Mollie Hemingway
How does the New York Times (and especially reporter Peter Baker) treat accusations that the F.B.I. overstepped their authority in a politicized effort to take down a president? That depends on who is president. On the front page of Monday’s New York Times, Peter Baker’s “news analysis,” “Trump Faces ‘Nonstop’ War For Survival,” used an overhyped Times blockbuster about an FBI counter-intelligence investigation to spread the idea of Donald Trump as a “Russian agent.” Yet Baker took the completely opposite tack on the F.B.I. when the bureau was accused of abuse of authority against Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky investigation.
Before the analysis ends on the first Trump prime-time Oval Office address, we must recommend Mollie Hemingway's Federalist smackdown of pseudo-"fact checks" attempting to discredit Trump's speech text. She found most of the "fact checks” were instead "critiques of opinions." Many journalists critiqued things not included in Trump’s speech, and sometimes “fact checkers” admonished the president for saying completely true things.
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist hammered National Public Radio for a false online report claiming that Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 conflicted with an account given by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Five hours later, NPR posted an editor's note that they had "mischaracterized" the answers from the president's son.
If the folks at the New York Times are capable of being embarrassed over their errors, the one President Donald Trump decisively exposed Friday would lead to a lot of red faces at the Old Gray Lady. Don't count on it. A week ago, the paper falsely reported that an administration spokesperson had said that holding the U.S-Korea summit in Singapore on its originally planned date of June 12 would be impossible. That spokesperson did not say that, and an audio recording proved it. Friday afternoon, Trump announced that the U.S.-Korea summit in Singapore is on — for, yes, June 12.
There is a determined disinformation campaign by the establishment press contending — in the face of admitted evidence to the contrary — that Barack Obama's FBI didn't spy on Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to debunk that nonsense.
TheFederalist.com's Mollie Hemingway appeared Saturday morning on Fox & Friends: Weekend to discuss NBC's botched "Michael Cohen was wiretapped" story, which is only the latest in a long line of establishment press stories subsequently requiring major corrections or retractions. Hemingway observed that the errors "always go in one direction."
Sunday, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called for an end to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. She didn't mention her similar-themed February 2017 column, likely because she filled up Sunday's allotted space lamenting that the event handed an absent President Donald Trump a PR victory, and with a howler about the performance and alleged integrity of the establishment press.
The New York Times Sunday magazine devoted 5,000 words to a hostile profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is infuriating liberals by blocking the narrative of Russia-Trump “collusion” during Campaign 2016. The Times is clearly trying to paint Nunes as a conspiratorial figure, as shown by the title to Jason Zengerle’s piece: “The Truth Is Out There.” But The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway defenestrated Zengerle’s misleading and out-and-out false work point by point: “....the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.”
Showing classic journalistic hypocrisy, New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos shared the Democrats’ alarm that Republicans may actually reveal what the country’s domestic surveillance organization is doing behind closed doors in his report for Tuesday’s front page, “Republicans Vote to Release A Secret Memo.” An aggrieved Fandos led with criticism of the Republican vote to release the now-famous four-page memo: "Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, disregarding Justice Department warnings that their actions would be 'extraordinarily reckless'...."
Now that Hillary Clinton has admitted that her campaign and the Democratic National Committee — which we now know her campaign totally controlled beginning in August 2015 — paid Fusion GPS for the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, it's long past time that people understand the full scope of what that firm, which has been serially misrepresented as just another "opposition research" outlet, has done to change the media landscape. Don't count on the establishment press to do it, because, as we'll see, Fusion has played a major role in corrupting their determination of what "news" is, how it gets covered — and how it gets covered up.
In a surprise appearance in the White House Briefing Room on Thursday, Chief of Staff John Kelly address the press to dispel all their rumors (aka news reports) that claimed he was unhappy in his position and was thinking about leaving. And in a panel discussion on Fox News Channel’s Special Report, Federalist journalist Mollie Hemingway went to town on the media for over-relying on “unreliable anonymous sources.”
Defending attempts by Democratic senators to issue a religious test to a Trump judicial nominee, New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein filed a hit piece for Friday’s edition on Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit: “Links to Religious Group Raise Issues for Nominee.” She wrote: "Legal scholars said that such loyalty oaths could raise legitimate questions about a judicial nominee’s independence and impartiality."