&#8220;Public broadcasting&#8221; is a comical phrase. Its audience is not the public. It is the Left. PBS and NPR don&#8217;t care one iota what everyone else thinks &#8230; even if everyone else pays a chunk of their budget through taxes.
On the morning before the last presidential debate, Kelly McBride, NPR&#8217;s &#8220;public editor&#8221; — the person who is supposed to bring outside perspectives from the public into the NPR bubble — tweeted, &#8220;Why haven&#8217;t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post&#8217;s Hunter Biden story?&#8221; Below a link to her newsletter was a quote in bold type from Terence Samuel, NPR&#8217;s managing editor for news: &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don&#8217;t want to waste the listeners&#8217; and readers&#8217; time on stories that are just pure distractions.&#8221;
In McBride&#8217;s newsletter, Samuel added: &#8220;And quite frankly, that&#8217;s where we ended up, this was &#8230; a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.&#8221;
This is beyond sick coming from NPR. Nina Totenberg made Anita Hill a legend with sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas that were never proven. It was the very definition of a &#8220;politically driven event,&#8221; a story leaked to Totenberg by Senate Democrats to sabotage the Thomas nomination. No one at NPR said that was an unvetted waste of time, a &#8220;pure distraction.&#8221;
Every allegation of sexual assault made against Brett Kavanaugh was a &#8220;politically driven event,&#8221; and Christine Blasey Ford, the most acclaimed accuser, couldn&#8217;t even define a time or a place to her supposed meeting with Kavanaugh. This is why NPR&#8217;s declarations about &#8220;pure distractions&#8221; look extremely partisan.
The essence of McBride&#8217;s argument is simply, &#8220;Consider the source.&#8221; If it came from a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper and two supporters of President Donald Trump, then it has to be garbage. &#8220;Intelligence officials warn that Russia has been working overtime to keep the story of Hunter Biden in the spotlight. Even if Russia can&#8217;t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect.&#8221;
They put NPR&#8217;s media correspondent David Folkenflik on the case — a man who routinely rains fire on Fox News and who wrote an entire book ripping into Rupert Murdoch. This was a promotional blurb for his book from Booklist: &#8220;One cannot, even facetiously, describe this account &#8230; as &#8216;fair and balanced.&#8217; It is neither.&#8221; Folkenflik said the New York Post story was &#8220;suspect&#8221; and the main reporter worked for Sean Hannity. He scorned it as &#8220;speculative partisan advocacy.”
When she became NPR&#8217;s &#8220;public editor&#8221; in April, McBride promised, &#8220;As I watch NPR, I promise to do so through the eyes of you, the audience — the core audience, and also those of you dipping your toes in around the edges of NPR.&#8221; She asked how NPR could broaden its audience. &#8220;Although I&#8217;m the advocate for the audience that NPR has right now, I&#8217;ll be mindful of NPR&#8217;s mission to broaden it. Through encouragement and accountability, I hope to hold the door open for new and diverse communities to connect with public radio.&#8221;
That&#8217;s obviously baloney. NPR is catering every day to its &#8220;core audience&#8221; of left-wing partisans, and its dismissal of any kind of Biden family scandal reeks of a disdain for &#8220;(holding) the door open&#8221; to all the taxpayers who pay some of NPR&#8217;s bills. Just like Folkenflik&#8217;s book, it&#8217;s easy to proclaim that one cannot, even facetiously, describe NPR as fair and balanced. It is neither.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

GRAHAM: NPR Defines Hunter Biden News As A Waste Of Time

Hunter Biden

Joe Biden

Media Bias

National Public Radio (NPR)

&quot;Public broadcasting&quot; is a comical phrase. Its audience is not the public. It is the Left. PBS and NPR don&#039;t care one iota what everyone else thinks ...

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The political-insider website Axios published a story Wednesday headlined &#8220;Joe Biden is the luckiest, least scrutinized frontrunner.&#8221; Mike Allen and Hans Nichols declared: &#8220;Eight months ago, Joe Biden was in danger of losing the Democratic nomination. Now he&#8217;s a prohibitive favorite for president — who got there with lots of luck and shockingly little scrutiny.&#8221;
Or, to put it another way, Biden is blessed with loads of &#8220;luck&#8221; due to a press corps that has energetically avoided all its own sloganeering about holding public officials accountable.
Axios didn&#8217;t note that President Donald Trump submitted to a rough interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios that liberal outlets everywhere exploited, while Biden has not been submitted to one.
President Trump submitted to a rough interview with Chris Wallace on &#8220;Fox News Sunday&#8221; that liberal outlets everywhere exploited. Biden&#8217;s gone nowhere near Wallace.
President Trump was lambasted as a moron for granting a pile of interviews to Washington Post &#8220;legend&#8221; Bob Woodward, which liberal outlets everywhere exploited. Biden was not.
The media are laser-focused on one objective: sending Trump back to private life. As Axios admitted, &#8220;The media&#8217;s obsession with Trump — and Trump&#8217;s compulsion to dominate the news — allowed Biden to purposely and persistently minimize public appearances and tough questions.&#8221;
There&#8217;s a word for a presidential aspirant who persistently minimizes tough questions: coward.
Our preposterously partisan press corps demonstrated its lack of professionalism all over again when the New York Post published a story on Oct. 14. It included an alleged email to Joe Biden&#8217;s son Hunter Biden from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Burisma board, on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the board at a reported monthly salary of up to $50,000.
He wrote: &#8220;Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It&#8217;s realty (sic) an honor and pleasure.&#8221;
In eight interviews, Joe Biden has drawn a bold red line saying that he and his son have never discussed the lobbying gigs. He said on MSNBC, &#8220;I never discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine.&#8221; He even exclaimed, &#8220;There has been no indication of conflict of interest in Ukraine or anywhere else, period.&#8221;
So, did Biden meet with the Burisma exec? Journalists don&#8217;t want to know. They want to accept the incredibly lame defense that such a meeting wasn&#8217;t on Biden&#8217;s &#8220;official schedule.&#8221; That&#8217;s simply denial, and they know it.
ABC, CBS and NBC all skipped the story on the evening newscasts. The next morning, NBC&#8217;s Hallie Jackson went all in on Biden spin. &#8220;Now, the story is so dubious,&#8221; she touted. &#8220;And we should note, by the way, that the Biden campaign says that meeting was never on Biden&#8217;s official schedule. But Facebook and Twitter made moves to try to limit the spread of this story. And The Washington Post is reporting that some intelligence experts think this has the hallmark of, like a disinformation campaign, meant to interfere with the election.&#8221;
So, Facebook and Twitter tried to censor the New York Post—an outrageously politicized prank—and the NBC &#8220;reporter&#8221; used that to say the story is &#8220;so dubious.&#8221; Jackson dismissed the source as &#8220;a tabloid&#8221;—as if it were the National Enquirer. She couldn&#8217;t even specify and say it was a &#8220;New York tabloid.&#8221;
This is a reporter whom NBC colleague Katy Tur congratulated in her book as one of the campaign &#8220;Road Warriors.&#8221; Oh, she sounds like a warrior, all right—for Biden-Harris 2020.
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.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

GRAHAM: Biden’s Historic ‘Luck’ With A Pusillanimous Press

2020 Election

The political-insider website Axios published a story Wednesday headlined &quot;Joe Biden is the luckiest, least scrutinized frontrunner.&quot; Mike Allen and Hans

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In the last few months, the Trump-Pence team has held a plethora of press conferences and &#8220;pool sprays&#8221; during which they&#8217;ve taken hostile liberal questions, while Joe Biden&#8217;s campaign has called a &#8220;lid&#8221; on the press many days and has &#8220;lidded&#8221; Kamala Harris from the national press since she was picked in August.
So it&#8217;s a little perverse that when Harris finally showed up for big-league questioning at the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page of USA Today gave her little-league questioning. Allow me to list the most frustrating and/or feckless Page inquiries in order:
1. &#8220;President Trump has several times refused to commit himself to a peaceful transfer of power after the election,&#8221; she said. &#8220;If Vice President Biden is declared the winner and President Trump refuses to accept a peaceful transfer of power, what would be your role and responsibility as vice president?&#8221;
There is no more useless softball. It&#8217;s a Democratic National Committee question because it assumes Trump will lose. Trump declines to answer because it builds the media narrative that he&#8217;s losing the election. They asked this in 2016, and it was useless because he won.
2. Then came the vomitous softball about the tragic shooting of Breonna Taylor. Her boyfriend shot first at the cops, saying he didn&#8217;t hear them knock and say they were police. Page said: &#8220;They say they were acting in self-defense. None of them have been indicted in connection with her death. Senator Harris, in the case of Breonna Taylor, was justice done?&#8221;
Page is implying &#8220;justice&#8221; means you indict cops when no jury would convict them—because they were acting in self-defense.
But notice what Page failed to ask. She didn&#8217;t ask if justice is done when stores are destroyed by rioting and looting. She didn&#8217;t ask about how Harris praised Jacob Blake, when he was accused of sexual assault. She didn&#8217;t ask about how Harris begged for donations for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed out a number of people charged with violent crimes. She didn&#8217;t ask if justice was done in the tragic shootings of police officers.
3. Climate change? Again? Page asked Pence, &#8220;Do you believe, as the scientific community has concluded, that manmade climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter and more deadly, and it made hurricanes wetter, slower and more damaging?&#8221;
Liberals always use this beat-your-wife framing: Are you with the &#8220;scientific community&#8221;? Or are you for Denial and Ignorance?
The toughest question Page gave Harris was one that noted Harris&#8217; ticket can&#8217;t take a consistent position on climate. &#8220;What exactly would be the stance of a Biden-Harris administration toward the Green New Deal?&#8221; she asked.
4. Page asked Pence whether Judge Amy Comey Barrett&#8217;s confirmation to the Supreme Court &#8220;would cement the court&#8217;s conservative majority and make it likely open to more abortion restrictions, even to overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.&#8221; Warning: Liberals always dress up their favorite rulings as &#8220;landmarks.&#8221; Big conservative wins are rarely &#8220;landmarks.&#8221;
Page continued: &#8220;Access to abortion would then be up to the states. &#8230; If Roe v. Wade is overturned, what would you want Indiana to do? Would you want your home state to ban all abortions?&#8221;
That&#8217;s a fair question. But then she asked the same question to Harris, with a slight twist: &#8220;Would you want your home state to enact no restrictions on access to abortion?&#8221; Isn&#8217;t that roughly where California is now?
Page didn&#8217;t ask Harris about the &#8220;devout Catholic&#8221; Biden pushing for taxpayer-funded abortions. She didn&#8217;t ask Harris about her politicized lawsuit against David Daleiden for &#8220;eavesdropping&#8221; in his hidden-camera probe of Planned Parenthood.
Harris only faced tough questions from Mike Pence. For example, he pressed about her refusal to take a stand against court packing. We need more balanced moderators. We&#8217;re not getting fair and equally accountable debates.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Kamala Harris

