Media Bias | Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion - Part 45
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Media Bias Tag

Add this to the annals of This is Why Everyone Hates the Media, Volume Eleventy Gazillion. In approximately three weeks, Americans in flyover country will be treated to what NASA calls, "one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights - a total solar eclipse."

There are many vitriolic anti-Trump regulars on Morning Joe. Elise Jordan ranks right up there with the "best" of them. Interesting, considering that Jordan is a Republican, having worked for President George W. and on the Rand Paul campaign. Perhaps that explains it: bitter aftertaste from the primaries? In June, as our friends over at NewsBusters noted, Jordan compared Trump to a "suicide bomber." In July, Jordan tried to revive the discredited Russian "dossier" to use against the president.

There are few things less ambiguous than a call to kill another person. Except, apparently, at The Washington Post. On July 21, imams Ammar Shahin of the Islamic Center of Davis (ICD) and Mahmoud Harmoush of Islamic Center of Riverside gave speeches calling for the destruction of the Jews in the context of the recent violence centered around the Temple Mount. Both imams called on Allah "to liberate Al Aqsa from the Jews."

I mentioned the other day how a friend, who is a lifelong Democrat and always has been very anti-Trump, expressed complete disgust at the media, particularly the handling of Russia, Media overplaying its anti-Trump hand – statistics and an anecdote about a lifelong Democrat:
The conversation was with someone I’ve known for almost 20 years. He’s a lifelong Rhode Islander and Democrat who has expressed strong hostility to me toward Trump in the past. We speak every couple of months, and I’ve never heard him say a good word about Trump....

Former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is at the center of a scandal involving her former IT staffer. We covered the scandal in recent posts: But you'd never know there was a scandal by the amount of time the mainstream media spends talking about it. Tim Graham reports at News Busters:

When Joy Reid and her merry band of liberals sink their teeth into something, it's hard to tear them away. Last month, we entertained you with this item about Reid & Co. mentioning "Russia" 56 times in one hour. On today's AM Joy, the word was "pardon." No Groucho-like duck came down, but Reid and her panelists pored interminably over the pardon possibilities. We counted 32 "pardon" mentions in the 14-minute segment. Naturally, the panel was horrified at the prospect of President Trump pardoning himself or others. Reid herself conjured up a nightmare scenario of Trump committing "treason, and then pardoning himself." The reliably hyperbolic Joan Walsh spoke darkly of a "constitutional crisis."

There has been a lot of attention in the past couple of days to the statistical disconnect between what is of importance to the media versus what is important to the public. Not surprisingly, the media is all Russia, Russia, Russia. The public not so much. Jon Gabriel at Ricochet originated the analysis, though many outlets ran with it, What Americans Care About vs. What the Media Cares About:

Give Joe Scarborough credit. Just when we were getting bored with all the Trump/Nazi analogies, Joe has come up with a new one. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough compared Trump press secretary Sean Spicer to an old Soviet spokesman and propagandist. Scarborough's beef was that Spicer had supposedly said that the meeting of Trump campaign people including Donald, Jr. and the Russians was "just about adoptions." Joe called that a "lie." But have a look at the screenshot below, showing what Spicer actually said.

The last post I wrote about the Donald Trump Jr. meeting was last Thursday, Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer: “there’s something very unusual about this whole thing”. Subsequent to that post, NBC News broke the story that there were additional people at the meeting than had been disclosed previously. Nonetheless, I think my Newsmax interview that was the subject of the post has held up pretty well:

Credit where credit's due: the HuffPost (now just HuffPost since founder Ariana Huffington parted ways) is launching a bus tour, stopping in 23 cities so their reporters (or bloggers) can find the answer to this burning question: What does it mean to be American today? The bus tour turned mobile video studio hopes to showcase "what we share as Americans, rather than what divides us."

The Washington Post has fallen almost as far as CNN. In a news analysis article, the paper tries to shift blame for James Hodgkinson's attempt to murder Republican congressmen on conservative talk radio. It's an established fact that Hodgkinson was a Bernie-loving, anti-Trump, Rachel Maddow "super fan," so wouldn't it make more sense to blame MSNBC?

A misleading video clip of Donald Trump supposedly being passed over for a handshake by the First Lady of Poland is sweeping the internet. In fact, there was a handshake a couple of seconds later, but the clip is cut so tightly that it appears that this was a sign of disrespect. If it were just another misleading internet meme, it would be bad enough. But it is being pushed by the Washington Post on Twitter and on its website, as well as by other major media. Here is WaPo's tweet:

CNN is having a rough time, albeit completely self-inflicted. The network with a penchant for making itself and its reporters the story is now the subject of universal internet ridicule and rightly so. Andrew Kaczynski, CNN reporter (formerly of Buzzfeed) who loves to dig through Trump appointee books and academic thesis in search of improper citation, penned a post describing how CNN was able to track down an anonymous Reddit user who claimed responsibility for CNN gif President Trump tweeted. The gif showed Trump punching a figure with a CNN logo affixed in place of a face.