Truth Matters:

Establishment Media Cover-Ups in 2016

OPERATION SPIKE

Top 10 establishment-media cover-ups of 2016

World Net Daily’s annual review presents news that wasn’t ‘fit to print’

At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top news stories of the previous 12 months.

WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.

WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.

Here, with the contribution of WND readers, are the 2016 picks:

1. The contents of the Podesta emails:

The hacking of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, certainly drew attention, with President Obama punishing Russia for the alleged act this week, without any hard evidence. Podesta, himself, declared the hacking of election-related emails the political equivalent of the 9/11 attack.

What was largely missing in establishment media coverage of the approximately 50,000 Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, however, was the content of the messages. The emails shed light, for example, on Clinton campaign collusion with the media, pay-to-play schemes involving the Clinton Foundation when Clinton was secretary of state, Clinton’s profiting from Wall Street bankers and the DNC’s rigging of it primary at the expense of Bernie Sanders.

2. The true Obama economy:

President Obama repeatedly has boasted that he pulled the U.S. economy from the brink of depression and into robust growth, and Politico declared in December that Trump will inherit an “Obama boom,” handing his successor “an economy that’s now the envy of the world.”

But voters apparently thought otherwise, particularly the working class in the rust belt who flipped their Democratic-leaning states to Donald Trump. And there are economists who share their skepticism of the “Obama recovery.”

3. The doubling of the national debt under Obama

Perhaps the biggest symbol of Obama’s economic legacy is the national debt.

Currently at $19.9 trillion, it is projected to hit $20 trillion by Inauguration Day, up from $10.6 trillion when Obama entered the White House in 2009.

It means Obama will have added to the debt as much as all previous 43 presidents combined.

4. Illegal aliens’ impact on national presidential popular vote:

Thanks to A.F. Branco at Legal Insurrection for his brilliant cartoons

Shortly after the election, as the media was making hay of Hillary Clinton’s margin of more than 2 million in the national popular vote, Donald Trump tweeted that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College tally “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” prompting a media uproar.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram insisted there “has been no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that would have had to taken place to give Clinton millions of illegitimate votes.”

But voter-integrity activists, who point out that 19 states did not require identification to vote Nov. 8, believe Trump may be right.

5. Obama’s stealth moves to force U.S. communities to receive Muslim immigrants

Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America can be seen in the large numbers of Somali and Syrian refugees that have been planted against the will of the people in small-to-mid-sized cities such as Bowling Green, Kentucky; Owensboro, Kentucky; and Erie, Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Minnesota and Ohio continue to be sent Somali refugees even though Minneapolis and Columbus have had terror recruitment problems within their Somali communities.

But Obama’s concentration of so many refugees in one place is a clear violation of statutes directing the Office of Refugee Resettlement to “insure that a refugee is not initially placed or resettled in an area highly impacted by the presence of refugees or comparable populations.”

Ann Corcoran, a leading refugee watchdog who authors the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, believes the Obama administration and the federal resettlement contractors are deliberately trying to turn red states blue by injecting them with refugees who are likely to vote for Democrats.

“Of course it would take a while with refugee numbers, but add in the illegals, et cetera, in those states and, yes, it is about turning the state,” Corcoran said. “Consider it the California model – it worked there!”

6. Huma Abedin’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood:

Hillary Clinton’s longtime top aide and confidante Huma Abedin was a central figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly as emails she sent and received while serving as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for operations at the State Department came under the FBI’s scrutiny, culminating in a bombshell announcement by FBI Director James Comey 11 days before the election. Comey announced that the bureau had reopened its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information after discovering 650,000 of Abedin’s State Department emails on a computer owned by her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly sexting a minor.

But almost entirely ignored during the campaign by establishment media or dismissed as irrelevant were Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia, including her position in her family’s institute, which was established by the Saudi government and supported by a prominent financial contributor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

7. The threat of ISIS and its Islamic roots

White House spokesman Josh Earnest downplayed the war against ISIS, saying “in some ways, this is actually just a war of narratives” against a “poisonous, empty bankrupt mythology.”

That attitude was summarized by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the title of a Senate hearing he held in June, “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism,” in which former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney testified that the administration “purged” more than 800 of his records related to the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. because they somehow were an offense to Muslims.

8. The establishment media’s ‘fake news’:

So far there’s been no solid evidence that Russian “fake news,” as the establishment media seem to believe, propelled Donald Trump to an astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton.
But in recent decades, and this year is no exception, the establishment media itself has been shown to be a purveyor of fake news, defined as the dissemination of false information from the government or a favored group.

Familiar memes are: the Benghazi 9/11 attack that killed four brave Americans was caused by a YouTube video, Michael Brown had his hands up and shouted “Don’t shoot” before Ferguson cop Darren Wilson shot him and man-caused global warming is settled science.

9. Anti-Trump hoax incidents

To fuel its narrative that the election of Donald Trump had brought about unprecedented expressions of hatred toward minorities, the media breathlessly reported “hate crimes” purportedly committed by Trump supporters.
Many of those reports, however, turned out to be hoaxes, while actual crimes committed by anti-Trump rioters were virtually ignored.

NBC News reported an openly bisexual Chicago student claimed she received anti-gay, pro-Trump notes and emails after the election such as “Back to hell.” Taylor Volk of North Park University said she was a victim of “a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden.” But later, a university investigation found Volk had fabricated the messages.

10. Democrats’ rigging of their own primary to make sure Bernie Sanders lost

As columnist Ron Hart put it: “Democrats and the legacy media got all twitchy after losing the election, saying the Russians rigged it. WikiLeaks released DNC emails showing how the DNC plotted to undermine Bernie Sanders in their primary. So to recap, if I understand what the left is saying here, Putin might have rigged our election by revealing how Democrats rigged their election.”
In one email, DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to communications director Luis Miranda about planting a narrative to the media that Sanders’ “campaign was a mess.”

In another email in early May, DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall brought up Sanders’ “Jewish heritage,” suggesting the DNC get someone in Kentucky and in West Virginia, which were holding upcoming primary elections, to ask if the candidate believes in God.

“He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” Marshall wrote.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – who was forced to resign because of the revelations – wrote in May that Sanders “isn’t going to be president” and “has no understanding of” the Democratic Party.
Read more at

http://www.wnd.com/2016/12/top-10-establishment-media-cover-ups-of-2016/