GRAHAM: The Moderator Who Built Kamala’s Cocoon

debates

Mike Pence

In the last few months, the Trump-Pence team has held a plethora of press conferences and &quot;pool sprays&quot; during which they&#039;ve taken hostile liberal

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Sympathetic Washington Post writer Matt Viser reports Joe Biden is pushing his religion in &#8220;a seven-figure ad buy that will air on religious TV stations and Christian radio networks in nine battleground states.&#8221;
In one ad, &#8220;Morning,&#8221; the narrator cites Biden&#8217;s faith as what got him through &#8220;dark times,&#8221; when he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972 and his son Beau Biden to cancer in 2015. Faith in God should get us through hard times. But you don&#8217;t have to belong to a church to have faith.
Maybe I watch too many Biden presentations, but these tragic losses are energetically, robotically presented anywhere and everywhere as humanizing &#8220;poor Joe&#8221; talking points. At least for me, it&#8217;s become distasteful.
In the second ad, &#8220;Principles,&#8221; Biden explicitly defines himself as Catholic. &#8220;My father would say the cardinal sin of all sins is the abuse of power.&#8221; A priest nods along as Biden aligns himself with &#8220;basic essential elements of what constitutes Catholicism. The idea that everyone&#8217;s entitled to dignity, that you have an obligation to reach out and be inclusive.&#8221;
Meanwhile, Biden warned that Judge Amy Coney Barrett&#8217;s nomination to the Supreme Court means &#8220;Women could lose the bedrock rights enshrined in Roe vs. Wade for 50 years.&#8221; Enshrined? As in &#8220;to preserve or cherish as sacred&#8221;? Abortion is &#8220;sacred.&#8221; Abortion rights define &#8220;the soul of the country.&#8221;
To Biden, unborn children apparently have no human dignity, and killing them doesn&#8217;t mean you aren&#8217;t &#8220;inclusive.&#8221; Killing a child even after it&#8217;s viable in the womb is never an &#8220;abuse of power.&#8221;
We can easily state as fact that this is the exact opposite of the Catholic teaching on abortion, and Joe Biden knows it. In this campaign, he has gone to a new extreme, insisting faithful Catholic taxpayers should be forced to fund abortions with their own hard-earned money.
Abortion is a central moral concern of the Catholic Church, but it&#8217;s not the only one. As a conservative, I have to examine my soul to ponder if I&#8217;ve done enough for the poor and neglected, if I have treated everyone with dignity. We confess our sins to each other at each Mass — &#8220;for what I have done, and for what I have failed to do.&#8221;
But we&#8217;re constantly told Biden is a &#8220;devout Catholic.&#8221; NBC News analyst Howard Fineman gushed: &#8220;Joe Biden is running the most overtly religious campaign since Jimmy Carter in 1976. It is as clear as a large-print Bible. He&#8217;s offering himself as Father Joe and Joe the father: a devout, humble man of decency.&#8221;
Don&#8217;t buy Fineman&#8217;s sales pitch. He also just tweeted, &#8220;#SenateDemocrats need the brains and guts of @alfranken on the #JudiciaryCommittee right now — he&#8217;d carve up Coney Barrett.&#8221; Carve her up &#8230; like an unborn child?
So, Amy Coney Barrett&#8217;s Catholicism must be &#8220;carved up.&#8221; Her faith apparently imposes &#8220;hard times&#8221;; it doesn&#8217;t get you through hard times. Reporters are frightened she might have a rosary in her pocket, while they tout Biden&#8217;s rosary in his pocket. She&#8217;s some kind of theocratic freak, and Biden is &#8220;Father Joe.&#8221;
The media elites describe Biden&#8217;s Catholicism as &#8220;complicated but deeply American.&#8221; I can&#8217;t help but hear something insulting in that. Disagree with Biden and you&#8217;re simplistic, and perhaps less American for your uncomplicated obedience to a distant moral authority. They&#8217;re describing chummy, wink-wink Kennedy Catholicism. Strike a pose in the pews; tout abortion in the news.
Catholics should ask Biden whether he&#8217;ll make an ad denouncing vandalism against churches and statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Or an ad denouncing Democrats who allow protests in the streets but not masses inside church. We won&#8217;t expect the media to ask anything like this.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Rosary

GRAHAM: Biden And Barrett And ‘Complicated’ Catholics

Amy Coney Barrett

Catholic Church

Supreme Court

Reporters are frightened she might have a rosary in her pocket, while they tout Biden&#039;s rosary in his pocket.

GRAHAM: Biden And Barrett And ‘Complicated’ Catholics | The Daily Wire

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Why is Joe Biden always putting a &#8220;lid&#8221; on his campaign? If you&#8217;re not familiar with the press lingo, a &#8220;lid&#8221; is a note to your press pool that you plan no further public events on your schedule. Biden tends to put a &#8220;lid&#8221; on it at 9 or 10 in the morning, saying his press corps has nothing to cover.
On Sept. 23, they called a &#8220;lid&#8221; at 9:30 a.m. — the ninth time they&#8217;ve done it this month. Is it due to never-ending debate prep? Biden denied that, saying he&#8217;s just getting ready to prepare.
Since March, Biden has barely done any campaigning, trying to make a virtue out of the fact that he&#8217;s not going anywhere or saying much of anything during the coronavirus pandemic. Biden&#8217;s staff would claim that while Trump endangers his voters by having rallies, their candidate is leading by example.
He&#8217;s not leading by example. He&#8217;s lidding by example.
Guess what? The liberal media, those energetic watchdogs who bombastically claim to keep democracy from &#8220;dying in darkness,&#8221; don&#8217;t care one whit. I popped into the Nexis search engine to find out how many times Brian Stelter&#8217;s Army at CNN has raged against Biden&#8217;s &#8220;lid.&#8221; In the last month, there are two scripts that contain the words &#8220;Biden&#8221; and &#8220;lid.&#8221; Neither was about a Biden story.
One was CNN&#8217;s White House shrieker Jim Acosta still obsessing over the Lafayette Square protesters cleared out on June 1 so President Trump could strike a pose in front of St. John&#8217;s Episcopal Church. Apparently, someone in the military wanted to use a heat ray on protesters, but it was never used. How this nonstarter is &#8220;news&#8221; is anyone&#8217;s guess.
Acosta used the L-word as he told Don Lemon: &#8220;I don&#8217;t think this is the last we&#8217;ve heard from this whistleblower. He is, I mean, he is doing something patriotic here, Don. He is blowing the lid off of our government using what are some pretty ridiculous tactics, harsh and un-American tactics on our fellow citizens.&#8221;
Actually, no — these tactics were not used.
ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS? Is there something wrong with the search engine? These networks all send cage fighters into the Trump and McEnany briefings, but they&#8217;re docile little lambs on the &#8220;lid.&#8221;
The Washington Post? No stories with &#8220;Biden&#8221; and &#8220;lid,&#8221; and media specialists like Erik Wemple and Paul Farhi haven&#8217;t touched it. USA Today had nothing.
What about NPR? Nope, media reporter David Folkenflik was napping like a Biden, although one weekend anchor promised &#8220;breaking news on the canning lid shortage.&#8221;
The New York Times? &#8220;Biden&#8221; and &#8220;lid&#8221; drew no stories. At least Mark Leibovich of the Times reported on Sept. 22 describing Biden&#8217;s &#8220;tightly restricted bubble,&#8221; that his &#8220;pandemic-era campaign appearances can resemble the pandemic-era NFL — quiet, eerie and almost entirely fan-free.&#8221; He noted pro-Trump protesters hold signs saying &#8220;Hidin&#8217; Biden.&#8221; But the story was loaded with Biden fans supporting his, er, restraint.
It&#8217;s not like Biden&#8217;s press corps is known for asking him the tough questions. On Sept. 23, he traveled to North Carolina, and reporters asked him softballs like, &#8220;What gives you the sense that you can win?&#8221;
Let&#8217;s bet that if Biden loses, all this extremely cooperative behavior will be upended. The media will complain that Biden was a bad candidate who didn&#8217;t campaign and venture outside the bubble enough. As usual, they&#8217;ll assign exactly zero blame to their own pusillanimous silence.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

