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As the year comes to a close, here are a dozen of the top stories the media majorly messed up:

The media ripped apart a 16-year-old student seen in a video smirking at a Native American activist on the National Mall during a school trip with Covington Catholic High School to Washington D.C. for the March for Life.

The release of added context however, reveals that Nick Sandmann, a junior at the school who is depicted in the viral image was being harassed along with his peers by members of the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI).

That didnt stop the media however, from vilifying Sandmann who has since launched legal challenges to media outlets who falsely reported the story.

Television star of the popular series Empire was offered a plethora of sympathetic media coverage throughout February after suffering from an alleged racist and homophobic Jan. 29 attack.

It was later revealed however that Smollett faked the crime and faced 16 charges for lying to police. The Chicago Cook County prosecutors office however, dropped the charges while maintaining it did exonerate him.

As Jonathan Tobin points out for The Federalist, the episode illustrates the societal double-standard that its okay to lie if its in the name of left-wing social justice.

In perhaps one of the medias most magnificent mistakes this year, special counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his findings from a two-year unlimited resource investigation completely exonerating President Donald Trump of being a Russian agent after years of the medias peddling of the Russia hoax.

Mueller found not one person from the Trump campaign, let alone Trump himself, colluded with the Russian government in 2016 to defeat Hillary Clinton. Muellers report also acquitted Trump of any obstruction of justice charges for firing one of the most corrupt directors of the FBI, James Comey.

He has no idea that hes going down, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough declared on Morning Joe as a result of the report.

The White House Correspondents Dinner in April this year opted to forgo a comedian this year to instead just attack Trump openly, complaining that the president might start rounding up journalists and putting them in jail.

Read The Federalists single editorial position on Washingtons NerdProm here.

While the #MeToo era has brought down powerful men for alleged inappropriate conduct in recent years, the media exposed its double-standard when it comes to men they want to protect.

Former Vice President Joe Biden sparked criticism this year for his interactions with young girls earning the Democratic frontrunner the nickname Creepy Uncle Joe.

While the media will eviscerate any man the progressive movement attempts to bring down with allegations of sexual harassment, most notably Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, the media when to bat to defend Biden who has been leading the Democratic primary field ever since.

Antifa, a left-wing movement to counter the fascist alt-right by conducting acts of domestic terrorism has been defended by the media as principled individuals united in their common valor to resist the anti-Trump forces threatening to destroy the country.

Exactly how Antifa is pursuing their mission? By destroying the country. Throughout the year the left-wing militant group has interrupted events and viciously attacked journalists covering their hate resulting in one reporter suffering a brain injury.

It says it right in the name. Antifa, which means anti-fascism, which is what they were there fighting. Listen, no organization is perfect, there is some violence, CNNs Don Lemon said.

They have taken a principled stand to stand against white supremacists and white nationalists wherever they may show up, said a guest on MSNBC.

While America celebrated one of human civilizations greatest accomplishments of world history by landing a man on the moon in 1969, the media condemned the event as a mostly white male dominated event Ok.

In a viral moment caught on a phone camera, a man began berating CNNs Chris Cuomo and called the primetime anchor Fredo.

Dont f***ing insult me like that Its like I call you punk b***h, you like that? Cuomo scolded.

While Cuomo took great offense to the word as an Italian slur, the word is actually a reference to a character in The Godfather.

Cuomo even once referred to himself as Fredo in a radio interview.

Its a true tragedy, really. A 16-year-old climate activist on the autism spectrum kicked off a campaign to save the world from climate change, sailing across the Atlantic and lecturing the world at the United Nations of its imminent threat to humanity.

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, Thunberg declared to world leaders.

Whats sad is the lefts puppeteering of Thunberg as their principle activist to prop up their efforts to enact radical climate legislation, using Thunberg as their flag-bearer to avoid criticism of their proposals labeling anyone who might dare question her demands as bigoted and cruel.

