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Project Veritas wins lawsuit against New York Times
A judge has directed the New York Times to return internal documents belonging to Project Veritas that were cited by the paper in an article last month. The report had sparked allegations that the FBI was behind the memos’ leak.
© Reuters / Shannon Stapleton
In his ruling on Friday, Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court in New York state ordered the New York Times to give Project Veritas back any physical copies of legal memos prepared by the media watchdog group’s attorneys and to erase all electronic copies.
The judge also upheld his temporary order issued last month against further publication of details from the memos. He said that the documents did not constitute a matter of public concern, adding that they fell under the group’s expectations of privacy that outweighed concerns about press freedoms.
“Steadfast fidelity to, and vigilance in protecting First Amendment freedoms cannot be permitted to abrogate the fundamental protections of attorney-client privilege or the basic right to privacy,” Wood ruled.
Project Veritas had raised objections to a November 11 New York Times article that purportedly revealed how the group held discussions with its lawyers to “gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.
The article’s timing prompted outrage and suspicions that an FBI source might have leaked the newspaper confidential data obtained during recent raids.
It came out in less than a week after an FBI raid of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s home – as part of an investigation into the group’s acquisition of a diary supposedly belonging to Ashley Biden, the US president’s daughter.
In a statement, Libby Locke, a lawyer for Project Veritas, said that the ruling affirmed the view that the New York Time’s behavior had been “irregular.”
The New York Times has long forgotten the meaning of the journalism it claims to espouse, and has instead become a vehicle for the prosecution of a partisan political agenda.
The decision came as part of a defamation lawsuit Project Veritas filed against the New York Times in 2020 when the paper published an article accusing the group of engaging in “deceptive” journalistic practices. The judge said that while these practices may be of public interest, legal communications were not.
Meanwhile, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said the paper would appeal the ruling – claiming that it was without “apparent precedent” and maintained that the documents were “obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”
BBC accused of ‘deep-seated’ biases against Jews
Jewish leaders are demanding an apology over the broadcaster’s coverage
of anti-Semitic abuse
The BBC has been accused of making a “colossal error” in its report on a November attack against Jewish teenagers on a bus in London and is being called on to apologize.
The public broadcaster was one of many outlets covering the November 29 Oxford Street attack against a group of Jewish teens who were sitting in a bus when a group of men started spitting at them from outside. The group made Nazi salutes and hurled threatening abuse at the teenagers.
A BBC London correspondent, while describing the attack, mentioned that “some racial slurs about Muslim people” could be heard from inside the bus, saying it wasn’t clear if that had played a role in the incident.
According to an independent report commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, however, the anti-Muslim “slur” the BBC journalist was referring to, was actually a call for help in Hebrew by a Jewish man in the bus, translated as “Call someone, it’s urgent.”
A separate forensic analysis of the footage and forensic linguistic analysis ordered by the organization also confirmed that there was no slur, the organization said in a press release published on Thursday.
The results prompted the Board to make an official complaint to the BBC, calling the report an example of “deeply irresponsible journalism.” The organization’s president, Marie van der Zyl, called the BBC’s recollection of events a “colossal error” that it should publicly apologize for “at the very least.”
Van der Zyl questioned the BBC’s impartiality and said the story raised “serious questions about deep-seated biases within the BBC towards Israelis, and towards Jews in general.”
She said this and other “ongoing concerns” would be raised with the corporation’s Director-General Tim Davie in the new year.
The BBC, however, said it is standing by its report of the incident.
“There was a brief reference to a slur, captured in a video recording, that appeared to come from the bus,” a BBC spokesman said, as quoted by British media. He said the reference was included “so the fullest account of the incident was reported.”
Campaign Against Antisemitism also raised concerns over the report, writing to the BBC to “demand explanations” over what it called the “outrageous” coverage of the incident. The group said police investigating the attack “have found no evidence” of the supposed slur from the victims.
The controversy comes after the BBC was ranked third on the infamous Global Anti-Semitism Top Ten list by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the US — after Iran and armed Palestinian group Hamas.
Top reporter explains quitting the ‘woke’ national broadcasting corporation
“To work at the CBC is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon
journalistic integrity,” Tara Henley wrote
August 9, 2021 © Getty Images / Artur Widak
Journalist and author Tara Henley penned a scathing resignation letter to the Canadian state-funded CBC, accusing it of peddling social justice dogma, shutting down debate, and racially profiling guests in the name of equity.
