Melania raking in millions from lies written about her in British papers

rolltide · Jan 27, 2019

just a year removed from The Daily Mail paying her $2.9M + legal costs now Britain's The Telegraph has to back up the Brink's truck for essentially creating a make-believe account of Melania's pre-Trump life

surprised Mowstradamus didn't copy and paste the Jan 19 article as proof that Melania had a fledgling modeling career before meeting The Donald.....

UK’s Telegraph to Pay ‘Substantial Damages’ to Melania Trump Over ‘False Statements’ in Recent Story

“We apologise unreservedly to The First Lady and her family for any embarrassment caused by our publication of these allegations,” newspaper writes

The UK newspaper The Telegraph has apologized for a Jan. 19 magazine cover story about Melania Trump that they now say contains “false statements which we accept should not have been published,” further agreeing to pay the first lady “substantial damages” and her legal costs.

“We apologise unreservedly to The First Lady and her family for any embarrassment caused by our publication of these allegations,” the newspaper published Saturday. “As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs. Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs.”

The Telegraph retracted several claims about Trump’s career as a model before and after meeting Donald Trump, including that he helped advance her modeling career. The article also retracted a characterization of her father as “a fearsome presence.”

A spokeswoman for the First Lady said she often encountered "opportunists out to advance themselves by disparaging her name and image. She will not sit by as people and media outlets make up lies and false assertions in a race for ratings or to sell tabloid headlines." @)

busterhyman · Jan 27, 2019

oh well...what's that saying...oh yea...get woke go broke

theDonger · Jan 27, 2019

The right thing to do. Good on her for clearing the air and getting compensated -- hopefully this discourages future incidents.

tatehill2000 · Jan 28, 2019

theDonger said:
The right thing to do. Good on her for clearing the air and getting compensated -- hopefully this discourages future incidents.

Sadly.. it wont...
They will pepper all stories with.. "if its true"... then go into lie

rolltide · Jan 28, 2019

FOUR fake-news scandals last week. Looking forward to what's to come in this final week of January :notme:

So which writer got so much wrong, and so maliciously wrong?

The article, written by Nina Burleigh, who works for Newsweek as national politics correspondent, was an excerpt of her upcoming book Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women.

Burleigh is of the media's establishment Left, actually teaching her brand of "journalism":

A contributing editor at Salon.com and Elle magazine, her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Time magazine, among others. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism.

And she refuses to admit to her many errors, despite the Telegraphpulling her piece and paying damages:

When reached for comment by The Daily Beast, Burleigh noted, "...The book has been out since October, and excerpted widely in various U.S. publications without a peep of objection. I stand by my reporting."

"Reporting" seems a very loose term. Burleigh's problem here seems to be that Britain has tougher libel laws than the US, where the media is much freer to publish falsehoods.

Britain's Daily Mail should already have served as a warning. From 2017:

The UK's Daily Mail newspaper has agreed to pay damages and costs to the first lady of the United States over an article about her modelling career. The newspaper had reported allegations that Melania Trump once worked as an escort, but later retracted the claims.

But the fake-news media has never had such a bad week as the one that ended with this latest smear of Donald Trump's wife.

Burleigh's malicious hatchet job is the third big "fake news" scandal in just one week from a media that's letting its insane hatred of Trump utterly destroy its credibility.

Consider. First Buzzfeed published a false claim that Donald Trump had ordered his lawyer to lie to Congress, according to evidence gathered by special prosecutor Robert Mueller. Major news organisations such as CNN and MSNBC ran had with this report, claiming it could lead to Trump's impeachment. Yet within hours the story was denounced as "inaccurate" by Mueller's own office.

Then many media outlets falsely accused white Catholic schoolboys wearing Trump's Make America Great Again caps of threatening and mocking an American Indian activist, triggering such hatred that the boys were publicly named and subjected to death threats. In fact, video confirmed the boys were innocent and the true victims - they'd been abused and threatened by black activists, and the American Indian man had then marched up to them and banged a drum in their faces.

And then came this smear of Melania Trump. What a week of shame for the media.

That makes four fake-news scandals in just one week for a media driven mad with hatred of Donald Trump.

rolltide · Jan 28, 2019

The Cure For Media Malpractice

There has been much wailing and rending of garments over the weekend about the layoffs of some writers, editors, and other staff at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, AOL, and Gannett. Naturally, the affected employees are upset and inclined to blame malign forces beyond their control. According to Gallup, the public now has less confidence in the news media than in banks, big business, organized religion, the medical system, the military, public schools, the presidency, the police, etc. This is true for all news sources, including television, newspapers, and the internet.

The erosion became noticeable during the Clinton era and it has continued unabated until the present. In 1993, for example, 46 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news. By 2018 that figure had declined to 20 percent. During the same period of time, public trust in newspapers dropped to 23 percent. Internet news has never enjoyed high levels of public confidence, yet even its credibility has declined to 16 percent.

This is why they studiously ignored Hillary’s Clinton’s denunciation of more than 30 million voters as “deplorables,” yet labeled Trump a bigot when he called felons entering the country from Mexico “criminals.” It’s why they run “news” stories, like the BuzzFeed hoax, whose basic fact claims weren’t verified. It’s why they desperately sought a way to continue running the Covington Catholic story even after multiple videos demonstrated that there was no rational way to maintain their transparently false narrative and fraudulent depiction of the “victim.”

Now imagine for a moment if either of these outlets had published similarly sleazy and fictitious tales about Michelle Obama. There would have been unbridled hysteria in the international media, accusations of racism against both publications by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and the rest of the usual suspects. However, because Mrs. Trump is married to a Republican President, any slander is acceptable. A few articles appeared about the lawsuits before they were settled, but “reporters” with the New York Times and other “news” publications were mostly interested in slut shaming.

So, what do we do with creatures like this? The First Amendment allows them to say and write absurd and malicious things. In those cases, the market will handle much of the problem, as it did when ESPN began injecting gratuitous political commentary into their programs and enough customers stopped watching to create financial problems. BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, AOL, and Gannett have also responded to market forces and will soon banish a lot of “reporters” and “editors” to outer darkness by the end of January. These journalists could recover by reporting facts rather than propitiating the tribal gods.

But their tribal gods, Alinsky and Marx, are powerful. Their high priests, Bezos, Sulzberger, and Soon-Shiong, sacrifice the truth every day at the altars of the Washington Post, New York Times, and L.A. Times to evoke the chimeras you see on the “news.” And their acolytes, Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin control much of what you see on the internet, whether it purports to be news or entertainment. None of these people are impervious to market forces, but this is a very large market. The cure is to cut them off