Category Archives: History

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 5, 2019:  

CNN‘s breathtaking decline in its audience following the release of the Mueller Report is symptomatic of the problem facing the entire mainstream media: CNN assumed that President Trump was guilty of all manner of offences involving collusion with Russia during his campaign for the presidency in 2016. The network was the head cheerleader of that parade, but following the release of the Mueller Report the entire mainstream media has suffered a mighty, perhaps fatal, blow to its claim of journalistic integrity.

CNN‘s decline in its audience is simply staggering. In April Nielsen reported that its prime time ratings dropped 26 percent from a year earlier, while in its most coveted 25- to 54-year old demographic (which drives advertising revenue) it lost 41 percent of its audience.

The decline extended into the second quarter, with CNN‘s 25-54 demographic suffering a 37 percent decline compared to the second quarter of 2018.

It isn’t just CNN that has lost so much of its audience and credibility.

This article was published by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, July 5, 2019: 

When pressured to defend itself against claims that it was biased against Donald Trump, the mainstream media responded that it was just reporting the “facts.” Defending its nearly total commitment to the proposition that the president colluded with Russia during his presidential campaign in 2016, Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, responded: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.” Martin Baron, executive director of the Washington Post, echoed Zucker: “Our job is to bring facts to light.” Dean Bacquet, executive director of the New York Times repeated the canard: “We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.”

But what if the “facts” are wrong?

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, June 21, 2019: 

A number of prominent political commentators, not all from the Right, are ignoring recent polls showing President Donald Trump losing — if the election were held today — to any number of socialist Democrats currently vying for their party’s nomination. Some of them hail from outside the United States, giving them both a perspective not available from the national mainstream media and protection from that same media for going off-script in their predictions that Trump will win reelection, perhaps decisively, in 2020.

Piers Morgan, the liberal British news host who was fired from CNN in 2014 over his show’s low ratings, wrote that “by any normal yardstick, the President is headed for a defeat in the 2020 election.” But these are hardly normal times, as Morgan was quick to point out:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, June 12, 2019: 

President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his likely Democrat opponent in November 2020, touched gloves on Tuesday in Iowa and then came out swinging.

Biden landed the first blows by revealing the text of his evening Davenport speech at 6:00 a.m., getting the jump on Trump’s usual early morning tweeting frenzy. Biden questioned Trump’s mental capacity to lead the country and challenged his moral conduct. He claimed that Trump’s tariffs have “crushed” Iowa farmers, saying, “It’s easy to be tough when someone else is feeling the pain.” He attacked the president on climate change, race, and his failed negotiations with China. He accused the president of backing off on threats of tariffs on Mexico, calling him “scared” and putting on a “stunning display of childishness” during his visit to Normandy to honor D-Day. This was no doubt a reference to a Trump tweet he sent while visiting the United Kingdom calling Bette Midler a “washed-up psycho.”

Biden told his Davenport audience that the president is “literally an existential threat to this country,” slamming Trump by name more than 75 times in his speech. Biden accused Trump of “embrac[ing] dictators such as Kim Jong-un [North Korea’s communist supreme leader] who’s a damn murderer and a thug.” He charged Trump with using “crude language” and “embarrassing behavior that is burrowing deep into our culture.” He added that Trump is defying the authority of Congress and using phrases such as “enemy of the people” when describing the mainstream media.

These charges were red meat for the president who,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 10, 2109: 

National Public Radio (NPR) reported on Saturday that “support for impeachment hearings grows.” It was interpreting results from a survey that NPR itself funded (using taxpayer monies) along with help from PBS (Public Broadcasting Service — also taxpayer funded) and the Marist Poll (funded by Marist College). Writer Domenico Montanaro noted that, based on that poll, “There is a growing desire for impeachment proceedings to begin against Trump.” He then admitted that “Americans are still split overall on what to do after the release of the Mueller report.”

He reported that

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 10, 2019:

Ken Stern was increasingly concerned about the blue/red “divide” in America in 2016, and left his “liberal bubble” to find out the truth. He quit his job at NPR and wrote about what he found in “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.”

He told the New York Post in October 2017:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work, and pray.

 

For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings, and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show.

 

I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike.

 

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches, and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues – how to help them, not how to keep them out – but that is what I got.

Nothing has changed at NPR. Writer Domenico Montanaro gleefully reported on Saturday that “support for impeachment hearings grows.” It was interpreting results from a survey that NPR itself funded (using taxpayer monies), along with help from PBS (Public Broadcasting Service – also taxpayer funded) and the Marist Poll (funded by Marist College). He breathlessly noted that, based on that poll, “There is a growing desire for impeachment proceedings to begin against Trump.” He then admitted that “Americans are still split overall on what to do after the release of the Mueller report.”

He reported that “a slim majority of Americans (52%) want one of the following: to begin impeachment proceedings (22%), to continue investigations into potential political wrongdoing of Trump (25%), or to publicly reprimand him – that is, censure (5%).”

Montanaro is guilty of cherry-picking. What he’s excited about is that last month just 16% of those polled by NPR/PBS/Marist wanted to “start impeachment proceedings against President Trump” while this month that number is 22%. What he failed to note in his exuberance is that