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Republicans Jump as Biden Falls, The Hill Misplaces Liz Cheney, and PolitiFact Struggles With Words

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06.02.23

Pounce of Prevention – VARIOUS OUTLETS

  • Biden drops, and the real story is – Republicans notice!

When video began circulating yesterday of President Biden toppling at the Air Force Academy, other media analysts and I speculated what the media coverage would be like.

One common assessment was how long it would take for the press to gloss over the president falling and focus on the reaction from conservatives.

Right on cue, the press acted as expected.

Stealth Story Evolution – THE HILL

This might just be the final nail in the coffin that is the political career of Liz Cheney. The Hill comes out with a piece touting her possible presidential run as an independent (ignoring the fact that as the field was recently measured for favorability she came in with a staggering -36 result).

In the desperate coverage to boost her as a viable candidate, the outlet underscored how much of a non-entity she will be; in the piece and the promo tweet it was said the Wyoming politician represented Wisconsin. Eventually, they got around to correcting this detail, with no CORRECTION to be found, so we screen-capped the proof for you folks.

Anti-Social Media – TWITTER

  • What was a bad look may actually be a harbinger of the challenges for Musk.

Twitter was abuzz yesterday when it was shown that the attempts of the Daily Wire to migrate its video content onto the newly available media platforms on Twitter hit a snag. The controversial Matt Walsh video "What Is A Woman" was blocked from being shared for a time. 

This led to an outburst from the site's CEO and Matt Walsh himself interacting with Elon Musk over the issue. It appears that long-standing flags in the Twitter coding prevented the video from being shared, and Musk was working to take down the blocks. Then a revealing news flash hit that Twitter's Head of Trust and Safety abruptly resigned in the middle of the controversy. 

Musk worked to get the video to be loaded but other restrictions on exposure and sharing were still in place and needed to be worked out. It almost appears that the coding at the company has layers, redundancies, and possible backup triggers to the suppression algorithms, making this a complex fix for the new owner. 

Body Checking the Fact-Checkers – POLITIFACT

At the august authority on the truth, PolitiFact had two of its experts dive into the issue of Florida schools restricting books for specific grades and came to a conclusion: When Ron DeSantis says there are no books banned in Florida, he is being FALSE.

Amy Sherman and Matthew Crowley look over all of the controversies and determine the governor is wrong, mostly because they found an expert who conveniently recalibrates the meaning of the word "ban":

'Banning' is in the eye of the beholder, said Emily J.M. Knox, an information sciences professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. People who seek to ban books define bans narrowly as the total removal of books. 

Some 'people like to say it's not banning because you can get it in the public library/bookstore/Amazon or whatever,' Knox said. 'But it is censorship, because it's about control of access to knowledge. The whole point is to make sure that some people do not have unfettered access to that info.'

This means that adhering to the definition of "ban" is the problem, not the media stretching it to mean keeping certain age groups from having wide access to all possible content and that content to be placed in the school library. 

To underscore this idiocy, this is saying that a movie "rated-R" movie has been banned because kids under 17 cannot buy a ticket. Not giving 10-year-olds unfettered access to an adult bookstore is now censorship. This is such foolish desperation that you have to laugh, to prevent one from crying. 

Low Octane Gas Lighting – CBS MORNINGS

  • When crazy conservatives oppose proper and decent-acting corporations, Tony Dokoupil weeps. 

As Pride Month arrives and many companies continue to endure self-created controversies that drive away customers, we get CBS News arriving to put everything into unbiased perspective: Those nut jobs on the right are ruining everything! 

In a wildly slanted report, Tony Dokoupil looks at the growing number of companies entering the culture wars. Still, it never enters Dokoupil's mind to wonder if their doing so is misguided. Nope, just those obstinate conservatives making life tougher for everybody for opposing the infringement on our freedoms. Where do they get off?!

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is locked in a political battle with Disney after the company publicly opposed a bill he later signed into law. Bud Light, meanwhile, faced backlash and watched its sales plummet for sending a promotional can to a prominent transgender social media star. And customers in some Target stores have confronted workers and knocked over displays of LGBTQ-supportive merchandise.

"Riffed from the Headlines" is Townhall's daily VIP feature covering the nation's deeply flawed aspects of journalism, where Brad Slager looks to bring accountability to the mishaps, malaprops, misdeeds, manipulations, malpractice, and manufactured narratives in mainstream media.


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