Time Magazine even picked Thunberg as their person of the year. The Federalist has chosen the Hong Kong protestor instead.

While Grabien lists media coverage condemning a violent meme video shown at a Trump resort as Octobers most mortifying moment, media reaction to the video wasnt entirely unjustified given the nature of the video depicting Trump of murdering his opponents and members of the press. Instead, the medias coverage of the presidents successful war on ISIS is far more worthy of condemnation.

After Trump announced the successful execution of the worlds most dangerous terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Washington Post published an astonishing obituary for the ISIS leader, branding the dead anti-American warmonger as an austere religious scholar in the headline.

Further, the Post spent the first half of the article chronicling al-Baghdadis rise in academia, waiting until the 40th paragraph to mention al-Baghdadi was also a serial rapist.

While the Post ultimately reframed story on the same day, the Posts glaring mistake is illustrative of the wider media coverage on Trumps battle with ISIS.

A leaked recording obtained by Project Veritas shows ABC anchor Amy Robach complaining that the network refused to run with her story on Jeffrey Epstein before the revelations surfaced of the hedge fund managers vast sex trafficking network.

Ive had the story for three yearsWe would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told, whos Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story, Robach said. It was unbelievable what we had, Clinton, we had everything. Now its all coming out and its like these new revelations and I freaking had it.

ABC has since declared war on the whistleblower who leaked the recording instead of coming down on the executives who buried the story.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department inspector general released a long-anticipated report on the FBIs FISA abuses of four warrants used to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign.

One of the major revelations to emerge from the report was the confirmation that the sources from the discredited Steele Dossier were relied upon to re-issue the warrants from the FISA courts to continue its deep-state operations. FBI officials knew as early as January of 2017 that the sources were providing junk intelligence and did not include that information in their warrant applications.

The media however, spent years defending the credibility of the Steele Dossier in peddling the Russia hoax.

More:
12 Stories The Media Got Horribly Wrong In 2019 - The Federalist

Donald J. Trump has become the third President in the history of our nation to be impeached by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanors against the people of the United States. This moment comes as a surprise to absolutely no one. Democrats have been keeping a tally of the immoral and illegal dealings of this President since his first day in office, vowing to defend the constitution the very moment the President had crossed the line from immoral to unconstitutional. Republicans have known since the Democrats won the House of Representatives that impeachment was likely- they too have watched the President act in unethical ways time and time again and knew that as soon as he crossed a line, the Democrats would proceed forward with an impeachment investigation.

Yesterday, as I watched the eight hours of debates on the House floor over the articles of impeachment being presented, I began to be reminded of a truth that we all know, but so easily forget: our country is irreconcilably divided. We literally live in (at least) two fundamentally different realities. As each Republican stepped up and claimed that this impeachment was nothing more than a witch-hunt and was based on made up charges, I wondered how anyone could interpret the facts this way. As Democrats testified time and time again, the President has admitted wrongdoing. He had, in fact, used his power to attempt to coerce a foreign government into helping him win the 2020 election. Yet the two sides seemed unable to convince each other of their perspective. They didnt seem interested in trying.

Then I logged on to Twitter. I saw my feed filled with my liberal friends rejoicing over the impeachment vote- and I joined them. But my curiosity led me to head over to President Trumps feed and follow some of his fans- and they were tweeting with palpable fury that this entire hearing was a sham, proclaiming that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and this was nothing more than the Democrats trying to remove Trump out of fear that he was going to win the 2020 election. They posted news stories and opinion pieces from sources I have honestly never heard of and claimed that the mainstream media that I was reading that offered evidence of Trumps wrongdoing was fake news and political propaganda. Nothing I could say would convince any of these Trump supporters, because all of the evidence I could provide was written off as fake. Nothing they could say could convince me, because the evidence and arguments they put forward seemed to me to bewellfake.

