Double Standards
Over a two-week period ahead of the first set of 2020 Democratic debates (June 10 – 23), NBC Nightly News ran a daily series they dubbed “My Big Idea,” in which they provided a platform to aid the candidates in reaching the public with their policy proposals. Almost nightly, anchor Lester Holt would openly admit that the 14-part series was essentially a Democratic propaganda mill with NBC correspondent Harry Smith making the policy pitches on behalf of the candidates. Smith also failed to provide any serious pushback or critical analysis of the policies he was helping to push.
The CBS Evening News targeted GOP state Senators in Oregon for ridicule and scorn Tuesday night, after some went into hiding and others fled the state in order to block a vote on a controversial climate change bill. In a video call with one Senator, CBS correspondent Carter Evan wondered: “What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of democracy?”
Journalist E. Jean Carroll is making sexual assault allegations against President Donald Trump, dating from the mid-1990s. Initially many journalistic outlets held off reporting her claims, which caused anger in left-wing social media circles. The New York Times editor-in-chief Dean Baquet has issued a groveling apology for not giving the thin allegations more intense play. The Times had a far different reaction in 1999, after Juanita Broaddrick came forward with her story of being raped by Bill Clinton. When it was Clinton being accused, the paper lamented the rush to judgement by other outlets. When it’s Trump, the paper’s editor lamented his own paper’s failure to rush to judgement.
Throughout NBC Nightly News’s two-week-long propaganda project for the 2020 Democratic field ahead of the first debate, a couple of the candidates actually suggested some half decent and probably generally supported ideas: fighting drug addiction and ending the practice of regime change overseas. These ideas tend to transcend party. So much so that these were actually ideas that President Trump supported.
Sunday’s edition of the NBC Nightly News Democratic-propaganda campaign featured the so-called “Big Idea” from Montana Governor Steve Bullock, despite the fact he failed to meet the requirements to make it onto the first primary debate stage. Bullock’s “Big Idea” was “ending dark money spending in our elections” and to crack down on the First Amendment right to free speech via political donations.
Sunday’s New York Times featured reporter Emily Cochrane’s “At Demand for Roll Call Votes, Colleagues Grouse: ‘This Is So Stupid,'" on Republican congressman Chip Roy insisting on roll-call votes on amendments before the House. The text box quoted a colleague: “All he’s doing is making everybody mad.” Times reporters sure become easily annoyed at Republican stunts -- but Democratic ones, like the summer of 2016 Democratic “sit-in” on the House floor to demand a vote on gun control, were seen as admirable by the Times and the rest of the press.
The New York Times must have regretted missing out on the misleading and slanted coverage of the rest of the press earlier this month, when multiple outlets blared the claim that housing child migrants at Fort Sill in Oklahoma would be locking them up in a former Japanese “internment camp.” But the paper made up for it with Ben Fenwick’s coverage of a subsequent protest on Sunday: “Protesters Denounce Camp Plan for Child Migrants.”
It was President Trump’s first interview with NBC’s Meet the Press since taking office, and political director and moderator Chuck Todd was not going to waste his opportunity to confront the President from the left. In contrast with his softball interviews with some of the 2020 Democratic candidates, Todd wasn’t afraid to get in the President’s face about topics like immigration. Todd demanded to know if Trump was holding migrant kids “hostage” at the border and whether or not he was “prepared to lose” in 2020.
Yesterday, guest writer Lilianne Milgrom published an article for The Huffington Post describing her experience with the 19th century Gustave Courbet painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World). The title of the article is “How An Encounter With The World’s Most Famous Vagina Painting Changed My Life.” This “vagina painting” is pornography. Full stop.
On June 16, Google chose to acknowledge Father’s Day with a gender-neutral doodle that an article from Summit News says “depicted a family which looked something like a cross between Teletubbies and ducks.”
For days now, NBC News has been running a series on NBC Nightly News called “My Big Idea” in which they give 2020 Democrats a chance to push their campaign propaganda with the network’s aid and largely unchallenged. Friday’s edition featured former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, who was demanding universal pre-K. And Saturday’s was about former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper who wanted yet another federal job training program.
Just a day after the White House announced the departure of Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, The Washington Post posted a heartwarming tribute to Sanders on its Instagram page. Just kidding. The Post instead followed the lead of cable television; providing nasty commentary describing her as “the queen of gaslighting” and mocking her “curled-lip disdain.”