NPR LIES? Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, says he started sounding the alarm internally when he noticed a bias creep into the network’s coverage. (Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)
Views: 13
The truth and nothing but the truth about NPR. NPR Has Lost America’s Trust, We Have A Problem With Reporting Things That Don’t Fit The Narrative.
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.
By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media. Russia gate was not NPR’s only miscue.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.
Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.
The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.
But that wasn’t the case.
When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.
Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”
Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.
Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”
When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.
Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)
I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.
You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.
After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”
And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”
He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).
All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.
But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.
In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.
Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.
And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.
There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.
The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.
More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.
For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.
I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”
And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.
It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.
In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thoughtwhen she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”
For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.
Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.
Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.
I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.
Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.
Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.
Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.
In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.
With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.
Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.
A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.
Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others.
The brainwashing of our youth – by social media corporations is out of control. Unfortunately, for all of us – it isn’t going to stop.
“We know best. We are going to remake the world. We are going to reshape kids around the world”
The government has a remedy for this type of unlawful business practice. The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act has bee utilized many times to break up monopolies. The Sherman Act outlaws:
“every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade,” and any “monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize.”
Google is out of control. They have not only monopolized the internet, they have monopolized the control of advertising. Both business strategies are being challenged by the DOJ in two separate lawsuits. Meta is also being sued for unfair business practices, as it has gobbled up its competitors in a series of buy-outs.
Or you might be watching MSM exclusively and using Google as your search engine.
I’ll be starting a new series on how Government is using its powers (Sometimes unconstitutionally and possibly illegally). Some of the articles will be in my own words (with sources) and some will be the reposting of articles from others.
I’ll be looking at local, state, and federal. Also, I’ll be looking at the educational system. Hopefully you will be shocked that this is going on. So, let’s see where this takes us.
If you have some ideas or have stories of weaponization, please feel free to comment or send me a link.
For conservatives, the definition of “racism” encompasses a narrower range of thought and behavior than it does for leftists or progressives. Conservatives see racism as an endorsement of one’s own racial group’s superiority, a belief about another racial group’s inferiority, or harmful behavior directed at someone specifically because of their race. Conservatives often require a higher standard of proof, relying on explicit evidence rather than implicit assumptions to charge someone with racist behavior.On the other hand, progressives define racism as not necessarily being limited to conscious intent, but as encompassing unconscious bias fundamental to everyone’s cultural upbringing and reaffirmed through systemic structures designed to support white people. They perceive racism as built into people’s way of being or seeing in the world. Therefore, progressives may charge someone with racism without explicit evidence the behavior or remarks of the accused were based on race, due to their belief that racism can operate as unconscious bias. Because progressives perceive many fundamental societal structures as built on systemic racism — meaning certain groups have more power than others — they view racism as linked to power, holding the belief that disadvantaged groups cannot be racist toward groups that have power.In the case of Trump’s tweets, the right sees a lack of explicit proof that Trump views the Squad as inferior due to their race, or denies that he criticized them based solely on their race and not their ideas. Progressives, on the other hand, perceive Trumps’s attempts to curb illegal immigration and the “go back” remarks as evidence of unconscious bias against immigrants and people of color.
Julie Mastrine is the Director of Marketing at AllSides. She has a Center bias.
This piece was reviewed by Samantha Shireman, Information Architect at AllSides, who has a Lean Left bias. It was also reviewed by AllSides Daily News Editor Henry Brechter, who has a Center bias.
Call a spade a spade. Hamas, Pro Hamas Rioters, and White and Black Progressive Supremacists have the same goals. For my Liberal readers, let me explain before you try to do a doxing on me the way Progressives do. This is my pointing out of white progressive and black progressive supremacists.
The two groups have the same goals. They don’t allow debate. Only one view is allowed, and they dox whenever they get the chance. They will also go after moderates and liberals who disagree with them.
They claim that they’re not antisemitic, but they don’t condemn the rioters or openly support Israel in the October attack. They also will say something like I don’t support the government, but I support the people. Never do you see them in rallies in support of the people. They only show up in these rallies for a river to the sea cleansing of Jews.
So, when you see me connect progressives with Hamas, KKK, Confederates, Jim Crow laws, and other signs of hate, you will know of whom I speak.
