France
Last week, the little birdies in Twitter's legal department notified me that one of my tweets from 2015 is “in violation of Pakistan law.” It seems like ancient history, but Islamic supremacists never forget — or forgive. My innocuous tweet featured a compilation image of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. It also linked to my Jan. 8, 2015, syndicated column on the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre in Paris.
France’s increasingly violent “yellow vest” protests began as grassroots, working-class opposition to a fuel tax hike that was promoted by the government as climate change action. But network stories about the protests ignored the environmental motivations most of the time.
As Americans begun celebrating the holiday season, almost 300,000 French people took to the streets to protest a massive fuel tax hike proposed by President Emmanuel Macron to fight climate change. The protests turned violent Saturday as the now-rioters began digging up the streets of Paris and trying to construct barricades as police fought back with tear gas and water cannons. Despite this ongoing battle, ABC News had not reported one word about it on air. Not even on Saturday’s World News Tonight.
Facebook will permit countries in European unprecedented level of access to how it controls content. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that in 2019, French regulators will be given access to Facebook’s content moderation process and allowed to study its attempts to control “hate speech.”
The French government and U.S. tech giants are pushing for a worldwide initiative to regulate the internet — including the issue of hate speech. The new declaration from the French government titled the “Paris Call For Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” is part of an international effort to crack down on cyber attacks, foreign interference, and hate speech, according to the organization that drafted the document.
Yes, Chris Matthews said that on Tuesday’s Hardball. And, no, it didn’t appear that Matthews realized how what he said about President Trump came across as quite the case of irony. In the A-block of his MSNBC program, Matthews wondered if the world is “about to see collusion in plain sight” by “eight-year-old” President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin even though, in Matthews’s world, Trump’s “brain soup” is “psychobabble.”
The New York Times featured a university student in France who has become a liberal hero by embracing a tenet of fundamentalist Islam in the form of a headscarf. It’s jarring to read a Times article so gung-ho in support of a sign of religious fundamentalism, and which criticizes the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo without mentioning the massacre of 12 of its employees by radical Islamists in 2015. The Times betrays a double standard when it comes to Islamic fundamentalism compared to that of other religions.
On Sunday's CNN Newsroom, early morning anchor Natalie Allen repeatedly freaked out over President Donald Trump citing the failures of gun control in Europe in his address to the NRA as the CNN host hyped anger expressed from French and British political figures. She employed words like "preposterous" and "bizarre" to deride the President's speech.
With French President Emmanuel Macron in Washington, D.C. for an official state visit, the liberal media were eager to pounce on any seemingly awkward “bromance” moments he and President Trump shared. And since Macron’s arrival, the two world leaders have exchanged seemingly countless handshakes and shoulder grabs (including Trump joking about brushing dandruff off his guest’s shoulder). Of course, former Republican Nicolle Wallace used her MSNBC show Deadline: White House to take a classless shot at the President’s marriage.
It became quite apparent Tuesday night that CNN was very much against President Trump’s request to the Pentagon for a military parade through Washington, DC. First, they claimed that if you backed the idea you were in support of a dictatorship, then CNN Tonight host Don Lemon wanted to know if Trump was thinking of having nuclear weapons in the procession down Pennsylvania Avenue and in front of the Trump International Hotel, which was on the proposed route.
CBS Evening News broadcasted live from Paris, France Monday ahead of a new international climate summit planned by French President Emmanuel Macron after President Trump announced he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. And in a one-on-one interview with the French President, anchor Jeff Glor appeared to be fishing for him to say something disparaging of Trump. But Macron never took the bait.
The New York Times jabbed at Christians and conservatives in two articles Saturday related to museum exhibitions. Emily Cochrane nitpicked the new Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., while an art critic looking at a Paris exhibit on the history of Christians in the Middle East suggested the French populist Marine Le Pen was as bad as the jihadists of ISIS.