As I try, in my peasant-y way, to navigate the reefs and shoals of all the “fake news” the world throws before us, I’m thankful we’ve got gatekeepers like “Snopes.com” to do our thinking for us.

Q: Did U.S. Rep. @AOC repeatedly guess "free" on the TV show "The Price is Right?"
A: https://t.co/95RRj4nSzs pic.twitter.com/L6KZTfjibR

— snopes.com (@snopes) April 16, 2019

That’s the American “Fact-Check” industry – guarding the ramparts of American intellectual integrity.

Gun violence is schools is a quarter what it was 25 years ago, even with the tragic mass shootings in recent years thrown in.

But Big Left and Big Media have succeeded in convincing a fair number of people that 2+2=5:

Twenty years after the Columbine High School shooting made practicing for armed intruders as routine as fire drills, many parents have only tepid confidence in the ability of schools to stop a gunman, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
And while most Americans consider schools less safe than they were 20 years ago, the poll finds a majority say schools aren’t at fault for shootings. Bullying, the availability of guns, the internet and video games share more of the blame.

If you tell people the sky is falling often and consistently enough, people will start carrying umbrellas.

next time a SITD critic claims the Obama administration was extraordinarily clean, not a single conviction, remind them of this:
joe doakes

Percpetion is reality.

If Obama’s cronies in the media and Democrat party messaging (ptr) say his time in office was “scandal free” enough times, people will perceive it that way.

Put another way – if Trump worked to defame Latinos the way Obama did to defame law-abiding gun owners, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have issued a fatwa.

Alan Dershowitz, in re the faculty at Harvard Law School: “Your idea of diversity is someone with different color skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you do”.

See also “Comedy Central“.

Sharyl Atkisson has a list of 78 “mistakes” the media has made in covering Trump so far.

Yes, I put mistakes in scare quotes.

In late November of 2016, on NPR’s “On The Media” show – as reliable a measure of the daily ebb and flow of the “Elite” media’s inner id as any artifact you’ll find – representatives from the Washington Post and New York Times newsrooms spoke at length with host Bob Garfield about the need to change the rules. Instead of just “telling the story” – the who, what, when, where, why and how of the news – and presuming the consumer an figure things out for themselves, the mission was going to turn to “de-normalizing Trump”.

The “mistakes” – not just in re Trump, but Nick Sandman, “Russiagate” and on, and on, and on – may not all be symptoms of an “elite” media whose mission has changed from informing to driving an agenda. Perhaps.

But if they had changed their mission, I’m at a loss for how they’d be doing anything differently.

I want to make a video, fisking John Oliver’s moronic piece claiming Australia’s gun laws “debunk” the “American gun ownership myth”. Spoiler: the only parts that are wrong are the parts where Oliver is moving his lips.

The problem is, watching John Oliver gives me a very unpleasant physical reaction. Watching him literally makes me ill.

It’s not just how he smugly mangles context and cherry picks factoids, and mugs for the trained seals in his audience; that was Jon Stewart’s schtick, too. But I can watch (and heckle and fisk) Stewart and enjoy doing it.

John Oliver could read a phone book, or “Goodnight Moon”, or even quotes from Margaret Thatcher and William F. Buckley, and I’d still feel my skin crawing, and start wanting to throw up.

I don’t even react like this to the useless Steven Colbert.

I literally get ill watching Oliver.

The only other thing like it? I get a headache watching Tim Burton movies. No kidding – I even got a headache watching one Burton movie even before I learned what it was and who directed it. It can be a Burton movie I love (“Nightmare before Christmas”) or hate (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), but it’s the same headache. Something about his style. I don’t know.

But even that reaction is nothing like the one I get from John Oliver.

No, I’m not exaggerating.

Does this happen to anyone else?

SCENE:  A busy office at a major news network.   Ira KATZ and Melyssa HOOPERMAN-BELL, two senior network executives, are discussing an upcoming newscast.

KATZ:   OK.  So we’ve got this piece on the revolving door between Fox News and the Trump White House.

HOOPERMAN-BELL:   Excellent.  I hate Trump.

KATZ:  Everyone hates Trump.

HOOPERMAN-BELL:  And this connection between them and Fox News is a threat to democracy.

KATZ:  Unprecedented.

HOOPERMAN-BELL:  Who should do it?

KATZ:  Stephanopoulos.

HOOPERMAN-BELL:  Definitely Stephanopoulos.

And SCENE.  Always, forever SCENE. 

Earlier this week, hundreds of students “spontaneously” walked out of Minneapolis’ Patrick Henry High School to demand legislators take away Second Amendment rights currently deemed unfashionable by Big Left.

