CNN – praag.org

New poll shows majority of Americans are proud of Confederate flag

As debate rages in South Carolina over the Confederate flag on its statehouse property, a majority of Americans see the rebel flag as a symbol of Southern pride, not a reminder of racism, according to a new CNN/ORC poll out Thursday. Public opinion is about where it stood 15 years ago, when the Palmetto State removed the rebel St. Andrew’s cross from the Capitol dome.

But there is a stark racial divide on how the banner is perceived and what should be done about references to the Confederacy.

Among all 1,017 adults participating, 57 percent said it’s a symbol of Southern pride, 33 percent called it more a symbol of racism and 5 percent said it’s both equally. Among whites, 66 percent said it symbolizes pride, while just 17 percent of African-Americans responded that way. In May 2000, 59 percent of Americans in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll called the flag a point of regional and historical pride.

A majority of both blacks and whites said they would oppose renaming streets and highways named after Confederate leaders, with 68 percent overall in opposition.

Americans appear to be more split on whether they support private companies like Amazon, Wal-Mart, eBay and others’ decision not to sell or manufacture items featuring the flag. Just 50 percent support those measures, compared to 47 percent overall. The margin is wide among African-Americans (65 percent to 33 percent), but much smaller when it comes to whites (49 percent to 47 percent).

There is also a lack of overall support for redesigning state flags that feature Confederate emblems or symbols, like the official banners of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi. Just 40 percent said they would back that, with 57 percent opposed.

At the same time, another majority (55 percent) supported removing Confederate flags from government property that is not a museum, but the racial divide grew more pronounced when respondents were asked if state flags should be redesigned (59 percent of non-Hispanic blacks support, compared to 35 percent of whites), and if tributes honoring Confederate soldiers should be removed from public places (49 percent of non-Hispanic blacks to 21 percent of whites).

The latest poll comes on the heels of another this week, by USA Today and Suffolk University, which found a more even split between those who found the flag racist and those who found it symbolic of Southern heritage. It should be noted that the question was framed slightly differently, as the 1,000 respondents were asked in that poll whether: “The confederate flag is a racist symbol and should be removed from state flags and other official locations” or “The Confederate flag is representative of Southern heritage and is not racist.” The poll found a split of 42 percent each responding either way.

The CNN/ORC poll was conducted June 26-28, surveying 1,017 Americans by telephone, carrying an overall margin of error of plus-or-minus 3 percentage points. The overall sample includes 303 African-Americans with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 5.5 percentage points. – politico.com

CNN blames military veterans for Baltimore

While conducting an interview with Democratic Maryland Representative Elijiah Cummings, CNN host Brooke Baldwin questioned whether the violence in Baltimore had something to do with the amount of military veterans in the police department.

“Another thing that has to be done here, is we’ve really got to look at our police department,” Cummings began.

“But in what sense?” Baldwin asked. “We talk about training, we talk about having officers — I was talking to the city councilman here last week. He said, ‘Brooke, these people have to live in the communities… or there’s a lack of emotional investment.’”

“And a lot of these young people — I’ve been talking about this so much. A lot of young people — and I love our nation’s veterans, but some of them are coming back from war, they don’t know the communities, and they are ready to do battle.”

“Yeah they definitely need training,better training, and they need better recruitment,” Cummings agreed.

Source: The Daily Caller

CNN withdraws from Russia

CNN International withdraws from Russian cable networks from December 31, 2014, according to a letter from Turner Broadcasting System Europe (CNN owner) TASS learnt about on Monday.

CNN is broadcast by operators of paid cable and satellite television, including Akado, Vimpelcom, NTV+, and others.

A copy of the letter available to TASS notifies Russian paid TV operators that Turner stops broadcasting CNN International in Russia from December 31, 2014. No reasons behind the move are provided.

Turner Broadcasting System’s director general in the CIS, Tatiana Kalita, refused to comment.

Akado and Vimpelcom confirmed they had received such a notification. “Yes, we have received such notification. We hope next year the channel will be back in Russia,” Vimpelcom’s press service said.

US media refuses to report news

Journalists from leading US media working in Russia refused to personally interview Ukrainian soldiers, who earlier in the week crossed the border into Russia asking for asylum, a deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s press department said.

