The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Objective Truth of @fmanjoo and the New York Times’ Partisan Bias

Posted on | September 13, 2016 | 1 Comment

What is the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health and why should Americans trust the media to tell us the truth? This was a question raised last month by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in an interview on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream:

“She has an entire media empire that…fails to point out several signs of illness by her. All you got to do is go online.”
Bream countered that Clinton’s campaign has vehemently denied the unsubstantiated claims she is in poor health, releasing medical records last year to prove her fitness.
“Go online and put down, ‘Hillary Clinton illness,’ and take a look at the videos yourself,” Giuliani responded. . . .
Giuliani’s comments on Sunday came after a week in which Trump himself questioned Clinton’s “physical and mental stamina.”
The Democratic nominee’s campaign has accused Trump and his team of “peddling deranged conspiracy theories in a desperate attempt to change the subject – this time with absurd and debunked claims about Hillary Clinton’s health.”

In response, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times took to Twitter to advocate that search results for videos about Hillary’s health should be suppressed: “Google should fix this. It shouldn’t give quarter to conspiracy theorists.” Is it Farhad Manjoo’s job to help elect Democrats?

Well, yes — yes it is. This is why New York Times pays his salary, because electing Democrats is what the New York Times is about. Sure, Farhad Manjoo is supposed to be writing about technology, but if you check his online archive at the New York Times, you find that this is very light work — he published exactly eight bylined articles during the month of August, and writing two articles a week isn’t what I’d call a full-time job. So what does Farhad Manjoo do with all his spare time? Check out his Twitter feed, and you’ll find an incessant barrage of anti-Trump, pro-Hillary messages. Basically, Farhad Manjoo’s actual job these days is to crank out Hillary Clinton campaign propaganda on social media, while occasionally contributing a tech article to the New York Times.

So, three weeks after Farhad Manjoo called for the suppression of “conspiracy theorists” who claimed Hillary Clinton has serious health problems, we now know for a fact that Hillary Clinton has serious health problems. Does anyone expect the New York Times to discipline Farhad Manjoo for this behavior? Of course not. This is his job, you see — everybody employed by the New York Times is expected to do everything they can to elect Hillary Clinton president. Citing Farhad Manjoo’s tweet, former CBS News reporter Cheryl Attkisson wrote:

Rather than reporting the facts, many in the media have taken it upon themselves to shout down the questions and to controversialize those asking them. . . .
[Farhad Manjoo] was advocating that a conspiracy be committed to stop people from researching Clinton’s health, which he labeled a conspiracy. Many others in the media also chimed in using the “conspiracy theory” moniker. It’s designed to convince the public to tune out the discussion, in much the same way as other common astroturf terms such as “debunked,” “bonkers,” “tin-foil hat,” “shoddy,” “discredited,” “quack,” “bogus,” “denier,” and “crank.”
Left-wing apparatus Vox chimed in with an article titled: “The bonkers conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton’s health.” The pro-Hillary Clinton smear machine, Media Matters, chided NBC News for “mainstreaming conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health.” Vice picked up the theme writing, “How conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health went mainstream.” CNN published an article “Debunking conspiracy theories” about her health. CNN media critic Brian Stelter urged the media: “Do Not Give Oxygen To ‘Conspiracy Theories’ That Hillary Clinton Is ‘Secretly Ill’.” HuffPost wrote, “Let’s call the conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health what they are…” ThinkProgress joined in with, “Trump campaign embraces conspiracy theory…” From MSNBC: “Trump, allies push conspiracy theory about Clinton’s health.” NPR: “Trump adds fuel to conspiracy theory about Clinton’s health.” You get the idea. Everybody’s on the same page.

Whatever the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health may be, the truth about the mainstream media is that they are partisan Democrats, and that their “news” coverage is actually Democrat Party propaganda, so that they are essentially being paid to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Maybe the reason videos by “conspiracy theorists” are popular is because journalists are so blinded by partisan bias that they can’t be trusted to do honest reporting.

This is why journalists get scooped by guys with cell-phone videos:

Video from the 9/11 ceremony, uploaded to Twitter on Sunday morning, appeared to show the Democratic presidential candidate being helped into a black van by aides and US Secret Service agents. The man who filmed the video, New Jersey resident Zdenek Gazda, 50, told BuzzFeed News he was at the memorial when he spotted Clinton being led away.
“I take two pictures before she passed me,” said Gazda, who said he moved to the US 24 years ago from what was then Czechoslovakia and is a Clinton supporter. “She looked like everything was fine and everything was good.”
“I just saw the secretary waiting for the van and the van came and she can’t walk inside and she gets helped,” he said. “She lost her shoe and everything.”
Campaign staff initially refused to tell reporters traveling with the Democratic presidential candidate what had prompted the early departure, after Fox News reported that Clinton had experienced a “medical episode.”
She arrived at the memorial at 8:18 a.m. and left unexpectedly after about an hour and a half, according to pool reports.

Zdenek Gazda has better news judgment than most reporters covering the campaign, who are apparently willing to write whatever Clinton staff tell them to write. If the Clinton campaign staff denounce questions about Hillary’s health as “conspiracy theories,” then we can expect a dozen headlines repeating that label, and no one in the press corps will bother to ask serious questions about Hillary’s health, because to do so would be to join the “conspiracy theorists.” If Hillary was suffering periodic seizures and episodes of delirium, so that she was only able to get through the day with the help of a doctor treating her with ibogaine, the one thing we know is that the New York Times would never report this news.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)




 

Category: Election, Hillary Clinton, Media Bias, New York Times

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One Response to “The Objective Truth of @fmanjoo and the New York Times’ Partisan Bias”

  1. News of the Week (September 19th, 2016) | The Political Hat
    September 19th, 2016 @ 10:26 pm

    […] The Objective Truth of @fmanjoo and the New York Times’ Partisan Bias What is the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health and why should Americans trust the media to tell us the truth? This was a question raised last month by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in an interview on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream. […]