EMPLOYEE OF ABC NEWS DEMANDS MORE OF HER FELLOW DEMOCRATS WITH CHYRONS: Sunny Hostin Demands Media Do More to Drag Kamala Harris Over the Finish Line.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking.

At the barbecue joint off Route 75 in Dallas, Lisa pulls out her phone to show me the dozen or so online platforms that traffickers and pimps use to sell girls for sex. The platforms—which include apps like TikTok, OnlyFans, and Facebook—are chockablock with ads of women, usually wearing lingerie, their faces covered to prevent anyone guessing their age. The sheer number of ads is astonishing. “Each week, we track over 12,000 ads for women in Houston, 2,600 in San Antonio, 3,500 in Austin, and 14,000 in Dallas,” says Lisa.

I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.

“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. “It’s that easy.”

Martha Raddatz would say, wait until you get those numbers under five minutes before we declare it a crisis.

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY FROM KAMALA! Trump campaign rips into Kamala Harris over resurfaced clip of her wanting to ‘cancel’ Columbus Day.

Former President Donald Trump‘s campaign berated Vice President Kamala Harris for trying to cancel Columbus Day, which is recognized as a federal holiday on Monday.

Old video clips of Harris promising to get rid of Columbus Day resurfaced on the holiday Monday as social media users reacted her controversial proposal.

Harris endorsed the idea of an effort by the federal government to change Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ in response to a question from an activist in a New Hampshire town hall in 2019.

‘Sure, sure. Yeah,’ Harris replied. ‘And why it matters is to your very point, we have to remember history … we have to remember our history, uncomfortable, to your point about truths, though it may make us.’

Harris applauded the effort to address the ‘vestiges of all of that harm.’

‘Count me in on support,’ she concluded.

As Vice President, Kamala Harris recognized Indigenous People’s Day during a speech to the National Congress of American Indians 78th Annual Convention in October 2021.

She pointed to the full ‘truth’ behind the ‘explorers’ who came to America from Europe.

‘Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease,’ she said. ‘We must not shy away from this shameful past and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on native communities today.’

Harris has also pointedly issued statements on social media and from the White House recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but not Columbus Day.

The Trump campaign reacted to the clips by reminding voters that Harris was a ‘stereotypical leftist.’

“Stereotypical leftists” have a new reason to hate him even more: Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish. DNA tests suggest explorer hid true identity due to rampant anti-Semitism across Europe.

Related:

UPDATE: So much for blaming resurfaced clips and tweets; Harris (or at least whoever writes her tweets) is sticking to her guns, still referring to “Indigenous People’s Day” on Columbus Day 2024.

JOHN NOLTE: Famed ‘Plagiarism Hunter’ Busts Kamala Harris Book: ‘Copied Virtually an Entire Wikipedia Article,’ ‘Fabricated a Source Reference.’

Harris is already seen by much of the public as a shallow phony. These blatant acts of plagiarism fit perfectly within that narrative. Team Trump should see this report for what it is — a political gift they should exploit to the hilt.

Let me tell you something else… Look at how far Harris rose — attorney general of California, U.S. Senator, Vice President, and Democrat presidential nominee, without the corporate media discovering this. Think about that… Think about all the corporate media outlets out there that are supposed to be vetting candidates and competing for scoops… Think of the endless resources available to them: billions of dollars and tens of thousands of staffers… And yet, they either never bothered to vet Kamala’s book — or they did, discovered the plagiarism, and hid it from the public.

The media did zero vetting of Obama in 2008 (quite the opposite, of course), but he was running an actual change campaign against a by-then exhausted administration that had been in office for eight years, and whose veep chose not to run to succeed the president. But Obama (who had his own issues with plagiarism) had the rock star charisma for his composite character creation to easily get the job done in November. Kamala is having, by contrast, a much rougher go of it at the moment: The Kamala Harris plagiarism row is a disaster for her campaign.

SO THAT’S WHY JOE BIDEN TAPPED KAMALA AS VEEP: Christopher Rufo on “Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem. The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime.”

To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.

