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There now seems to be mass media recognition there is a border crisis.
Interesting how whatever Trump says is rejected at first and deemed another lie and the mass media wonder why they are held in such low regard.
The fact that the mass media has sunk so low in public esteem is dangerous but they worked hard to accomplish their degree of rejection.
Yes, Trump uses them as a foil but he could not if they were truly trustworthy.
The quality of those who supposedly report the news has descended to the bottom. There are few who can hold a candle to the caliber of those who reported the news in my youth. Cable TV audience is declining and a growing number of Americans no longer rely upon the mass media for their news.
Entertainment has replaced factual information and bias has supplanted objectivity. The Fourth Estate has destroyed the role they importantly played throughout the many decades. This is not a positive for our Republic which continues to need an informed and participating electorate.
The New York Times, the mass media's leading matriarch, has sunk to new lows. (See 1 below.)
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Biden The Union's Soul Man! Trump not a happy camper. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
1)New York Times Is ‘Cesspool,’ Israeli Ambassador to US Says
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, has called The New York Times “a cesspool of hostility towards Israel.”
In remarks posted to his official Facebook page and prepared for delivery at a Holocaust memorial event at the US Capitol, Dermer spoke of what he called “the Jew-hatred of growing parts of the intellectual class.”
“The same New York Times that a century ago mostly hid from their readers the Holocaust of the Jewish people has today made its pages a safe-space for those who hate the Jewish state,” Dermer said. “Through biased coverage, slanderous columns and antisemitic cartoons, its editors shamefully choose week after week to cast the Jewish state as a force for evil.”
In describing the Times as a “cesspool,” Dermer said that the newspaper’s treatment of Israel “goes well beyond any legitimate criticism of a fellow, imperfect democracy.”
The Israeli diplomat was taking a side in a rift that is splitting The New York Times: Was the publication last week of a cartoon that even the Times eventually apologized for and conceded was antisemitic an aberration, the “error” of “a single editor,” as theTimes claimed? Or was it rather, as I have argued and as the Times’ own Pulitzer-prize winning op-ed columnist, Bret Stephens,subsequently wrote, part of an ongoing pattern? Stephens called it “the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry.”
Dermer’s remarks made heroically clear how the government of Israel viewed the matter. The New York Times, however, is having a hard time coming to grips with this criticism. One Times columnist, Michael Powell, took to Twitter to describe the Stephens column as false. “the NYT, news pages & opinion, has absolutely not mainstreamed anti-Zionism or published anti-Semitic arguments & claim is absurd,” Powell wrote in a Tweet that was “liked” by Times reporters Clifford Kraus, Steve Lohr, Jim Dwyer, John Schwartz, and Mathew Goldstein, and also by a former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, Clyde Haberman.
In a separate tweet, Powell described the gist of Stephens’ column as “simply untrue.” Powell wrote, “No one is mainstreaming anti-Zionism or anti-Semitic argument. It’s hardly as if our pages resemble those of Der Sturmer …”
When the Times is in the position of publicly insisting that its pages do not resemble those of Der Sturmer, maybe it’s a signal that the paper’s leaders should stop digging, denying and defending and instead begin the long overdue process of sincere self-examination and improvement?
Even Powell conceded the cartoon “was terrible.”
A spokeswoman for the Times didn’t immediately reply to an inquiry from The Algemeiner seeking a response to Dermer’s comments.
In other developments in the fast-moving, escalating scandal over the cartoon:
- The curator of Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism, Ann Marie Lipinski, seized on the situation to call on the Times to restore its “public editor,” a position the newspaper abruptly eliminated in May 2017. “I wish they’d reconsider,” Lipinski wrote, linking to the Stephens column about the cartoon controversy.
- Critics of the Times scheduled an in-person protest for Monday outside the newspaper’s 620 Eighth Avenue headquarters. Those scheduled to attend included a former New York state assemblyman, Dov Hikind. An advisory press release for the event said those gathered would call for the firing of those responsible for the cartoon’s publication. They also said they would hold signs saying “Shame On The New York Times,” “NYT Has Jewish Blood On Their Hands,” and “Fire the Anti-Semites.”
- An author and former US government official, Dan Senor, noted that the Times international edition also published a second cartoon featuring a “blind” Netanyahu. “Is the Times obsessed with Israel’s prime minister?” Senor asked. A former Timeseditor, Mark Horowitz, tweeted, “Please tell me the Times didn’t run a SECOND Netanyahu cartoon in the International Friday- Saturday edition, one day later! It can’t be, right?”
