Trump on releasing the JFK records

[Kirk Gallaway]

 

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

Or maybe he just saw intelligence that proves we really are under threat.

I know it's difficult for some on this board to contemplate sometimes, but there really are other countries in the world more nefarious than the one you live in.

I will say KK has a point that intelligence could just make up BS stories about doomsday threats to Johnson to justify FISA warrants. But to assume that under some situations FISA warrants aren't necessary is just plain naive.

But what kind of BS excuse could intelligence make up to Trump to justify not opening up files on a 60 year assassination?I wouldn't tend to believe any BS excuse Trump could make, as history has shown him a compulsive liar. But what was said?

I don't know how many hundreds of times I've witnessed the trembling at hearing that  Schumer statement here,

Schumer is an institutionalist  and will play up the U.S. as the biggest, baddest, and meanest intelligence organization in the world and it works!, as witnessed by the awe it  inspires by it's the very mention here, particularly among those foreign to the U.S. 

But to those  in Washington, that was not a "limited hangout". There's nothing ominous about that statement other than  a general advisement to be careful who you screw with  that most people understand.

[Benjamin Cole]

https://archive.ph/jFKhz

This is the NYT take on the the controversy regarding NPR. 

The NYT does not mention that of 87 staffers in the Washington office of the NPR, all 87 are registered Democrats. 

For the record, the NPR asserts it was not biased in its coverage of C19, the Hunter Biden laptop story and Russiagate, and it is not a biased news organization. 

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"Edith Chapin is an American journalist and the current Editor in Chief and acting Chief Content Officer of NPR News. She was previously the senior supervising editor of the NPR News Foreign Desk; prior to working at NPR, she spent 25 years at CNN."---Wikipedia 

[W. Niederhut]

Geez... This is uncanny.  Ben Cole still doesn't understand why Uri Berliner's hit piece on NPR is bunk.

Instead, Ben simply re-posts more articles about Berliner's bunk, as if they validate his flawed claims.

It reminds me of Ben's inability to study and accurately understand the truth about Russia-gate and Trump's conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

What was it Obama said?  "When the other side repeats the lies, our approach is to repeat the truth."

I'll repeat the truth, for Ben.

 

Ben,

     As for Uri Berliner's moronic hit piece on NPR this week, Kevin Drum completely demolished it in a few concise paragraphs yesterday.*  

     I'm going to re-print Drum's demolition of Berliner's hit piece, because he specifically debunks the bogus MAGA "Russiagate hoax" trope that you have been repeating on this very thread.

      Kindly pay attention to Kevin Drum's facts about Russiagate and the Mueller Report -- which are identical to my comments (above) on this thread.

The peculiar tale of NPR’s decline and fall – Kevin Drum (jabberwocking.com)

* The peculiar tale of NPR’s decline and fall

Kevin Drum

 

April 9, 2024 – 4:36 pm

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, has written a buzzy article at the Free Press about how NPR has recently fallen apart. He attributes this to widespread changes following the murder of George Floyd in 2020:

There’s [now] an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

I haven't listened to NPR in decades, but I don't doubt there's some truth to this. Oddly, though, it comes only in the second half of Berliner's piece. In the first half he offers three examples of stories where NPR "faltered," and not one of them has anything to do with racism, transphobia, and so forth. Nor is it clear the NPR actually faltered much. Here they are:

• NPR ran lots of stories about Donald Trump's collusion with Russia but never issued a mea culpa when special prosecutor Robert Mueller exonerated him.
  .
  Mueller specifically said he never even addressed "collusion" because it's not a legal term. However, he did document a large number of links between Trump and Russia. These links are the things everyone was reporting about, and Mueller mostly confirmed that they had happened. He just didn't think they rose to the level of indictment.

• NPR ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story during the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. But the laptop later turned out to be real.
  .
  "Later" is doing a lot of work here. At the time the laptop story was dodgy in the extreme. The narrative about a blind PC repair guy who just happened to contact Rudy Giuliani was bizarre. Multiple outlets passed on the story before the New York Post ran it, and even one of their reporters was so skeptical he refused to allow his byline to be used. Other reporters who followed up on the story found nothing. Giuliani refused to let anyone examine the hard drive. There was never any evidence implicating Joe Biden. The entire thing bore all the hallmarks of Republican ratxxxxery and deserved to be treated skeptically by reputable journalists.

• NPR consistently reported that COVID-19 had a natural origin even though there was plenty of evidence that it might have been the result of a lab leak.
  .
  In this case NPR was entirely in the right. The authors of "Proximal Origins," which supported the natural origins theory very early on, didn't have any secret doubts about what they wrote. There's no serious evidence that Anthony Fauci or anyone else manipulated evidence in favor of natural origins. The lab leak theory was motivated from the start not by scientific evidence but by (admittedly legitimate) suspicion of China's behavior combined with the coincidence of the virus breaking out in a city that contained a major biolab. The lab leak hypothesis has always been unlikely, and over time has gotten ever more unlikely. It's all but completely discredited now.