This is where we are at as a country. We are literally living in two realities. We cant even determine the basis for what reality even is. This isnt exaggeration. When we cannot agree on what is real, when be believe that the other side is producing fake information to deceive us, and that the motives of the other are truly nefarious and evil, how can we possibly move forward? How can we possibly have a generative future together? I dont mean to sound alarmist, but historically circumstances like these usually lead to war- literally fighting to determine who is the most powerful, and therefore, gets to determine what is right and true. And the fury that I saw last night, in the red face of President Trump at his rally and between both Democrats and Republicans on Twitter make it seem that we really, truly, are at war. Not over political positions, not over who should occupy the White House. Were at war to determine what is fundamentally real.

From where I sit, it seems to me that there is only one potential path to bring us back from the brink of actual war with each other: all of us must put the common good and public service before party allegiance. Those of us on both sides who have not bought into conspiracy theories and complete caricatures of our political others must come to the table together and hash out what is actually, factually true. This would require the sacrifice of party allegiance for all of us, and the ability to truly see things as they are. I have to believe that most Republicans know that Democrats never had a secret plot to seek to remove the President just because they didnt think they could win an election. I have to believe that most Democrats know that many Republicans are deeply disturbed by the Presidents behavior and somewhere deep down would like to hold him accountable (and have said as much). If both sides would truly put public service first, instead of maintaining power, then perhaps we can walk the country back from the edge of yet another civil war.

And I should make another fact clear: While I do think both Democrats and Republicans hold some degree of culpability in creating this divisive moment, it is clear that the bulk of the confusion going around in this moment has stemmed from Republican leaders legitimizing alt-right conspiracy theories. When the President of the United States regularly retweets stories that he knows are false but paint a favorable narrative of him, when Senators give interviews to conspiracy theory sites like Breitbart or One American News, they are legitimizing the disregard for truth and reality. Sure, doing so is politically expedient for them. It absolutely helps them win elections. But it also is eroding millions of Americans ability to distinguish what is real and what is true- and this is not something that can easily be undone.

I am naturally an optimistic person, and I want to end this reflection with hope- but the truth is, I am not hopeful. I believe that the love of power and influence is going to outweigh the desire to do what is right. I really do believe that millions of conservative Americans are going to buy into truly outlandish, fake news and become filled with uncontainable rage that is going to manifest somehow in the future. I really do believe that millions of progressive Americans are going to continue to grow to believe that most conservatives lack a moral foundation and should not be given a hearing or consideration. And if we continue to grow in these two polar opposite directions, the only result will be the fundamental erosion of our democracy. No election will solve this problem- whoever the next President will be will face threats of impeachment and a complete partisan stalemate that will make it nearly impossible to govern.

Nothing short of a miracle can change the direction our country is heading. Nothing short of a true political revolution, that called our leaders away from party and back to a posture of service. Nothing short of a return to honesty in the public square, rather than whatever theories garner support for our party will save us from this era of division.I truly hope that this will some day become our reality. But as for today, I am not very hopeful. I believe we may truly be witnessing the end of the American experiment. And until we awaken to the truth of this harrowing reality, I have little faith that anything will change in our country.

Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

What is truth? retorted Pilate.

John 18:37-38

More here:
What Is Truth?: Witnessing The End of the American Experiment - Patheos

Scott Greer

Carlson hosted Greer to promote his book No Campus for White Men in February 2017. Greer, who at the time of his appearance on Fox was a columnist at The Daily Caller, was outed in July 2018 by The Atlantic as having written for the white supremacist journal Radix under a pseudonym. This wasnt the first time The Daily Caller, a website co-founded by Carlson, has published a white nationalist.

In August 2018, Carlson hosted far-right British activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, after he was released from prison pending trial for contempt of court charges. Robinson is the former leader of the English Defense League, an anti-Muslim extremist group.