GRAHAM: Biden Keeps A Lid On Liberal Media

Why is Joe Biden always putting a &quot;lid&quot; on his campaign? If you&#039;re not familiar with the press lingo, a &quot;lid&quot; is a note to your press pool that you plan

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CNN host Brian Stelter has a slimy new book out called &#8220;Hoax&#8221; in which he attacks Fox News and President Donald Trump with a lot of anonymously sourced hit quotes. My favorite stop on his book tour has to be an appearance during the closing minutes of ABC&#8217;s &#8220;The View&#8221; on Sept. 16.
Stelter&#8217;s obsequious inquirers such as NPR&#8217;s Terry Gross and PBS&#8217; Judy Woodruff never pressed him on whether CNN manipulated politicians behind the scenes and lied about it. What made his appearance on &#8220;The View&#8221; great was how several co-hosts turned the microscope back on CNN.
Meghan McCain turned right to the ethical questions being asked about CNN lately, most prominently by Tucker Carlson on Fox. Turnabout is fair play. Carlson played audio in which CNN President Jeff Zucker appeared to offer debate advice to Trump in 2016 and talk about offering Trump his own program. Jake Tapper was exposed for allegedly lying about trying to urge his Republican acquaintance Sean Parnell to run for Congress in a &#8220;safer R district&#8221; instead of Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb&#8217;s vulnerable seat.
McCain really drew blood discussing the unprofessional comedy between Chris Cuomo and his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo: &#8220;I had serious problems with the way Chris Cuomo had a recurring prime-time, sort of comic routine with his brother instead of asking about policies that were literally sending my friend Janice Dean&#8217;s older relatives to die in nursing homes. So, with the criticism of CNN, do you believe that this is acceptable?&#8221;
Stelter didn&#8217;t answer the question honestly. It&#8217;s tough to be forced on the defense, especially when you play the Media Ethics Police on &#8220;Reliable Sources&#8221; every Sunday morning. Instead, Stelter first complained these tapes &#8220;are cherry-picked.&#8221; Everything that airs on the news is &#8220;cherry-picked.&#8221;
Then he turned to leaker conspiracy theories: &#8220;You know, Michael Cohen says these audiotapes were only held by Trump, the Trump Organization and the DOJ. So, all of a sudden, they&#8217;re airing on Fox News. You have to wonder if it&#8217;s another example of this feedback loop that exists between Trump and Fox.&#8221;
Michael Cohen is a convicted liar, so he&#8217;s probably not your most, ahem, reliable source.
By then, Stelter was flailing: &#8220;I&#8217;m not a spokesperson for CNN. You know, it&#8217;s not for me to comment on these tapes. Here&#8217;s what I do think is sad, though. I think it&#8217;s sad that private conversations get leaked out, get distorted and then, you know, they become polarized and weaponized.&#8221;
If you&#8217;ve turned pages of Stelter&#8217;s book, you know that comment is simply obscene. The book is nastily &#8220;cherry-picked,&#8221; with recounts of leaked private conversations that are &#8220;weaponized.&#8221; The book is filled with tawdry little claims, such as that Rupert Murdoch&#8217;s wife Jerry Hall calls Trump a &#8220;pig.&#8221; Unlike Carlson&#8217;s revelations, most of this gossipy material isn&#8217;t backed by recordings.
Stelter wasn&#8217;t done being preposterous. ABC&#8217;s Sara Haines asked if CNN is guilty of blurring news and opinion, which she said contributes to &#8220;the misinformation and extreme divisiveness&#8221; of politics today.
He agreed but claimed, &#8220;I talk about it with my staff at &#8216;Reliable Sources,&#8217; and I always want to make sure that I&#8217;m not part of that problem.&#8221; What? Anyone who has watched this show knows Extreme Divisiveness is routine, starting with his opening, during which he snarls anti-Trump commentaries. One of his guests said Trump&#8217;s policies would kill more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. Stelter pushback: Zero.
Beyond lamely claiming CNN is standing up for decency and democracy, Stelter can&#8217;t defend CNN for blurring opinion into the &#8220;news&#8221; product and providing an assembly line of acidulous anti-Trump segments day after day. He can&#8217;t claim CNN isn&#8217;t trying to manipulate and coach newsmakers behind the scenes. He&#8217;s not allowed to scorn the brotherly softball treatment on &#8220;Cuomo Prime Time.&#8221; He clearly wasn&#8217;t prepared for this test, and he flunked.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Brian Stelter

GRAHAM: Brian Stelter Flunks At Defending CNN

Donald Trump

Meghan McCain

The View

CNN host Brian Stelter has a slimy new book out called &quot;Hoax&quot; in which he attacks Fox News and President Donald Trump with a lot of anonymously sourced

GRAHAM: Brian Stelter Flunks At Defending CNN | The Daily Wire

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&#8220;Trump lied. People died.&#8221; This was the hot smear from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the first snippets of tape were leaked by Washington Post bigfoot Bob Woodward from his new anti-Trump book, &#8220;Rage.&#8221; The president told Woodward back in March that he wanted to downplay the coronavirus so people wouldn&#8217;t panic, even though he said he&#8217;d been told it was an airborne threat.
Predictably echoing Schumer, MSNBC&#8217;s Joe Scarborough dug into the mud bucket: &#8220;Donald Trump says he didn&#8217;t want Americans to panic. No, he just wanted to sit by and watch them die.&#8221; Insert the MSNBC pandemic slogan: &#8220;This is who we are. We are in this together.&#8221;
Let&#8217;s put aside the nagging question of why Republican presidents grant interviews to this liberal Watergate war horse. Let&#8217;s focus instead on the nastiness of blaming hundreds of thousands of deaths on the president. Imagine, for a minute, if Hillary Clinton had been president when the coronavirus arrived from China. Would the press place a single death at the White House door?
That&#8217;s a rhetorical question.
Grant the liberals a few points and assume the death toll were only, say, 150,000 at this moment. Consult the coverage of former President Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis. The reporters would show Clinton valiantly working 16-hour days, endlessly consulting scientists, and they would tenderly feel the pain of her sleepless dedication to saving lives.
Any Republican trying to blame Clinton for a single American death from this persistently infectious disease would face the wrath of &#8220;Pants on Fire&#8221; and &#8220;Four Pinocchios&#8221; ratings from the &#8220;independent fact-checkers&#8221; for stating &#8220;without evidence&#8221; that the White House failed to combat the pandemic.
Look no further than the Obama-Biden handling of the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. The network news couldn&#8217;t even say the word &#8220;Obama&#8221; when Obama bumbled with a vaccine that October. Then-CBS anchor Harry Smith said: &#8220;Now to the H1N1 flu. Federal health officials admitted today their projected timetable for producing the vaccine was way off.&#8221; ABC&#8217;s Charles Gibson reported, &#8220;The government originally predicted 40 million doses of vaccine would be available by the end of October, now says there will only be about 28 million.&#8221;
When Democrats mess up, &#8220;federal health officials&#8221; and &#8220;the government&#8221; get blamed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were 12,469 American deaths from H1N1 under Obama. Scarborough and the rest of the media were too bored to say much.
This happened all through the Obama years. In 2014, a scandal erupted when hundreds of veterans died waiting for treatment at Veterans Affairs hospitals. When this socialized-medicine debacle was at its hottest in May, ABC&#8217;s Jon Karl didn&#8217;t hold Obama accountable. He told viewers, &#8220;President Obama promised accountability after meeting with Shinseki,&#8221; then the VA secretary. NBC said, &#8220;Kristen Welker reports the president considers Secretary Shinseki to be on probation.&#8221;
In June, NBC anchorman Brian Williams interviewed Obama in France on the 70th anniversary of D-Day &#8230; and never asked about the VA scandal. He did end the interview, however, by pushing an old Obama myth that his grandpa Stanley Dunham &#8220;fought in Patton&#8217;s Third Army.&#8221;
Two months later came the same song, this time from NBC&#8217;s Lester Holt: &#8220;For his part, President Obama addressed the scandal again today. In a speech to the national convention of the American Legion, he promised a new culture of accountability.&#8221;
These networks aren&#8217;t part of a &#8220;culture of accountability.&#8221; They smear Republicans and absolve Democrats. That&#8217;s how they see their job. A President Hillary would have expected their servility &#8230; and they would have delivered.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Hillary Clinton

GRAHAM: Would President Hillary Be Blamed For Coronavirus Deaths?

