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We know the mass media is out to gut Trump. We have plenty of evidence of how they twist facts to reveal an untrue and unflattering image of the president they love to hate. Here is an article that adds more logs to the flame of media bias.
Disinfecting Journalistic Ethics
Donald Trump’s ‘Lysol’ moment says more about the media than it does him.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
I finally read the lengthy transcript of President Trump’s April 23 press conference but it turned out to be unnecessary. Under the heading of “If your time is short,” the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact website kindly summarized: “The briefing transcript shows that Trump did not say people should inject themselves with bleach or alcohol to treat the coronavirus. He was asking officials on the White House coronavirus task force whether they could be used in potential cures.”
It was a reporter in the audience who asked an accompanying official: “The President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there?”
No, was the answer, but the question was apparently enough for a few dozen common-run-of-humanity journalists to create a 99% fake story, and it’s not hard to guess why: clicks and page views; cable channels whose business model depends on a steady flow of contempt for Mr. Trump and his voters.
A New York Daily News story pointed to a spike in callers to the city’s poison control hotline “over fears that they had ingested bleach or other household cleaners in the 18 hours that followed President Trump’s bogus claim that injecting such products could cure coronavirus.”
Notice both the untruthfulness and absurdity of this sentence. The callers “feared” that Mr. Trump’s words somehow prompted household cleaners to jump down their throats? What the city dubbed its “case management” actually meant responding to callers saying, “Yuck, yuck, I drank Lysol because Trump suggested it.” Not only were there no poisoning cases. Pranksters didn’t get the idea from Mr. Trump but from the press’s version of what Mr. Trump said.
Which should remind us that Jussie Smollett-style fake stories happen (and happen, and happen) partly because of the media’s own complicity.
The Washington Post, which would later flog the Lysol story, didn’t mention the subject in its “3 takeaways from Thursday’s White House coronavirus briefing” published soon after the event. A writer at the Atlantic complained that the episode had made America an overseas “laughingstock.” She might have noticed that foreigners weren’t judging for themselves. They were imbibing, unvetted, the attitudes of the U.S. media.
Abraham Lincoln waved off impromptu speaking invitations, saying a president couldn’t afford to appear foolish. That’s not Donald Trump but reporters have had four years to get used to his blurting out offhand, half-formed thoughts that even his fans don’t take seriously.
Good journalism does not consist of lying. It does not consist of competitive adventurism in twisting these episodes to make them better stories than they are.
I knew something was up when, during the 2016 Democratic convention, the progressive journalist Cenk Uygur on ABC News accused Mr. Trump of comments that took a “fallen U.S. soldier and puts him in the same camp as radical Islamic terrorists.”
What Mr. Trump said about Capt. Humayun Khan, a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, was foolish, but it wasn’t that. I knew then we were off to the races if the media decided it could put words in a public figure’s mouth with impunity.
After this year’s State of the Union, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand declared the president a “liar” for saying prescription drug prices had fallen. How did she know? Because, she explained to National Public Radio’s Brian Lehrer, an unidentified voter at some unspecified moment in Ms. Gillibrand’s past had complained about high drug prices. That was the entirety of her reasoning.
In fact, the usual fact-checking sites found Mr. Trump’s statement to be accurate. What was peculiarly demoralizing for the media was Mr. Lehrer’s failure as a reporter to let his audience know that Ms. Gillibrand’s argument was completely non-pertinent to her claim.
It’s not that objective inquiry into the facts and logic of events is even difficult. It just has become irrelevant to journalists thriving in today’s professional milieu. We’ve become more Trumplike than we care to admit, panting for the spotlight, desperate to say something colorful. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say Mr. Trump modeled his own intellectual sloppiness on the cable TV that he consumes in such large doses. Nowadays an insidious rationale has intruded: Reporters are actually praised for “advancing the narrative”—i.e., finding “facts” to support a desired story line.
If this is what our industry really is coming to, we deserve everything the internet and cord-cutting have done to us. By the way, an intelligent public (whatever portion of the public that description might represent) does not suffer under the exchange: If anything, they are oversupplied with interesting, original thought and knowledge, often supplied at the provider’s own expense, by dozens of high-quality volunteers on blogs and social media, easily found amid the dreck. We only succeed in increasing their relevancy as we decrease our own.
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When you have been on top of the world for several centuries you do some wrong things, you build up a pile of jealousies, even among your allies, and there are always natural, enemies.
Today America has a host of threatening adversaries and in no particular order the main ones are:
China, Pelosi, progressives in general, European leaders, our own government and many officials who run government agencies as we are learning and a host of organizations and individuals who hate America, capitalism and who lust for power in order to seek the demise of America.
Until Trump came along,, pledging to drain the swamp, many of the above had a field day and open range in which to engage in their nefarious activities. Trump has made a concerted effort to put an end to many of their engaging efforts but the resistance has been a match because losing power and control is vital to their questionable efforts and endeavors.
