A recent Washington Post article by media reporter Paul Farhi raises the alarm that the White House Correspondents’ Association has not once, but twice, assigned a Daily Signal employee, Fred Lucas, to be the pool reporter, i.e., the reporter who serves as the “proxy for the rest of the press corps.”

The Daily Signal is the “news and commentary site” founded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, he reports, labeling it an “advocacy organization.”

“In other words,” writes Farhi, “the news that reporters received about the vice president came from a journalist employed by an organization with a vested interest in the direction of White House and federal policy.”

The idea that the so-called mainstream press somehow stands above their own vested interests, or, put another way, against their own agenda, is laughable at best.

The distinction between biased advocacy news organizations and the supposedly independent press has not only blurred—it has become obsolete. Organizations such as The Daily Signal and Breitbart are just as capable of speaking truth to power as media outlets such as The New York Times, the Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC.

In fact, it is these supposedly impartial news organizations that have continued to lobby for the leftist agenda. When President Barack Obama was in office, they not only worked to legitimize and enhance the Obama legacy, ignoring scandal after scandal, but they even tried to influence the Supreme Court to uphold Obama’s signature legislation, Obamacare.

The deceit of the media didn’t stop there.

Under Obama, the media consistently portrayed the economy as recovering even though the labor participation rate remained at abominable levels. A vast number of the jobs supposedly created in the Obama years were part-time, many lasting for just weeks at a time.

The unemployment rate dropped to under 5 percent only because millions of people gave up looking for work, not because the economy was booming. Moreover, Obamacare prevented millions of people from getting a full-time job based on the disincentives built into Obama’s signature program.

A case in point is the coverage of the Congressional Budget Office’s report scoring the proposed Republican legislation intended to replace Obamacare. The headlines and stories focused on the “24 million” people who would “lose health insurance coverage by 2026.”

But as The Weekly Standard pointed out, the CBO report doesn’t actually say that. What it does say is that “the total number of individuals insured under the Republican plan would eventually be 24 million fewer than the total insured under Obamacare” by that time.

Ironically, it was just a year ago that The Weekly Standard reported that the CBO had been off on another one of its projections on Obamacare by, you guessed it, 24 million people. That error was the average number of people who would have private insurance during any month in 2016, and it took just three years from the 2013 projection to show that the CBO overestimated it by 24 million.

In addition, more than six years after the passage of Obamacare, there were still 29 million people who had no health insurance at all, even though the law required it. The price for not buying insurance is a fine, later redefined as a tax, in order to have it ruled constitutional.

The point is that the so-called mainstream media will grab onto whatever they can to put Republicans and conservatives on the defensive, so they are forced to explain how they can be so cruel as to cause 24 million people to “lose their insurance.” They rarely offer anything close to the proper context to help people understand what the Republicans are trying to do.

How many tens of millions of people have seen their premiums and deductibles skyrocket, or lost their ability to keep their doctors or their policies, or have been unable to find a full-time job because of the employer mandates imposed by Obamacare?

Do those numbers matter? Apparently not.

The conservative media also have an agenda, but at least they are generally transparent about it.

The leftist, mainstream media pretend to be neutral, biased only for a good story. But they rarely acknowledge that they deceitfully work to cover for the policies and scandals of the Democrats, while working to destroy conservatives and their policies, treating them as cruel and venal.

And in the heat of the 2016 campaign season, WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 revealed the Democrat Media Complex, where reporters would have cocktails with the Hillary Clinton campaign. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos previously worked for the Clintons and later gave donations to their foundation without properly disclosing his actions.

This is par for the course with the complicit media. The idea that “independent” news organizations somehow lack conflicts of interest is absurd.

Farhi expresses concern that “The Daily Signal’s inclusion in the pool could set a precedent for other advocacy organizations … ” He even goes so far as to suggest that the “slope could become even more slippery if extremist or racist organizations sought similar status.”

It seems preposterous to assume that allowing a foundation’s publication to communicate with other reporters will somehow result in rampant racism and extremism. This is the same type of inflammatory rhetoric used against President Donald Trump and his senior adviser, Steve Bannon.