Bob Woodward

Coronavirus

COVID-19

&quot;Trump lied. People died.&quot; This was the hot smear from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the first snippets of tape were leaked by Washington

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Apparently, the proper role of the &#8220;independent fact-checker&#8221; during today&#8217;s presidential campaign is to present the consistent opinion that Joe Biden is a force for truth and light, and President Donald Trump is a rampaging liar who never says anything true.
No one should suggest that these &#8220;fact-checker&#8221; groups need to parcel their rulings out in a completely even fashion so everyone gets a participation trophy for being half-right. But the dramatic tilt in these &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; betrays an obvious partisan bias.
Just look at PolitiFact&#8217;s Truth-O-Meter rulings for Biden for the month of August: Mostly True, Mostly True, Mostly True, Mostly True, Mostly True and Half True.
Now let&#8217;s compare that to Trump&#8217;s August Truth-O-Meter rulings: one Half True, two Mostly False, 11 False and four Pants on Fire.
The shock is that PolitiFact threw in one Half True. What drives you batty is that PolitiFact employed one of its typical tropes, saying: &#8220;President Trump and Housing Secretary Ben Carson claimed a San Francisco lawmaker pushed &#8216;to abolish single-family zoning in California.&#8217; Housing experts say the claim is technically correct but leaves out key context.&#8221;
Overall, from the start of 2019 through August 2020, Trump has gotten 197 Truth-O-Meter ratings, and Biden has only gotten 64. Trump rated Mostly False or worse in 156 of them (79%). He was only Mostly True or True in 17 ratings (8.6%). By contrast, Biden rated Mostly True or True in more than half: 33 of 64 (52%), and then there are 29 Mostly False or worse (45%).
Does anyone less partisan than Brian Stelter think these &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; should boast of their &#8220;independence&#8221;?
Some might suggest this is just about a serious aversion to Trump&#8217;s casual relationship with the truth. So let&#8217;s take a broader view. Take the dates of the party conventions, from the start of the Democratic one, on Aug. 17, to the aftermath of the Republican one, on Aug. 28. Over those 12 days, PolitiFact checked Republicans and their affiliated PACs and pundits 32 times and only checked Democrats and their equivalents 11 times. The disparity of checks alone implies a partisan tilt.
The Democrats drew eight Mostly True or True ratings, two Half Trues and one Mostly False, a 10-to-1 true-false ratio. During their convention, former first lady Michelle Obama scored a True, and former President Bill Clinton was Mostly True — as usual?
Then look at the Republicans. There were four Mostly Trues and one Half True &#8230; out of 32. The other 27 ratings were Mostly False or worse. Trump drew two Pants on Fire ratings. Donald Trump Jr. and Rush Limbaugh also received a Pants on Fire. This all adds up to almost a 1-to-8 true-false ratio.
On July 17, PolitiFact posted a YouTube video of executive editor Angie Drobnic Holan to answer the question &#8220;What is PolitiFact&#8217;s agenda?&#8221; Holan declared, &#8220;Our agenda is simple: It&#8217;s to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.&#8221; That&#8217;s what all the left-wing journalists say.
She later proclaimed: &#8220;The PolitiFact agenda is: Don&#8217;t take sides with any politician or party.&#8221; Really? There&#8217;s no political tilt? She claimed: &#8220;We&#8217;re independent, and we work hard to find the truth. So we follow the facts wherever they take us, regardless of who made the claim.&#8221;
Fact check: Pants on Fire.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Pants on fire

GRAHAM: PolitiFact’s Pants-On-Fire Claims Of Neutrality

PolitiFact

Apparently, the proper role of the &quot;independent fact-checker&quot; during today&#039;s presidential campaign is to present the consistent opinion that Joe Biden is

GRAHAM: PolitiFact&#039;s Pants-On-Fire Claims Of Neutrality | The Daily Wire

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There may be no more blatant violation of the concept of truth in advertising than CNN&#8217;s boastful claiming of the slogan &#8220;Facts First.&#8221; If facts were water and opinions were whiskey, CNN would concoct a very potent cocktail.
It&#8217;s easy to compare CNN&#8217;s very hostile coverage in the minutes after Vice President Mike Pence finished a Republican convention speech in front of a small crowd at Fort McHenry to CNN&#8217;s reaction to Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris&#8217; speech the week before.
Jake Tapper thinks of himself as firmly fact-based, especially when rebutting Republican speeches. Over video that showed President Donald Trump and Melania Trump engaging with supporters, Tapper insisted Pence was &#8220;whitewashing&#8221; the Trump team&#8217;s coronavirus testing numbers. Then he added: &#8220;Speaking of whitewashing, as I believe the vice president did to a large degree about their record when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, again, the U.S., with less than 5% of the world&#8217;s population, has more than 20% of the world&#8217;s deaths.&#8221;
The &#8220;facts first&#8221; assumption at CNN is always that Trump and Pence &#8220;own&#8221; the American death toll. Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was in charge of the state with the highest death toll, and on CNN, he was celebrated with jokes about large Q-tip-type testing swabs from his brother/CNN host Chris Cuomo.
Jaundiced Jake didn&#8217;t break in after Gov. Cuomo &#8220;whitewashed&#8221; his record at the Democratic National Convention &#8230; because no one broke in at CNN. The network ran the DNC videotape and tried not to say a word.
Tapper then assessed Pence on rioting: &#8220;Speaking of whitewashing, they talked about the violence in the streets, including in Kenosha, Vice President Pence did. There was no specific mention of the fact that the 17-year-old who has been accused of murdering two — we believe they were protestors — is, according to his social media accounts, a Trump supporter.&#8221;
This network would not suggest that the Bernie Sanders fan who tried to kill Republican congressmen on a baseball diamond in 2017 was somehow owned by Sanders. This &#8230; is CNN.
Now rewind a week to the minutes after Kamala Harris&#8217; speech. Tapper offered no fact check of Harris. He gushed: &#8220;I don&#8217;t think we can overstate how significant a moment it is for the girls and women and people of color in the United States and around the world watching this event tonight. What a historic moment for Kamala Harris &#8230; It really is truly historic and one of these moments that is going to change people&#8217;s lives and inspire people because of the groundbreaking nature of that.&#8221;
And the speech itself? &#8220;There was a lot of very progressive messaging going on there in terms of systemic racism and ideas like that,&#8221; he said.
Facts don&#8217;t come first. &#8220;Historic&#8221; racial and gender quotas accomplished by Democrats come first.
Tapper then put his promotional pedal to the metal in assessing former President Barack Obama&#8217;s speech earlier in the night. &#8220;He&#8217;s well aware of how historic what he&#8217;s doing is,&#8221; Tapper said. &#8220;(W)here he spoke this evening, the Museum of the American Revolution, which is a part of Philadelphia that is full of all sorts of colonial history and landmarks, that says to me that he knew that he was taking a stand for what our Founding Fathers back in 1776 were taking a stand for in his mind.&#8221;
For those of you who don&#8217;t freely associate Obama&#8217;s presidency with founding principles, put away your airsickness bag. This froth wasn&#8217;t aimed at you. It was for Obama, and the Obama voters who make up CNN&#8217;s audience. Their liberal satisfaction comes first, not the facts.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Jake Tapper

GRAHAM: Jake Tapper’s Revolting Post-Game Analysis

Barack Obama

There may be no more blatant violation of the concept of truth in advertising than CNN&#039;s boastful claiming of the slogan &quot;Facts First.&quot; If facts were

GRAHAM: Jake Tapper&#039;s Revolting Post-Game Analysis | The Daily Wire

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Ryan Lizza, chief Washington correspondent of Politico, is the kind of character assassin who likes to go to the White House briefing and throw beanball questions about how many coronavirus deaths President Donald Trump thinks are acceptable.
If that sounds darkly partisan, you could also see the sunny side of Lizza on Twitter, who almost levitated over former President Barack Obama&#8217;s speech at the Democratic National Convention. &#8220;Barack Obama just delivered the finest convention speech in modern history (again),&#8221; he tweeted. &#8220;Spell-binding, chilling, optimistic, beautifully written, and expertly delivered. Incredible moment.&#8221;
Conservative Twitter informally awarded him the Chris Matthews Thrill Up My Leg Prize for most infatuated reaction. But it was still second to the emotions of the average &#8220;objective&#8221; journalist.
So let&#8217;s focus on how Obama&#8217;s speech could be evaluated more critically. Some lines were mean-spirited, phony or laughable.
1. Obama said: &#8220;Donald Trump hasn&#8217;t grown into the job because he can&#8217;t. And the consequences of that failure are severe: 170,000 Americans dead, millions of jobs gone, while those at the top take in more than ever.&#8221;
If we were to have a President Hillary Clinton, would Obama (or his many media allies) consider it fair game to blame tens of thousands of American COVID-19 deaths on her? Do they honestly believe that, under Democrats, the death toll would have been 170? That would ignore the fact that the worst coronavirus death tolls are largely in states with Democratic governors.
2. Obama touted Joe Biden&#8217;s character: &#8220;Joe&#8217;s a man who learned early on to treat every person he meets with respect and dignity &#8230; That empathy, that decency, the belief that everybody counts — that&#8217;s who Joe is.&#8221;
That&#8217;s a Pants on Fire lie. Just weeks ago, Biden sneered that any black voter who doesn&#8217;t support him isn&#8217;t really black. In 2012, Biden smeared Wall Street when speaking before an audience with many African Americans, saying, &#8220;They&#8217;re gonna put y&#8217;all back in chains.&#8221; Examples abound.
3. This Obama spin about Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris really makes opponents laugh: &#8220;They believe that no one — including the president — is above the law, and that no public official — including the president — should use their office to enrich themselves or their supporters.&#8221;
Does that include presidents who massively enrich themselves immediately after leaving office? I don&#8217;t recall Biden denouncing Obama&#8217;s mega deals with Penguin Random House and Netflix.
4. This routine about Biden and Harris and their beliefs continued. &#8220;They understand that in this democracy, the commander in chief doesn&#8217;t use the men and women of our military, who are willing to risk everything to protect our nation, as political props to deploy against peaceful protesters on our own soil,&#8221; Obama said.
If Obama were ever surrounded by skeptical journalists, they might ask which protesters in cities like Portland and Seattle are &#8220;peaceful,&#8221; because it certainly wasn&#8217;t the hooligans throwing bricks and trying to set federal buildings on fire. Obama is right that Democrats love to blur the peaceful and violent protesters into a heroic whole. Harris called them a &#8220;coalition of conscience&#8221; taking to the streets.
5. Finally, Obama said of the Biden-Harris ticket: &#8220;They understand that political opponents aren&#8217;t &#8216;un-American&#8217; just because they disagree with you; that a free press isn&#8217;t the &#8216;enemy&#8217; but the way we hold officials accountable.&#8221;
False. In April, Biden said Trump&#8217;s differing opinion on mail-in voting was &#8220;un-American.&#8221; And most conservatives thought it was rich for Obama to uphold the press, when even Obama-supporting journalists admitted he was the harshest president in history in prosecuting journalists during leak investigations.
Donald Trump isn&#8217;t wrong to think of the media elite as an enemy, even as Obama arrogantly poses as the defender of hardened observers such as ABC&#8217;s Terry Moran, who oozed in 2009 that Obama was &#8220;taking a step down into the Oval Office.&#8221;
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.