The Media was waiting, cameras all a-whirl.

OK, I lied.  It was ten kids.

OK.  I only half lied.   The Strib was waiting anyway , there to give the “spontaneous” anti-freedom demonstration all the attention it wanted.

So when President Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”, let’s just say my condemnation is muted to the point of nonexistence.

…Is Babylon Bee satire, or is it the best straight news source in America?

Phony “survivors” making up stories about Brett Kavanaugh: heroes.

Survivor of one of the most harrowing rapes – no, read the account, there’s no euphemizing it – who calls BS on Big Media’s growing uselessness to preserving democracy?

Not so much.

So if wrote a piece about a fact-checking site “checking facts” on a satirical story, you’d either think that the “Fact Check” site was the one being satirical, or that the satire site had gone just a tad over the top.

Neither is apparently the case in this story, in which Snopes “fact checks” Babylon Bee – which, in its own way may be America’s finest news source today, if you think about it – and a “story” it did about Jussie Smollett getting a job at CNN. Babylon Bee was (so far) being satirical, and Snopes was not.

Oh, yeah – did I say the Bee was likely America’s most reliable source of news? I’m being a little less satirical than they are:

Jussie Smollett Offered Job At CNN After Fabricating News Story Out Of Thin Airhttps://t.co/RNCG1r6ShA pic.twitter.com/Efsd5WEOMa

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 18, 2019

They may do news better than the Big Three, these days.

American public media reports – or, in a sense, “Reports” – on the ironic rising cost of water in several Great Lakes-area cities and, naturally, its disproportionate effect on the poor.

The cities – they focus most especially on Cleveland, Detroit, Duluth, Buffalo and Chicago – have water rates that are rising extremely fast, as the ageing infrastructure starts to give out.

What it doesn’t mention?

Every one of the cities has been run by Democrats, according to Democrat priorities, as long as anyone can remember.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is shopping for a new casserole trivet for his Instant Pot (C) when MyLysa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, rounds the corner.

BERG: Er…Ms. Silberman.

SILBERMAN: [visibly searching for name] . Er – hello, Merg.

BERG: So – any comment about the allegations against Ralph “Satchmo” Northam?

SILBERMAN: In these inflammatory situations and divided times, it’s a journalist’s responsibility to make sure they get the facts straight.

BERG: OK. So – Brent Kavanaugh…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly screams, face red with rage] WE ALWAYS #BELIEVEWOMEN, YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!

BERG: Huh. So – Democrat governor Northam…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] Get the facts…

BERG: Northam, Ellison, Clinton…

SILBERMAN: [Abruptly calm again] We can’t report a story where we’re not absolutely sure…

BERG: The Covington kids..

SILBERMAN: [Enraged again] . WHITE! MAGA! THE…SMIRK! I JUST WANT TO BURN THAT KID’S FACE OFF!

BERG: Right. So I’ve predicted that the media will declare Northam “rehabilitated” within the year.

SILBERMAN: Rehabilitated from what?

BERG: Er…yeah. Exactly.

And SCENE

A friend of the blog writes:

Have you noticed the Star Tribune is really running a lot of Amy articles lately?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

Why, it’s almost as if they are “shaping the battlefield” on behalf of their former columnist’s daughter.

…over the recent layoffs in the hipster millennial junk news industry…

…but in this case, it’s Iowahawk doing the Schadenfreud.

Another @iowahawkblog work of art pic.twitter.com/BDhiXxUKRo

— SixStringTweets (@SixStringTweets) January 25, 2019

I can’t tell if sound more like a Nebraska outtake or a Jay Farrar demo.

NYTimes  reporter tweets:

I'm a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I'd like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.

— Dan Levin (@globaldan) January 24, 2019

Gosh – what do you suppose his angle is going to be?

Caitlin Flanagan at that noted conservative tool The Atlantic notes that h Big Media botched everthing that could be botched about the Covington flap – and gave us the pullquote of the week:

The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.

But read the whole thing anyway.

…what Ashley Simpson was to “live performance”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Gun use surges in Europe, where guns are rare.  What could be the cause of this? 
The article is a shambles.  It throws women afraid of being raped into the same bag as South American terrorists and Eastern European refugees – they all want guns and guns hurt people so guns are bad. 
The author’s inability to distinguish between citizens who desire guns for lawful self-defense in response to government unwillingness to crack down on refugee violence, versus the Muslims shooting up markets or the narcotics gangs killing judges and policemen, makes an analysis impossible and the proposed solutions worthless.
Is clear thinking really so hard to come by, these days?

On today’s left?