On early Monday a group of 438 Ukrainian troops and border guards from pro-Kiev forces fighting against militia in the embattled southeast of Ukraine asked Russia’s southern border authorities for permission to enter Russia seeking asylum, and a humanitarian corridor was opened for them.

Maria Zakharova wrote in her Facebook account that as the news broke out on Monday about over 400 Ukrainian soldiers crossing into Russia seeking asylum, the Russian Foreign Ministry decided to arrange a meeting with the soldiers for foreign journalists accredited in Russia.

“Keeping in mind how important it will be for journalists, particularly for foreign ones, to talk to Ukrainian military servicemen, to learn firsthand about the real combat actions, motivation of the Ukrainian soldiers and the actual reasons behind their decision [to seek asylum], we decided to invite a group of foreign correspondents to the Rostov Region,” Zakharova said.

She said an aircraft from the Russian Defense Ministry was scheduled for flight on Monday to the Rostov Region, where the Ukrainian soldiers were temporary sheltered, and the plane was ready to take along a group of between 30 and 40 journalists.

“We have immediately started calling everyone,” she said. “We gathered up to 40 [correspondents] within an hour.”

However, Zakharova said, there was only Bloomberg news agency representative in the group as the rest of the US media decided to decline the ministry’s initiative.

“Except for Bloomberg there were no journalists representing US media!!! An opportunity to meet with the Ukrainian military servicemen, who crossed into the Russian territory, was declined by representatives of leading US media,” she said. “They were CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor.”

“What are these journalists base their materials upon if they decline talking to firsthand sources?” Zakharova said. “The funniest episode was with Reuters journalist, who registered, left for the airport, but changed his mind half way there and did not fly.”

“Russia is being criticized for little interaction with western media and it is allegedly the reason for Russia’s media blackout,” she said. “But the fact is that we speak and they either refuse to listen or they are prohibited from listening.”

The Ukrainian military servicemen, who laid down arms and crossed into Russia, were accommodated in a tent camp that was set up for them near the Gukovo border checkpoint in Russia’s Rostov Region.

The soldiers expressed surprise over being treated well on the Russian territory as, according to them, news information they gathered earlier from Kiev media was in sharp contrast to the reality they saw.

Source:

Another CNN geography goof-up in Ukraine

CNN, already infamous for its embarrassing geography goof-ups, has mistakenly relocated the Eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk in an infographic – all the way to the Crimea peninsula.

The American network was reporting Saturday on the Kiev military forcing out the self-defense troops out of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, the cities in Ukraine’s Donetsk region that used to be their strongholds for a while. In a lead-in to the report, the TV channel showed a map – where Slavyansk was moved hundreds of kilometers away from its actual location, to Crimea, a peninsula that rejoined Russia in March.

In fact, the distance between Slavyansk (in Ukrainian language – Slovyansk) and Kramatorsk is only about 16 kilometers. Both cities lie to the north of the region’s capital, Donetsk.

It is not the first time that CNN graphics staff have demonstrated a relaxed attitude to accuracy when it comes to geography.

Earlier this year, the channel reshaped the world suggesting on its map that Eastern Ukraine was somewhere in Pakistan. The error was snapped by one of eagle-eyed viewers from a TV screen and published on Twitter, soon going viral on the internet and a target for sarcastic comments.

African-Americans deserve reparations

African-Americans deserve reparations. Discuss.

The idea of reparations — that the descendants of slaves should be compensated by the national government for the wrongs and the legacy of slavery — has always been controversial.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic wrote the June cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” he set a traffic record for the magazine’s website. He provoked responses from across the political and ethnic spectrum. Some of his critics did him the courtesy of reading the entire 16,000-word piece. Others, particularly in the Twittersphere, reacted viscerally to the headline and to reactions to the headline.

Through many of these responses, whether thoughtful or tossed-off, there’s been a certain thread of uneasiness; a reflexive move to find reasons why reparation couldn’t be done or why it wouldn’t be workable or fair.

To me, this reflex is as interesting as the original argument. And it suggests that before America could ever actually do reparations, America would have to first be able to imagine the necessity of reparations. The greatest obstacle to considering reparation isn’t practicality; it’s a dearth of moral imagination.

