Andrew Trunsky on April 28, 2021

Hunter Biden will be a guest lecturer at Tulane University for a course titled “Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts” that focuses, in part, on “fake news.”

The son of President Joe Biden is one of nine guest speakers for the class, which focuses on “the current state of the media landscape in the United States and how media polarization, fake news, and the economics of the new business impact public policymaking in Washington, D.C.,” said Fox News, which first reported the story.

Other guest speakers include Dr. Deborah Birx, Fox News analyst Juan Williams, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, many media outlets labeled a New York Post story detailing how Biden helped arrange a meeting between his father and a Ukrainian energy executive as “fake news,” and social media platforms censored the company over the story’s perceived falsity.

Following the elder Biden’s victory, Hunter Biden acknowledged that he was under federal investigation, and that his laptop at the center of the Post’s story could “certainly” have been his, though he added that it may have been stolen or hacked by Russia to spread misinformation.

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Mary Rose Corkery on January 21, 2021

Will Wilkinson, vice president for research at the Niskanen Center and a New York Times contributing opinion writer said Thursday that President Joe Biden would lynch former Vice President Mike Pence if he desires unity.

“‘Aha! Biden proposes policies I dislike. HIS CALL FOR UNITY IS A LIE!!!’ is all the forlorn conservative mind can seem to muster. Sad,” Wilkinson tweeted, according to a screenshot.

“If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence,” Wilkinson tweeted, according to the screenshot.

The tweet, posted at 12:33 a.m. Thursday, has since been deleted.

“The Pence tweet was a tart way to drive home the exasperating irony and bad faith of right-wing pundits who have accused Biden of insincerity in his heartfelt calls for unification,” Wilkinson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“[T]heir own divisive rhetoric and willingness to spread disinformation about the election contributed to hundreds of Republicans storming the Capitol, erecting a noose, and calling for Mike Pence to be hanged.”

Wilkinson said that his agreement with Biden “that it is crucial for Americans to come together” is, in part, why he deleted the tweet.

Twitter told the DCNF it is looking into the tweet.

President Joe Biden promised in his inauguration speech on Wednesday to bring the American people together during a time of division and conflict.

“For those who did not support us, let me say this: Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart,” Biden said.

Biden said disagreement is American and democratic and said “the right to dissent peaceably… is perhaps this nation’s greatest strength” in his inauguration speech.

“Hear me clearly: disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans, and I promise you I will fight as hard for those who didn’t support me as those who did,” Biden said.

Twitter purged conservative accounts on a large scale after the Capitol riot in early January and after temporarily suspending former President Donald Trump’s account. The company tweeted on Jan. 6 that three of Trump’s tweets broke their “Civic Integrity’ policy.

The social media company announced it banned Trump’s account after the initial suspension.

The company also banned Gen. Mike Flynn, Sydney Powell and other accounts of Trump supporters for furthering the QAnon conspiracy theory, NBC News reported on Jan. 8.

The Niskanen Center and The New York Times didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.\

Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated with Wilkinson’s statement.

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“According to  @nytimes best-seller list, some organization is doing bulk buys of  @RubinReport’s book. Media never talk about this. There is endless money for right-wing grifters. Billionaires finance all of the so-called grassroots conservatives, I’m sorry, classic liberals.”, tweeted Uygur.

Rubin responded to Uygur’s claims, calling him a liar and issuing a challenge to Cenk to prove him wrong, saying he would donate $5,000 to any charity of Cenk’s choice.

“Hi Cenk. Like everything you spew, that is a lie. 107 copies of over 20K sold were bulk. And we have the receipts from Penguin Random House themselves.

But I’ll be a sport. Prove I’m lying and I’ll donate 5K to any Armenian Genocide charity of your choice.”, Rubin tweeted back.

“Don’t Burn This Book” currently sits at #12 on the New York Times’ Best Seller list after just making the list this week.

“Don’t Burn This Book” claims to be a guide to understanding the arguments and agenda of the Progressive Left with the goal of enabling readers to provide a counterargument.

As Rubin’s book says:

Dave Rubin launched his political talk show The Rubin Report in 2015 as a meeting ground for free thinkers who realize that partisan politics is a dead end. He hosts people he both agrees and disagrees with—including those who have been dismissed, deplatformed, and despised–taking on the most controversial issues of our day. As a result, he’s become a voice of reason in a time of madness.

Now, Rubin gives you the tools you need to think for yourself in an age when tribal outrage is the only available alternative. Based on his own story as well as his experiences from the front lines of the free speech wars, this book will empower you to make up your own mind about what you believe on any issue and teach you the fine art of:

• Checking your facts, not your privilege, when it comes to today’s most pervasive myths, from the wage gap and gun violence to climate change and hate crimes.
• Standing up to the mob against today’s absurd PC culture, when differences of opinion can bring relationships, professional or personal, to a sudden end.
• Defending classically liberal principles such as individual rights and limited government, because freedom is impossible without them.

