The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.
Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:
#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.
#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.
#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.
Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.
Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.
Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.
An NBC poll released yesterday found that Americans who consume more traditional forms of media tend to favor President Biden, while those who don’t follow any political news tend to be more favorable to Donald Trump and Republicans. It’s hilarious that NBC and the sources I’ve seen reporting on the poll see it only as damning to opponents of the Biden administration—you know: ignorant deplorables. But of course the polls results cut both ways: anyone foolish and lazy enough to only follow mainstream media news sources gets the kind of propaganda, deception and news manipulation illustrated by today’s morning “top stories” array on Memeorandum.
CNN, which is trying lately, sort of, to be a less obvious mouthpiece for Democrats, at least has the Columbia story—several of them, in fact—placed prominently on its website. Te home page also promotes opinion pieces like “Even if Trump can’t stay awake this week, the jury will have reason to,” and “What conservatives don’t get about the protests roiling college campuses.” Summary of that one: what they “don’t get” is that the rioting and anti-Semitic intimidation of Jewish students doesn’t mean elite progressive colleges aren’t wonderful. (The author went to Yale.)
Citizen Free Press is, of course, a far right news aggregator and proud of it. Its top links:
INTIFADA flag hangs outside Hamilton Hall.
Employees held hostage last night. Columbia student newspaper confirms.
NYPD officers chose not to enter campus last night.
Terrorists celebrate victory while Columbia president sleeps.
Dozens of Columbia students just became felons.
Columbia president is probably asleep. Where are campus police officers. Where is the nypd.
At least CFP doesn’t hold itself out as unbiased, like Memeorandum. At least it isn’t burying news that is inconvenient to the party in power.
The same dichotomy was also on display on the various news networks. While Fox News concentrated on the campus anti-Israel protests and encampments almost exclusively—Fox is concluding, correctly, that this is bad for Biden and Democrats—MSNBC avoided the story as much as possible. CNN even brought out an analyst to tell us that nobody cares about the anti-Israel protests, that it’s no big deal, that it only matters to 3% of the electorate.
So why cover it, then? It’s a “nothingburger”! Memeorandum clearly agrees.
Ethics Alarms 
Yes, it reminds me of my college days. So many protests, so many clueless protesters. What this all tells me is that most college majors really do not require enough work. If they were actually teaching students something, they wouldn’t have time to do this, especially this close to finals.
I’d be willing to bet you that these students don’t include too many science, engineering, or economics/business majors. Most of those folks have too much work to do to get involved in this nonsense and do not care about a conflict half a world away. But I’m betting you’ll find a lot of students whose majors end with “studies.” With the exception of religious studies, which is actually an expansion from a department of theology, these majors are generally worthless and just amount to four years’ worth of ginning up outrage at the perceived injustice or some perceived injustice in the world. They are of no practical value and attract mostly lazy students who are only interested in getting stoned, screwing, and destroying things while feeling righteous about it. A bunch of these students are probably mad they didn’t get to ride the BLM wave in 2020 because they were too young and now they see their chance.
The thing is, now the media is in a very tough spot. It was ok to side with the protesters in 2020 because the more things escalated, the worse Trump looked. Now the more things escalate, the worse their guy looks, and he already looks clueless and out of touch. However, if the media side with the administration, they just confirm what we already know: that how they report and what they report depends on who looks good or bad by it. Trust in the media has already hit rock bottom, they don’t need to start drilling into the rock.
Democrat local government is also in a tough spot. A lot of them looked the other way on the BLM stuff because these were their constituents out in the street, and the people being targeted were either the other side or were just going to have to take one for the team. Now their constituents are targeting their other constituents (about seven in every ten Jews vote Democratic), and that’s quite another matter. Lose either the Muslim or the Jewish vote in a lot of places and you are out of luck, but who to side with?
Biden also faces the fact that he could lose one or the other vote. I am guessing he is banking that American Jews will put loyalty to party and hatred of Trump over everything else and not abandon him just because of some ignorant kids talking smack and roughing a few of them up, while he does just enough to appease the Muslims in Minnesota and Michigan to keep those states in his column, because if he loses either, he is sunk.
