11 Liberal Media Lies That You Probably Did Not
Even Know Were Bogus:
Guns Kill People And Gun Control Decreases
Murders
A typical line of bias
against gun ownership employed by the media is bogus “expert” testimony. An
example might be the 2009 story ABC put out that aired the opinions of a rabid
anti-gun group, but did not tell the viewers that those being presented as
“experts” had a political agenda. Another thing the media does is use scary
words that have little meaning.
To the media, any gun
used in a crime is an “assault weapon,” even though there really is no
legitimate definition of such a class of weapons. Another example might be the
story of the Chicago gun buy-back program that the media touted as a good
program even though gun related crimes continued to soar in the city. Instead
of talking about why crime was occurring in the city the media focused on the
guns as if guns got up and did the shooting all by themselves.
Unfortunately, almost
every publicized shooting in America immediately signals the obligatory calls
for gun control. The circumstances, motives, or mental condition of the
shooters is rarely taken into consideration. Nor, tragically, are the victims.
For the media, these unfortunate people are simply convenient fodder in their
ongoing war against gun ownership and their unreasonable hatred of guns.
Of the over 14,000
murders committed in the United States in 2012, almost 8,900 were done using a
firearm. Given the fact that gun ownership is legal here, and illegal gun
ownership is prevalent among criminals, this is not really surprising. What
might be shocking to the rabid anti-gun folks are the number of homicides
committed using knives, blunt instruments, by poisoning, drugging, drowning and
burning people to death.
And while the number of
murders committed using a firearm are distressingly high, something the radical
left does not want people to know is that a disproportionate number of these
murders are being committed in cities and localities that already have strict
gun control measures.
Conversely, the Cato
institute observes; “The 31 states that have ‘shall issue’ laws allowing
private citizens to carry concealed weapons have, on average, a 24 percent
lower violent crime rate, a 19 percent lower murder rate and a 39 percent lower
robbery rate than states that forbid concealed weapons. In fact, the nine
states with the lowest violent crime rates are all right-to-carry states.
Remarkably, guns are used for self-defense more than 2 million times a year,
three to five times the estimated number of violent crimes committed with
guns.”
The point here is that people kill people, whether they have
a gun or not.
Lone Wolf Terror Attacks Are Rare
Of course, the
media generally tends to ignore any Muslim connection to the increasing number
of crimes carried out in the United States since 9/11. While the conservatives
are often the first people the media blames for hate crimes, real or imagined,
Islam is consistently downplayed or entirely ignored as playing a role in actual shootings and attempted
terror attacks.
The question can be
asked, “Have we had attempted terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11?”
The short answer is, “Yes!” And the actual number of terrorist attacks that have been planned or actually
carried out may shock you.
Of course, the reason
you don’t know about these attacks is because they are not reported (or are
grossly under-reported) by the main stream media.
The case of a
26-year-old man from Massachusetts is a good, but far from a singular, example.
Few reports of the arrest of Rezwan Fedaus mentioned he was a Muslim. Instead,
the mainstream media chose to characterize him “lone wolf” as if he just
decided to plot a terrorist bombing with no connection at all to Islam or Islamic
terrorist organizations.
However, Ferdaus was
arrested by the FBI on September 28, 2011, for plotting to
attack The Pentagon and the United States Capitol Building
using remote-controlled model aircraft packed with C-4 explosives.
In
addition, he was charged with supporting Al-Qaeda by plotting attacks
on American soldiers abroad and for making detonators for improvised
explosive devices. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to destroy national defense
premises, conspiracy to damage and destroy buildings owned by the U.S.
government, and conspiracy to provide material support and resources to
Al-Qaeda.
You may not have ever
heard of Ferdaus because this incident, like so many others, was tellingly
under-reported at the time and since. And Ferdaus is just one of a long list of
perpetrators of Jihadist, Islamic terrorist acts committed, attempted or
planned over the last 14 years since 9/11. In fact, according to most
reliable resources, there have been dozens of known plots and untold numbers
being plotted or abandoned.
According to a report
from The Heritage Foundation, on June 2, 2015 in Boston, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim
drew a knife and attacked police officers and FBI agents, who then shot and
killed him. He was being watched by Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force because
he had been plotting to behead police officers as part of violent jihad. This
plot marked the 69th publicly known
Islamist terrorist plot or attack in the U.S. since 9/11. But it’s not likely
you heard much about it.
