Bozell & Graham: The outrage over Pelosi-mocking videos
Two videos mocking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were hot topics heading into Memorial Day weekend. One distorted and slowed down Pelosi's speech at the Center for American Progress to create the impression she was drunk. The other one was an edited package of Pelosi's very real verbal blunders and stammers that aired on the Fox Business program "Lou Dobbs Tonight."
President Trump was slammed for retweeting the Lou Dobbs video, and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani was condemned for sharing (but then taking down) the distorted "drunken" Pelosi video. It's routinely suggested by the left that nearly all misinformation in America can be blamed on Trump and his backers.
Trump fakes aren't considered outrageous. In January, a video of Trump's first address from the Oval Office was badly doctored by a Seattle TV station, making it look as if the president was sticking his tongue out languidly between sentences, and he appeared more orange than he looked in the actual video. This wasn't unnoticed. Millions of his supporters saw this and were outraged. It undoubtedly came across the radar screen of those same journalists who are now so upset about the Pelosi videos.
Yawn. It's Trump. Trump deserves it.
When President Trump creates a verbal miscue, the late-night comedy brigade has a field day. A misspelled tweet. A facial expression. A hand gesture. It takes nothing to trigger media mockery. What if it's a Democrat? In the Dobbs video, Pelosi cites "three things" and holds up two fingers. If you think anyone in the late-night world is going to pan Pelosi for mental errors, you're not paying attention.
The perpetually angry left and its allies in the "news" media were outraged that Facebook and Twitter didn't take down the distorted Pelosi video, although Facebook reportedly "deprioritized" it, making it less visible. They don't remember how they have mangled videotape (and audiotape), like when NBC was sued for allegedly mangling George Zimmerman's phone call about Trayvon Martin. Or when everyone pretended President Trump called all immigrants "animals" when he was really discussing MS-13 murderers. Or when everyone misrepresented the Covington Catholic kids as hate-speech villains.
The Washington Post editorial board felt a need to pronounce on the subject on Friday, trying to play the role of Solomon, only to make the situation even more lopsided. "The 'slurring' video, accompanied by manufactured accusations of drunkenness, may fall on one side of the [censorship] line," the Post proclaimed. "The stammering video may fall on the other."
It may fall on the free speech side of the line? A truthful, untouched video may be OK? Be still our hearts.
The Post insisted that the Fox Business clip package "offered a misleading impression of a perfectly coherent 21-minute news conference" (as if holding up two figures and saying "three" is perfectly coherent). They snidely added the president did not "pull it from the right-wing fever swamps of social media. He took it instead from the fever swamp of Fox Business Network."
The social media giants should strive to create a clear and balanced standard for what content will be banned, no matter which party is affected. Right now, it seems to conservative Americans that the current policy is to take down videos and accounts quickly and haphazardly, often based on angry left-wing-activist complaints. Conservatives cannot count on the "independent fact-checkers" to police videos, since they have all the same leftist biases as these activists and the "news" media. If these imbalanced current practices continue, these social media companies will be as mistrusted as the Old Media.
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NBC manages to dig up a standard to smack a conservative with
Chuck Todd demanded something of a conservative on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend that he and his network rarely seem to ask of themselves: a consistent standard.
Erick Erickson was put on the spot to atone for the supposed sins of Rush Limbaugh and others who, in Todd’s view, waxed conspiratorial in the wake of Cesar Sayoc’s alleged mail bombs. And, to be fair, I’m sympathetic to that view in some of its particulars.
But after Erickson similarly acknowledged as much, Todd began frothing at the mouth as if the acknowledgement wasn’t passionate enough. Erickson responded this way: "The problem is in this situation, we have a lot of people who no longer trust the media, they don’t trust institutions, they don’t trust their neighbor. We've gone inward. Unfortunately, I do think it’s gonna be an external threat that brings us together. There is nothing left in this country that unifies us as a whole."
Not bad, but maybe it’s time consider if one of those external threats might ultimately be the media itself. Because to make Erickson answer such a question, in a way that displays such an appalling lack of self-awareness or humility concerning NBC’s own malfeasance index the last few years, is truly a diagnosis of the media’s intention to keep our civic dialogue fractured at all costs.
To sum up, here’s what Chuck Todd has to ignore in order to get all Church Lady-uppity when Erickson basically refused to become a Democrat before his very eyes:
*The perpetual rehiring of Keith Olbermann, who not only has a penchant for his own conspiracy theories involving Trump and Putin but also a long track record of saying things like Michelle Malkin is a “big mashed up piece of meat with lipstick on it” and S.E. Cupp is “a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does.”
*Matt Lauer’s infamous rape dungeon.
*Refusing to publish Ronan Farrow’s revelation about Harvey Weinstein’s appetite for sex slavery, including threats by company lawyers to come after Farrow if he didn’t back off the story.