Source: CNN

Bawbawa’s journalistic porn

by Ilana Mercer

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Barbara Walters has promised to retire. But then so did that lip-licking lizard, Larry King. You can’t take them at their word.

In my journalism school days, one looked up to the legendary, late Oriana Fallaci. These days, it’s mediocrities like Walters and colorectal crusader Katie Couric who’re considered cutting-edge clever. And they’ve sired a new crop of talking coifs.

Although they’re walking clichés – and there’s little they can say that’ll edify or enlighten – the likes of Brook Baldwin and Erin Burnett of CNN are regularly invited to deliver commencement addresses to university graduates! “Remember, it’s not about you,” Baldwin lectured students at her journalism and communications school alma mater. Yet journalistic evenhandedness regularly tips into self-serving advocacy under the direction of this feminist front-woman. “As a woman, I get frustrated, protested, as she browbeat a British reporter for daring to criticize Kate Middleton’s barely there underwear.

Coming as she did from a background in “women’s interest stories,” it was only natural for Walters to bring the same one-dimensional perspective to “The View,” a roundtable dominated by women and aimed at the same demographic. “The View” was “charitably” punctured by the occasional “Guy Day Friday.” So successful was Barbara’s formula, that it has been copied by Fox News (where, with exceptions like Gerri Willis, Elizabeth MacDonald, Melissa Francis and Kennedy of the Business channel – the babes are not much better). “Outnumbered” (but not outfoxed) is “The View,” but with a better view of legs and cleavage. Views voiced by the self-congratulatory cyphers in short skirts on the GOP network, however, are just as formulaic as Barbara’s Democrat-friendly debates.

Another of Barbara’s brainchildren was the much-anticipated, annual “Most Fascinating People List,” for which she redefined the concept of “fascinating.” Yes, Walters has been a cog in a coarsening culture. Some of her past picks for “The Most Fascinating List” included Paris Hilton, KimYe (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) and twerker Miley Cyrus.

All Walters’ interviews make the flesh crawl. Paris Hilton made a porn debut, in which she made love to the camera (i.e. herself). Walters’ syrupy “journalism” transformed the narcissistic specter into a PG-rated tale of innocence betrayed. Well, of course: Paris was led astray by a man.

And the broadcaster’s empathic posturing concealed a good deal of cattiness, even cruelty. Her idea of getting to the guts of a story: Bring a supremely vulnerable celebrity to tears. Wicked Walters once prefaced an interview with singer Celine Dion by pronouncing, “You are not beautiful.” She then paused to watch, gleefully, as tears welled in Dion’s beautiful eyes. Now that’s what I call a scoop!

The one person to rival Barbara’s bitchiness is sly Katie Couric. She interviewed Hillary Clinton while drunk with love for Obama. Couric’s below-the-belt barbs made Hillary appear elevated by comparison. The former “first housewife” was courteous where Katie was unkind. “Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?” Couric inquired. “Only with some boys,” Clinton replied, laughing. Couric makes Clinton seem quick and classy.

Years back, Walters was granted an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. To Walters, complexity has always been a cuss word. Her approach was to stick to the inane and the mundane, while lobbing an occasional misguided missile. Out of the blue – and true to her sensation-driven style – Walters asked the former KGB operative if he’d ever killed anyone. Putin’s mouth said no; his eyes seemed to be saying, “I feel a strong urge rising.”

Contrast the typical Walters tête-à-tête with the fusillade of irreverent questions and scalding ripostes Fallaci fired on Muammar Gadhafi in 1979. As the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot tells it, at one point, the colonel complains that she must not have read his manifesto, “The Green Book.” “Her answer is pure Fallaci, and very satisfying: ‘On the contrary, I read it. It doesn’t take very long, you know, 15 minutes at the most. It’s so small. My powder compact is bigger than your little ‘Green Book.’”

Good newsmen are a dying breed. Good newswomen are mostly dead already. (For reasons not mysterious, mainstream mediocrities are doing their utmost to marginalize sleuths like Sharyl Attkisson, formerly of CBS, and Laura Poitras, the documentarian who helped Edward Snowden expose the National Security Agency.) By the time she died, the brilliant and brave Oriana Fallaci had long since been buried professionally by the likes of Barbara Walters. For her unabashed contempt of Islam, Fallaci was forced to flee her native Italy. She came to America, where, needless to say, she never made it onto Barbara’s List.