In all three of these instances, Berliner has fallen prey to a sort of conventional centrist wisdom that requires liberal reporters to bend over backward in order to be "fair" to right-wing inventions. But at least in these three cases, conservatives don't have a leg to stand on. Berliner is accusing NPR of nothing more than exercising pretty good editorial judgment.

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[Benjamin Cole]

Another perspective on the the NPR lack-of-credibility issue, his time from a lady who runs an agriculture news publication, The Fence Post. 

This article on The Fence Post is probably from the other end of the spectrum from the article I posted from the NYT. 

One value of the internet is the ability to read far and wide. 

The truth comes out at NPR

News NEWS | Apr 12, 2024

 

Rona Johnson  

rjohnson@thefencepost.com

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Like most everyone, I love it when I have been proven to be right. I have for a long, long time listened to National Public Radio and complained about its left leaning reporting. But I listened any way because I thought it would be good to know what the left is thinking and saying. Many times, I would catch myself yelling at the radio and slapping my forehead in disbelief and frustration.

So, when senior business editor Uri Berliner wrote an opinion piece for Bari Weiss’ Free Press, criticizing NPR, which is funded primarily with taxpayer dollars, for its liberal stance, I felt vindicated.

I have been long raging that NPR should lose public funding because of its politics but I am but a lowly ag editor and my opinion doesn’t much matter in the world.

 

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In his piece Berliner severely criticized NPR on its coverage of “Russiagate” even though it was later debunked. The worst part of the news organizations coverage of Russian collusion by Trump, is that once the scandal was proven not to be true, NPR didn’t bother to apologize or explain to their listeners that they were wrong and felt no need to set the record straight.

“What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media,” Berliner said in his piece. 

 

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He also lamented NPR’s coverage of the origin of CVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying, “The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”

Berliner even went so far as to research his colleagues and find out where they leaned politically. He found that 87 of NPR’s newsroom were registered Democrats and none were Republicans.

And, what’s worse, although NPR has embraced people of color and sexual identity and jumped on the white conservatives are bad bandwagon, they have made no inroads into the black and Latin communities as far as listenership.

To his credit, Berliner tried to talk to his superiors about these issues but was pretty much ignored. I have to give him credit for coming out of the closet per say but I doubt it will do much to change the liberal bent of the news media because the train left the station many years ago. It will take many years for the news industry to go back to being fair and balanced in its reporting and no amount of telling us how fair and balanced they are will change our views. People need to be able to trust the media and know that they are reporting all the news in a nonpartisan way.

There is plenty of room for opinions in newspapers and magazines, for instance in The Fence Post we have an Opinion page and an Editor’s Note. But if a publication decides to make every page an opinion page then they are not informing you of the news, they are telling you what to think.

Berliner, who has been at NPR for 25 years, is still employed but I must wonder how long that will last. I’m sure he gets a frosty reception whenever he steps into the newsroom.

Although I feel vindicated, I don’t take pleasure in seeing the news industry stray from its mission and lose the trust of the American people.

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I do wonder how a news (or academic) organization could end up with 87 staffers from one major party, and zero from the other major political party. 

[Matt Allison]

On 4/13/2024 at 12:47 PM, Matt Allison said:

Or maybe he just saw intelligence that proves we really are under threat.

I know it's difficult for some on this board to contemplate sometimes, but there really are other countries in the world more nefarious than the one you live in.

And how about that; Mike Johnson, who I most certainly do not care for, did the right thing as an American.

A must-watch right here:

 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

And how about that; Mike Johnson, who I most certainly do not care for, did the right thing as an American.

A must-watch right here:

 

I agree, Matt Allison.

The US, Japan, India, Israel, most European nations have flaws, like any working democracies.

They also have free press that point out those flaws, in profusion.

But, egads, look at Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah. They do not have free press that illuminate anything, but rather service oppression, repression, suppression and atrocities. 

The Western liberal democracies need to be stout in standing up for traditional liberal values. 

 

[Sandy Larsen]

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

 

 

Wow, I'm very impressed. I didn't think Johnson had it in him.

Maybe the Democrats will save his Speakership from MTG and her sorry ilk.

 

[W. Niederhut]

Steve Inskeep published a detailed expose of Uri Berliner's fraudulent claims about NPR at Substack this week.

How my NPR colleague failed at “viewpoint diversity” (substack.com)

Pundits throughout the MAGA-verse-- and Donald Trump, himself-- have seized on Berliner's fraudulent article to denounce NPR, and demand that it be de-funded.

WaPo published an overview of the anti-NPR MAGA sh*t storm today.

NPR editor Uri Berliner resigns after Free Press essay accuses network of bias - The Washington Post

Among other errors documented by Inskeep, Berliner's claim about all of NPR's staff being registered Democrats is false.

But, more importantly, almost all of Berliner's claims about NPR's journalistic modus operandi are blatantly untrue.

Several of Inskeep's points-- e.g., about reporting on Trump's Russiagate scandal and Giuliani's 2020 Hunter Biden laptop "October Surprise"--are the same ones enumerated (above) by Kevin Drum.

Edited April 18 by W. Niederhut