Rhetorical question, right?

Last week, I was listening to NPR.

I know, I know. Worth with me, here.

I can’t find it online – I didn’t try all that hard, but then I suspect it’s not the only piece like this. that’s going to turn up if you look hard enough.

An earnest-sounding SEIU leader – y’know, a non-biased, politically-objective source, solemnly intoned:

“We don’t want to politicize the border and immigration issue . We just want policy to reflect the changing patterns of migration”

In other words: we want “ignore the national boundary so that people can migrate north to join our power base” to become the new normal.

Oddly, the NPR host said nothing about this.

I’ve got friends who still say, with a straight face, that the media does a good job of playing things down the middle. 

Here’s 18 cases where the media displayed naked bias, shimmying around the narrative poll, waiting for Big Left to stuff dollar bills in its G-String.  

One example here:

After the Avenatti carnival turned the Kavanaugh confirmation upside down, NBC attempted to report the bizarre claims his client was leveling. NBC spoke with a supposed corroborating witness Avenatti produced, but that woman instead debunked most of the client’s claims. When confronted, Avenatti told NBC the woman debunking his client’s claims was in fact his corroborating witness, but after being told she didn’t corroborate anything, he shot back: “How about this, on background, it’s not the same woman [as the corroborating witness]. What are you going to do with that?” There was more back and forth and the “corroborating witness” ultimately said Avenatti was lying about everything, yet despite all of this happening before Kavanuagh’s confirmation vote, NBC didn’t actually publish the story until weeks later. The Daily Wire published a helpful overview. 

Seventeen to go.  Get reading. 

German “journalist” Claas Relotius spent many years on the European and world journalistic fast track, until it was realized he’d spent years falsifying stories.

One of those stories was about the xenophobic misanthropic fascist racists in…

…Fergus Falls, MN.

And he didn’t just make up the little stuff. Two local residents combed through the story:

There are so many lies here, that my friend Jake and I had to narrow them down to top 11 most absurd lies (we couldn’t do just 10) for the purpose of this article. We’ve been working on it since the article came out in spring of 2017, but had to set it aside to attend to our lives (raising a family, managing a nonprofit organization, etc.) before coming back to it this fall, and finally wrapped things up a few weeks ago, just in time to hear today that Relotius was fired when he was exposed for fabricating many of his articles.

The following was neither the dumbest nor the most extravagant of Relotius’ lies:

6. The view from the Viking Cafe
“You can see the power plant where he works when you look out the window of the Diner, six tall, gray towers, from which rise white steam clouds.”
The Viking Cafe is Fergus Falls’ most treasured downtown establishment — over 60 years old. One of the reasons we Minnesotans all like it so much is that it has a cozy, underground feeling. Why? Because there are literally NO WINDOWS in the interior of this restaurant. Sure, you can see a little bit out the small front windows, but nothing beyond the shops across the street. The power plant Relotius refers to is almost 2 miles away on the northeast edge of town, blocked from view by a neighborhood on a large hill, and sports a single smokestack. Relotius’ imaginings are dramatic for the movie version of Trump’s America someday, but is it accurate and true? Not in the least.

Further proof that if you read it in the mainstream media, and it’s even a little bit political, distrust first. Then verify.

Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

Ken Martin’s “investigation” into the domestic violence allegations against Keith Ellison is almost done.

Is the suspense killing you, too?

Kevin Williamson on – ahem – “Why Alexandria Ocasio Cortez drives Republicans Crazy”, and I’m gonna stop right there.

She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”.  She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually is as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and much more extreme.

No matter!

Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise — her far-left politics — wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She’s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word “socialist” means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans’ noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he’s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont — a useful cat’s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.

As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they’d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans — no strangers to callow dilettantism — still have a chance after all.

On NPR the other morning, I heard a story about Hungarian protests against a new overtime  law.

The protesters complained to NPR’s reporter on the scene that the main broadcaster in Hungary – which is governed by a conservative, putatively “Trumpist” popular government led by Viktor Orban – is controlled by the state, and that all major private media is controlled by allies of the government.

And I thought “Hmmmmm”, as I listened to NPR on the local Minnesota Public Radio station, and looked at the copy of the Star/Tribune in the passenger seat of my car.

But I continued listening.

One of the protesters complained that the media didn’t accurately report the numbers of people at their demonstrations, when they bothered to report about the demonstrations at all.

And I pondered for a moment, remembering when the media reported “hundreds” of attendees at Tea Party rallies at the Capitol in 2009-2010  that drew closer to 7,000.

And I thought “Huh.  So there are examples of media bias that the mainstream American media will report on”.