Fast And Furious Was Just A Botched Operation
To this day the media
has not spent much time covering the Obama Regime’s murderous program of
supplying weapons to Mexican Narco-Terrorists, a program that has killed
hundreds of Mexican citizens and several U.S. law enforcement agents. To its
credit, the L.A. Times has been
very good on this story and so has Sharyl Attkisson, formerly with CBS, but
months went by before the rest of the media began to begrudgingly cover the
story.
The tactic known as
“Gunwalking”, or “letting guns walk”, was used by the Arizona Field Office of
the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives (ATF) during a series of sting operations that were
conducted between 2006 and 2011. These operations were concentrated in the
Tucson and Phoenix area where, according to emails from the Justice Department,
the ATF “purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal
straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and
arrest them.”
These operations were
part of a project that was allegedly intended to minimize the flow of firearms
into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the
United States. The stated goal was to allow gun purchases to continue and to
then track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers
and key figures in Mexican cartels. It was expected that this would lead to
their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels. But it didn’t work out quite
as planned… or then again, perhaps it worked out exactly as planned…
In fact, the tactic was
questioned during the operations by a number of people, including ATF field
agents and even cooperating licensed gun dealers. During Operation Fast and Furious, the
largest “gunwalking” probe, the ATF released about 2,000 firearms to straw
man purchasers who were known to sell weapons to drug cartels.
What happened? Our
government claims it made a mistake and neglected to install or activate
tracking devices on many of the weapons utilized in the operation. Was
such gross and outlandish negligence an innocent mistake? Giving our
government the benefit of the doubt on that score does strain credibility.
Radio talk show host
Rush Limbaugh even went so far as to say: “To me, it’s almost an inescapable conclusion that they wanted to put
American guns… across the border…. The assault weapons ban had failed, and
that’s not good enough for Obama and Holder and the rest of the Democrats who
don’t want you having guns. This was a way to change your mind. They created
crimes. They facilitated the creation of crimes. There were two hundred Mexican
deaths at the hands of drug cartels. You could not escape what was going to
happen here. In fact, it was just the opposite. You had to know, if you were
the regime, what was going to happen, and you had to want it to happen.”
Of course, some of these
weapons were later recovered (about 710) over the years at crime scenes on
both sides of the Mexico–United States border, and at the scene where United
States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010. And
although a number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted; as of
October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.
By the way, a Google
search for “Operation Fast and Furious Controversy” garnered 1,090,000 results
whereas “Anchor Babies” brought back 8,670,000 hits. Go figure!
Fort Hood Was An Act Of Workplace Violence
Yes, we realize that
most people now know that the Fort Hood Massacre was terrorist attack, but we
include it because that was not always the case. The media and political
elites tried to tell us for months that it was an act of “workplace violence”
and the fact that we now know otherwise is really nothing more than an
affirmation that sometimes the American people are able to actually see the man
behind the curtail.
One of the many ways to
spot media bias is by examining what they don’t say as opposed to what they do say. The Fort Hood shooting in 2009 was a perfect example.
The media did is best to either ignore Major Nidal Hasan’s Muslim religion or
downplay it, choosing instead to focus on the fact that he was an Army
psychiatrist. They focused on reports of Hasan’s alleged mental instability and
– when it was apparent that they had to call it something – insisted this was
classic case of “workplace violence.” Except that it wasn’t.
There are no recorded
incidences of actual workplace violence where the perpetrator was heard to
shout “Allahu Akhbar” while
shooting unarmed co-workers. But we do have a few well-known instances of this
behavior in conjunction with actual Islamic terrorist attacks, most notably
9/11.
In fact, Hasan’s actions
have been noted to be just what they appeared to be: a terrorist attack. Both
Michael Scheuer, the retired former head of the Bin Laden Issue Station,
and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey have called the event a
terrorist attack, as well as terrorism expert Walid Phares. And the testimony of others supports the idea
that Major Hasan was primed to commit a terrorist attack in the name
of Islam. Some of Hasan’s former colleagues have said he occasionally unnerved
them by expressing fervent Islamic views and deep opposition to the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fox News released
documents in August 2013, long after it became apparent to the majority of
right-thinking Americans that Hasan was indeed a terrorist, written by Major
Hasan. In most of these documents, in which he explained his motives, Hasan
included the acronym “SoA”, which is considered shorthand for “Soldier of Allah.”