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CNN terminates transatlantic talk show experiment

CNN has pulled the plug on the British talkshow host Piers Morgan.

Falling ratings finally took their toll on a transatlantic talk show experiment that brought British conceit to American primetime audiences.

It took three years for the former Daily Mirror editor Morgan – who lost his job at the Daily Mirror after publishing fake pictures of alleged British troop misconduct in Iraq – to realise he was not the best at what he was doing.

Morgan has said in the past that he believes he is the best at his job.

He said he thought he was better than everyone else. Asked in October last year whether he was now the best TV interviewer in Britain, Morgan boasted: ”Yes, because I don’t think that my so-called rivals do what I do.

‘I think I’m almost in a category of my own.”

He is now blamed for a steep slide in the show’s ratings since Larry King’s retirement.

“It’s been a painful period and lately we have taken a bath in the ratings,” Morgan told the New York Times, which first broke news of the CNN decision on Sunday.

Morgan has never matched the ratings regularly achieved by King and had recently started to suffer new lows in terms of audience figures. This month saw six of the show’s smallest 10 audiences since he took over in January 2011.

A broadcast on 18 February, which included coverage of Ukraine’s dramatic political crisis and an interview with the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, drew its second smallest audience to date among adults aged 25-54 (50,000). Analysts Nielsen reported that the show also drew just 270,000 total viewers, its ninth smallest gathering at that time.

David Carr, the New York Times journalist called Morgan a “British television personality who refuses to assimilate” and that his moralising sermons on guns and violence “were rife with contempt”.

It also emerged this month that Morgan had been questioned under caution by Scotland Yard detectives investigating the phone-hacking scandal in the UK.

The glories of Hussein’s proctology

by Ilana Mercer

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The message that greeted future Obamacare patients who logged on to Healthcare.gov was as follows: “Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

Healthcare.gov is the deluxe version of Obamacare.

The interminable waits on Healthcare.gov are a harbinger of things to come under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This so-called “Health Insurance Marketplace” is using the good name of the marketplace in vain. A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy. As such, they will result in long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of central planners to bring demand and supply into balance.

Like Canadian, Cuban and British nationalized healthcare, Obamacare’s motto will become, “We have boatloads of patients, too few doctors, supplies and equipment and not nearly enough of your money. Don’t like it? Go jump in the lake.”

Like me, you must know Obama-heads (doctors included) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by Obama’s politburo of proctologists—a modest expansion totaling $2 trillion—would cost them anything at all. (Doctors for Obamacare ought to revel in the 140,000 added codes into which they’ll have to categorize care rendered. These include nine new codes for injuries sustained from the common macaw! You’re more likely to be felled by an Obama-guided drone than by that gentle hook bill.)

I’m already feeling the care. How about you?

Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. Before Obamacare, this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Obamacare became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how to continue caring for us under current conditions (and keep operating).

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It has already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

Perhaps like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself. In this case, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has more bad news. On the individual-market, “Obamacare will increase average … insurance premiums by 99% for men, 62% for Women.” Middle-class Americans Obamacare subsidies will not protect. They “face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies.”

Well before Roy, a healthcare expert had warned John Stossel’s viewers that the employer mandate forces every employer of more than 50 workers (insurers are employers) to provide them with a one-size fits all government-designed plan.

The costs of the employer mandate are such that it’s economically more viable for a proprietor to deny coverage and pay a penalty, considering that compliance will add about $1.75 per hour to the cost of a worker and may see a business go under.

Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires. An additional $1.75 an hour doesn’t much matter when one is hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high; this is a proposition only government can entertain, given that it derives its revenue fromtaxing, borrowing and minting money.

Not even CNN’s resident physician, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, can doctor the reports any longer. Sad to say, but across the country people have been reporting what Gupta admitted only yesterday. Those who had full-time employment and healthcare insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed bereft of a job and insurance.

Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.

This same belief plagues the simple-minded pinkos at Politico.com, where two female reporters gushed that “[d]espite the unceasing GOP campaign to sink the law, Obamacare has exceeded expectations in some significant ways.” The gush and tosh was over the fact that the central planner had instructed insurers on how to “better” allocate resources, forcing them “to issue more than $500 million in rebate checks to consumers because they failed to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care.”