Among the developments that argue in favor of seeing the cartoon as part of a pattern rather than as a single mistake were a 2015 Times graphic that used a yellow color to identify Jewish members of Congress opposed to the Iran nuclear deal. Asubsequent Times editor’s note said, “Many readers and commenters on social media found that aspect of the chart insensitive. Times editors agreed and decided to revise it to remove the column specifying which opponents were Jewish.”
The Times has used octopus imagery to describe Jewish settlers in the West Bank that the newspaper itself called “an Anti-Semitic symbol” when it was used by the National Rifle Association to depict Michael Bloomberg.
The Times has blamed measles in New York on “powerful” Jews spreading a “highly contagious” disease. That echoed what theHolocaust Encyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum said was a “recurrent theme in Nazi antisemitic propaganda … that Jews spread diseases.” Meanwhile, the newspaper has ignored recent mumps outbreaks with no apparent connection to Jews.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. More of his media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
2)
Why Trump is bitter the firefighters union endorsed Joe Biden
PITTSBURGH — Joe Biden’s decision to kick off his presidential campaign in Western Pennsylvania Monday shows that he is not just in the race for the battle for the soul of the country, he is in a battle for the soul of his party.
That battle begins and ends with a long primary contests that many Democratic experts and officials believe will be decided exactly one year from today on Pennsylvania’s April 29 primary voting day.
“This nominating process certainly has all of the ingredients to go long, and the Democratic voters in this state hold the key to help defining our party as being the party of the working class,” said Harold Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters in an interview with The Post in Pittsburgh.
The IAFF, which represents more than 316,000 full-time firefighters, announced its endorsement of Biden in Pittsburgh, something Schaitberger said is one of the earliest endorsements it’s ever done, and one it did not give Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
“That marked the first time we’ve ever not endorsed in a presidential election,” he said.
Schaitberger bluntly admits Clinton just did not connect with labor, but Biden does.
“We’re also responsible to make sure that, quite frankly, the nominee isn’t a nominee that is gonna take the party off the left cliff,” he said. “It seems that too many candidates have high minded, aspirational ideals, but it’s not a recipe for winning and succeeding. And it doesn’t really reflect in many ways the heart and soul of workers, middle class workers.”
If you think the IAFF’s influence in the Democratic primary process is not of significance, an often overlooked moment in what happened in 2004, when then-Vermont governor Howard Dean had captured the imagination and speculation among the press and pundits.
“As you know, Howard Dean was gonna be the nominee, it was that simple, at least that is what everyone said. Until all of a sudden we snuck up and literally carried John [Kerry] through Iowa and through New Hampshire, and then he was off and running in the rest of the world,” Schaitberger said.
The decision to back Biden already annoyed President Trump, who tweeted Monday, “The Dues Sucking firefighters leadership will always support Democrats, even though the membership wants me. Some things never change!”
Often where the firefighters go, so do other union workers.Harold McDonald, a Democratic committee man from Penn Hills, Pa., and retired council representative for the Carpenters Union for 19 years is convinced this race is going long. “This is truly the battle for the soul of our party. You have pundits and reporters on the national news saying our party is one thing, and then you have the rank and file voters here saying that’s not what we are voting on at all,” he said.
McDonald, who is African American, said voters here worry about health care and education. “That is what is important to me as well. That is why I am supporting Biden already,” he said.
The same goes for 22 year-old Hannah O’Toole, who sang the national anthem at the Workers Memorial Day celebration in Pittsburgh ahead of Biden’s visit, along with her father Marty, 60, who is the business manager for Plumbers Local 27.
“Joe Biden’s been a big part of the way we think and want to go and he has always been a front runner for us here in Pennsylvania,” said Marty, who is personally supporting the former vice-president.
Hannah is also leaning toward Biden. “I’ve liked him since Obama,” she said.
Darrin Kelly, president of the powerful local labor council here in Western Pennsylvania and a city firefighter as well, said the party has drifted too far left and this is the state where not just in the general, but mostly in the primary where that will be decided.
“Today is an important reminder of what is important to voters in Pennsylvania in a Democratic primary and we expect the Democratic Party to truly start listening to what our message is, stop polarizing us and start welcoming us back, we want FDR style politics,” Kelly said.
“If our strength is truly our diversity then the party has to start listening to the working class, they have to welcome us back and our voice will be heard in the primary in this state and that the message we want about job creation, health care and pension security is what will bring us out in a general,” he said.
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