GRAHAM: Phony Lines From Barack Obama’s Speech

Democratic National Convention

Ryan Lizza, chief Washington correspondent of Politico, is the kind of character assassin who likes to go to the White House briefing and throw beanball

GRAHAM: Phony Lines From Barack Obama&#039;s Speech | The Daily Wire

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The new Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Democratic ticket debuted in Delaware on Aug. 12, followed by the typically frantic partisan sugar-sculpting competition on cable &#8220;news.&#8221; But MSNBC&#8217;s Lawrence O&#8217;Donnell took the saccharine prize by claiming that there was not a single false utterance in 35 minutes.
The energetic promoters of &#8220;independent fact-checkers&#8221; — who want &#8220;real-time&#8221; fact-checking of President Donald Trump — couldn&#8217;t muster any effort to evaluate this thunderclap of leftist rhetoric echoing in a nearly empty high school gym. Let&#8217;s list a few fact-mangling whoppers. Start with Biden.
1. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have given us &#8220;four years of mismanagement and coddling of terrorists and thugs around the world,&#8221; Biden said. Did Trump &#8220;coddle&#8221; Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group? No, he&#8217;s dead. Did Trump &#8220;coddle&#8221; Iranian terrorist Gen. Qassem Soleimani? He&#8217;s dead, too. Biden opposed taking down Osama bin Laden, so he should sit a spell.
2. Trump has no &#8220;plan&#8221; for the pandemic. He has &#8220;no real help for the states and local governments trying to fill the vacuum of leadership from the White House, no real help for children and educators, for small businesses and front-line workers,&#8221; Biden said. We didn&#8217;t allocate $3 trillion to mitigate the pandemic, aiding governments and businesses and vaccine development?
3. Trump was accused of referring to neo-Nazis and racists when he said, &#8220;There are very fine people on both sides&#8221; of the 2017 Charlottesville protests. This is transparently false &#8230; and yet, fact-checkers like PolitiFact go limp and let Biden unspool this lie. Reporters at the time prodded Trump, and he explicitly condemned the neo-Nazis and racists.
4. Trump is &#8220;on track to leave office with the worst jobs record of any American president in modern history.&#8221; In January, FactCheck.org reported, &#8220;The economy added 6.7 million jobs, and unemployment fell to the lowest rate in half a century.&#8221; We&#8217;re now in a pandemic that shocked the economy, but the economy is recovering. Does anyone think the &#8220;fact-checkers&#8221; would let a Republican blame the Democrats for the economy if this were to happen under a President Hillary Clinton?
5. Kamala Harris said: &#8220;The president&#8217;s mismanagement of the pandemic has plunged us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. &#8230; He inherited the longest economic expansion in history &#8230; And then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground.&#8221; Did Democrats oppose the lockdown kicking and screaming? Shouldn&#8217;t they share responsibility for it?
6. Harris insisted, &#8220;After the most competitive primary in history, the country received a resounding message that Joe was the person to lead us forward.&#8221; That&#8217;s a joke. There were a huge number of candidates, but it didn&#8217;t end up competitive at all, in part because of the pandemic. It certainly didn&#8217;t match Obama vs. Clinton in 2008.
7. Harris said, &#8220;I cannot wait for America to get to know my husband, Doug, and our amazing kids, Cole and Ella.&#8221; Our? Facebook labels claims like this as having &#8220;Missing Context.&#8221; They&#8217;re Harris&#8217; stepkids from her 2014 marriage to Doug Emhoff, and they&#8217;re 26 and 21 years old.
8. Speaking of terrible context, Harris tried to compare the coronavirus pandemic to the Ebola outbreak of 2014: &#8220;Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job. Only two people in the United States died. Two. That is what&#8217;s called leadership.&#8221; These are apples and oranges in epidemiology. Ebola is much deadlier than the coronavirus. But the spread isn&#8217;t nearly the same, since Ebola is not infectious until you have symptoms, and you&#8217;re quickly bedridden.
The nation&#8217;s most influential newspapers largely skipped over many of these troubling quotes in their accounts. Did that occur because they knew how unfactual these claims were?
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Fake News

GRAHAM: Joe And Kamala’s Fact-Mangling Debut

fact-checking

The new Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Democratic ticket debuted in Delaware on Aug. 12, followed by the typically frantic partisan sugar-sculpting

GRAHAM: Joe And Kamala&#039;s Fact-Mangling Debut | The Daily Wire

https://www.dailywire.com/news/graham-joe-and-kamalas-fact-mangling-debut/

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Fifty years after the Public Broadcasting Service launched, we&#8217;re still seeing our taxpayer subsidies transform into Democratic donations during election years. On Aug. 4, &#8220;PBS NewsHour&#8221; hatched a love-in with Dr. Jill Biden.
Anchor Judy Woodruff hit every Joe Biden campaign talking point with partisan perfection. She began by reminding viewers of the Biden family losses, saying: &#8220;He had lost his first wife and another child. You were coming out of your own marriage. You describe how daunting it was. How did you do it?&#8221;
Then she recalled how Joe Biden&#8217;s son Beau Biden died of brain cancer five years ago. The interview ended on a light note about how, in March, Jill protected her candidate from two hecklers who jumped onstage at a Los Angeles event. Woodruff joked, &#8220;So, my question is, has the Secret Service deputized you?&#8221;
The closest thing to a difficult question was still a softball. &#8220;The campaign, as I&#8217;m sure you know, is already one of the most, if not the most polarized in history. It&#8217;s down and dirty,&#8221; Woodruff complained. &#8220;The names that are being thrown around, President Trump has already called your husband corrupt, crazy, mentally shot, the most extreme left-wing candidate ever. This is going to be one for the history books. How do you get prepared for that? Because it is going to be personal; it is personal.&#8221;
Mrs. Biden circled right back to deaths in the family: &#8220;When we made our decision, Joe and I looked at one another, and I said, &#8216;Joe, we have been through the absolute worst thing that could happen to two people, and that is the loss of a child. &#8230; So, Donald Trump, whatever he throws at us, we can take it.'&#8221;
Woodruff said nothing about the nasty things Biden says about Trump: how the president is a &#8220;sociopath,&#8221; imposes &#8220;North Korean-style loyalty tests&#8221; and has taken &#8220;an authoritarian line of domination.&#8221;
Oh, sorry! Those are things &#8220;PBS NewsHour&#8221; pundit David Brooks has said about Trump just since March, and Woodruff never objected.
This brings me back to the 1992 conventions, when Woodruff offered the same soft soap to Hillary Clinton: &#8220;How important do you think it is that Hillary Clinton not become an issue in this campaign? And I ask that because Republicans, conservatives are already saying —you know, about the articles that have already been written — &#8216;She&#8217;s very liberal. She came into this campaign being the wife of a governor with a strong set of opinions on everything, to children&#8217;s rights to aid to the El Salvador rebels and so on and so on. How important is it that that not enter in, and should it enter in?&#8221;
But a month later, Woodruff took a different approach with Barbara Bush. She was pitched one hardball after another. &#8220;U.S. Treasurer Villalpando &#8230; just said yesterday &#8230; that Gov. Clinton is a skirt chaser &#8230; does that have a place in this campaign?&#8221; Woodruff asked. Bush objected, rightly saying Woodruff didn&#8217;t do this to the Democrats. Woodruff pressed on about how infidelity isn&#8217;t a legitimate issue.
Two nights later, Woodruff was at it again with Marilyn Quayle, saying, &#8220;I still don&#8217;t understand what bringing up draft dodging and some of the other points you made has to do with the election.&#8221; Then-candidate Bill Clinton had said he smoked pot but &#8220;didn&#8217;t inhale.&#8221; Woodruff asked Quayle: &#8220;Why did you bring that up? Is drug use important in this campaign, do you think?&#8221; She also objected to how Quayle supposedly distorted Hillary Clinton&#8217;s record by citing Clinton&#8217;s old writings and calling her &#8220;liberal&#8221; and &#8220;radical.&#8221;
Now you know why Melania Trump won&#8217;t be sitting down with Judy Woodruff during this campaign.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Joe and Jill Biden

GRAHAM: PBS Adores Democratic Wives And Hates GOP Wives

Jill Biden

Fifty years after the Public Broadcasting Service launched, we&#039;re still seeing our taxpayer subsidies transform into Democratic donations during election