“Don’t Burn This Book” was released to retailers on April 28^th.

Image: Collision Conf / Gage Skidmore

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Jason Hopkins 

–  The New York Times editorial board interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, discussing a range of issue before the board decides who it will endorse in the 2020 Democratic primary. 

–  The board entered a back-and-forth with Sanders on the topic of illegal immigration, with members pointing out that he once said illegal immigrant labor leads to lower wages for U.S. workers. 

–  Sanders — who supports policies that would lead to large-scale legalization of illegal workers — claimed his previous position was “250 years ago” and that he would help the rights of all workers.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a supporter of border decriminalization and comprehensive immigration reform, acknowledged in an interview that illegal immigrant labor can lead to lower wages.

In an interview for the New York Times’ editorial board, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke about a range of political issues affecting the U.S. The interview — which was released Monday — is part of the editorial board’s decision process for making an endorsement in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. The board pressed the senator on a number of his positions — including immigration.

Sanders, when asked, reaffirmed his support for border decriminalization and his pledge to end all deportations — positions that immigration enforcement officials have said would lead to more illegal immigration. However, the board then reminded the senator that he once said illegal immigrants and guest worker programs lead to lower wages for low-skilled American workers.

“No, that’s what I said on the Lou Dobbs’ show 250 years ago, right?” Sanders answered. “It gets repeated a little bit. But look, I think if you look at the proposal that we have, and I speak as the son of an immigrant. What we are going to do — you asked me what we do in the first hundred days. I’ll tell you what we do on Day 1.”

The senator said, if elected president, he would give legal status to DACA recipients, attempt to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” and undo other Trump administration border policies. Sanders went on to say that he’s seen illegal immigrants get exploited by employers, and that he would work to end such exploitation.

“So, I think you’re raising an issue, though, that we don’t talk about a whole lot when we talk about immigration, and that is the exploitation of undocumented workers. If you don’t have any documentation, I could hire you for five bucks an hour and what recourse do you have?” Sanders said.

“But you don’t think that that exploitation results in lower wages for domestic workers?” Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the NYT editorial board, then asked the senator.

The Vermont lawmaker answered in the affirmative.

“Sure it does. Right now, we have people who are being exploited. If you’re undocumented, and you’re being paid five bucks an hour, why am I going to pay her $12 an hour?” Sanders said.

This answer led to confusion between Sanders and the editorial board, with Appelbaum pointing out that the senator seemed to be reiterating his past position that the exploitation of illegal immigrant labor leads to lower wages for American workers.

Sanders clarified that he was speaking about how worker exploitation leads to lower wages for everyone, suggesting that the issue was much bigger than just taking advantage of illegal immigrant labor

With the exit of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro earlier this month, Sanders is left as perhaps the most progressive candidate among the 2020 Democratic candidates on the subject of immigration.

The self-described Democratic socialist released his immigration platform in November, pledging to not only end deportations and decriminalize illegal immigration, but also calling for the break up Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol. He also wants to accept 50,000 “climate migrants,” provide sweeping amnesty to illegal aliens who’ve committed low-level crimes, and provide a pathway to citizenship for the county’s estimated 11 million illegal aliens.

However, before the onset of President Donald Trump’s administration, Sanders used to hold hawkish views of illegal immigration.

In a 2015 interview with Vox, Sanders referred to “open borders” as a “Koch brothers proposal,” adding that an open borders-level of immigration would lead to the erosion of the nation-state and “make everybody in America poorer.”

This had been a position he had held for many years. In a 2007 interview with then-CNN host Lou Hobbs, Sanders said the following: “I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.”

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Image: Gage Skidmore

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Chuck Ross

The co-authors of a new book about Brett Kavanaugh blamed New York Times editors on Monday for removing a key passage from an essay they published over the weekend that laid out a new, but uncorroborated, sexual misconduct allegation against the Supreme Court justice.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly addressed the controversy over a New York Times Review essay they published on Saturday that previewed their book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.”

The essay focused on uncorroborated allegations that Deborah Ramirez made against Kavanaugh in 1983, when they were both students at Yale. It also revealed that a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer named Max Stier told the Senate last year about another incident he claims involved Kavanaugh and another woman. Stier reportedly said that Kavanaugh had his penis out at a party at Yale, and that a friend grabbed it and thrust it in a female student’s hand.

WATCH:

But as Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway (who has written a Kavanaugh book of her own) noted, Pogrebin and Kelly’s book had additional information about the most recent allegation that was exculpatory for Kavanaugh. Buried at the back of the book was the revelation that the woman in question refused to be interviewed and that her friends said she did not recall the incident.