Yet, even Farhi tacitly admits that there is no real need for concern when he writes that “there were no objections to Lucas’s pool reports on [Vice President Mike] Pence” and that Lucas’ reporting merely crossed a “symbolic” line.

The Post isn’t the only paper spewing vitriol about conservatives’ newfound influence over the White House press corps. The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz claims that the press sees the rising influence of conservative reporters, or “far-right sites,” as an “existential threat.”

Marantz writes:

Outlets that have become newly visible under the Trump administration include One America News Network, which was founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; LifeZette, a Web tabloid founded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, the radio commentator and Trump ally; Townhall, a conservative blog started by the Heritage Foundation; the Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, now a Fox News host; and the enormously popular and openly pro-Trump Breitbart News Network.

He goes on to quote an anonymous “radio correspondent” as saying, “At best, they don’t know what they’re doing … At worst, you wonder whether someone is actually feeding them softball questions … You can’t just have a parade of people asking, ‘When and how do you plan to make America great again?’”

Under Obama, the press consistently used administration statistics and reports in its friendly, fawning reporting designed to further the Obama legacy. Now that Trump has taken office, the press has reinvested in oppositional journalism, fact-checking minutiae, and claiming that Trump has colluded with Russia.

This is a blatant double standard. (For more from the author of “The Truth About the Supposedly Impartial News Media” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

For years, establishment media outlets have ignored the uptick in violence against Jews nationwide. Now that Donald Trump is president, they use anti-Jewish hate in America as a tool to attack the White House’s legitimacy.

Jewish Community Centers throughout the country have been on the receiving end of bomb threats, forcing school closures and a tense environment in these local areas. In one recent high-profile incident, a Jewish graveyard was vandalized. Though the perpetrators of these crimes have yet to be identified, many media and left-wing institutions have decided that Trump is to blame for these incidents.

The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, an obscure far-left institution based in New York City, has utilized the namesake of the Holocaust victim to bash the entire White House as an anti-Semitic administration. Their statement, which includes sentences like: “The anti-Semitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration,” has been picked up by countless media outlets, few of which point out the organization’s extreme left-wing platform.

President Trump is many things, but an anti-Semite he is not. For decades, he has been a very public figure, and the media is yet to find a single file that proves Trump has ever fanned the flames of anti-Semitism.

Trump’s children, Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr., are all married to Jews. His top advisors are Jews. His closest friends are Jews. His Mar-a-Lago club (in the city of Palm Beach, where Jewish entry to many of institutions is still blocked to this day) and his many other properties encourage Jewish membership. He has been incredibly supportive of the Jewish state of Israel. Simply put, there is *zero* evidence that Donald Trump has ever said or done anything explicitly anti-Semitic. He is, by all accounts, a close friend of the Jewish community.

In November 2016, the FBI released its annual hate crime data for the year 2015. Of the 1,402 victims of anti-religious hate crimes in 2015, over 52 percent were Jewish. From 2014 to 2015, hate crimes against Jews shot up nine percent. Year after year, the vast majority of anti-religious hate crimes have targeted Jews, although American Jews account for only two percent of the U.S. population.

But in reporting on anti-Jewish hate crimes that occurred under the auspices of President Obama, the mainstream media either completely ignored the facts or buried the most important information. Never did anyone in the media ever ask if Barack Obama was to blame for a supposed anti-Jewish climate growing in America.

When the FBI report came out while Obama was still in office, showcasing that more than half of all anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews, the New York Times headline on the data read: “U.S. Hate Crimes Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims.” The Washington Post echoed the Times report, using the title: “Hate crimes against Muslims hit highest mark since 2011.” The Post story made no mention that Jews accounted for the vast majority of victims. Politico headlined its story: “FBI: Hate crimes against Muslims in U.S. jump 67 percent in 2015”. CBS News utilized an almost identical title. The Boston Globe, NBC News and several others followed suit with comparable titles.