Hopkins has appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight 15 times in 2017 and 2018 according to Media Matters internal database. Hopkins is a far-right British commentator, (thought she appears to have left her employer) who has built a media grift around being virulently xenophobic. Her racist comments include calling for a final solution following a terror attack in the U.K., labeling refugees as cockroaches, and calling for London police to profile young Black men. Hopkins has also promoted a conspiracy theory about white genocide in South Africa circulated by white nationalists (she shares this position with Carlson). She has numerous ties to far-right figures, including Robinson, Infowars Alex Jones, white nationalist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone, and white nationalist Lauren Southern.

Carlson hosted apartheid apologist Ernst Roets of AfriForum in May 2018 to fearmonger about the South African governments effort to correct unequal distribution of land ownership that occurred during apartheid. AfriForum is the South African Afrikaners rights group pushing the white nationalist conspiracy theory that a land reform proposal in South Africa is part of a plot for white genocide. Roets was on a tour of America promoting the conspiracy theory with his AfriForum colleague Kallie Kriel, who is also an apartheid apologist. Roets has appeared on white nationalist Stefan Molyneuxs YouTube talk show and gave an interview to The New American, the magazine founded by the conspiratorial far-right group the John Birch Society. When Carlson held a subsequent segment on the conspiracy theory a few months later, President Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to look into the issue.

Carlson has hosted white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seven times since 2017. One of these appearances included a cleanup interview after King tweeted that Americans cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies (which echoes the white nationalist great replacement conspiracy theory). During the interview, Carlson defended the congressmans racist comments, saying, Everything you said I think is defensible and probably right. After King expressed explicit support for white nationalists and white supremacy in an interview with The New York Times, Carlson first ignored the interview except to attack the media and then deflected when pressed, saying, Steve King, whatever he said, he didnt call for an ethnostate. Kings racist views have been known for years.

In September 2017, Carlson hosted Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, an alternative social media platform dubbed a haven for white nationalists and a magnet for the alt-right, after it was removed from the Apple and Google app stores for violating hate speech rules. A little over a year later, Torba and Gab were in the news again after one of the sites users posted a message there before murdering 11 Jewish people during a worship service at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania. The site has since almost completely fallen apart.

Carlson has four times hosted Joey Gibson, leader of the Portland, Oregon-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, which has been involved in violent street fights. Gibson is currently facing criminal and civil charges related to a fight that broke out at a bar this past May in which a woman was knocked unconscious. The group is also closely connected to the violent far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. In 2015, Carlson gave an interview to Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes in which Carlson defended statutory rape. He also posed for a picture with members of the group in 2018.

Since 2017, Tucker Carlson has hosted racist conspiracy theorist Roger Stone eight times. Stone has beenan Infowars regular, has close connections to the violent street gang the Proud Boys, and has a long legacy of violent, racist, and sexist comments. Carlson has repeatedly used his show to lobby President Trump to pardon Stone, who in November 2019 was found guilty on charges related to his September 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. Carlson has also appeared in a documentary on Stone's life and wrote an introduction to one of his books.

See more here:
A list of Tucker Carlson guests who have links to white nationalism - Media Matters for America

For the better part of 30 years, Pittsburgh band Anti-Flag have made unapologetically confrontational political punk, cranking out fervent, hook-driven diatribes against facism, racism, animal cruelty, the surveillance state, and other social ills. Theyve also walked the walk, using their band as a platform to support a variety of causes (among them Amnesty International, the ACLU, Greenpeace, and Pittsburghs Center for Victims of Violence and Crime) and playing free shows at protests and demonstrations, including one outside the 2008 Republican convention. Theyve even launched a couple of organizations of their own; one of them, Military Free Zone, opposes military recruiting in schools. And while many punk bands become more complacent with age, Anti-Flag have only grown more resolute in their fight for social justice, and you can feel their rage in their music. In 2018 they released American Reckoning, which compiles acoustic versions of songs from their previous two albums (2015s American Spring and 2017s American Fall) with a few protest-rock covers (including John Lennons Gimme Some Truth) and highlights their lyrical chops with its mix of dark and lighthearted moods. On the upcoming 20/20 Vision (Spinefarm), theyre going straight for the jugular of the Trump administration and all the theocrats, white supremacists, gun lobbyists, and other right-wing thugs in its gravitational pull. The title track is a pop-punk indictment of the way alternative media frameworks developed by punks in the 80s and 90s to challenge power structures have been co-opted by the alt-right at the expense of the left. Album opener Hate Conquers All begins with a sample from a Trump speech before the band dives into a grooving, anthemic ripper that rejects the idea that love alone can beat those who seek to destroy us. Rather than mire listeners in a sense of helplessness, Anti-Flag urge them to be strong and get involved in the fight: as vocalist-guitarist Justin Sane sings in Unbreakable, What doesnt kill us now / Will lead us back from hell. v