*Making Nicolle Wallace its cover girl of the week after she proudly admitted that her advice to Jeb Bush during the 2016 presidential campaign was to punch Donald Trump in the face.
*Propping up Joy Reid’s lies that her social media accounts were hacked in order to protect her from past statements about gays that would get conservatives hanged by NBC.
*NBC still employs the notorious liar-turned-hilarious meme Brian Williams.
*And most recently, the network buried evidence that would have supported the cause of Brett Kavanaugh’s innocence and has given unnumbered uncritical television appearances to Michael Avenetti, whom Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred for criminal investigation for making false statements to Congress and obstruct its investigation.
But sure, let’s haze Erickson for the sins of others. Because infotainment. Because tribalism. Because pro wrestling. Because of anything other than honest analysis or real debate that might actually help heal our national dialog.
It’s all evidence that healing isn’t remotely on NBC’s radar as a goal as much as revolution and iconoclasm is. The leftists want their way, and they fully plan on breaking things to get it — the truth, context, or propriety be damned.
Erickson was basically asked to take responsibility for the actions of others, while NBC never takes responsibility for what’s going on in its own backyard, because he is viewed by Chuck Todd as a foreign agent, not a fellow American.
I think much of what the political Right refers to as "media bias" is an anachronism that harks back to a time when our country’s Venn diagram was much healthier than it is now. Although we weren’t as honest with each other as we should have been back then, we hated each other much less.
If we are honest with ourselves now, though, most of mainstream journalism and all of progressive journalism are simply broadcasting to and from a foreign country. The America of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and their clear Judeo-Christian underpinnings are not the target audience. Sadly, it seems to be their target.
Bozell & Graham: Roseanne's spontaneous combustion
Who knew we would look back at Roseanne Barr's crotch-grabbing massacre of the national anthem in 1990 and see a mere flesh wound on her career? She embarrassed herself, mocking America in front of America, but her hit show rolled along.
But one egregiously racist tweet destroyed the "Roseanne" reboot of 2018 in a Hollywood minute. Tweeting that former Barack Obama top aide Valerie Jarrett is a mixture of the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of the Apes" put an abrupt end to the top broadcast television program of the year.
ABC made the right decision -- and the obvious business decision. You cannot compare blacks to monkeys. That is an old, dehumanizing trope. It is viciously mean-spirited to compare President Donald Trump to an orangutan, as many leftists have. But that is a mockery of one man's hair and intelligence, not the rhetorical equivalent of a burning cross.
In retrospect, everyone said ABC should have known this was going to happen. Barr has always been a loose cannon, and her politics have zigzagged from running on the presidential ticket of the nutty-left Green Party all the way over to backing Trump. But the network thrived with the original formula of "Roseanne," and it saw a win-win with a reboot: The show's old audience would tune in, and ABC could sell itself as reaching out to the red states after mysteriously dumping Tim Allen's hit show. The ratings were terrific. Then Roseanne drove the reboot over a cliff.
Dehumanizing tropes about black people don't always destroy careers ... when the black is a Republican. For example, Pat Oliphant didn't stop being the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world after he drew then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a parrot with large lips sitting on then-President George W. Bush's hand in 2008.
This was a trend. Christian Science Monitor cartoonist Jeff Danziger drew a barefoot Rice in a rocking chair saying, "I knows all about aluminum tubes! (Correction) I don't know nuthin' about aluminum tubes ..." In the radical fever swamps, cartoonist Ted Rall drew one with Rice saying, "I was Bush's beard! His house n----!" And a black male character replies, "Now hand over your hair straightener." He is wearing a T-shirt that says, "You're not white, stupid."
Even as "Roseanne" is canceled, let's not congratulate Disney CEO Bob Iger as the King of Televised Civility. This is the same company that dragged its feet for weeks after ABC co-host Joy Behar insulted millions on "The View" when she cracked that Christians like Vice President Mike Pence who act like "Jesus talks to you" have a "mental illness." We protested until Behar apologized on air, and she has since compared Trump to an orangutan, because it's just another day in the Resistance.
Days before the Barr debacle, Disney-owned ESPN rehired Keith Olbermann, fresh off a series of unhinged Trump-hating videos for GQ magazine and a book titled "Trump Is F---ing Crazy (This Is Not a Joke)." He's also vicious on Twitter, like this tweet to the president and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio: "You and @Potus can go f--- yourselves, you racist Nazi f---s!" In another tweet, he lectured Republicans with emphasis: "This is the creature you have unleashed on us. GET THIS SON OF A B---- THE F--- OUT OF HERE."
With Olbermann, no one inside the liberal-media bubble is yet preparing a spin for the next inflammatory incident: "Disney should have known what it was doing when it rebooted this unstable character for another run."
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If Democrats Didn’t Have Double Standards … | 9/15/22