After backlash across the political spectrum, The Times eventually added a correction to the story on Sunday that included the full passage from the book.

Pogrebin, Kelly and the Times all came under heavy scrutiny over the omission. Jim Dao, the Times editor who handled the article, conducted a Q&A session with readers concerned over how the story was handled. But Dao did not address how the key passage from the book was left on the cutting room floor, or whether editors indeed decided to remove it.

“In your draft of the article, did it include those words that have since been added to the article?” O’Donnell asked the reporters.

“It did,” they both replied.

“So somewhere in the editing process those words were trimmed?” the MSNBC host asked.

Pogrebin theorized that the passage was cut because it also identified the woman who they alleged had the encounter with Kavanaugh. The reporter said that editors likely cut the full passage as they cut the name of the alleged victim.

“I think it was sort of an editing, done in the haste, in the editing process, as you know, a closing section,” she said.

Both reporters denied that they intended to mislead readers in the essay.

“There was zero intent to mislead anybody about the details of the incident,” Kelly said.

“We certainly never intended to mislead in any way. We wanted to give as full a story as possible,” added Pogrebin.

They also acknowledged that they took part in the discussions to add the correction to the Times story.

“I think we felt like there’s so much heat, everyone has been kind of seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn’t want this to be an issue anymore,” Pogrebin said.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Peter Hasson

The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday’s paper that has since been corrected.

Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly left out exculpatory evidence in an article that claimed Kavanaugh had his pants down at a “drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” The sole source for the claim was Max Stier, an attorney in Washington, D.C.

Pogrebin and Kelly failed to inform readers in the original article that friends of the alleged victim said she has no recollection of the incident in question. That crucial fact was included in Pogrebin and Kelly’s new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” which was the source of the material in their article.

The Times published a correction to the misleading article late Sunday night.

The Post previously declined to publish the thinly sourced accusation, the D.C. paper revealed in an article Sunday night.

The Post “last year confirmed that two intermediaries” had passed along Stier’s claim “to lawmakers and the FBI” but “did not publish a story in part because the intermediaries declined to identify the alleged witness [Stier] and because the woman who was said to be involved declined to comment,” the Post’s article said.

Neither the Times nor Pogrebin and Kelly have explained why the article omitted the fact that the alleged victim reportedly has no recollection of the incident. Pogrebin and Kelly didn’t return emails inquiring about the omission.

Conservatives were critical of the Times’ decision to publish the misleading article.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway noted that Stier and Kavanaugh have a “long and contentious history,” stemming from Stier’s defense of former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, while Kavanaugh served on Ken Starr’s team in the Whitewater investigation.

National Review’s John McCormack described the Times’ omission as one of the “worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.” The Times’ article was more of a “dud” than a “bombshell,” McCormack added in a column, noting that “the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to corroborate the allegation.”

Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

[RELATED: The Self-Gaslighting of Partisan America]

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And here from David Rizardo is a longer list all drawn from the NYTimes. Rizardo has a page where you can graph the trends for words of your own choosing.

RELATED: Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals

This article is republished with permission from Marginal Revolution. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post A Visual Demonstration of How Fast the NYT Got Woke appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chris White on January 21, 2019

Twitter said Monday that former CNN contributor Reza Aslan did not violate the platform’s policies when he posted a tweet Saturday suggesting one of the boys involved in a dust-up during the March for Life rally had a “punchable face.”

“We have investigated the reported content and could not identify any violations of the Twitter Rules or applicable law,” Twitter wrote in a letter Aslan included in a tweet. “Accordingly,” the letter adds, “we have not taken any action at this time.”View image on Twitter

Reza Aslan@rezaaslan

Hey @twitter – How’s the complaint over your users saying they’re going to kidnap and kill my kids coming along?62910:50 AM – Jan 21, 2019519 people are talking about thisTwitter Ads info and privacy

Aslan, who until 2017 worked as a host at CNN, was responding to a New York Times article titled “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native American Elder at Indigenous People’s March,” which reported several boys wearing MAGA hats were harassing an American Indian shortly after Friday’s March for Life rally.

Aslan was fired from CNN after he called President Donald Trump a “piece of shit” in a tweet in 2017.

WATCH:

Recent reports appear to raise doubts about TheNYT’s depiction of events. The boys were identified as students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. A full video of the interaction suggests the boys were unwitting participants in a large demonstration and counter-demonstration between Black Israelites and American Indian protesters. One of the groups hurled insults at the boys while they were waiting for a bus back to Kentucky.