Here is the original post:
Political punk stalwarts Anti-Flag take Trump to task on their upcoming album - Chicago Reader

History, as written, tends to be executed upon black people rather than by them. Brought to the United States as slaves, freed by Abraham Lincoln, oppressed under Jim Crowin schoolbook constructions, blacks are the supporting players in Americas ultimate redemption arc. An anti-segregation activist such as Rosa Parks is reduced to a humble seamstress who was too tired to give up her seat on the bus.

HBOs Watchmen risks falling into this trap, by placing one of the deadliest atrocities ever perpetrated against black Americans at the center of a comic-book franchise full of brooding white men in masks. The series opens with the true events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which white rioters burned down the entire black neighborhood of Greenwood and killed as many as three hundred people. The brutal and breathtaking spectacle of this Watchmen episode, conveyed through the eyes of a small boy running for his life from a neighborhood movie theatre, has the familiar beats of black victimhood. A woman is shot from behind and collapses in the middle of the road. Two black bodies are dragged behind a speeding car, clouds of dirt billowing in their wake. Armed Ku Klux Klan members roam the streets. Its an adrenaline shot of vicious racism, at the expense of mostly anonymous victims.

As layers of mystery are peeled back in later episodes, though, Watchmen (whose Season 1 finale airs on Sunday) reveals itself to be a show about black people who have the ability to mold history in ways their ancestors could not. Though grounded in deeply sensitive past events, the series shares its most keen insights in the throes of its superhero conceit. Alan Moores original 1986 graphic novel followed white costumed adventurers who use P.R. campaigns, military contracts, and vast personal fortunes to turn themselves into superheroes in the public imagination. The show, however, upends some foundational Watchmen myths, by reorienting our vantage around three black heroes.

The standout episode of the season, This Extraordinary Being, travels back to the nineteen-thirties to cast the first costumed crusader in the Watchmen universe as a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor. Will Reeves, the young boy who grew up idolizing black gunslingers in Greenwoods movie theatre, becomes one of the few black cops in the N.Y.P.D. After a near-lynching by his fellow officers, he dons a hood, a noose, and the whiteface makeup necessary for the public to ascribe honor to his vigilante antics. If you want to stay a hero, his wife, June, advises as they devise his costume, townsfolk gonna need to think one of their own is under it. By night, he is Hooded Justice, the legendary, anonymous crimefighter who inspired future heroes. By day, his black skin becomes the perfect secret identity. If he has a superpower, its the ability to leverage both the invisibility and hypervisibility that black people often experience.

In the present day, Reevess granddaughter Angela Abar lives a double life as a masked cop and a costumed crusader named Sister Night, flitting between police work and vigilantism as she sees fit. Shes deeply suspicious of Reeves when he becomes the primary suspect in the murder of Tulsas police chief. Later, she comes to understand her grandfathers motivations after taking a psychoactive drug that lets her relive his memories as Hooded Justice. Abar and Reeves share similar childhood traumas and a roiling anger thats often vented by pummelling white supremacists. These violent scenes can feel thrillingly transgressive, a pushback against centuries of depictions of blacks as docile victims of racism. But they also use comic-book caricature to hint at a truth that Hollywood might shy away from depicting in a more realistic setting; read the archives of Tulsas black newspaper from the years before the massacre and youll find plenty of calls for armed resistance to white lynch mobs.