He wrote that he was required to renounce any oaths that required him to defend
any man-made constitution that superseded the commandments in Islam. In another
place, he stated, “I invite the world to read the book of All-Mighty Allah and
decide for themselves if it is the truth from their Lord. My desire is to help
people attain heaven by the mercy of their Lord.”
And in another document,
Hasan had indicated that he believed there is an irreconcilable conflict
between American democracy and obedience to Islam. “. . . in an American
democracy, ‘we the people’ govern according to what ‘we the people’ think is
right or wrong, even if it specifically goes against what All-Mighty God
commands.”
Whether the Major was
mentally unstable or not, the fact is he intentionally set out to commit an act
that reasonable Americans view as an Islamic terrorist attack. The mainstream
media begged to differ.
Gabrielle Giffords Was Shot By A ‘Right-Wing’
Nutjob
From the moment that the
crime against Representative Gabrielle Giffords became national news, members
of the media began to blame her attack on the “violent rhetoric” of
conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular.
Attention focused on the
harsh political rhetoric in the United States allegedly promulgated by
right-wing commentators and politicians. A “climate of violence” perpetrated by
the right was at fault, said the media. This line of attack on the right
was unleashed by the media before the name of the attacker was even known.
Some media commentators
blamed members of the political right wing for the shooting. Names were thrown
out and, in particular, there was an attempt to implicate Sarah Palin
because of gun-related metaphors in her speeches and because of the website of her
political action committee. This site had “targeted” the districts of a number
of Democrat politicians, including that of Giffords, with pictures
of cross-hairs on an electoral map.
It later turned out that
shooter Jared Lee Loughner had no discernible political beliefs at all and, in
fact, had been targeting Giffords before the Tea Party movement was even
started. In addition, he was clearly unstable mentally and had already been
refused re-admittance to his community college until he had a mental health evaluation
and clearance to be readmitted. He never did. He was also attempted to enlist
in the U.S. Army in 2008, but his application had been rejected as
“unqualified” for service. There was a rumor that his disqualification may have
been drug related.
Loughner was initially
found by a federal judge to be incompetent to stand trial based on two medical
evaluations, which diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. Even once he did
stand trial in 2012 it was still unclear as to what he himself considered his motives
to be for the shootings. At one point, he had posted on his MySpace account
that he believed the government was brainwashing the citizenry with language.
His distrust and dislike of politicians crossed party lines as he claimed to
hate all politicians.
Sadly, despite the
tragic murders of six people – including 9-year old Christina Taylor Green –
the leftist media pundits chose to focus on gun control and seized on the
shootings as an opportunity to slander their opponents.
Timothy
McVeigh Was A ‘Christian Terrorist’ According to the entry in Wikipedia, “The Oklahoma City
bombing was a domestic terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April
19, 1995. Carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the
bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. The blast
destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius, destroyed or
burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby
buildings, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.”
This is reasonably fair
assessment of what Timothy McVeigh did and was: a domestic terrorist. However,
there has been a long-running litany of statements and articles attempting to paint
a different picture of McVeigh and his “real” motivation. For example, Bruce
Prescott in a January, 2010 post in EthicsDaily.com, a piece by Pierre Tristam
in July, 2011 on FlaglerLive.com, and an August, 2013 propaganda post by Alex
Henderson in Salon.com all provide examples of this canard.
In a seemingly pathological
impulse to defend jihadist Muslims these authors, along with dozens of
others, have twisted and misinterpreted Timothy McVeigh’s grievances and his
allegiances. Moreover, what most people still don’t know is that the Oklahoma bombing may have
been an Islamic Terrorist plot.
Accuracy in Media
reports: “[Jayne] Davis, author of a
blockbuster book on the attack, The Third Terrorist, has examined and presented
the evidence showing that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was in fact a
front man for Middle Eastern terrorists. The third terrorist, in addition to
the two, McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted, was an Arab. This was
the mysterious ‘John Doe’ who was never found. But other members of an Arab
terrorist network were involved, she says. She says the evidence was ignored
and dismissed because the Clinton Administration didn’t want to go to war with
Iraq, the likely culprit, and wanted to blame the attack on domestic right-wingers
for political reasons.”
Consider this quote in
an article from the U.K.’s “The Guardian” about McVeigh’s execution: “In his letter, McVeigh said he was an
agnostic but that he would ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’, if it turned out
there was an afterlife.’If I’m going to hell,’ he wrote,
‘I’m gonna have a lot of company.’ His body is to be cremated and his
ashes scattered in a secret location.”