If Trump is unsuccessful the world will be a far more dangerous place because America remains the only power capable of thwarting the "evil doers" and our own capabilities are fading fast. A Biden presidency would simply be another nail in our own and the world's coffin.
One of my dearest and most brilliant lawyer friends and fellow memo readers introduced me to The Federalist Society and founder, Leonard Leo
Judicial Code of Misconduct
An ethics advisory committee is used to defeat a nominee.
The Editorial Board
Here’s one for the books: The ethics committee that wants to bar judges from belonging to the Federalist Society because it is supposedly too political is now being used as a political weapon against a judicial nominee.
Let’s unspool the political skulduggery. In January we told you about the draft advisory opinion by the Committee on Codes of Conduct of the U.S. Judicial Conference. The committee, composed of 15 or so judges, sets ethical guidelines for the judiciary. The committee had circulated a draft that reversed decades of policy by saying judges shouldn’t belong to the Federalist Society or American Constitution Society (ACS).
The draft offered a phony political balance because the Federalist Society leans right and ACS was created as a liberal counter to the Federalist Society. But the ACS plays an active role in political issues while the Federalist Society avoids taking sides on policy and doesn’t file amicus briefs. The Federalist Society is composed of chapters, notably at law schools, that host debates and panels on legal issues that often include giants of the legal left.
Our editorials echoed in the judicial community, which has responded with what we’re told are more than 70 letters to the Codes of Conduct Committee. The vast majority oppose the advisory draft. A March 18 letter was signed by 210 judges, including such lions of the judiciary as José Cabranes of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and district court judges Richard Leon and Royce Lamberth of the D.C. Circuit.
“We believe the exposure draft conflicts with the Code of Conduct, misunderstands the Federalist Society, applies a double standard, and leads to troubling consequences,” the judges write. “The circumstances surrounding the issuance of the exposure draft also raise serious questions about the Committee’s internal procedures and transparency. We strongly urge the Committee to withdraw the exposure draft.” That’s what we call feedback.
But here’s the rub. One of the signers is Justin Walker, a district court judge in Kentucky whom Donald Trump has nominated to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The political left is trying to stop Judge Walker’s confirmation, and his Senate hearing is scheduled for this week. In what is no coincidence, the letter signed by Judge Walker was leaked Sunday to the New York Times.
Here’s how the daily diary of the judicial left spins the letter: “As the Senate this week considers elevating a politically connected judge to an influential federal appeals court, the judge has stepped into a fierce ideological debate about a legal group shaping President Trump’s rightward overhaul of the judiciary.
“The judge, Justin Walker of the U.S. District Court in Kentucky, has joined more than 200 federal judges—a majority of them appointed by Mr. Trump—in signing a letter that defends their right to be affiliated with the group, the Federalist Society.”
The horror. The horror. A judge who belongs to the Federalist Society, as dozens of others do, signed a letter defending membership in the group. The story rolls through the usual fantasy political offenses of the Federalist Society and, inevitably, calls on the Senate’s main antagonist of conservative judges, Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) for an above-the-fray, fair-minded, thoughtful comment. Or not.
Reports the Times: “‘The Federalist Society has become so significant in the judicial selection process,’ Mr. Whitehouse said in an interview. ‘That is a particularly noxious role for an organization that has judges as its members.’”
The Times did not report that Mr. Whitehouse has a friend and long-time legal collaborator who contributed to the Codes of Conduct draft. His name is John McConnell, a former Rhode Island plaintiff lawyer who is now a federal district court judge. The main Senate sponsor of Judge McConnell’s nomination? Sheldon Whitehouse.
We don’t know who leaked the judges’ letter, and many people saw it. But the leaker set up the Times reporters to spin the story as an attack on Judge Walker days before he is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Whitehouse is on Judiciary.
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All of this raises even more doubts about the fairness and transparency of the Codes of Conduct Committee’s deliberations and advisory draft. As the letter from the 210 judges puts it: “Yet reports suggest that no member of the Committee was permitted to dissent, despite some members’ strong disagreement with the exposure draft. Other reports suggest that at least one member of the Committee was barred from voting on the draft. And the Committee’s reversal of its prior, settled interpretation—without any relevant change in the Code—raises further concerns.”
We’ll be blunter. This ethics committee is being manipulated unethically to stigmatize the Federalist Society and now to defeat a judicial nominee. Chairman Ralph Erickson, a judge on the Eighth Circuit, has let his committee be used. If he lets the draft become formal policy, even when it is opposed by so many judges, he will have turned the committee into precisely the politicized body his draft claims to dislike.
What an embarrassment—to Judge Erickson, to the Judicial Conference, and perhaps to the entire judiciary if the committee accedes to Sheldon Whitehouse’s agenda. Chief Justice John Roberts is the official head of the Judicial Conference, and he should call Judge Erickson and tell him to kill this draft forthwith.
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