But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

No word yet if Neil Kinnock will be endorsing her, as he did Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, a well-known Republican is pouncing and/or seizing in response:

UPDATE: The New York Post called Hamilton after Rufo’s story broke, leading to this terse exchange:

“Oh gosh,” Harris’ ghostwriter told The Post over the phone shortly after the allegations were published.

“I haven’t seen anything,” she added. “I’m afraid I can’t talk to you right now, though, I’m in the middle of something. Let me go try to figure that out.”

I doubt the paper is waiting for a call back.

UPDATE (6:48 PM): I did the “pouncing and/or seizing” joke above about Vanz, but the New York Times actually does the meme for real about Rufo! Sad Trombone: The New York Times Is Not Handling the Kamala Harris Plagiarism News Well at All:

The Gray Lady’s then-ombudsman confirmed the paper’s leftist bias way back in 2004, but by employing the “conservative activist seizes” headline, it’s good to see the Times remind its readers of its ideology twenty years later. As well as reminding them that paper exists to protect Democratic Party candidates, not break actual news about them.

JIM TREACHER: Happy Anniversary to Hunter’s Laptop.

Four years ago today, my Twitter account was instantly suspended for posting the following picture:

That’s Hunter Biden. The photo came from the laptop he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, less than five miles from his father’s house.

Vladimir Putin didn’t take that snapshot. He didn’t plant the laptop. It belonged to Hunter, who then abandoned it and lost legal custody of it because he’s a drug addict.

And yet when I posted that photo in October 2020, just weeks before the election, my Twitter account was instantly locked down.

I don’t mean within minutes, either. The instant I clicked the button to post that, I was locked out of my account.

Here’s the warning I received:

I had been censored. Lil’ ol’ me!

So I removed the tweet, under duress, to restore access to my account.

As it turned out, I was far from the only one. Anybody who shared any part of that news story — and it is a news story — got instantly locked down by Twitter. You couldn’t even share the URL of the original NY Post story. A complete blackout.

The Democrats wanted Trump out of the White House, and they thought this story would interfere with that. So they locked it down.

Exit quote: “Hunter’s laptop. COVID-19. ‘Climate change.’ Letting boys beat up girls in sports. No matter the issue, some very powerful Democrats want you to shut up about it. You can vote however you want, but you can’t make me complicit.”

THERE’S A HEADLINE I WASN’T EXPECTING: Boom! Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Silences Angry Leftists Over Trump’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Campaign Ad.

THE ATLANTIC’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFREY GOLDBERG WARNS NEWSROOM DECAY IS HOW ‘DEMOCRACY DECOMPOSES:’

We work very hard to produce only highest-quality journalism. Sometimes, we don’t hit the mark, but not for lack of trying. Our operating theory is so simple. The only way to get people to pay for your product is to make a great product, something they can’t find elsewhere. To do this, we have to have the best journalists. Readers become our subscribers when they realize that they will find illuminating and delightful stories, written by journalists at the very top of their game, on a regular basis.

How worried are you about the decline we are seeing transpire in many legacy newsrooms? And what effect will that have on society?

It’s awful. To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible. This is the way democracy decomposes. We’re sleepwalking into an absolute disaster. Jefferson had it right almost 250 years ago when he said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Goldberg of all people to be advocating for a massive reduction in the size of government, but I’m happy to see him advocating for America to return to its libertarian roots. However, “newsroom decay” (a phrase written by CNN alum Oliver Darcy in his headline, not Goldberg) happens in a variety of ways, not just in shrinking the quantity of the manpower inside of the newsroom.

Another leading cause are weak editors who let their young uber-woke, and very emotionally brittle staffers wag the dog, and that’s something that Goldberg knows quite a bit about. Two years before the New York Times and other publications began their Marxist struggle sessions (leading to last week’s freakout at CBS News over Tony Dokoupil performing journalism), Goldberg hired and then almost immediately fired Kevin Williamson when his female employees dived for the fainting couches over the never-Trumper’s views on abortion. As Kurt Schlichter tweeted at the time:

And while the Atlantic appeared to have survived 2020 without a struggle session on par with it collective 2018 meltdown, that year saw the magazine infected with a massive case of Covid-driven paranoia (in addition to its already dangerous levels of TDS), as Christine Rosen wrote in Commentary two years ago: The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown.