Dr. Maha Almasri was fired from her position as a math tutor for her posts supporting Palestinians. - CNN
Views: 28
Story by By Alaa Elassar, CNN (Arab/Muslim, per CNN)
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has requested the US Department of Education investigate the expulsion of a Palestinian American high school student over pro-Palestinian content his mother posted on social media.
Jad Abuhamda, 15, was expelled on November 19 from the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His mother, Dr. Maha Almasri, was fired from her position as a math tutor at the school after she made posts criticizing Israel’s “collective brutality” against Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza during the ongoing war, CAIR said in a Wednesday news release.
The private school issued a statement saying they considered Almasri’s social media posts to be “hateful and incendiary,” which Almasri has denied. “We viewed some of this individual’s posts — including, for example, an image of a soldier pointing a machine gun at an infant inside of an incubator and an image with commentary suggesting that some wanted to roast babies in an oven — as having the possibility of inciting hatred and creating a climate of fear,” Pine Crest School said. “Her behavior was also such that the School believed it could increase the risk of violence in our community and compromise the safety of our students, employees, and families.”
Almasri told CNN her posts were taken out of context and her son has been subjected to wrongful treatment.
CAIR Florida managing attorney Omar Saleh said during a Thursday news conference they have not received a response from the school to their letters requesting more information on why Jad was expelled. The school responded to CNN’s request for comment with a link to its news release.
“For these reasons, the Student Handbook and enrollment agreement make clear that if a parent engages in behavior that is ‘disruptive, intimidating, or overly aggressive’ or ‘interferes … with the School’s … safety procedures, responsibilities, or the accomplishment of its educational purpose or program,’ the School may take the action that it deems necessary to address the situation,” the school statement said.
CNN has independently viewed the social media posts, which discussed the mounting death toll of children in Gaza, the number of explosives dropped on Gaza, and the history of Palestinians who were “violently expelled from Palestine in 1948 to form the state of Israel.”
One of the photos the school alluded to is a cartoon graphic depicting an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at a baby in an incubator, a metaphorical reference to the premature babies at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, whose incubators stopped working when Israeli airstrikes cut off the generator powering the incubators. At least three of the babies died, according to previous CNN reporting.
Almasri says her posts were referring to the mounting humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people, Israel has launched a siege and war that has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza.
“None of my posts were inciting violence, they were merely shedding light on what was happening, the humanitarian crisis that was happening in Gaza,” Almasri said during a CAIR news conference Thursday. “It didn’t call for hate or violence or any of that. I feel that, again, criticizing a government or a set of people should not lead to any retaliation against that person who’s trying to express that and also take it upon themselves to also punish her child.”
Saleh said the group’s call for an investigation is about the expulsion of Jad, who Saleh says did not say or do anything to warrant the expulsion, as well as what CAIR described as inaccurate accusations regarding Almasri’s social media posts.
Jad, who is in 10th grade, has been unable to attend classes since November 19. The expulsion has interrupted his studies and college preparation, his mother told CNN, adding they now have to find a new school.
“He gets very depressed and withdrawn. He doesn’t know what to do with all this time,” Almasri told CNN. “He misses his friends a lot, he misses the school corridors, he misses everything. He’s trying to be strong, but he feels betrayed. At the end of the day, this is about expelling Jad for nothing he did.”
‘It’s almost like a weight lifted off my chest’ Jad, who was born and raised in Florida and grew up at the school, said he had always hidden his Palestinian identity until he was expelled as a result of his mother’s social media posts.
“Most people at Pine Crest had no idea that I was Palestinian, because I never felt safe to say that I was Palestinian at Pine Crest School,” Jad said. “Now that it’s out, it’s almost like a weight lifted off my chest … Now I feel that I can finally come out as who I am, which is a Palestinian kid who was wrongfully expelled by Pine Crest School.”
“Pine Crest School was my home, is a place where I was very comfortable, since 1st grade, since I was six years old,” Jad said during the news conference as he stood next to his mother.
“The friends I made there became family, even the people who I am not as close with there are still my community. They are the people I’ve seen every day of my life for the past 10 years. To have that taken away from me, for no reason at all, is heartbreaking,” he added. “I didn’t do anything at all.”
A petition started by an anonymous person calling for the school to reinstate Jad garnered more than 31,000 signatures in over two weeks and the family has received “overwhelming” support from community members, Almasri said.