Author Lou Michel spent
many hours interviewing McVeigh when he wrote “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing”. During
an interview with CNN Michel stated, “McVeigh
is agnostic. He doesn’t believe in God, but he won’t rule out the possibility.”
Yet, the mainstream
media has portrayed convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as a
so-called “Christian terrorist.” Yet it is clear that McVeigh never claimed he
committed his crimes in the name of religion, Christian or otherwise. He
described himself as a type of anti-government activist and never used religion
to justify any of his crimes.
But the claim of McVeigh
being a “Christian terrorist” is still being made. As recently as four years
ago it was voiced by journalist Juan Williams. Along with this implied slander
of Christians, there was also McVeigh’s alleged affiliation with the hyped
“white militias” the media imagined in the 1990s.
Banning DDT Has Saved Countless Lives
It’s not the sexist of
liberal lies but the reality is that banning DDT has probably killed more
people than it has saved.
It was in 1962 that a
book entitled Silent Spring was
published. Author and biologist Rachel Carson created a firestorm of debate and
ecological angst among 60’s liberals, eco-warriors, and a vast swath of the
unsuspecting American public. Carson’s work was highly touted by the mainstream
media and rarely disputed or challenged. As far as the media was concerned it
was valid science. Except that it wasn’t.
In her book, Carson
stated that “Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have
now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable
harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT
was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal
numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”
However, Dr. James
DeWitt published in 1956 an article in Journal of Agriculture and Food
Chemistry that came up with quite different results. In his study, quail were
fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding
season. He reported that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the “control”
birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Less than a 4% difference? Hardly a
conclusive indictment of DDT.
Carson also left out Dr.
DeWitt’s report that “control” pheasants hatched only 57% of their eggs, yet
those fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched
more than 80% of their eggs!
And the science goes on in various studies for over four decades. The truth is that DDT would have saved
millions upon millions of lives throughout the world by increasing crop yields
and decreasing the spread of diseases.
In fact, according to
the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of
the Committee on Science and Public Policy in 1970, “To only a few chemicals
does man owe as great a debt as to DDT… In little more than two decades, DDT
has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would
have been inevitable.”
Yet, almost 20 years
later, it was stated in the Africa News, January 27, 1999 “It is believed that
[malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7
million deaths, mainly among children under five years.”
As late as 1999 Time
magazine named Carson one of the “100 People of the Century.” However, the fact
is that DDT has never been shown to be a human carcinogen even after
four decades of intense scientific study. And the ban has been contributed to
the almost 3 million malaria deaths each year in Africa alone. Yet, the
media continues to tout Rachel Carson’s work as fact.
There Is A Wild Surge Of “Right-Wing Extremist”
Groups In America
Increasingly over that
last 10 years or so, there have been stories from various TV news reports, or
newspapers and magazines that claim that there is an alarming growth of
extremist hate groups in America.
One example is a recent
story on CNN.com referencing an intelligence assessment report released by the
Department of Homeland Security back in February 2015. According to the CNN
correspondents, the DHS claimed that domestic terrorism threats are on an equal
par with that of Islamic terrorist cells. What’s their supporting source?
“Mark Potok, senior
fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there
are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen
extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.”
Stories such as these
are conspicuously based on the claims of only one source: the Southern Poverty
Law Center. There is cause to suspect the claims of the SPLC for many reasons.
In fact, not only
conservative, but moderate and left-leaning media have criticized the group.
Writing in Counterpunch, a left-wing website, Alexander Coburn referred to SPLC
founder Morris Dees as “king of the hate business.”
Coburn wrote, “Ever
since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising
letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his
lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by
the SPLC.”
In a Harper’s Magazine
blog in 2007, Ken Silverstein wrote, “What [the SPLC] does best… is to raise
obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe]
groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest ‘civil rights’
organization.”
But does the bulk of the
media establishment take care to consider the accuracy or truthfulness of the
SPLC? Apparently not. Its claims are taken at face value, especially if
they support the spurious left-wing agenda of the mainstream media.
Detaining Terrorist At Guantanamo Bay Was An
Unjust Exercise In Folly
The media has gone out
of its way to portray the terror detainee facility run by the U.S. military as
an illegitimate, even racist venture. President Obama even ran his campaign
promising to close the facility in a year after he ascended to the White House
(a promise he later broke).