The Atlantic launched the COVID Tracking Project to count the number of cases and deaths when they were not readily available, and published innumerable stories, articles, items, and memoirs on the subject. Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his COVID stories.

But with Trump out of the White House and pandemic fatigue becoming more fully entrenched among the public, subscription growth has slowed significantly. According to Byers, “even with last year’s substantial surge, the magazine had lost more than $20 million and was on track to lose another $10 million [in 2021].” The magazine laid off 68 employees in the spring of 2020, though they were mostly in the public-events area—understandable, given that there were no public events to be staged in a country in lockdown.

Twenty million is a drop in the bucket for Laurene Jobs, but nobody likes to lose that kind of money. Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire whose purchase of the New Republic was the original model for the Laurene Jobs play, found that magazine’s annual losses a quarter of that size intolerable and sold it off after only a couple of years.

Those numbers might help explain why the overwhelming experience of reading the Atlantic in 2021 and the first weeks of 2022 is like being a therapist whose severely anxious patient flops on the couch and delivers a monologue about the tortures of his daily life.

Or perhaps we should view the Atlantic community of editors, writers, and readers as a kind of daily group-therapy session. Consider that the “Most Popular” articles on the magazine’s website on a late-December day featured one potentially heartening story about COVID—“Omicron is the beginning of the end”—followed by several more that promised only horror: “How Long Does Omicron Take to Make you Sick?” “Is Omicron Milder?” A week earlier the magazine had warned, ominously, “America Is Not Ready for Omicron.”

And lest one think this tone infects only reporting on COVID, another popular recent piece promised to explain how “We’re Heading Toward a Very American Climate Tragedy.” An earlier one highlighted the looming menace of . . . rocks: “The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.” Even our cars are threatening: “Big Cars Are Killing Americans” was another headline of late. The print magazine strikes a similar tone: A 2021 cover story about foreign autocrats warned that “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”

Fortunately for Goldberg, he’ll know in about a month if his subscription numbers will see a significant upturn next year.

I’M DONALD TRUMP AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE:

Bill Clinton: Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if the border had been secured by Kamala Harris.

He said this while campaigning FOR her. Lmfaopic.twitter.com/T5I65qpstm

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 14, 2024

VDH: The Strange, Mythological Campaign of Kamala Harris.

Central to Harris’s metamorphoses has also been her somewhat massaged biography. She often omits that she is the daughter of two PhDs, a Stanford professor, and a cancer researcher at UC Berkeley. Harris never really lived long in Oakland as claimed but grew up in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in university towns like Berkeley, Palo Alto, and an elite district of Montreal.

Harris, in the past manner of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, does not limit her fluidity to her bio but extends her makeover to the trivial, such as altering cadences and accents in efforts to sound somewhat more authentic to particular black, Caribbean, or Hispanic audiences.

For the first time in her life, Harris also seeks to cement her supposedly conservative middle-class bona fides by reinventing her past and present tastes and experiences. She claims she once worked at McDonald’s, but oddly cannot cite which franchise she worked at and when.

Harris insisted she owns a Glock handgun without specifying when and where she purchased it, to whom it is registered, or which model. Much less does she remind listeners that, as California Attorney General, she made it nearly impossible to purchase many Glock models. The once noted wine connoisseur now populist Harris now, of course, drinks beer on television.

During the recent slippage in Harris support, the campaign has issued a number of near-comical “working-class” commercials. Their aim is to regain support from blue-collar males, especially poor white men without college degrees. But such ads aimed at these constituencies are laughable, with actors caricaturing how elites imagine working males talk and look like when voicing support for Harris.

At times, Harris oddly thinks the best way to win back the male vote is to ridicule it. In a style reminiscent of Hilary Clinton’s disastrous lambasting of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Barack Obama recently ventured out on her campaign trail to lecture supposedly naïve young black men not to be misled, fooled, or suffer from false consciousness into voting for a supposedly racist Trump rather than a progressive black female Kamala Harris.