GRAHAM: PBS Adores Democratic Wives And Hates GOP Wives | The Daily Wire

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The 2020 campaign has been so contorted by the coronavirus that the Democrats and Republicans are still figuring out how on Earth they&#8217;ll hold virtual conventions. Now imagine how it could make a mess out of November.
As President Donald Trump bizarrely tweeted about delaying the election, the media are starting to admit that mail-in voting might not turn out very well. People inherently know from experience that trusting the U.S. Postal Service with their vote sounds sketchy. Almost everyone has lost something they sent in the mail.
A month ago, The New York Times was throwing the usual darts at Trump for tweeting that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. It was spewing &#8220;fact-checks&#8221; in staunch defense of the integrity of mail-in voting.
Then, reality intruded. The Times published a story headlined &#8220;Mail Carrier in West Virginia Pleads Guilty to Attempted Election Fraud.&#8221; Then it was forced to report from its own city on July 17. The headline and subheading were blunt: &#8220;3 Weeks After Primary, N.Y. Officials Still Can&#8217;t Say Who Won Key Races: Tens of thousands of absentee ballots in New York are still uncounted and many races have yet to be called. What will November look like?&#8221;
Two Times reporters lamented it was &#8220;absurd&#8221; that ballots had been barely counted: &#8220;In the 12th Congressional District, where Representative Carolyn B. Maloney is fighting for her political life against her challenger, Suraj Patel, only 800 of some 65,000 absentee ballots had been tabulated.&#8221; Even now, the Associated Press hasn&#8217;t declared a winner between these Democrats.
This does not inspire confidence. It leaves too much time for cynical conspiracies about manipulation of the results.
The first and foremost reason for these delays is the number of absentee ballots: More than 400,000 were mailed for the June New York City primary, compared with just 76,000 counted in the city in the 2008 presidential election. Now imagine this deluge nationwide. Do we really want to wait weeks to figure out who won which races?
CBS News also attempted to explain how mail-in voting may not be ideal. &#8220;CBS This Morning&#8221; co-host Tony Dokoupil reported that they attempted to mail 100 mock ballots to a post office box in Philadelphia. The early results were terrible. &#8220;Twenty-one percent of our votes hadn&#8217;t materialized after four days,&#8221; he said. That number eventually improved after CBS begged postal workers for assistance, but the test concluded with a shocking 3% failure rate.
Dokoupil concluded: &#8220;(T)hat means three people who tried to vote by mail in our mock election were, in fact, disenfranchised by mail. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal, especially in what&#8217;s expected to be a record year for mail-in voting.&#8221;
This kind of journalism looks like an attempt to test the system &#8220;without fear or favor.&#8221; CBS took the chance to experiment with it and then shared the results even when they weren&#8217;t inspiring, at a time when reporters have stormed around saying there is &#8220;no evidence&#8221; that elections might be hampered.
Voting is a right and an honor, and this year, people have risked their health and stood in long lines to participate in our democracy. The prospect of an orderly election with results the people can have confidence in is looking grim.
In 1984, I cast my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan with an absentee ballot mailed home to Wisconsin. My father regretted to inform me, after Reagan won in a landslide, that my vote wasn&#8217;t counted. That wasn&#8217;t heartbreaking, but if this election gets messy and isn&#8217;t a landslide, we&#8217;re going to have heartbreak, angst and rage.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Mail-in ballots

GRAHAM: Will Democracy Seem Lost In The Mail?

mail-in voting

The 2020 campaign has been so contorted by the coronavirus that the Democrats and Republicans are still figuring out how on Earth they&#039;ll hold virtual

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Four years ago this week, the leftists at WikiLeaks tried to ruin the Democratic convention by posting a trove of emails exposing how the Democratic National Committee blatantly favored Hillary Clinton and tilted against Bernie Sanders. But even then, the media downplayed the juiciest tidbits for conservatives: emails in Clinton aide John Podesta&#8217;s account that demonstrated how shamelessly reporters and Democrats work hand in hand to shape the &#8220;news.&#8221; Some might even say it sounds fake.
For example:
1. ABC&#8217;s George Stephanopoulos harshly interviewed &#8220;Clinton Cash&#8221; author Peter Schweizer on his Sunday show on April 26, 2015. In an email, Clinton campaign staffer Jesse Ferguson boasted that Stephanopoulos &#8220;refuted&#8221; Schweizer and wrote: &#8220;Great work everyone. This interview is perfect. He lands nothing and everything is refuted (mostly based on our work).&#8221;
Stephanopoulos didn&#8217;t just donate to The Clinton Foundation. He donated at the office.
2. Maggie Haberman was singled out as a pliant recycler of the Clinton narratives. Podesta wrote: &#8220;We have &#8230; a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed.&#8221;
Now match that with how Haberman is the heroic challenger of all things Donald Trump for The New York Times. She&#8217;s not a journalist first; she never disappoints at teeing up stories for Democrats.
3. CNBC anchor Becky Quick — who helped moderate the atrocious CNBC Republican primary debate in 2015 — made a promise to Podesta after then-President Barack Obama nominated Sylvia Mathews Burwell for health and human services secretary, saying she would &#8220;make sure to defend her when things get further along in the nomination process.&#8221;
4. Before the release of a Clinton profile in July 2016, Mark Leibovich of The New York Times Magazine told Clinton communications director Jen Palmieri, &#8220;you could veto what you didn&#8217;t want.&#8221; At the end of an email, Palmieri listed her vetoes and then shot back like a demanding boss: &#8220;Let me know if that is not clear. Working from an iPhone on the plane so am not able to access the transcript to cut and paste.&#8221;
The Clinton campaign got cut-and-paste privileges!
Leibovich had quoted Clinton talking about eating moose stew and mocking Sarah Palin on her moose chatter. Palmieri instructed: &#8220;Fine to use the moose, but appreciate leaving the mention of Sarah Palin out.&#8221; She also instructed Leibovich to change a Clinton quote about gay rights.
&#8220;Pleasure doing business!&#8221; Palmieri oozed.
If you think this sort of collusion isn&#8217;t happening right now between Biden&#8217;s aides and the journalists who want Trump bounced from office, then you&#8217;re dreaming. Even worse, CBS brought on Leibovich to discuss WikiLeaks &#8230; and never mentioned any of this!
In February 2016, the website Gawker published a cache of emails between reporters and Clinton PR operative Phillippe Reines. The best example was Marc Ambinder, a longtime ABC and CBS reporter then with The Atlantic.
In July 2009, Clinton was delivering a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ambinder wanted an advance copy of the speech. Reines insisted on conditions. &#8220;You must describe her tone as &#8216;muscular,&#8217; and you must note that her most prominent underlings at the State Department (George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke) would be seated in front of her to convey her command of the staff,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;Got it,&#8221; Ambinder replied. Later that day, he published a story in which he Xeroxed the Clinton spin right at the top, touting a &#8220;muscular speech&#8221; Clinton would deliver that day in front of her rival &#8220;power centers&#8221; in the State Department.
This is how reporters are exploited by anonymous &#8220;senior administration officials&#8221; to set the table for Democrats, whether they are in power or not.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

GRAHAM: The Real Collusion Scandal Of The 2016 Campaign

2016 election

Four years ago this week, the leftists at WikiLeaks tried to ruin the Democratic convention by posting a trove of emails exposing how the Democratic

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For many Americans, the most painful consequence of the coronavirus lockdowns is the closing of church services. The grace and peace of Sunday makes it easier to make it through the week. But our media and political elites are indifferent to that pain, or openly hostile.
The New York Times recently proclaimed in a headline, &#8220;Churches Emerge as Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.&#8221; A three-reporter team announced the newspaper constructed a database to count church-spawned infections as the &#8220;virus rages&#8221; and blamed 650 infections across America on church activities. How is this a &#8220;major source&#8221; of cases?
Most regular churchgoers didn&#8217;t want to fit into that secular-media stereotype of being so fanatically trusting in God&#8217;s protection that they would gather unmasked in churches and share hugs and handshakes. They were willing to observe lockdowns as a public health necessity.
But then came the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd that clogged the streets. Suddenly, mass gatherings were not only allowed; they were praised and glorified on a global scale. The coronavirus counters dropped off cable-news screens.
There won&#8217;t be a headline in The New York Times that reads, &#8220;Protests Emerge as Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.&#8221; The Times created no database to warn of any dangerously disobedient and unscientific citizens among the &#8220;progressives.&#8221;
Instead, the newspapers proclaimed there was little evidence to suggest massive street protests were spreading the virus. &#8220;Public health experts&#8221; exempted protests from their danger zone, and some even marched themselves.
It&#8217;s a blatant double standard that strongly suggests that in today&#8217;s America, protests are the most sacred activity, far more sacred than Americans gathering to worship God. But not all protests, obviously. Protesting the lockdowns in May was pitched as a dangerously nutty exercise of the First Amendment. CNN&#8217;s warning headline on screen was &#8220;Protesters, Some Armed, Descend on Michigan Capitol.&#8221;
Leftist protesters never &#8220;descend on&#8221; places. In May, CNN cued up Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to describe how the people protesting her restrictions were a band of scary, gun-lugging extremists, maybe even Nazis and Confederates.
In a similar Democrat-enabling interview last week, CNN&#8217;s Wolf Blitzer brought on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to explain how he has banned large gatherings in his city but exempted the police-bashing protests.
The mayor said staying at home is best. &#8220;But we understand that this moment in history, people are talking about the need for historic changes,&#8221; he said. He touted his prank painting of &#8220;Black Lives Matter&#8221; in front of Trump Tower: &#8220;(T)his is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we&#8217;re used to, the parades, the fairs, we just can&#8217;t have that while we&#8217;re focusing on health right now.&#8221;
We&#8217;re focusing on health right now &#8230; unless you&#8217;re lining up with Historic Moments of Change. Someone — certainly not a journalist — might suggest the life of Christ was a very Historic Moment of Change worth celebrating.
Blitzer didn&#8217;t ask about the double standard because CNN has never been the Church News Network. He didn&#8217;t ask de Blasio about proclaiming that the &#8220;devout religious person&#8221; has less of a right to assemble than someone &#8220;grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism.&#8221;
In short, our media elites don&#8217;t care when religious believers of all colors and creeds are demoted to second-class citizens in a dizzying display of &#8220;affirmative discrimination.&#8221; Go complain about it to your God, they might say. This is a call to action, even that mysterious action called prayer.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Protest