Aslan was one of many commentators and journalists who shamed the boys as “MAGA brats” who are “being radicalized by Trump in front of our very eyes.” TheNYT’s Maggie Habberman tweeted out her disproval of what she believed was the boys’ bad behavior.

“There are dozens of students laughing and egging on the behavior. Will be interesting to see if anyone is actually expelled, as officials suggest is possible,” she wrote in a tweet Saturday. Other commentators removed similar tweets after getting a fuller understanding of what transpired.

National Review pulled the article on Sunday that relied on an incomplete video of the incident and published an explanation by editor Rich Lowry.

“Anyway, if not a hoax, this at the very least was not what it initially seemed,” Lowry wrote. “I deleted my original tweet and we also took down a strongly worded post by my colleague Nick Frankovich that relied on the incomplete video.”

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Chris White

Facebook executives are angry at The New York Times for what they believe is unfair reporting about the company, NBC reported Friday, according to sources. The news comes as the paper is getting dinged for posting advertisements on Facebook telling users how to delete the platform.

The NYT ads give Facebook users a step-by-step guide on how to slowly pull back from the Silicon Valley company’s platform. The advertisement comes as the paper continues to report on Facebook’s controversies, including the company’s handling of personal data.

It is important to download whatever data you might need in the future “[b]efore you commit to breaking up with Facebook,” the paper notes in the first step. Users can then delete their accounts after downloading their essential information, NYT tech review writer Brian Chen wrote in October.

The NYT refutes the notion that the ads are unethical. 

“There is no connection between our coverage of Facebook and the company’s business dealings with Facebook,” NYT executive editor Dean Baquet told reporters on Jan. 4, adding that, “The stories grew organically from the controversies surrounding Facebook and elections.”

The paper reported in December that information from Facebook was mainly shared with major tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify. TheNYT glossed over the fact that it was one of nine media organizations that also obtained special access to things like a users’ friends lists.

Access to the data of 2.2 billion people is a potential goldmine for companies like Instagram, Netflix, and The NYT. The paper has faced claims of bias recently, particularly from former Executive Editor Jill Abramson.

The first woman to hold the position, Abramson, criticized the paper’s “unmistakably anti-Trump” coverage in an upcoming book. She claimed in the book that the storied newspaper has a business incentive to bash Trump regularly in its hard-news coverage to satisfy its reader base.

Facebook has not yet responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment about the nature of the advertisements.

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• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said a “starting consideration” for the company’s potential new values could be based off the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights
• Whether Dorsey knew it or not, several key rights found in the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights advocate for free speech and freedom of expression without fear of censorship
• Dorsey hinted at this in response to a New York Times op-ed bashing him for not censoring Alex Jones

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Friday there’s a potential to re-evaluate the company’s values based on the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights — which openly supports free speech.

“Our early values informed our rules. We likely over-rotated on one value, & then let the rules react to rapidly changing circumstances (some we helped create). We need to root these values in human rights law,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet Friday, adding that a “starting consideration” would be the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Whether Dorsey knew it or not, several key rights found in the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights advocate for free speech and freedom of expression without fear of censorship — the antithesis of what Twitter has been under fire for lately.

The second paragraph of the preamble to the Declaration of Human Rights states outright that “freedom of speech and belief” are “proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.”

Article 18 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Additionally, article 19 says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Dorsey was responding to The NYT op-ed, “Rules Won’t Save Twitter. Values Will” with a sub-headline, “The platform won’t ban the dangerous liar Alex Jones because he ‘hasn’t violated our rules.’ Then what’s the point of these rules?”

The crux of The NYT op-ed — with which Dorsey said he agreed — boils down to advocating removing users for “hate speech” while labeling Dorsey at worst a hypocrite and at best lazy for not banning political provocateur Alex Jones, claiming the company’s values don’t match its rules.

Dorsey “has little intention of truly cleaning up” Twitter, the op-ed author, Kara Swisher wrote Wednesday.

“While principles and rules will help in an open platform, it is values that Mr. Dorsey should really be talking about. By values, I mean a code that requires making hard choices,” Swisher added.

Swisher even comes close to advocating removing President Donald Trump from the platform: “many argue that [Trump] has violated various Twitter rules, by threatening violence … and by systematic harassment of people.” It’d cost Twitter $2 billion in market value if Trump simply decided not to tweet any more, Bloomberg reported August 2017.

While Twitter at one time labeled itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” it removed that slogan when then-CEO Dick Costolo departed July 2015, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

Twitter has been bogged down over the last few months for censorship, including shadow banning users and posts. Shadow banning is the use of algorithms to make users or posts harder to search for on social media platforms without outright deleting them, giving users the impression they haven’t been censored.

Dorsey himself has hinted at changing the social media giant’s policies that could include stricter enforcement of hate speech violations, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

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