Yet Obama, like Harris, is apparently completely unaware that wealthy coastal elites (the Obamas own three mansions in Hawaii, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard) convince few when they begin lecturing supposedly clueless working-class men, both black and white, on why they are being fooled into voting for Donald Trump.

All of those incongruities have led this week to “The Mid-October Democratic Presidential Campaign Panic Attack,” Jim Geraghty writes. “Again, does this mean Donald Trump is guaranteed to win? No. But seven swing states being neck-and-neck, three weeks before Election Day, is not where Democrats thought they would be. They’re sweating, and they have good reason to sweat.”

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: It’s the 4th anniversary of the biggest lie the Biden-Harris administration ever told. It’s only gotten worse.

Three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published its first article on the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop. The report featured an email in which one of Mr. Biden’s business partners mentioned a meeting with President Biden. President Biden had denied meeting with Hunter Biden’s business associates while on the campaign trail.

Photographs later proved that President Biden had met with one of Hunter Biden’s business partners. In fact, everything on his laptop was authentic—and the FBI, members of the Biden-Harris campaign team and Hunter Biden himself knew it all along. Instead of squarely addressing the content of the laptop and telling the American people the truth, the Biden-Harris campaign developed an elaborate scheme to mislead voters just three weeks before the presidential election by pretending the laptop was Russian disinformation.

The American people understand it is not uncommon for political campaigns to spin negative stories, but this went far beyond spin. It was a lie.

Before the New York Post had even published its reporting, the FBI began to pressure Twitter and Facebook to suppress the story. Facebook restricted posts that linked to the story to ensure fewer people saw the content. Twitter completely banned links to the report and shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account entirely. The Post’s account remained censored for 16 days.

Flashbacks:

● Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop Story Interfered With Election.

● The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

● Finally, return with us to the crazy week that the Post’s laptop story broke and this banger of an exchange:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Shot: The End of the Kamala Harris Media Honeymoon: Whose Fault Is It?

—Ward Clark, RedState, Saturday.

Chaser: Time magazine owner calls out Kamala Harris for turning down multiple interview requests.

The owner of Time magazine called out Vice President Kamala Harris for turning down multiple interview requests with the prominent publication as the campaign for the White House enters the homestretch.

Marc Benioff, who has owned Time since 2018, criticized the Democratic nominee on Sunday while pointing out that ex-President Donald Trump and President Biden — before he dropped out — both sat down for interviews during their campaigns.

“Despite multiple requests, TIME has not been granted an interview with Kamala Harris — unlike every other Presidential candidate,” tweeted Benioff, who is best known as the founder of Salesforce.com.

—David Propper, the New York Post, today.

If you’re a Democratic Party presidential candidate who can’t sit down for an interview with one of your most reliable house organs (to the point where Time magazine explicitly declared both Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020 as being the next FDR), you’ve got serious communication issues. Why is she so bad at this stuff?

UPDATE: Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier to Conduct Interview With Vice President Kamala Harris On Special Report This Wednesday, October 16th.

WHY ON EARTH IS THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS PRO-VENEZUELAN GANGS? J.D. Vance Destroys ABC News Anchor for Downplaying Immigrant Gang Violence.

Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?"

🔥 pic.twitter.com/VY4Ai35YJk

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 13, 2024

I can’t imagine George’s former(?) boss agreeing with this policy:

As we’ve noted before, Bill’s clip from 1995, and other past clips from Democrat grandees such as Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama with similar messages should be running in Trump adds with an “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message” tag tacked on.

UPDATE:

More: The guild protects its own:

“CAN I GET ME A HUNTING LICENSE HERE?” THE NEXT GENERATION: Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote.

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election.

“Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator.

Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.” They will have a national organizing call next week, but the campaign has not indicated which prominent hunters and anglers will be a part of the coalition.

Some hunters and anglers are already reacting negatively to the campaign’s plan, pointing out that Harris and Walz have supported gun control measures and that the Biden-Harris administration has made life more difficult for hunters and anglers.

Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum and host of the District of Conservation podcast, quipped that “No $40 camo hat will convince most sportsmen and women that Harris-Walz represents them.”

But then, maybe it’s not intended to:

In any case, Kamala’s outreach to men may have just been derailed by Gwen Walz’s schoolmarm hectoring to Kamala’s base:

Gwen Walz has an assignment for you 👩‍🏫 pic.twitter.com/tTBZPJxsjs

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 13, 2024

Exit quote: “What the heck? Too much of the fumes from those burning tires during the riots? Maybe she should have closed the windows.”

DEVELOPING: Trump targeted in THIRD ‘assassination attempt’ as gunman arrested outside Coachella rally.

SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING: Tensions rise between Harris and Biden teams as election nears.

The relationship between Kamala Harris‘ team and Joe Biden‘s White House has been increasingly fraught in the final weeks before Election Day, 10 people familiar with the situation tell Axios.

Why it matters: Biden’s team wants Harris to win the election, but many senior Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid and are still adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.

• “They’re too much in their feelings,” one close Harris ally said of the president’s team — a sentiment shared even by some White House aides.

Driving the news: Some on the Harris team say that top White House aides aren’t sufficiently coordinating Biden’s messaging and schedule to align with what’s best for the vice president’s campaign.

• Biden gave an impromptu press conference in the White House briefing room Friday just as Harris was about to do an event in Michigan, ensuring that her event would get less TV coverage than it otherwise would have.

• Earlier in the week, Harris criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for not taking her call about the recent hurricanes, only for Biden to praise DeSantis soon after for being “gracious” and “cooperative.” (A person familiar with the situation told Axios that Biden hadn’t been briefed on Harris’ comments.)

• Biden has been eager to boast about a robust jobs report, helping to end the strike by the longshoremen’s union and other perceived victories recently. Harris has been trying to focus on voters’ pocketbook concerns, including inflation.

• One person involved with Harris’ campaign told Axios: “The White House is lacking someone in the room thinking first and foremost about how things would affect the campaign.”

Dr. Jill, channeling Edith Wilson, smiles.

DELETE THIS MESSAGE: Review: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism. An unobservant or gullible person could read The Message and have no idea that the Israeli soldiers’ vigilance is a consequence of Palestinians’ notable tendency to lunge at Jews with knives, self-detonate in crowded areas, and otherwise maim and murder innocents. Coates doesn’t mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or any other act of Palestinian terrorism. Nor does he wonder why, although more than two million Arabs are citizens of Israel, few if any Jews are citizens of Arab countries.

With The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a clownish, postmodern Walter Duranty. Duranty, recall, was the prize-winning Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times who deliberately misled the American public about Soviet crimes. Only Coates isn’t misleading anybody. And Duranty, for all his sins, could write.

Basil Fawlty smiles — finally someone took his advice: “Just don’t mention the war.”

DON’T GET COCKY: Social media goes into meltdown as Saturday Night Live destroys Kamala Harris: ‘It’s over. The Democrats have lost SNL.’

UNEXPECTEDLY: America’s New Millionaire Class: Plumbers and HVAC Entrepreneurs. Private equity is pouring money into skilled-trade small businesses; ‘Next thing you know, you’re running an empire.’

Aaron Rice has two logos tattooed on his left leg: one from the plumbing business he co-founded more than a decade ago, and another from the private-equity-backed company that recently bought it.

Few businesses are as vital to their customers as local plumbing, heating or air-conditioning companies—especially in places like Tucson, Ariz., where Rice works and residents sweltered in 100-degree heat most days this summer.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD HAS A QUESTION (Video):

Are YOU man enough to vote for Kamala Harris? pic.twitter.com/qCyWGhcEH0

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 12, 2024

ONE MAN’S TERRORIST IS ANOTHER MAN’S FREEDOM FIGHTER, SLIGHT RETURN: CBS News Told Staffers Not To Refer to Hamas as ‘Terrorists.’

CBS News executives cautioned their journalists against referring to Hamas members as “terrorists” in a memo issued the day after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, according to the Free Press. It’s the latest embarrassment for the news organization, which is in turmoil amid a daily drip of disclosures about institutionalized anti-Israel bias as well as anti-Trump bias.