GRAHAM: Leftist Protests More Sacred Than Church Services

Black Lives Matter

church

protests

For many Americans, the most painful consequence of the coronavirus lockdowns is the closing of church services. The grace and peace of Sunday makes it

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The July 6 Washington Post carried a typically colorful headline on top of the Style section. &#8220;A binder full of bombast: Kayleigh McEnany plays her boss and his base with derisive news briefing walk-offs.&#8221;
Media reporter Paul Farhi wrote McEnany&#8217;s &#8220;would-be smackdowns seemed so orchestrated&#8221; they only lacked some kind of musical flourish, like the opening witticisms that lead into the theme song on the crime drama &#8220;CSI: Miami.&#8221;
McEnany flourished again later that day, noting: &#8220;I was asked probably 12 questions about the Confederate flag. This President is focused on action. I&#8217;m a little dismayed that I didn&#8217;t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend.&#8221; She wasn&#8217;t asked &#8220;about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week, and over the last seven days shooting skyrocket by 142%.&#8221; Reporters groaned and protested.
For analysis of this tactic, Farhi turned to Ryan Lizza, the chief Washington correspondent of Politico. Lizza said these mic drops create delight for Trump and &#8220;the universe of Trump-friendly websites&#8221; who turn these commentaries into clips &#8220;for the MAGA-sphere.&#8221; That&#8217;s true. McEnany&#8217;s commentaries are great clickbait for people who want to see arrogant reporters get a dose of their own medicine.
But is Lizza really an objective observer? He then claimed: &#8220;We used to have this quaint idea that the press secretary wasn&#8217;t just a mouthpiece for the president, that half of the job was serving the press and the public. &#8230; That model is gone now. Now it&#8217;s almost pure theater, and (she&#8217;s serving) the negative partisanship that drives all else.&#8221;
Lizza isn&#8217;t being honest, because he represents &#8220;pure theater&#8221; and &#8220;negative partisanship&#8221; from the other side of the exchange. On May 26, he asked McEnany this beanball question repeatedly: &#8220;We&#8217;re about to cross the 100,000 dead American milestone &#8230; on Election Day, what does the White House view the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?&#8221;
Recently, Lizza asked her facetiously, &#8220;Does President Trump believe that it was a good thing that the South lost the Civil War?&#8221;
Lizza&#8217;s live-in girlfriend, Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine, beat him to the sleazy punch when she asked Trump on April 27, &#8220;If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?&#8221;
This kind of question is performance art. It&#8217;s a look-at-me spectacle, a Jim Acosta bump and grind. There&#8217;s nothing &#8220;quaint&#8221; about it.
Farhi closed out this article with the expertise of Jennifer Mercieca, described merely as &#8220;an associate professor at Texas A&amp;M who specializes in rhetoric and public affairs.&#8221; McEnany&#8217;s &#8220;leave-taking behavior&#8221; points to &#8220;how adversarial the relationship between the press secretary and the press is at present,&#8221; she says. &#8220;The abrupt ending signals a lack of respect for the press, especially after she has berated their reporting.&#8221;
The Post didn&#8217;t note that Mercieca has a brand-new book about Trump called &#8220;Demagogue for President.&#8221; Its dust cover promises she will show, as one review reads, &#8220;how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America&#8217;s authoritarian PT Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.&#8221;
This would seem to signal a lack of respect for the president — or the ringmaster/dictator, in her overactive imagination. This book sounds like quite a &#8220;binder full of bombast.&#8221; But The Washington Post is pretending that political bombast is a one-way street &#8230; like no one ever reads its front page.
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.

Kayleigh McEnany

GRAHAM: The Press Secretary Puts Down Bombastic Reporters

Washington Post

The July 6 Washington Post carried a typically colorful headline on top of the Style section. &quot;A binder full of bombast: Kayleigh McEnany plays her boss

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Levar Stoney, the black Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, made the executive decision to remove a statue of Gen. Thomas &#8220;Stonewall&#8221; Jackson on Monument Avenue to &#8220;expedite the healing process for the city.&#8221; This demonstrated how cities with liberal majorities can take down statues in an orderly fashion without vandalizing them or pulling them down. Or it demonstrates how Democratic mayors respond to pressure from the self-appointed statue-removal squad.
The left is interested in taking down all kinds of statues, which raises an obvious question: What about the statues the left has put up? No one&#8217;s ripping those down.
In 2017, Peter Dreier at BillMoyers.com wrote a piece headlined &#8220;Where Are All the Monuments to the Progressive Americans?&#8221; He complained most of our country&#8217;s statues celebrate military, political and business heroes. &#8220;Shouldn&#8217;t we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country?&#8221; he asked.
Then he listed a few examples of the left&#8217;s heroes who have statues.
Exhibit A: &#8220;This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.&#8221;
Honk if you find it bizarre to describe Sanger, a racist and eugenicist, as your avatar of &#8220;humane and inclusive&#8221; policies. Her creation Planned Parenthood is a leading destroyer of black lives before they start. But when black men and women cooperate in abortions, you can&#8217;t possibly be allowed to tell them those extinguished lives matter.
They were &#8230; inconvenient.
Pro-lifers will show you Sanger&#8217;s autobiography in which she discussed speaking before the women&#8217;s branch of the Ku Klux Klan: &#8220;I accepted an invitation to talk to the women&#8217;s branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. &#8230; In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not surprising that no one has vandalized the Sanger statue. No one has ripped it down and set it on fire. It stands undisturbed. It&#8217;s not on public property. The Old South Meeting House was a Puritan church. Conservatives can despair at the &#8220;evolution&#8221; of this once-Christian space, but not one has vandalized it.
Meanwhile, NPR reported the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously on June 30 to remove Boston&#8217;s copy of the Emancipation Memorial depicting a formerly enslaved man at the feet of Abraham Lincoln. That statue has stood in Boston&#8217;s Park Square since 1879. But, activists complained, it was a &#8220;white-created statue.&#8221;
&#8220;Boston artist Tory Bullock said the sculpture is a whitewashed portrayal that denigrates an entire group of people,&#8221; NPR wrote. &#8220;This is a frozen picture. This man is kneeling, he will never stand up,&#8221; Bullock said. &#8220;This image is problematic because it feeds into a narrative that black people need to be led and freed. &#8230; Why is our trauma so glorified?&#8221;
Sanger, the racist and eugenicist, remains, while Lincoln was removed. He&#8217;s apparently the enemy of the African American people. An image of emancipation is traumatic. The abortion of black babies is apparently therapeutic.
Leftists like Tory Bullock do not understand how people who gladly acknowledge that &#8220;black lives matter&#8221; would consider the left&#8217;s moral posturing to be based more on ideology than reality. Those on the left speak angrily and endlessly of violated &#8220;black bodies,&#8221; but — to borrow a phrase from George Orwell — they imply some black bodies are more equal than others.
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.

Margaret Sanger

GRAHAM: Lincoln Statues Must Go. Margaret Sanger Stays?

Abraham Lincoln

statues

Levar Stoney, the black Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, made the executive decision to remove a statue of Gen. Thomas &quot;Stonewall&quot; Jackson on

