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Journalist Olivia Nuzzi blew the lid off that narrative with a July 4 report titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden” with the subheading, “The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.” She's not known as a right-leaning author, and didn’t write this for RedState or any other conservative outlet—she penned it for New York Magazine, hardly a bastion of right-wing journalists.
But now she’s paying the price, according to Semaphore: //
“When I write something that agitates the right, I am accused of being a liberal activist. When I write something that agitates the left, I am accused of being a conservative activist. The difference is that mainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right,” she observed.
PBS’s Judy Woodruff may have spent the last 50-plus years in journalism, but her attempt to wrongfully accuse former President Donald Trump of killing the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas and then lying about it proves she’s more of a Democrat propagandist than anything else. //
Woodruff claimed she was “referring to reports I had read, in Axios and Reuters, about former President Trump having spoken to the Israeli Prime Minister.” //
In this case, however, neither outlet asserted that Trump tried to discourage Netanyahu from peace negotiations, as Woodruff claimed. //
Woodruff’s decision to lie in the “clarification” and “apology” she designed to cover for her initial lie only further solidifies that she is not fit to fairly and accurately report.
When people ask me why I despise the government, stories like this come to mind.
A Falcon, Colorado, woman convicted for entering the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021 while the riot was occurring was sentenced on Monday to one year of probation.
Rebecca Lavrenz, known as “J6 Praying Grandma” on social media, is also being forced to fork over $103,500 in fines after being convicted of four misdemeanor counts, the Colorado Sun reported. //
federal prosecutors asked the judge to throw Lavrenz in a cage for ten months and put her on supervised release and 60 hours of community service. They argued that she has been “one of the loudest public voices calling the prosecution of January 6 riots a corrupt exercise.”
The prosecutors acknowledged Lavrenz’s First Amendment rights but insisted that “her unrepentant promotion of the riot is powerful evidence that she continues to pose a threat to future acts of political violence like that which engulfed the nation on January 6.” //
Even further, prosecutors argued in favor of the fine because the defendant – wait for it – participated in interviews and used online fundraising accounts to supposedly seek “celebrity status” for her supposed criminality. How dare she try to raise funds for her legal defense, right? //
Unfortunately, Lavrenz is not the only one. People get railroaded by government at the federal, state, and local levels on a daily basis. //
anon-fl4c
4 hours ago
Jeff, did you catch Glen Beck today? He featured a woman that survived Yugoslavian concentration camps and has now been sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating the FACE Act. She said she is fully prepared to die in prison. This government is not the United States. We’ve already been taken over.
At no point did any news outlet report that Trump told Netanyahu to not take a deal with Hamas, much less for political reasons as Woodruff claimed. She made the story up out of whole cloth, and then, instead of admitting it, doubled down on lying about it by blaming other outlets. That's a breach of journalistic ethics that would make Dan Rather blush.
But perhaps there is one item that succinctly declares where NPR rests on the political spectrum. Each year, on July 4, the network has the tradition of having various on-air talent reading from one of our most famous founding documents. The outlet, in recent years, has seen the need to include an editor’s note with this presentation, heeding the possible sensitivities of its audience that could become offended by some of its content.
Yes – National Public Radio provides a trigger warning for the Declaration of Independence.
Ben Kew @ben_kew
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NPR’s far-left CEO Katherine Maher: "Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done."
0:18 / 2:11
7:46 AM · Apr 17, 2024
Look, it is a staggeringly ignorant thing for anyone to come out and declare that the facts and the truth can become distaff items in the servicing of the narrative. For this to be a set of principles held by someone overseeing a news outlet is downright disturbing. This is — quite literally — Orwellian “Big Brother” (Sister) statism thought-policing taking place. And as we have come to learn, this is hardly Maher slipping up and having the veil slide on her views; she not only holds to these principles of lording over the facts, she brags about it. //
She goes on to say the First Amendment makes it “a little bit tricky” to censor content. She is not holding the 1-A as sacred; she is declaring it an inconvenience to her goals. Controlling speech and driving the approved narrative — with the partnership and coordination of government — is kind of, sort of, a little bit, maybe the polar opposite of what journalism is charged with as its mission statement. This is who NPR chose to lead its news dissemination outfit. Maher is vastly inexperienced and displays all of the traits that run counter to journalistic principles, yet NPR selected her to run its entire operation.
It is not a question of who thought this was a good idea, but “why?” //
The reason why she was hired might be seen in the reaction to all of these revelations in the broader journalism sphere. That is to say – there is no reaction. Uri Berliner’s column has mostly been covered in the press by the reactions it has generated. The actual revelations he delivered and the effects it has been having on the press industry have gone wholly unaddressed. Now we have a CEO of a major news outlet found to have a history of avowed hostility towards facts and the truth in order to drive the news narratives, and nobody in journalism circles seems at all bothered by these revelations.
There is abject silence because so many news divisions operate in this very fashion. //
Katherine Maher is not an anomaly in the industry; she is the very product that is sought out. A generation ago, the idea of trampling on the First Amendment would have generated immediate howls from proper journalists. Today, a news division CEO can boldly tout the need to silence free expression, and she is welcomed with open arms. The only reason this is a possible problem today is that the voices pointing out her disturbing views had not been properly silenced.
Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think. //
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t. //
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. //
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it. //
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage. //
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world. //
But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism. //
Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from. //
Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.