Media

• "Arbiters of truth" sounds bad enough, but when that "truth" is the US government's approved line, uniformly spouted by the press, it's much worse. From Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com: An angry mainstream U.S. media is shaking its fist at anyone who won’t clamber onboard the Russia-gate groupthink bandwagon.
• Related: NYT Says Congress Has 'Duty' to Make War--Rather Than the Right to Reject It

Robert Gore, Straightline Logic

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April 5, 2017 | An angry mainstream U.S. media is shaking its fist at anyone who won’t clamber onboard the Russia-gate groupthink bandwagon, reports Robert Parry.

The mainstream U.S. media is never more unctuous and unprofessional as when it asserts that it alone must be the arbiter of what is true and what is not, regardless of what the evidence shows or doesn’t show.

Robert Gore is a writer, investor, attorney, and former bond trader. His website is Straight Line Logic <http://straightlinelogic.com>. He is also a regular columnist for The Savy Street <http://thesavvystreet.com>.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, is available in print here or as an e-book (from barnesandnoble.com).

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Related: 

NYT Says Congress Has 'Duty' to Make War--Rather Than the Right to Reject It, Adam Johnson, FAIR.org. 

The whole point of granting war-making powers to Congress, it should be noted, was so that Congress could serve as a barrier to war. Somehow for the paper of record, this task has morphed into a “duty” to approve wars that are already taking place, lest the self-evidently good and noble war effort be undermined.

The whole point of granting war-making powers to Congress, it should be noted, was so that Congress could serve as a barrier to war. Somehow for the paper of record, this task has morphed into a “duty” to approve wars that are already taking place, lest the self-evidently good and noble war effort be undermined.

Adam Johnson, FAIR.org. 

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March 27, 2017 | The New York Times argues that Congress has a duty to authorize war–rather than a responsibility to determine whether war should be fought.

As reports come in detailing the degree to which Donald Trump has escalated the “War on ISIS”—and killed hundreds more civilians in the process—this would seem like a good time for the country to sit back and examine the United States’ approach to fighting “terrorism” and its recent iteration, the so-called Islamic State.

Not for the New York Times editorial board, which didn’t take the wave of civilians deaths as a reason to question the wisdom of America’s various “counter-terror,” nation-building and regime-change projects in the Middle East, but instead chose to browbeat Congress into rubber-stamping a war that’s been going on for almost three years.

The editorial, “Congress’s Duty in the War With ISIS” (3/26/17), began with a false premise.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. 

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Francis Dean / Getty Images

• Disability rights activists worry about the ammunition stories like the one in the Post could give to benefit-averse Republicans, who now control the White House and Congress.
• They are perpetuating the same myths that have been debunked over and over again without regard for how misleading reporting can affect people with disabilities already living on the financial edge. --Rebecca Vallas, Center for American Progress
• Related: Special Project | Disability: Disabled, Shunned and Silenced in Trump’s America

Daniel Marans, 

04/22/2017 | Disability rights advocates and a leading Democratic think tank are livid at The Washington Post over a March 30 front-page story on the prevalence of disability benefits in rural America.

The newspaper claimed that “as many as one-third of working-age adults” in rural communities receive disability benefits. But as the Center for American Progress calculated ― and The Huffington Post confirmed by looking at the raw data ― that proportion holds true in only one county in the entire country.

Daniel Marans, Reporter, Huffington Post

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Special Project | Disability: Disabled, Shunned and Silenced in Trump’s America, Melissa Blake, New York (NY) Times 

• I’m a woman. I’m physically disabled. And I’ve never been more scared than I am right now.
• Related: Trump Scrubs Civil Rights, LGBTQ Rights, Climate Change from WhiteHouse.gov

Thomas Faull via Getty Images 

• A healthy skepticism is always in order.
• Related: Norman Solomon on Trump and the Press

Frank Connolly, Huffington Post

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Dave & the Crew

03/30/2017 | If you’re like a lot of folks, you’ve probably had quite enough of the ongoing media kerfuffle over “fake news.” What started out as an interesting discussion about politics, journalistic ethics, and the truth, has degenerated into a hyper-partisan food fight.

First, President Trump commandeered the term, using it to disparage news outlets he doesn’t like; then commentators and academics on the left responded by branding conservative websites they don’t like as “fake news,” too. By now, the meaning of fake news is largely a matter of partisan opinion – which means the term really has no meaning at all.

Frank Connolly, Contributor, Huffington Post; Senior Editor, MindEdge Learning

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Related:

Norman Solomon on Trump and the Press, FAIR 

@PresidentSupervillain

• Donald Trump says the press corps are the “enemy of the people.” The press corps, in turn, say Donald Trump is “presidential.” Where the people find themselves in this dance is unclear. We’ll talk about what media really looking out for the public interest might look like with author and FAIR associate Norman Solomon, national coordinator of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
• Related: 'Soul-Sucking, Attention-Eating Black Hole': Why we need to look beyond Trump

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