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Radicalism in America&#8217;s largest cities seems impervious to reason. Consider this headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: &#8220;Despite a wave of violence, Minneapolis &#8216;defund police&#8217; effort continues: An influential bloc of City Council members is pressing ahead with plans to dismantle the department as a monthlong eruption of gunfire sent tremors through neighborhoods.&#8221;
Reporter Liz Navratil explained that a majority of the Minneapolis City Council and like-minded community activists have used terms such as &#8220;defund,&#8221; &#8220;dismantle&#8221; and &#8220;abolish&#8221; in different ways. There&#8217;s some semantic tap-dancing. But they&#8217;re serious. They&#8217;re working to rewrite the city charter and dismantle a &#8220;minimum size requirement&#8221; for the police department. They talk about a police-free future.
A protester named Maisah Outlaw insisted: &#8220;This isn&#8217;t the first time an institution that is rooted in racism has been abolished. It&#8217;s not impossible.&#8221; She claimed, &#8220;We don&#8217;t need to scare people and beat people into submission.&#8221; Who&#8217;s going to be scared and beaten after the police go away?
The radicals behind this movement don&#8217;t just tweet about abolishing the police. They also talk about abolishing prisons. If violence is the problem, how is emptying prisons the solution? What next? Abolish the courts? These activists seem to think only police officers commit the kind of violence worth protesting. Prosecuting violent crimes like burglary, rape and murder is apparently racist. Conversation about Black-on-Black crime is treated like a distraction employed by racists.
One has to wonder if this is really the kind of stance people will support at reelection time. But it seems the pendulum only swings further to the left. Democrats have gotten reelected for decades on end to run big American cities. Many mayors and police chiefs are minorities. If &#8220;systemic racism&#8221; is rampant in America, how does that explain the systemic progressivism that keeps failing?
In the meantime, people who commit crimes are acting. With at least 113 people injured or killed in shootings since George Floyd&#8217;s death on May 25, some locals are &#8220;asking urgent new questions&#8221; about the potential effects of defunding the police, the Star Tribune reports. Do these elected officials fail to imagine what could happen if you were to &#8220;dismantle&#8221; the police force? The consequences of their utopian naivete?
Steven Belton, president and CEO of the Urban League Twin Cities, told the Star Tribune he believes all this Defund the Police advocacy &#8220;has emboldened criminals and sparked a new wave of violence.&#8221;
But city council member Steve Fletcher claimed they often don&#8217;t need armed officers, saying, &#8220;It&#8217;s so much more common that we&#8217;re showing up (and) the person has already left who has committed the crime.&#8221; So, should police officers show up at crime scenes unarmed, assuming the crook fled the scene? That seems to be the suggestion &#8230; that is if the cops have jobs in the coming years.
The radical experiment is coming. Cities will send social workers instead of police officers to deal with domestic violence complaints and drug overdoses. Will unarmed social workers be harmed in these volatile situations? Will they wish they had an armed cop backing them up?
Can liberal big-city newspapers be trusted to report on the aftermath of an overreaction? Or will they be too torn by inner newsroom turmoil over racial politics to paint an accurate picture for their community? Given their business model erodes, it&#8217;s not like they can afford to get this wrong.
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.

“Defund the Police” sign

GRAHAM: Abolish The Cops. Abolish The Prisons. What Next?

Defund The Police

Leftism

Minneapolis

Radicalism in America&#039;s largest cities seems impervious to reason. Consider this headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: &quot;Despite a wave of violence,

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One of the cultural shocks following the death of George Floyd under a policeman&#8217;s knee is the vandalism and destruction of statues across America. Usually, these statues are posted on public land by public officials with public assent &#8230; even if that came many years ago.
It&#8217;s not undemocratic to advocate for statues of men now considered unworthy to be removed from public spaces. You may argue there are &#8220;too many dead white men&#8221; in parks. But it&#8217;s blatantly undemocratic to vandalize them, behead them or pull them down. These are provocative acts with great potential for mounting revenge, disorder and countervandalism.
It&#8217;s amazing that the left can say mere words are violence, or that &#8220;silence is violence,&#8221; and not think it&#8217;s violent to tear down a statue.
No historic figure is safe from the anti-statue mobs. The Oregonian reported, &#8220;protesters tore down a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States who also owned over 600 slaves during his lifetime, outside his namesake high school in North Portland.&#8221;
Notice how journalists choose the word &#8220;protesters&#8221; to describe the perpetrators.
Some &#8220;protesters&#8221; look uneducated or nihilistic. A statue of abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, which stands outside Philadelphia City Hall, was defaced with spray paint. The word &#8220;colonizer&#8221; was strangely painted underneath. Apparently, any dead white male in a long coat must be racist.
In Boston, a monument to black soldiers who fought for the Union and against slavery during the Civil War was vandalized. The granite backside was covered with phrases including &#8220;Black Lives Matter,&#8221; &#8220;No Justice, No Peace&#8221; and &#8220;Police are Pigs.&#8221;
Richmond, Virginia — whose Democratic mayor sits under the state&#8217;s Democratic governor — is a hot spot for this vandalism virus. The New York Times reported, &#8220;Protesters toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, in Richmond &#8230; as demonstrators across the country continued to target symbols of white supremacy after the death of George Floyd.&#8221;
&#8220;A statue of Christopher Columbus was torn down and tossed into a lake in a Richmond city park where protesters had gathered for a demonstration in support of Indigenous peoples,&#8221; The Times added.
&#8220;Vandalism&#8221; was not the word of choice: &#8220;Statues of the Confederate generals J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, all of which stand on the city&#8217;s Monument Avenue, were marked.&#8221; Marked?
The Times called all this &#8220;a national reckoning over racist imagery and emblems.&#8221;
Then, as I predicted, someone vandalized the statue Richmond statue of Arthur Ashe, the black pro tennis star of the 1960s and 1970s. The New York Times said the statue was &#8220;vandalized,&#8221; not &#8220;marked.&#8221; It was not called a &#8220;reckoning.&#8221; Someone sprayed &#8220;WLM&#8221; (&#8220;White Lives Matter&#8221;) on the pedestal. The man who vandalized was not a &#8220;protester,&#8221; just a &#8220;man&#8221; who was quoted as saying, &#8220;You guys tagged my statue so I am tagging your statue.&#8221; Stupid tit and tat.
Ashe&#8217;s nephew David Harris Jr. told The Times: &#8220;People are outraged that people choose to vandalize a statue that represents peace, prosperity, inclusion, education, and the life and true fabric of the country: children. &#8230; there are folks out there that don&#8217;t believe in being inclusive.&#8221;
The Times fails to see the bitter irony in the assumption that &#8220;inclusion&#8221; is associated with the side that rips statues down without any care for who is not consulted, or which democratic norms are undermined. The left and its allies in the press are favoring disorder and vandalism &#8230; if it&#8217;s on &#8220;the right side of history.&#8221;
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.

GRAHAM: The Anti-Statue Mobs Undermine Democratic Norms

George Floyd

One of the cultural shocks following the death of George Floyd under a policeman&#039;s knee is the vandalism and destruction of statues across America.

GRAHAM: The Anti-Statue Mobs Undermine Democratic Norms | The Daily Wire

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Liberals are beginning to swagger around as if the 2020 election is already over. Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post exclaimed that President Donald Trump&#8217;s reelection campaign is &#8220;beginning to look like the Titanic.&#8221; Joe Biden should be preparing his inauguration remarks.
One reason for this arrogance is the absolutely punishing media coverage of Trump. The coronavirus pandemic did what some might have thought was impossible: made Trump coverage even more negative. Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from March 4 (when Joe Biden had basically wrapped up the Democratic nomination) through May 31, Trump coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was 94% negative. In May, it was 99.5% negative, an all-time low.
There were 474 evaluative comments about President Trump during this period, and 445 were negative. By contrast, there were only 85 evaluations of Biden, and 51 were negative (61%). They were nine times more negative about Trump.
This sounds a lot like the warp and woof of the 2016 campaign coverage, during which Trump drew the lion&#8217;s share of media attention and it was overwhelmingly negative, while Hillary Clinton seemed like an afterthought. Even in the last three months of the campaign, Trump was evaluated four times as much as Clinton.
The Democrats thought that made her a shoo-in. It didn&#8217;t turn out that way.
Here&#8217;s the problem for them. Anyone who has spent time with these networks knows they have a throbbing, swelling urge to destroy Trump politically. They can&#8217;t possibly be considered &#8220;referees&#8221; of presidential campaigns. One reason they&#8217;ve been so angry about the fate of &#8220;democracy&#8221; is they can&#8217;t stand it when voters ignore their incessant advice.
Jonah Goldberg recently wrote a column in which he argued Trump must think his voters are idiots since he proclaims he is running against the media instead of Biden. Obviously, the media aren&#8217;t on the ballot. But Biden&#8217;s attacks on the president cannot possibly match the media&#8217;s 24/7 aggression and firepower. They are not some irrelevant bystanders, especially now that Biden is campaigning from a cold computer screen.
Their protective coverage of Lovable Grandpa Joe is just as transparent. Noyes reported that ABC, CBS and NBC could barely muster three minutes of airtime on how Biden told black voters, &#8220;If you have a problem figuring out whether you&#8217;re for me or Trump, then you ain&#8217;t black.&#8221; NBC gave it a few seconds. ABC and CBS both rushed to &#8220;balance&#8221; the story with negative Trump news. CBS showed Biden was leading among black voters, 90% to 3%.
When it broke that Biden, in his last days as vice president, joined a list of other Obama officials requesting the &#8220;unmasking&#8221; of an American who turned out to be incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — which led to a smear about the former Army major general being a Russian pawn — the story drew merely 62 seconds of coverage: 55 seconds on ABC, 7 seconds on CBS and none on NBC. Voters who rely on these cynics for &#8220;news&#8221; wouldn&#8217;t even understand the Big Picture: that Team Obama improperly spied on the Trump campaign and was still trying to ruin Trump&#8217;s presidency during the transition.
Biden&#8217;s TV interviews are littered with please-trash-Trump questions, such as this beaut from MSNBC&#8217;s Brian Williams: &#8220;What is President Trump&#8217;s level of culpability — what&#8217;s his level of responsibility, say, toward the illness and fatalities we&#8217;re witnessing every few minutes these days?&#8221;
This sums up the tone of the latest evening news: How many Americans has Trump killed? They hope their nightly onslaughts demoralize Trump voters and energize Biden backers. But to many Americans, this is not journalism. It&#8217;s badly disguised campaign advertising.
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.

Trump

GRAHAM: The Media’s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump

Media

Liberals are beginning to swagger around as if the 2020 election is already over. Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post exclaimed that President Donald

GRAHAM: The Media&#039;s Broadcast Brutality Against Trump | The Daily Wire

https://www.dailywire.com/news/graham-the-medias-broadcast-brutality-against-trump/

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