offices.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Newspapers.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: The Media Help Erode Our Norms

Media

Washington Post

A few weeks ago, Rep. Devin Nunes appeared on Mark Levin&#8217;s Fox News show, &#8220;Life, Liberty &amp; Levin.&#8221; Near the end, he talked about how he and his staff put out a memo in early 2018 &#8220;to expose the counterintelligence malfeasance that was occurring in the FBI&#8221; in the search for Russian &#8220;collusion&#8221; with Donald Trump. The media did all kinds of stories about how the Republicans were concocting &#8220;conspiracy theories&#8221; and destroying the nation&#8217;s law enforcement agencies.
Nunes boasted: &#8220;And what we really find out now: Everything that we said at that time was 100 percent accurate. Everything that the Democrats and the media said at the time: 100 percent inaccurate.&#8221;
At the time of the memo&#8217;s release, we found that the networks spent 17 minutes complaining about its release and only about five minutes explaining what was in it!
As Mollie Hemingway noted on The Federalist website, the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz established that the Nunes memo was accurate and the response from Rep. Adam Schiff was not. While fired FBI Director James Comey proclaimed he was vindicated, Horowitz testified, &#8220;the activities we found here don&#8217;t vindicate anybody who touched this.&#8221;
Let&#8217;s review some of the Nunes findings that Horowitz found to be true.
1. Ex-British spy Christopher Steele&#8217;s sleazy and unsubstantiated dossier of dirt on Trump &#8220;formed an essential part of&#8221; an application sent to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to secure a right to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The application did not explain that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
2. The application extensively cited a 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which didn&#8217;t corroborate the dossier — since Steele himself was Isikoff&#8217;s source! The FBI wrongly claimed Steele was not a source for the story.
3. Nellie Ohr, wife of Bruce Ohr, then a high-ranking Justice Department official, worked for the firm Fusion GPS to assist the Clinton campaign effort. Her husband sent her research to the FBI. He admitted that Steele &#8220;was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,&#8221; but he and his wife concealed this as well as their relationship with the Clinton campaign from the FISA court.
4. &#8220;The dossier was &#8216;only minimally corroborated&#8217; and unverified, according to FBI officials,&#8221; wrote Hemingway.
These deeply dishonest FISA applications were submitted by Comey and his Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Schiff&#8217;s then-minority side of the committee put out a memo in response to Nunes with competing claims. Each of these Horowitz found to be false:
1. Obama&#8217;s Justice Department &#8220;made only narrow use of information from Steele&#8217;s sources about Page&#8217;s specific activities in 2016.&#8221;
2. Team Obama &#8220;disclosed&#8221; the &#8220;assessed political motivation&#8221; of Steele&#8217;s benefactors.
3. &#8220;In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele&#8217;s reporting,&#8221; Hemingway wrote.
4. &#8220;The Page FISA warrant allowed the FBI to collect &#8216;valuable intelligence,'&#8221; she added.
5. The DOJ &#8220;repeatedly informed the Court about Steele&#8217;s background, credibility, and potential bias,&#8221; she wrote. (In fact, it never used his name.)
6. &#8220;The FBI conducted a &#8216;rigorous process&#8217; to vet Steele&#8217;s allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI&#8217;s reasonable basis for finding Steele credible.
7. Steele&#8217;s prior reporting was used in &#8216;criminal proceedings.'&#8221;
Despite Horowitz&#8217;s carefully noncommittal demeanor and his facts&#8217; lining up with Nunes&#8217;, the media sided with Schiff. Russiagate fanatic Rachel Maddow called it &#8220;a sad trombone for Trump.&#8221; Two leftist Washington Post writers wrote an article headlined &#8220;The Nunes Memo Is out. It&#8217;s a Joke and a Sham.&#8221;
The fake media can&#8217;t believe anyone would doubt that everything they say is the gospel truth.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Rep. Devin Nunes.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Devin Nunes: Mocked For Being Right

Devin Nunes

FISA

Abortion is the highest expression of feminism. It&#8217;s the only concern of feminists. Just ask the first lady how many feminists came to her defense after her son&#8217;s name was dragged through the mud on Capitol Hill. Ask Kellyanne Conway how many stood behind her when she was insulted as a terrifying killer clown on &#8220;Saturday Night Live.&#8221; Ask Juanita Broaddrick who came to her defense when she declared that the (liberal) president of the United States had raped her.
But abortion? Anyone who dares to oppose abortion is a sexist, a racist and maybe even a Christian.
You could find these attitudes in a recent article in fashion magazine Harper&#8217;s Bazaar, where legendary extremist Gloria Steinem was interviewed/celebrated by British actress and model Jameela Jamil, who stars in the NBC after-death sitcom &#8220;The Good Place.&#8221;
Back in May, Jamil caused a ruckus by tweeting like a typical feminist about her awesome abortion: &#8220;I had an abortion when I was young, and it was the best decision I have ever made. Both for me, and for the baby I didn&#8217;t want &#8230; So many children will end up in foster homes. So many lives ruined. So very cruel.&#8221;
Work your way through that equation: Abortion is the best thing that could happen to an unborn baby.
In the glossy pages of Harper&#8217;s Bazaar, Jamil was modeling and pouting in a $3,800 blazer and $300 tights under the sugary headline &#8220;Jameela Jamil Is the Feminist-in-Progress We Need Right Now.&#8221; As with her showy clothes, it&#8217;s all about her. She proclaimed, &#8220;People have abortions, sometimes a woman just wants her liberty, and we have to normalize that it&#8217;s okay just to make that choice for yourself, because your life is as important as a newborn life that doesn&#8217;t even exist yet.&#8221;
Me, me, me.
Steinem heartily agreed and turned on the pro-lifers by calling them budding authoritarians. &#8220;It took me a while to understand that the first step in every authoritarian regime is controlling reproduction, and that means controlling us,&#8221; she said. &#8220;Unless we — men and women — have power over our own bodies and voices, there is no such thing as democracy.&#8221;
To her, pro-lifers smell like Nazis. &#8220;Every authoritarian regime that I have ever read about, including Hitler&#8217;s rise to power, every regime starts with controlling reproduction and that means controlling women&#8217;s bodies,&#8221; she said.
In other words, there&#8217;s no such thing as a holocaust of tens of millions unborn babies, because they&#8217;re not counted as actual human lives and they have no human dignity. Besides, those who support life for the unborn are Nazis. George Orwell, call your office.
Jamil also told Steinem that she likes her theory that whites have &#8220;a fear that not enough white women are being born.&#8221; Steinem elaborated: &#8220;The white evangelicals are supporting Trump solely on the issue of abortion. Obviously, it has nothing to do with his lifestyle. It has to do with their racism.&#8221;
Our friend Katie Yoder wrote up all this nonsense on Townhall.com with a headline that accurately summarizes: &#8220;Gloria Steinhem and Jameela Jamil: There&#8217;s &#8216;No Democracy&#8217; Without Abortion.&#8221; Jamil responded with Hollywood sophistication, tweeting: &#8220;I SAID WHAT I F—-ING SAID and you&#8217;re clueless if you think I&#8217;m going to take it back. My life *is* more important to me than an unborn fetus&#8217; one. Suck on that.&#8221;
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Jameela Jamil.

BOZELL & GRAHAM: Feminists Exalt The Wonder Of Abortion

Gloria Steinem

Jameela Jamil

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