The U.S. has been
accused of committing acts of torture, a claim that has been disputed and
debated endlessly. But one thing the media has not reported on is that the
recidivism rate in detainees returning to terror upon release from the facility
is extremely high.
The very fact that the
media uses the term “recidivism” as if they were speaking of domestic prison
inmates who return to a life of crime is, in itself, a form of bias. But these
are not mere criminals, nor are they U.S. citizens. These are enemy combatants
who have either killed, or aided in the killing of American military personnel.
We’re not talking about grand theft auto here.
The actual numbers is
difficult to verify (released detainees don’t check in with a parole officer!).
However, it is estimated that the current number of released combatants that
have returned to the fold is as high as 30% or more. Republicans have made claims
of a 30 percent recidivism rate which are based on combining the figures of all
detainees confirmed and
suspected of re-engaging in terrorism. There are some who believe that the
actual numbers may be even higher.
Regardless of the actual
percentage, what this means in real life is that of the 620 prisoners formerly
detained in Guantanamo, almost 200 of them have, or probably have, gone back
into action against the U.S. and others. But the Obama-loving media types
would have you believe that the real number is closer to 38, or 6 percent.
Well, that should make everyone feel better: the administration has “only” put
less than 40 combatants back into circulation!
Climate Change Is The Number One Threat Facing
Our Nation
The mainstream media establishment
has almost exclusively reported global warming from the point of view of
religiously zealous global warming advocates. But when thousands of emails were
released to the public by hackers that proved that climate “scientists” were
cooking the data and then working with members of the media, especially the
BBC, to sell global warming theories, the Old Media tried its best to
completely ignore the story. Weeks and weeks went by before the first few
mavens of the Old Media finally mentioned the emails that put the lie to the
“consensus” of global climate change.
John R. Lott reported in
a column in 2009 on FoxNews.com that “Computer
hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit
at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now
been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with
ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing
the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims.
The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.”
Yet biased media
piece after biased media piece attempted to counter this disturbing
story with plaintive accusations of misinterpretation and blaming
conspiracy-theorists. The mainstream media dutifully circled the wagons and
continued to cry “global warming” in an attempt to drown out the dissenting
voices pointing at the “smoking gun” of damning emails. And it may have worked.
That was then, this is
now. And now, according to Robert Tracinski writing in TheFederalist.com, “…one
of the big problems with the global warming theory: [is] a long plateau in
global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was
not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the
lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models.”
So what do the
conscientious researchers do in the face of contrary data? “Why, change the
data, of course!” And, in the meantime, thousands more Climategate emails have
been released, but have you heard of them? Probably not…
The Soviet Union Was Not An Evil Empire
Most people now believe
that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, but that was not always the case in the
days prior to and just after WWII. It might shock people to know that back
then, the general consensus among the media and political elites was that Josef
Stalin had indeed succeeded into transforming his nation into a workers’
paradise.
Probably the single
worst example of liberal media bias, of the last century, is the media’s
steadfast refusal to accurately report the monstrous evils of the Soviet Union
— even still to this day. It didn’t matter how many millions of Soviet citizens
that Joseph Stalin and his successors murdered, it didn’t matter how evil the
Soviet Union was, the liberal media was not going to report about it. The media
even awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty, a New York Times columnist who wrote articles shilling for the murderous
Soviet Union.
The
New York Times did initiate a
third-party assessment of Duranty’s veracity and objectivity back in 2003. A
Columbia University history professor was hired by The New York Times to make an independent assessment of the
coverage Duranty provided from the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. The
professor, Mark von Hagen, said that the Pulitzer Prize the reporter received
in 1931 should be rescinded because of his ”lack of balance” in covering
Stalin’s government. The Pulitzer board chose
to let the award stand.
To be fair, this was not
the first time The New York Times
conceded that Duranty’s take on Soviet atrocities was less than truthful. As
early as 1986 it was pointed out in a review of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet
Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. And it only took them 50 years
to acknowledge it!
And there are the famous
Venona Project files publicly released in 1995. These disclosures from reams of
secretly intercepted and decrypted Soviet transmissions between 1943 and 1980
have, in fact, been grossly ignored and underreported by the media. This
is typical of the mainstream journalists since a number of academics and
historians assert that most of the individuals mentioned in the Venona
documents were most likely either clandestine assets or contacts of Soviet
intelligence agents.
A short list of
revelations includes the fact that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indeed
guilty of espionage, as were Klaus Fuchs who worked on the Manhattan Project,
and Alger Hiss of the U.S. State Department.
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