“I am guessing he is banking that American Jews will put loyalty to party and hatred of Trump over everything else and not abandon him…”
That is my thinking, too. Many American Jews are secular and are not entirely supportive of Israel. For all we know, that voting bloc will conform just like many black voters do.
Trump was criticized for saying that no “real” Jews should support Biden. That made more sense than Biden saying that if you voted Republican you weren’t black. I will not be surprised if this is a tipping point for reflex Jewish support for the Democratic Party. It should be.
It should, but it’s been my experience that more often than not these hopes fail to materialize. Party inertia is tough.
I think most American Jews are liberals first and just kind-sorta Jews. Being a Democrat has replaced being of any particular religious faith. I think they’d just as soon Israel sort of just disappeared, as they wish those really conservative Jews in Brooklyn would just sort of, you know, cool it. And get decent haircuts.
A local account of news media withholding vital information here in Alabama. (NOT HAMAS Related). It seem that our super majority Republican government has pushed through the house a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to attend colleges at in state tuition rates. An amendment to the bill would provide free college education for the same illegal immigrants. I call this the Alabama version of Obama’s DREAMER program.
This is happening in … Alabama??? And I thought Arizona had gone down the tubes. Sheesh. What’s going on?
I’m sorry, Jack, but if you trust Memeorandum, I question the depth of your understanding of the site. Look at their sources (i.e. check Memeorandum River), and also look at how often rando left-wing sites like Popular Information (run by ThinkProgress founder Judd Legum) and The Lever, which I kid you not has this in their “About” page:
The Lever is a nonpartisan, reader-supported investigative news outlet that holds accountable the people and corporations manipulating the levers of power. The organization was founded in 2020 by David Sirota, an award-winning journalist and Oscar-nominated writer who served as the presidential campaign speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. [my emphasis]
Text searching Memorandum River for right-wing sites finds them few and far between (one HotAir, 6 Fox News, 3 NY Post) and literally tons of Daily Beast, NYT, WaPo, Politico, The Hill, The Guardian, New Republic, Salon, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, etc. ad infinitum.
I read it ever day just to snark at the headlines and read the occasional right reaction to the stories, but the big, fat bold headlines are 90% left-wing and worse.
Well, obviously, you’re right. The way I use it is to find stories, then I look for multiple versions of the stories, and it has generally been useful in flagging events and issues. This was an extreme example of embargoing a major event, but that shouldn’t happen even once.
I agree. And yes, they are useful for finding related stories that might otherwise be hidden. I just want people using them to understand that they choose their primary sources for stories, and those choices are overwhelmingly progressive.
Jack wrote, “An NBC poll released yesterday found that Americans who consume more traditional forms of media tend to favor President Biden, while those who don’t follow any political news tend to be more favorable to Donald Trump and Republicans. It’s hilarious that NBC and the sources I’ve seen reporting on the poll see it only as damning to opponents of the Biden administration—you know: ignorant deplorables. But of course the polls results cut both ways: anyone foolish and lazy enough to only follow mainstream media news sources gets the kind of propaganda, deception and news manipulation illustrated by today’s morning “top stories” array on Memeorandum.”
On that note, here’s how a Dane County Wisconsin, tunnel visioned, totalitarian leaning progressive translates that poll for his readers…
Trump Supporters Mostly Are “Uninformed, Don’t Follow Political News At All”
Pay attention to the overall tone this writer uses and how he parrots as many false propaganda narratives as he can to smear Republicans.
I think it’s really interesting that the writer writes “New data strongly suggests as NBC reported this week, that his base is easily led by Trump due to the fact they are utterly uninformed about the facts of the political world around them.” while if you read his blogs, since Trump came on the political scene, it’s clear that the writer has swallowed the propaganda narratives offered by the political left’s Pravda-USA media even when the actual facts were available but yet rejected by the political sheeple shepherds at his favorite media sources like the Washington Post, NPR and CNN. It’s interesting to see that progressive writers, like this one, seem to think that consuming, believing, and parroting the false propaganda narratives and bald-faced lies from their media sources which have been shown to be unreliable and ignore actual facts is much better than ignoring those biased media sources that have shown their true colors as activists, unreliable propagandists and liars.