Dr. Manhattan, the radioactive blue super soldier at the center of the original Watchmen comic, ultimately serves as the bridge between Abar and Reeves. Though born a white German-American, Dr. Manhattan spends a decade hiding in Tulsa as Abars black husband, Cal. Like Hooded Justice, he uses blackness as a shield of anonymity in a world transfixed by white heroes. But because he agrees to give up his powers and memories to save his relationship, blackness also robs him of his ability to alter history with the snap of his fingers. The future is uncertain, he admits not long after turning into Cal, and my ability to influence events is limited.

Many of the narratives swirling around the three heroesthe ones that dont involve them directlyturn out to be distortions of Watchmen canon. In the show-within-a-show American Hero Story, Hooded Justice is portrayed as a square-jawed white brawler pulled straight from Action Comics. The fiction that Dr. Manhattan lives on Mars as a blue demigod is perpetuated by a paid hotline service that people can use to send him prayers. The villains that Sister Night is fighting, members of a mysterious white-supremacist group named Seventh Cavalry, draw their inspiration from Rorschach, the original Watchmen antihero, whose racist musings have turned him into a martyr for the alt-right.

Though the new Watchmen expertly subverts expectations set up by the original comics, the show seems less confident inhabiting the world of Tulsa itself. There are vague allusions to a reparations program instituted for massacre victims and a couple of quick exposition dumps about Greenwoods past glory. The city itself only really comes to life, terrifyingly, in the opening scenes. But what Watchmen nails, more than details of Greenwoods history, is the way that history itself is so susceptible to manipulation, distortion, and erasure. In the real world, the massacre was initially national news, landing on the front page of the Times and prompting promises of recompense by embarrassed white Tulsans. But, unlike on the TV show, justice was never served in Greenwood. No white rioters were punished for their actions. Insurance companies and the city government refused to compensate black Tulsans for their lost property. Lawsuits stalled out in the courts. Many Tulsans, both white and black, stopped talking about what happened. A brutal invasion became a victimless crime, then a repressed memory, then a hazy urban legend that few people had even heard about.

But some of the people who rememberedblack people on the outskirts of recorded historynever stopped talking about it. Massacre survivors such as Bill Williams and Mabel Little recounted their memories of the event in memoirs or interviews with journalists. In the nineteen-nineties, two black Oklahoma state legislators, Maxine Horner and Don Ross, spearheaded the creation of the Greenwood Cultural Center, which serves as a community gathering place, memorial to survivors, and archive of firsthand accounts of the attack. More recently, the city of Tulsa has reopened a search for long-rumored mass graves of massacre victims, using oral histories from residents as a guide for where to look.

Black people have always derived power from their ancestral stories, from their ability to speak a truth that immediately complicates or contradicts an American myth. The reason we know what happened in Greenwood at allthe reason that the massacre is tangible enough for Hollywood to re-create in a glitzy prestige cable showis because folks in Tulsa kept talking about their memories, even when the conspiracy of silence was deafening. So its fitting that this new iteration of Watchmen turned out to be a story about a black family shaping and sharing history. After he regains his powers (and his famous blue skin), in the penultimate episode of the season, Dr. Manhattan mediates a conversation across time, between Abar in the present day and Reeves ten years prior. Together, the three of them determine that the sheriff is a closeted Klansman, with the robes in his closet to prove it. Watchmen offers some vital lessons about Tulsas past, even if the full history of the neighborhood still deserves a more thorough onscreen retelling. Where the show shines most is in how it conditions viewers to second-guess any story that is presented to them as a definitive historical account.

Originally posted here:
The Great Achievement of Watchmen Is in Showing How Black Americans Shape History - The New Yorker