Thursday night, the Free Press published an excerpt of an email sent to reporters on October 8, 2023, with the subject, “Standards guidance: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

“Reporting on this weekend’s violence in Israel and Gaza requires a closer look at the language we use when describing events,” the email stated. “For instance, the U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization; however, suggesting an individual is a ‘terrorist’ may be inaccurate depending on the facts.”

The email also noted there are disagreements over whether the attack was “justified” in response to “Israeli occupation of their lands.” The message then said there are “others” who “believe this to be an unprovoked attack on Israel and, as such, Israel has every right to defend itself.”

A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed the guidance to the Sun. They said the goal of the guidance is to avoid generalizations about people in Gaza, such as labeling a doctor or nurse with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry a terrorist without information they engaged in terrorism.

However, even the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations notes Hamas has “put in place authoritarian institutions” that leave little room for flexibility or the ability to operate independently. Those who step out of line can face harsh punishments.

Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces have released video footage as evidence that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure such as hospitals as “command and control” centers and even possibly to hold hostages from the October 7 attack.

CBS News did not comment on the guidance.

As T. Becket Adams of NRO adds: CBS Makes a Mockery of ‘Standards.’

As incomprehensible as CBS’s approach to these back-to-back issues may be, one should not be surprised. This is hardly the first time the network has played fast and loose with its own unique and, apparently, proprietary set of journalism standards.

Recall that Gayle King, a news anchor, ruffled no feathers on May 26, 2020, when she declared following the death of George Floyd, “I am speechless. I am really, really speechless about what we’re seeing on television this morning. It feels to me like open season . . . and that sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for black men.”

This pronouncement cleared the network’s bar for “impartiality”? Or did management reason that King was exempted from the usual standards regarding personal commentary because she is black, and the news upon which she was commenting involved a black man? If so, does this courtesy not extend to Dokoupil, who, as a Jew, might have a valuable perspective on matters affecting the life and death of Jews, as King presumably did for blacks?

And what are we to make of King’s CBS Mornings interview of the Israeli father of a child taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, in which she said, “Now this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that? You know, you have innocent children and Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying. And no one seems to be able to say, ‘Enough, stop that.’” To this, Tom Hand replied, in a tone of anguished exasperation, that he didn’t care about politics, he just wanted his Emily back. CBS’s Standards and Practices and Race and Culture units had nothing to say about this interaction? No all-hands reprimand for King’s “tone”?

The Dokoupil saga will likely get dumber before it eventually blows over. But let’s not lose sight of the big question underlying it. CBS executives claim Dokoupil failed to meet their exacting standards of journalistic excellence. They say this even though his colleagues have grilled guests with objectively inappropriate lines of questions, with zero internal pushback. These executives say this even as 60 Minutes openly violates the network’s interview production and editing standards, with zero explanation or defense provided.

All of this goes back to the underlying question: What standards?

It’s the Calvinball Broadcasting System. But is the clock ticking on its current woke insanity? The joke is on woke CBS News execs as new execs considering ‘blowing the place up.’

What is less public is how all this weirdness is impacting CBS’s future as an ongoing business, and most important, its pending sale to Skydance, an independent studio run by movie producer David Ellison of “Top Gun: Maverick” fame.

David’s dad, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, provides much of the money behind the deal and from what I gather, he’s not too happy about his latest acquisition.

If you don’t know Larry, here’s a primer: He’s one of the world’s richest men, and one of the most pro-Israel executives in corporate America — he’s buds with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Let’s just say the people at Skydance and the Ellisons read the newspapers (particularly The Post, which I know for a fact).

They are powerless to do anything about what’s happening at CBS for now; the $28 billion deal to buy the network’s parent Paramount from the controlling Redstone family doesn’t close until sometime in the spring.

But they won’t be powerless for much longer. As one person who knows all the players at CBS’s new owners told me: “They’re thinking about blowing the place up.”