“Think about the other Jads in that school and around,” said Abdullah Jaber, executive director of CAIR-Florida. “Our main concern is suppressing the right of Americans to express what they feel within their heart is to be decent human rights.”
The treatment of pro-Palestinians who speak up, Saleh said, is dangerously “one-sided” and the same discipline is not applied to those who post or make pro-Israeli commentary.
Both CAIR representatives and Almasri denied accusations her social media content condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza incited hatred or violence and instead advocated for the rights of Palestinians.
CAIR has recorded more than 2,171 requests for help and reports of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias in the nine weeks since October 7, including students and faculty being targeted for supporting Palestinian rights.
In Maryland, the advocacy group filed a discrimination complaint on behalf of a Black Muslim, Arab American teacher who was placed on administrative leave for her email signature, which included “from the river to the sea,” a controversial phrase supporting Palestinian rights.
By requesting a DOE investigation into Jad’s expulsion and the accusations made against Almasri based on her posts, CAIR said it hopes to protect other Arabs, Muslims, and pro-Palestinian people from receiving unfair punishment for condemning Israel’s actions.
CNN has reached out to the Department of Education for comment on the request.
“We have to get real. Speech because it’s sympathetic to Palestinians or because it’s critical to Israeli military or because it evokes a sense of conscience for humanity, it doesn’t make it antisemitic, it doesn’t make it anti-Jewish, it’s not disruptive and it’s not inciteful,” Saleh said. “You can wish peace to Israel and say free Palestine at the same time.”
REBUTTAL:
Screenshot from footage taken in Gaza NICU showing a stashed gun hidden in an incubator.
Hospital workers admit: Weapons hidden in NICU incubators intended to treat premature babies.
It would seem that that “paragon” of Journalism (insert LMAO meme here), CNN, is on the same side as this woman. This isn’t surprising; after all, the reporter is also a Muslim. An Egyptian -Palestinian, to be exact.
I couldn’t find the actual cartoons — for some strange reason, nobody has reposted them. Yet, there are at least four major listings for this story.
And isn’t it strange how this arrogant woman thought she could get away with posting libelous cartoons in a conservative state with a large Jewish population? And isn’t it also strange that the boy was “afraid to admit he was Palestinian?
I also have to question the claim: “A petition started by an anonymous person calling for the school to reinstate Jad garnered more than 31,000 signatures in over two weeks…” I would love to know how many of the IP addresses associated with these “signatures” come from outside Florida and how many of them come from OUTSIDE the USA.
Israel has launched a siege and war that has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza.
After it’s been shown that Hamas has been using hospitals as “Human Shields” for C & C centers and weapons storage, why would anyone with more than two brain cells believe anything they post?
Iranian protesters burn an Israeli flag during an anti-Israel rally at Enqelab-e Eslami (Islamic Revolution) Square. (Sobhan Farajvan via Getty Images)
Stop Progressive misinformation groups.
Alex Wong / Getty Images
Views: 13
Winning. Congressman Johnson gets a stop misinformation amendment in the Defense Bill. It’s been a regular practice by the Biden Administration to allow Progressive groups like Newsguard and Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to control who’s allowed to advertise with the Pentagon. This new bill stops that.
The new NDAA provision expressly prohibits any advertising agency the Defense Department contracts with from using services that engage in “determinations of misinformation.”
The new law would also require the Pentagon to inform the House and Senate Armed Services committees any time the recruitment division directly contracts with NewsGuard, GDI or a similar entity.
For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
Who will they come for next? Progressives goal to wipe out diversity and social disagreement. Have you noticed that those who claim that diversity is their goal want only those who think like they do?
The target since the Obama age was only single white males, then females, and white married couples were added. Children were the last that were added to the list. And maybe they will achieve their goal when they import the new China virus.
Ann Coulter did a take on a famous poem I’m sure you will recognize. Whites are still the main target, but only the beginning.
First they came for working class whites and I did not speak out— Because I was not a working class white.
Then they came for white police officers and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white police officer.
Then they came for white women who call the police, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a white women who calls the police.
Then they came for the white college applicants, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white college applicant.
Then they came for statues of white male American heroes and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white male American hero.
Then they came for whites applying for jobs with the S&P 100 and I did not speak out— Because I was not a white applying for a job with the S&P 100.
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