The anatomy of media bias - crystal clear examples

A story is making the rounds on Facebook that claims Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is calling for “ID badges” for American Muslims. The image on the story is of Jewish children wearing yellow starts during the Holocaust. Very frightening–and a lie.

Step 1: Seed. The lie begins with a Yahoo! profile in which Trump is asked, supposedly (the reporter does not provide his exact question), if he would “require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion.”

Trump does not say yes or no. Instead, he dodges the question, and comes back to the question of monitoring mosques (which the U.S. has done in the past): “We’re going to have to–we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

The Yahoo! reporter, Hunter Walker (a hater of note), construes Trump’s answer as follows: “He wouldn’t rule it out.”

Step 2: Amplify. The story is picked up by CNN. Sara Murray asks whether Trump would “rule out” a database for Muslims–borrowing from Walker’s article. Trump is surprised, and tells her, truthfully, that he never responded to Walker’s question...

Step 3: Distort. NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard confronts Trump: “Should there be a database system that tracks the Muslims here in this country?” Trump replies: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems. And today you can do it. But right now, we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall, and we cannot let what’s happening to this country happen any longer.” Hillyard asks: “But that’s something your White House would like to implement?” Trump: “Oh I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.” Hillyard follows up: What do you think the effect of that would be? How would that work? It would stop people from coming in illegally. We have to stop people from coming into our country illegally.” Hillyard asks if Trump would go to mosques to register people. “Different places,” Trump says.

Step 4: Smear. Hillyard comes back later, asking Trump: “Mr. Trump, why would Muslim databases not be the same thing as requiring Jews to register in Nazi Germany?” Trump realizes Hillyard is out for blood. “You tell me,” he says, and walks away...

...Asked whether Muslims would be legally required to sign up for such a database, the businessman said, “They have to be — they have to be.” 

“[The database] would stop people from coming in illegally. We have to stop people from coming into our country illegally,” he added.

When asked how his plan differed from prewar Nazi Germany, Trump repeatedly responded, "you tell me."...

...But the media, Trump says, is not honestly reporting his policy positions.

“Today, in the New York Times, they had a report on the front page that was false,” Trump said. “Front page… But it’s a false story. And Breitbart wrote it correctly, and now The Times is suffering.”

In recent days Donald Trump has caught flak for several ostensibly anti-Muslim comments. Among them was his statement that he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrating after the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. This claim has been roundly and unanimously denounced [by the mainstream media, particularly by NPR]. NPR says:

So NPR, the New York Times and the Associated Press searched contemporaneous news accounts and could find no evidence of Muslim-Americans cheering in Jersey City. That’s odd. Because it took me less than two minutes to find this story from the Washington Post dated September 18, 2001 (although I did have to spend $3.95 to buy it from the Post’s archives):

Why does this happen? Are NPR, the Times and the AP incapable of using Google? Perhaps. But here is another possibility: note that the Times and the AP coyly limited their denials to news accounts of “mass cheering” or “mass celebrations” in Jersey City. I think they found the Washington Post story but preferred not to mention it. Instead, they deceived their readers...

I think that these news outlets are so hysterically eager to discredit any concerns about Islam that they won’t let something as minor as the facts get in their way. There is dishonesty here, but it is on the part of NPR, the New York Times and the Associated Press, not Donald Trump...

...but none of this is a secret, or hidden history. It’s not even deep-dive history. Anyone who has picked up a biography of Jefferson or Madison is well aware of this.

Apparently, the following news outlets — CNN, Politico, and the Washington Post — have not picked up that biography, or they are intentionally smearing Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson … again.

During a Monday appearance on C-Span, Carson said, quite correctly, that he admired Jefferson primarily for his role in helping to craft the Constitution...

The reaction from the DC Media on Twitter was not just instantaneously ignorant, it was fantastically ignorant....

Rather than crack open a book or use that Google-thingy right in front of them, Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN actually went so far as to publish stories claiming Carson got it wrong.

Worse still, but to no one’s surprise, all three outlets have refused to properly correct their provable errors...

Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone hails the Republican frontrunner’s proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration as “one of the most extraordinary” and “brilliant” moves by Donald Trump.

“What amazes me is, he calls for a complete and total temporary ban on Muslim immigration, but NBC essentially, cleverly edits his words – so they take out the part where he says, ‘until our representatives can get their hands round what’s going on,'” Stone told host Stephen K. Bannon during Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Radio.  “They then try to say, ‘Trump has called for a total ban on Muslims in the United States,’ and then there’s a media onslaught unlike anything I’ve seen since Nixon was under siege in D.C. in 1974, at the worst part of Watergate.”

Stone said most of the backlash against Trump’s proposal has consisted of “name-calling,” with “fascist” serving as an especially popular epithet.

“Now Trump has had to go out and say, ‘no, no, I said temporary’ on every major media outlet, because of this smear job here, but all of this really shows you, Steve, how desperate the Ruling Class is to stop Donald Trump.”...

...About ten years ago I stumbled upon the Tancredo strategy, and predictably was pummeled and ridiculed for it. I was being interviewed by a radio talk show and was asked this question, which at the time was very hypothetical but no longer is quite so hypothetical: What if al-Qaeda said they had a nuclear bomb inside the United States ready to detonate? “What should we do?” I was asked. I said, we should tell them if they do that, we will bomb Mecca, Islam’s holiest place… “With nuclear bombs?” was the next question. “Yes,” I said.

“Tancredo says we should nuke Mecca” was the headline. No, what I said was we should threaten to bomb Mecca if Islamists detonate a nuclear bomb in one of our cities. I believed then and believe now that only such a threat will cause Islamist radicals to reconsider their deadly plans...

In the feudal era there were the “three estates”—the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”...

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies...

Enter The Donald.

His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display...