Henley, whose work has also appeared in multiple US and UK outlets, resigned from the news network this week after nearly a decade. In a resignation letter of sorts published on her new Substack blog and by the conservative-leaning National Post, she said that in the years since she started at the CBC, it “went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.”
Henley, who describes herself as left-wing, claimed that the CBC’s management have wholly embraced “a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States,” forbidding any questioning of “woke” orthodoxy.
This agenda extends to selecting which guests appear on the CBC’s shows, Henley claimed. According to her letter, reporters booking guests have to fill out “racial profile forms” to ensure they’re booking “more people of some races and less of others.”
In selecting which topics to cover, Henley said CBC management have no interest in hosting genuine debate on “sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures,” instead prioritizing reporting on “microaggressions” and “ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.”
Henley said she has for months been receiving complaints from readers and viewers about the editorial direction of the network.
“People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported,” she wrote. “Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as ‘brainstorm’ and ‘lame.’”
CBC is Canada's national broadcaster and is almost completely funded by taxpayers. The Liberal government is much more generous to the CBC than previous Conservative governments. In 2015, the then CBC News frontman, Peter Mansbridge, was so happy when the results of the federal election started coming in showing a Liberal sweep of the Maritime Provinces, that he was literally spitting.
Both examples are real, with the CBC publishing multiple articles and videos this year on the lack of terms for “non-binary” in the Filipino Tagalog language, and describing the terms ‘brainstorm’ and ‘lame,’ as well as ‘blacklist’ and ‘savage,’ as “Words and phrases you may want to think twice about using.”
Henley’s gripes with the CBC aren’t unique, and she is far from the first to lambaste the “woke” mainstream media in recent years. However, she joins a growing number of mainstream journalists leaving the outlets that made them famous and pursuing editorial freedom on platforms like Substack. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald have migrated to Substack in the last year or so, with both accusing their former employers of ideological censorship, and even Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias – an avowed liberal – soon followed suit.
However, another former CBC reporter took to Twitter on Monday to argue the exact opposite to Henley. Ahmar Khan, who left the network in December 2020 after a dispute in which he called ice hockey pundit Don Cherry “xenophobic,” claimed that CBC management “have no idea what poor people, what black people really go through,” complaining that they rejected a race-focused story he pitched them. Referring to Henley’s move to Substack, Khan tweeted that “writing (badly) and shouting about wokeness is the new grift.”
And, yet, Khan is exactly the type of "journalist" Henley is complaining about. Someone who thinks the news media is there for them to use to alter society to their standards. There are programs where such things can be addressed, and should be addressed, but they should be identified as such, not as the nightly news.
Rand Paul quits YouTube over ‘despicable’ censorship
Citing the platform’s rampant censorship practices, the lawmaker said
he was leaving YouTube as part of an ‘exodus’ from Big Tech
July 20, 2021. © Getty Images / Stefani Reynolds
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has announced that he will no longer be posting content on YouTube, branding the Google-owned platform as the “worst censors” among a host of “Big Tech gatekeepers” that “silenced” opposing views.
Penning his thoughts in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner on Monday, Paul noted that the move would be part of a bigger “exodus” from the “new town square” of “Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram” over rampant censorship and an “almost religious adherence to the edicts of government bureaucrats.”
i.e. Deep State!
“Just because private censorship of speech is allowable under the law, that doesn’t make that censorship any less despicable or illiberal,” Paul wrote, adding that he would be posting video content on rumble.com, an alternative platform that has gained popularity with creators dissatisfied with Big Tech companies’ misinformation policies.
Last year, the outspoken lawmaker received two strikes on his YouTube channel, leading to temporary account suspensions in August and September, for what the platform alleged were violations of its policy regarding Covid-19 misinformation. But Paul countered that the company had “the gall to delete constitutionally protected speech” by taking down his videos challenging prevailing narratives.
It is indeed ironic that the censors likely think of themselves as progressive but their actions are more suggestive of the diktats of the Medieval church.
“In the US in 2021, you are being told there are ideas or opinions that are too ‘dangerous’ for you to see,” Paul said, taking aim at “loud voices” in Congress “on the Left and the Right” who say they want to “break up or regulate Big Tech” without stepping up and doing something about it.
While describing the departure as his “New Year’s resolution,” Paul said he may still post videos on YouTube in order to “criticize them” or promote the competition. He encouraged “other liberty lovers” to follow suit and take their business elsewhere.
“About half of the public leans right,” he noted, adding that if, instead of “conforming to [Big Tech’s] approved opinions,” they “all took our messaging to outlets of free exchange, we could cripple Big Tech in a heartbeat.”
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