Another tenet of this prevailing worldview is that an act of force—a law—is all it takes to make medical manna fall from the heavens.

In April came news that Big Brother will be appointing “navigators” to show the beneficiaries of the bankrupting Affordable Care Act the way: 21,000 navigators in California alone translates into 140,000 of them nationwide, a bureaucratic army that will swell the already swollen federal oink sector. By Pat Buchanan’s telling, navigator pay will run from $20 to $48 an hour, almost $100,000 a year for one federal oinker, for a total of between $5 and 10 billion.

In California alone navigators will cost between $871 million and $2 billion a year.

These navigators will likely be members if the entrenched minorities who speak the languages of the welfariat for which Obamacare has been sculpted. Since the chosen workers will be Obama’s pepes—community organizers, union folks and PlannedParenthood advisers—recruiting new Democrats will be part of their job description.

Despotism is upon us when, as one wag put it, “government officials write laws that apply only to us and not to them.” Lawmakers and staff were supposed to have lost their generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to be replaced by health insurance purchased at the comically calamitous Healthcare.gov.

The proctologist-in-chief caved to the squealing quislings. The 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of their Capitol Hill staff will still retain the subsidies provided by taxpayer largess. Obamacare for thee, but not for me.

That’s what you call the law of rule, not the rule of law.

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The silent co-conspirators in military mass shootings

by Ilana Mercer

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At Dummies.com you can learn how to “refresh a computer system.” It is hardly a super-specialized IT job.

“Refreshing computer systems” for the Navy Marine Corps’ Intranet network was the job description of the Washington Navy Yard killer, Aaron Alexis. Alexis, who gunned down 12 military contractors in the capital, on Sept. 16, was not an irreplaceable cog in the US military-industrial complex. Given his checkered record, Alexis ought to have been a liability to any organization.

Nevertheless, the former Navy reservist would have been coveted by military contractors for his prized possession: the secret military security clearance and common-access card (CAC), courtesy of the U.S. government.

Access is invaluable. If you’re cleared to work on military installations, you’re gold to contractors – who are themselves cogs in the corrupt military juggernaut.

A government grant of privilege, not his skills, turned a mass murderer in the making into an asset to The Experts Inc., for which Alexis worked.

Unburdened by brains, liberals are demanding to know “why was Alexis able to buy guns?” Again, ask the government. Gun sellers must use the FBI-run National Instant Criminal Background Check System for background checks on customers. Sharpshooters Small Arms Range, from which Alexis bought the Remington 870 shotgun used in the crime, was in compliance. The shop checked Alexis out with the feds. The government gave them the go-ahead.

Equally compromised, Republican Sen. Susan Collins was prompted to “question the kind of vetting contractors do.” Ask the government you serve, Susan, for it, not the contractors, conducts background checks.

“The government maintains the final approval authority,” Rear Adm. John Kirby told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

And for government officials, no infraction committed by Alexis was too egregious to ignore.

Even stranger is the discrepancy between the killer’s performance during his Navy service and the glowing evaluations and awards he received from his superiors. If anything, top brass’s outsized ambition for Alexis incriminates them, not him.

“A valuable asset to the command” and to “any civilian organization.” In possession of “unlimited potential.” In the category of “must promote”: These are just some of the superlatives Alexis’ superiors deployed in plotting what was supposed to be his meteoric rise through the ranks.

All despite the fact that Alexis “had eight instances of misconduct in the Navy.” As reported by CNN’s Brian Todd, “Police records say he had three arrests between 2004 and 2010,” two for “gun-related offenses.” “A private firm does background checks on civilian contractors with the government’s Office of Personnel Management. OPM checks the information and then passes it on to the Department of Defense. There is one office in DOD that determines whether someone gets the kind of security clearance Alexis had.”

Aside from this office, Alexis would have been scrutinized by layers of military security; among these the Department of the Navy’s Central Adjudication Facility (DONCAF) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

Not only is it preposterous to float the idea that the point people at OPM, DOD, DONCAF or NCIS “dropped the ball” (as media are framing it) – the truth is almost entirely the opposite.

Intuitively, we all know why Alexis was being groomed for great things, despite grave lapses in judgment; why, he was praised in exuberant language and honorably discharged, in 2011, for dishonorable conduct. How elastic are military morals? No less an authority than the aforementioned rear admiral characterized Alexis’ indiscretions as “fairly mild,” while conceding that this was “no stellar sailor.”

The same military honor system worked wonders for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadi who committed fratricide at Fort Hood.

The military minded not a bit that Hasan breezed about the base in his jihadi jumpsuit. If anything, his superiors encouraged his “areas of interest” – proselytizing for Islam. Hasan’s devotional zeal Army psychiatrists dismissed as merely “different.” The same great military put a positive spin on the psychiatrist’s substandard professional performance and felt no qualms about unleashing him on vulnerable veterans. (A mother whose son was left to the mercies of the major attested that he was scary, inappropriate and without empathy.)

Like Aaron Alexis – who was allowed to retain a secret security clearance issued in 2007 and valid until 2017 – no amount of trouble Hasan got into undermined his own gold-embossed security clearance, employment status, rank and six-figure salary.

In both cases, the wise monkeys of the military chose to see no evil, hear no evil and most certainly speak no evil of the two archetypal holy men: a Muslim and a black man. The Navy Affirmative Action Plan (NAAP), matched by the Department of the Army Affirmative Action Plan, demands it.

None of this should come as a surprise. The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

Military top dogs and their loyal political lieutenants should have been tried with Nidal Malik Hasan, and they should stand in the dock for Aaron Alexis.

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US media completely ignore racist rampage

NewsBusters asked Saturday if the media will report a New York man becoming brain dead as a result of an unprovoked attacked by a black man saying “I hate white people.”

So far with the exception of local New York coverage, the answer is a resounding “No.”

Analyses of Google News, LexisNexis, and closed-caption transcripts found absolutely no national reporting of Jeffrey Babbitt, the 62-year-old retired train conductor now in a coma at Bellevue Hospital.

Not one word on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or NBC.

Potentially even more curious, the largest newspaper in New York, the New York Times, appears to have not reported this attack despite it occurring in its own backyard.

If Babbitt were black, and his assailant shouted “I hate black people” before inflicting what appears will be a death blow, would America’s media be so disinterested?

Or would this be headline news much like what we saw with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman?

Sadly, we all know the answer as our media have once again shown that they are only interested in white on black hate crimes.

The other variety just don’t fit the agenda.

Update: It turns out the New York Times did report this matter at its website Friday and in print Saturday. Unfortunately, the name of the assailant was wrong and the article didn’t include Babbitt’s. That’s why it appeared this event had gone unreported.

Readers are advised the errant report was a total of 152 words buried on page 21.

I guess that’s the importance the Times gives to black on white hate crimes. – newsbusters.org

Why Putin is winning the War of Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin has created an anti-CNN for Western audiences with the international satellite news network Russia Today. With its recipe of smart propaganda, sex appeal and unlimited cash, it is outperforming its peers worldwide.

Russia Today uses the source material America supplies to its rivals untiringly and with relish. Even Washington’s relatively minor peccadilloes don’t escape notice. For instance, the show also includes a story about Gabonese dictator Ali Bongo Ondimba, whom US President Barack Obama supports.

Many in the West are also interested in seeing critical coverage of the self-proclaimed top world power. Russia Today is already more successful than all other foreign broadcast stations available in major US cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago and New York. In Washington, 13 times as many people watch the Russian program as those that tune into Deutsche Welle, Germany’s public international broadcaster.

Two million Britons watch the Kremlin channel regularly. Its online presence is also more successful than those of all its competitors. What’s more, in June, Russia Today broke a YouTube record by being the first TV station to get a billion views of its videos.

The station was even more triumphant when it signed Larry King, a legend of American radio and TV journalism who began working for Russia Today this summer. “America’s best known TV interviewer is defecting to the Russians,” wrote the London-based Times in May.

King and his new colleagues have a simple assignment: They are to “break the monopoly of the Anglo-Saxon mass media,” President Vladimir Putin said during a studio visit a few weeks ago. The Russians’ recipe for success has three ingredients: sex appeal, which has been atypical for most news channel; a rigidly anti-American stance; and a never-ending flow of money from the Kremlin.

The Ministry of Media Defense

Since 2005, the Russian government has increased the channel’s annual budget more than tenfold, from $30 million (€22.6 million) to over $300 million. Russia Today’s budget covers the salaries of 2,500 employees and contractors worldwide, 100 in Washington alone. And the channel has no budget cuts to fear now that Putin has issued a decree forbidding his finance minister from taking any such steps.

The Moscow leadership views the funds going to the channel as money “well invested,” says Natalya Timakova, the press attaché to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. “In addition, Russia Today is — and I hope the Germans will forgive me for this remark — significantly more modern than Deutsche Welle, for example, and it also has more money.”

The government has also spent a lot of money on the new broadcasting center in northeast Moscow, which Russia Today moved into in May. The station, citing confidentiality requirements, isn’t willing to quote an exact price tag. On the grounds of a former Soviet tea factory, the broadcaster is now creating programming in Arabic, English and Spanish. In 2009, it rebranded its English- and Spanish speaking divisions as simply “RT.” The evening news is currently focused on the euro crisis, social protests in Portugal and the NSA surveillance scandal.

Margarita Simonyan is the woman who shaped Russia Today into Russia’s most effective weapon in the battle for influencing the opinions of the global public. In her office on the eighth floor of its headquarters in Moscow, the editor-in-chief has Orthodox icons on her desk and a dozen flickering screens around it. Putin made Simonyan the head of the new station in 2005. At the time, she was only 25 and derided as an unknown reporter from the crowd of journalists that accompany the president at meetings.

Simonyan’s mission is to prevent Russia from ever losing a war of images.

CNN showed images of destroyed buildings, allegedly taken after a Russian bomb strike on the Georgian provincial city of Gori. According to Russia Today, however, they were actually shots of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali after a Georgian attack. “There is no objectivity,” Simonyan says today, “only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible.”

Mistrust of the domestic media is also greater than ever in the United States. CNN, for example, is struggling to cope with a massive loss of viewers. – Der Spiegel

Race boycotts loom as Jesse Jackson calls Florida ‘Apartheid state’

The Rev. Jesse Jackson has called to boycott the “apartheid state” of Florida if the Department of Justice does not lodge a civil rights case against George Zimmerman.

“Trayvon is a symbol of a deeper malady,” the reverend said in a CNN interview Thursday.

“No doubt, the inclination is to boycott Florida, stop conventions, to isolate Florida as a kind of apartheid state” if the DOJ does not act, Jackson said.

Jackson charged that homicides against blacks have tripled since stand your ground laws were put in place in Florida. The Daily Caller reported Tuesday that the law actually benefits blacks in the state disproportionately, saying blacks made about a third of Florida’s total stand your ground claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of the state’s population.

“The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites,” the Daily Caller said.

Martin Luther King III said at a recent NAACP convention that if supporters of Trayvon Martin really want to put their money where their mouths are, they can boycott the Florida orange juice industry.

“The true way generally when people don’t understand your plight is when you decide to exercise your buying power elsewhere,” he said at the Orlando, Fla., convention, CBS reported.

He made the comments in the context of condemning “stand your ground” laws. He’s not the first to raise the idea of boycotting Florida’s citrus growers and sellers in the days since George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin — but he is one of the highest-profile figures to do so.

Hundreds of protesters at Philadelphia’s Love Park called for the same action on Sunday, just hours after learning of the acquittal. – The Washington Times

CNN uses racial tags for Zimmerman trial

On Wednesday, CNN once again referred to Hispanic defendant George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic who is on trial for last year’s shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a black teen, in Sanford city.”

The term “white Hispanic” was coined by the media after outlets wrongly labeled Zimmerman white; Zimmerman’s father is white, and his mother is Hispanic.

On March 8, 2012, the Associated Press wrote, “The neighborhood watch leader is white.” When it came out that he was not, media outlets including CNN began labeling Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” in order to maintain the false narrative that the killing was race-based.

CNN has biased its case against Zimmerman before. During the original case controversy, CNN isolated audio that made it sound as if Zimmerman used a racial slur about “f—ing c—ns.”

Mediaite repeated that falsehood.

CNN called legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, who said that the tape was “extremely significant” and could lead to hate crimes prosecution.

When the tape was clarified, however, it turns out that Zimmerman had said it was “f—ing cold.” – Breitbart