Mainstream media outlets appeared very concerned with the rise of anti-Muslim violence (as they should be), but breezed completely over the most common victims of anti-religious hate crimes.

Until Donald Trump became president, much of the media didn’t seem to care that Jews were overwhelmingly the majority of victims of anti-religious hate crimes. Now, the media utilizes consistent widespread anti-Semitism as a tool to target Trump. (For more from the author of “The Media Ignores Anti-Semitism Unless It’s a Tool to Target President Trump” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Here’s a paradox for you. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack, the immediate response from government officials and the media is: “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Yet when there are breaking reports that Muslim or Arab Americans were allegedly victimized by bigots in some hate crime, the response is instant credulity, outrage and hand-wringing.

This doesn’t really even scratch the surface of the double standard. When there’s a terrorist incident, there’s deep skepticism at every stage of the unfolding story. At first we’re told there’s no evidence that the attack is terror-related. Then, when reports come in that a shooter shouted “Allahu akbar!” or has an Arabic name, we’re assured there’s no evidence that the shooter is tied to any international terror groups. Days go by with talking heads fretting about “self-radicalization,” “homegrown terror,” and “lone wolves.” This narrative lingers even as the killer’s Facebook posts declaring allegiance to ISIS emerge.

Now, truth be told, I think some of this skepticism is understandable. Often, the media and the pundit class on the left and right are too eager to win the race to be wrong first. It’s perfectly proper to not want to get ahead of the facts.

More annoying is the Obama administration’s studied practice of slow-walking any admission that the war on terror isn’t over, but at least it’s understandable. President Obama came into office wanting to end wars and convince Americans that terrorism isn’t such a big deal. It seems to be a sincere belief. The Atlantic reported that Obama frequently reminds his staff that slippery bathtubs kill more Americans than terrorism. It took Obama six years to admit that the shooting at Fort Hood was terrorism and not “workplace violence.”

Regardless, my point here is that I can understand why politicians and the media want to be skeptical about breaking news events and even why they try to frame those events in ways that fit a political agenda.

The best defense of that agenda isn’t the sorry effort to pad the legacy of our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. It’s the desire to err on the side of caution when it comes to stigmatizing law-abiding and patriotic Muslims with the stain of acts of terror in the name of their religion. The media doesn’t want to give credence to the idea that all Muslims are terrorists, not least because that attitude will only serve to radicalize more Muslims. As we are often told, ISIS wants peaceful Muslims in the West to feel victimized and unwelcome.

And that brings me back to the media’s instant credulity for stories of anti-Muslim bias. This eagerness to hype “anti-Muslim backlash” stories has been around for nearly 20 years, and it has always been thin gruel. According to the FBI, in every year since the 9/11 attacks, there have been more — a lot more — anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Muslim ones. Which have you heard about more: the anti-Jewish backlash or the anti-Muslim backlash?

Amazingly, the “experts fear an anti-Muslim backlash” stories keep popping up after every Islamic terror attack, despite the fact that the backlash never arrives. To be sure, there have been hateful and deplorable acts against Muslims. But evidence of a true national climate of intimidation and bigotry has always been lacking.

What has not been lacking is evidence that many activists want to convince Americans that such a climate exists. This effort has been old hat for the media-savvy spokesmen of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) for years. But since Donald Trump’s election, there has been an explosion of freelance anti-Muslim hate crime hoaxes. A Muslim girl fabricated an attack by three Trump supporters on a New York subway. A young man pulled a similar stunt on a Delta flight this week. False fraud claims by Asian and Hispanic students at various universities have popped up as well.

The media, still in the throes of anti-Trump panic, has been quick to credit these hoaxes and grudging in clearing the air when they’ve been debunked. It’s time the media applied at least the same level of skepticism that they reserve for real terror attacks to fake hate crimes. Why? First, because their job is to report the facts. Second, because if they’re really concerned about not alienating or radicalizing American Muslims, they shouldn’t hype the propaganda efforts of the idiots who are doing exactly that. (For more from the author of “Media Guilty of Double Standard on Terror Attacks” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.