What exactly “blowing the place up” means, no one knows for sure. Will it result in the defenestration of CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon and news-gathering chief Adrienne Roark, both of whom presided over the in-house thrashing of Dokoupil?

Hopefully Ellison won’t be as hands off in shaping CBS News as Jeff Bezos has been while the Washington Post spiraled out of control.

(Classical reference in headline.)

TO BE FAIR, SHE’S ALWAYS BEEN PRO-BUSSING: The Univison Town Hall Imploding: They Flew in Audience Members.

[Michael Tracey] investigated Univision’s “town hall” and found half of the audience was flown in at the network’s expense, while the other half was brought in by a rent-an-audience company called FansOnQ.

It turns out, some “undecided” voters admitted to being Kamala Harris supporters.

“I already knew I was going to go for Kamala before the event, and now that just kind of solidified it… part of the reason I wanted to go was just fully support her,” one respondent said.

Everything about the Harris campaign is *FAKE.*

Worse than that, the U.S. and international media are helping her to fake it. This is Mexican collusion to commit election interference.

Tracey adds:

Tracey tried to interview some of the attendees:

However, a corporate dictate apparently came down prohibiting this. “We won’t be making them available,” Anna Negron, Director of Corporate Communications at TelevisaUnivision, told me when I asked if there would be an opportunity to interview said audience members. She would not elaborate on the reason for this strange secrecy. Reporter Mark Kellner of the New York Post asked Negron the same question, and was similarly dismissed.

“Gee, I wonder why,” Townhall’s Matt Vespa writes, adding, “We made fun of the fact that a teleprompter was in view during this event, which wouldn’t shock us since the vice president is a disaster without a script. Supposedly, that’s been debunked; she wasn’t using such a device for this event, but this revelation is frankly much worse.”

HEY, CONSIDERING HOW THE WOKE LEFT BEATS HIM UP EVERY YEAR AT THIS TIME, CAN YOU BLAME HIM? Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish. DNA tests suggest explorer hid true identity due to rampant anti-Semitism across Europe.

Finally, the long-awaited Tucker Carlson interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates has a topic to explore!

UPDATE: Heh, indeed:

North Jersey residents might want to give the Gualtieri Crew a particularly wide berth right now:

https://t.co/McqJCOiSkc pic.twitter.com/bAGNKN4ZTw

— Dean Clark (@earldean71) October 13, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: “Can I get me a hunting license here?”

—John Kerry, October 2004.

The New Hotness?

The really good hunters are able to stalk and strangle pheasants. https://t.co/la5ueTNjz6

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 12, 2024

C’mon — it’s 2024; Walz bags pheasants by aiming mental death rays at them, Sheldon Cooper-style:

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Obama Is Blaming Black Men for the Democratic Party’s Failures.

In both 2008 and 2012, I was proud to be an Ohio delegate for President Barack Obama. So I was shocked to hear what former President Obama had to say while speaking to Black men during a surprise visit to Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign field office in Pittsburgh.

His words made my jaw hit the floor. In fact, they made my blood boil.

President Obama had some choice words for the enthusiasm gap for Vice President Harris specifically when it comes to Black men. “My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” President Obama said, and then went on to lecture Black men about their lack of support for Harris. “Part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

I was infuriated to hear these remarks. No other group of voters is talked to like this, as if they are children. But it’s not just the paternalistic tone that had me enraged. It’s the underlying message in his words—that Black men are misogynistic and can’t bring themselves to vote for a woman.

This vilification of our men is out of line. For starters, it’s false. Black men are socialized in the same patriarchal society that every other American man is socialized in, yet when Secretary Hillary Clinton ran for President in 2016, 81 percent of Black men voted for her, while only 32 percent of white men did the same.

As for Black men allegedly being so reticent to vote for Vice President Harris, her lowest numbers are with Black men under 50 years old—72 percent of whom support Harris.

If white men supported Harris at 72 percent, they’d be held up as an example of how men can support women. So why are Democratic Party leaders like former President Obama vilifying Black men?

It’s simple: The Democratic Party is setting Black men up to take the fall in case Vice President Harris fails to defeat former President Trump in November. It’s that simple.

Evergreen: