Journalism & Media

‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Racial Bias!’

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Associated Press reports on New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul setting up a commission to make “non-binding” recommendations regarding the state’s debt to the victims of slavery, presumably that they should be addressed by monetary reparations. This is going to take at least a year, after which Hochul assumes, I’m guessing, that she’ll be able to use reparations as a wedge issue. But I digress; the post is about this section of the story:

The idea of using public money to compensate the descendants of enslaved people is almost certain to draw a backlash from some, including some white people who don’t believe they should have to pay for the sins of long-ago ancestors, and other ethnic groups that weren’t involved in the slave trade.

The Associated Press certainly understands evil, racist “white people.” It just knows they will selfishly want to hold on to their ill-gotten wealth and protest a massive transfer of cash from those who had nothing to do with slavery to those who never experienced slavery a day in their lives or ever knew anyone who did. And surely no African-Americans will be objective enough see the logical, economic and political problems with such a plan.

The AP apparently employs no editors capable of reading that swill and had and gently saying to some proudly woke reporter, “Uh, no. This is blatant racial stereotyping. Try again. I have an idea: why not just report the facts without indulging in mind-reading or making baseless predictions of what will happen more than a year from now? Incidentally, reparations are hardly a new idea, so you don’t need to speculate about what “some white people” are ‘almost certain to think.’ You can factually report on what economists, social scientists and other experts on both sides of the issue and of a variety of races and ethnicities have already said about the concept.”

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Yes, Donald Trump Of Course…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia…all over the world they’re pouring in.”

–—Presumptive GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump during a rally in Durham, NH.

To its credit, C-Span introduced the clip of Trump blathering by noting he was talking about illegal immigrants, and I’m sure he was. However he never said “illegal immigrants” or anything similar. He just gave a number that could be illegal immigrants or just immigrants. “When they let 15, 16 million people into the country…we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he began. Wait, we “let” legal immigrants into the country: is Trump complaining about them?

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: An Insider Confirms The Ethics Rot At The New York Times And In American Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The bad news is that the platform for this powerful exposé is The Economist, which most Americans don’t read. Another problem is that the essay by former Times opinion editor James Bennet is prohibitively long: over 17,000 words. Nonetheless, everyone should read it, especially those who still hold on to the myth that “advocacy journalism” is journalism, that’s it’s healthy for our democracy, or that the New York Times can be trusted to convey facts rather than propaganda.

The piece is titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” and the author begins by focusing on the Senator Tom Cotton op-ed piece that he was forced to take down and that cost him his job. It is understandable that Bennet feels that way, but the fact that he would point to that episode and not many others that occurred before it shows his own blindness and bias. Apparently the Times announcing in late 2016 that it would henceforth frame the news to ensure that Hillary Clinton, or pushing the Hillary-seeded Russian collusion myth for two years didn’t qualify as signature significance of a corrupted paper, but pulling a conservative U.S. Senator’s op-ed because the Times staff disagreed with it does. Well, that one cost Benett his job, after all.

Ironically, Bennet’s biases enhance his credibility: in many ways he’s a classic Democratic, Trump-hating progressive, and yet he’s still blowing a very loud whistle on his colleagues. Is he a “disgruntled ex-employee”? Sure he is; Bennet is bitter and disillusioned, and maybe that’s why he felt it necessary to write such an exhaustive piece. Nonetheless, his argument is persuasive. If the Times was the newspaper it claims to be (and that Bennet shows it is not), it would have published his essay itself.

The article is here, and to encourage you to read it, I’ll point out some representative passages:

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Confirmation Bias Test: The Rasmussen 2020 Voter Fraud Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Trump’s reaction aside, what is a fair, rational, measured way to evaluate the results of the just-relased Rasmussen survey about voter fraud in the 2020 election?

The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.” The findings, in brief:

1. “More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud.”

2. “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”

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The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It [Expanded & Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

City-Journal, arguably the best of the conservative websites, has extensive coverage of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, whose presidency of Harvard was already on shaky ground following her awful testimony before Congress regarding the burgeoning anti-Semitism on campus. It is too detailed for me to summarize correctly, and if I cut and paste sufficient amounts of the piece I’ll be plagiarizing, so you should read all about it here. (You may have to register, but access is free.)

Disgustingly, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not reported this yet. That’s outrageous, and one more screaming example of how the Left circles its wagons any time an ally seriously screws up. Harvard is to progressive indoctrination in education what the Times is to progressive propaganda in journalism, but the last thing the mainstream media needs now is another Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. Harvard is very much in the news already for it’s ugly role in the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck; Gay is now a central figure, and for the plagiarism development to be given the “nothing to see here” treatment by the news media is spectacularly foolish as well as unethical. [Update: This afternoon, after Harvard mentioned the plagiarism issue, both the Times and the Post finally reported on it its digital editions.]

But I digress…I had initially assumed that the accusations that Gay had violated Harvard’s own policies on citations, credit to other scholars and plagiarism were like past attacks on controversial authors like Ann Coulter, technical but non substantive, the sort that could be dug up on many published public figures by those seeking to damage their reputations. I was mistaken, however. Gay’s violations are substantive and substantial. Moreover, Gay appears to have appropriated material from one of the most significant scholars in the field of racial issues in American, now retired Vanderbilt professor and author Carol Swain.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update, Woke Universities’ Hypocrisy Exposed: Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

As I assumed it would, the uproar over the three college presidents’ embarrassing testimony regarding anti-Semitism has continued, and presumably will continue for quite a while. I want to highlight a few developments that I came upon after writing the earlier post.

  • Harvard president Claudine Gay issued a mewling apology to her campus.“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson.“Words matter. When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.” Yes, she really talks like this.

    “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay went on to say in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged. Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”

I’ve been writing a few posts lately examining my biases. One bias I don’t intend to overcome is the strong wave of nausea I experience when anyone talks about their “truth.” The rhetoric smacks of ethics relativism, and, in the immortal words of the iconic New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.” Continue reading →

Just In Case You Don’t Appreciate How Much Of A Progressive Hack Site Politico Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…consider this coverage of the Jamaal Bowman censure. Some quotes:

  • “The House voted mostly along party lines to formally reprimand Rep. Jamaal Bowman over triggering a fire alarm last September, the latest episode of the GOP’s censure ire.” That’s the first sentence, essentially “Republicans pounce.” Bowman broke both a DC misdemeanor law by deliberately pulling a fire alarm without any fire, a federal law by disrupting a vote in Congress, and the House ethics rules as well. Politico frames this as a contrived partisan “gotcha!” by Republicans as in“There they go again, making a big deal out of nothing.” This is ethics corrupting behavior by Politico.
  • “Bowman (D-N.Y.) is the third Democrat that Republicans have voted to censure this year.”  Same thing: the sentence implies that the censures were just partisan attacks without basis. Twenty-two Democrats joined  Republicans in censuring Rep. Tlaib, whose repeated statements and tweets excusing Hamas while rationalizing the anti-Semitic chant “from the river to the sea” were exactly the kind of conduct condemned by the House ethics code. The hyper-partisan conduct in both cases was by the Democrats, most of whom couldn’t bring themselves to enforce Congress’s ethics standards as they must be enforced to protect the integrity of the institution. The House failed to censure Rep. Adam Schiff for his repeated lies in the media about the evidence of Trump campaign with Russia because Democrats protected him. The significance of the three censure votes involving Democrats is that the party’s ethics have rotted so thoroughly that Republican look relatively chaste by comparison.
  • “Bowman already pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for pulling the fire alarm in a House office building during a chaotic vote on government funding at the end of September. The lawmaker had also agreed to pay the maximum fine, but some House Republicans who’d been incensed by Bowman’s actions demanded further punishment.” That commentary is moronic, and deliberately misleads readers. Its thrust is “he’s suffered enough,” as if the legal consequences of Bowman’s actions should preclude official sanctions by Congress. They are separate and distinct. Moreover, Bowman’s obvious lies about mistaking the fire alarm for a device that would unlock the door were worthy of House discipline themselves.
  • “Some on the right have charged that Bowman triggered the alarm to obstruct or delay the House proceedings that day, though he’s maintained he did not intentionally set off the alarm.” “Some on the right?” Bowman was caught on video doing exactly what he repeatedly claimed he did not do—still claims, in fact.  In the video, he doesn’t try to get out of the building; he takes down the two signs that would undermine his lie about finding the doors locked and mistakenly pulling the alarm in  a state of confusion and panic. The evidence is clear and undeniable: he intended to pull the alarm.  Politico’s report sets out to mislead readers who haven’t followed the story so they will believe there is a legitimate controversy over Bowman’s actions and intent. There isn’t. Democrats decided to support an obvious lie.

Politico is considered a major political news source. It is biased and unreliable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“Does Anybody Care?” The Justice System’s Ominous Sacrifice Of Derek Chauvin

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Glenn Loury, is an economist, academic, and author who holds the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. Since he is tenured, Loury doesn’t feel constrained by the lock-step ideological conformity so many of his race (he’s black) hew to in the wake of the George Floyd Freakout. In his latest newsletter on substack, Loury writes in part,

Poetic truth “thri[ves] more by coercion than reason,” accusing all who dispute it of complicity with the ineradicably racist system that governs and has always governed the country.

That Darren Wilson executed Michael Brown is one such poetic truth; that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is, I believe, another. Despite the aptness of Steele’s term, poetic truth is no truth at all, nor is it particularly poetic. It is power masquerading as fact, brute force in the guise of knowledge. The cities that burned across the country following Floyd’s death were expressions of such a truth, as was the incarceration of the police officers convicted of a crime they did not commit. The scramble to implement race-based policies and quotas, to elevate self-appointed gurus of “antiracism,” and to proclaim, against all evidence, the unreconstructed nature of American society were all tendrils of the same truth, which still threatens to assert itself whenever an incident emerges that fits its preferred pattern.

The cost in life, limb, and property incurred by this particular poetic truth would be bad enough. But I fear that, in the aftermath, when the embers have cooled and Chauvin’s name has been forgotten by everyone save his family, the true danger of the poetic truth of George Floyd will come to fruition.

Later in the piece, Loury quotes John McWhorter, the New York Times pundit: Continue reading →

It’s Time To Play That Exciting New Game Show, “Who’s The Dictator?” !!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hello everybody! Welcome to “Whose the Dictator?” the popular ethics game show!  Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…

You see before you two Presidents: one, Joe Biden, a Democrat and current residence of the White House. Next to him is Donald Trump, previously President, and currently seeking to be the candidate of the Republican Party for his old job in 2024. Currently, the mainstream media is calling Mt. Trump an aspiring dictator, based on banter with Sean Hannity at a Fox News town hall. Here’s CBS’s report…as you know, CBS is the most trusted name in news, being the network that gave us Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan…never mind, let’s stop at Walter:

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday in Fox News Town Hall that he would not be a dictator “except for Day One” if he is elected to the presidency next year.

In a taped town hall with Fox News anchor Sean Hannity in Iowa, the former president was asked whether he would use the presidency to “abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people” several times.

“You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.

“Except for Day One,” Trump said.

When asked to clarify, Trump said he would use the presidency to close the border and increase oil drilling in the U.S.

“That is not retribution,” Hannity said.

“I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, no. Other than Day One.’ We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,” Trump said.

The Biden campaign immediately pounced on the comments in a campaign email and posted a clip of the exchange to X.

“Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.

The report didn’t bore anyone by discussing why “drilling, drilling, drilling” suggests dictatorial conduct or aspirations, or what the statutory authority is for the President closing the border legally and constitutionally, but, as you know, panel, the American voter is already fully cognizant of and sophisticated in its knowledge of these things, thoroughly educated on the President’s role in constitutional government and the limits of Presidential power thanks to the excellent training in civics that our public school system provides. Besides, everyone knows what Trump is like and what his real motives are, right?

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Ugh.How Many Times Will Trump And The Mainstream Media Make Me Write This Post?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I can’t avoid it this time: the episode comes too close on the metaphorical heels of Curmie’s examination of biased and misleading reporting (here and here) and the post about the desperate AUC (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) settling on declaring Trump an American Hitler as its best shot at keeping him out of the White House if they fail at “locking him up.”

What happened next was so similar to what was described in my post that it’s almost comical. In an Iowa town hall with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump was asked about the current scare-mongering narrative that he was going to be a dictator. Trump, who apparently can’t stop himself from trolling, said,

“He says, you’re not going to be a dictator, are you? I said no, no, no — other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling (for oil). After that I’m not a dictator.”

And how was that quote relayed on multiple outlets? “Trump says he’ll be a dictator from Day One.” See? He admits it! Aaron Rupar, the same shameless hack I mentioned in the earlier post, tweeted, “Trump admits he plans to do some dictatorial things on “day one” of his second term.” Rupar’s a dishonest asshole, but he’s not stupid. He knows that what Trump was describing isn’t “dictatorial,” but he exploited, as usual, Trump’s inflammatory language.

The executive branch has statutory power to close borders under certain circumstances. If Trump used that power, it wouldn’t be “dictatorial,” it would be legal and backed by democratically- determined laws. If the President doesn’t have statutory power to do something, he can’t do it. As for “drilling”: all Trump can do is lift Biden’s executive orders blocking drilling. The measures he’d be eliminating were no less “dictatorial” than his orders cancelling them. The President can’t order private companies to drill (or else what, shoot the executives?). So once againTrump was being careless in his rhetoric, thus throwing raw meat for his foes in the media and the Trump-Deranged to freak out over. And, of course, they took the bait.

Trump enjoys doing this, even though it fuels the hysterical and biased coverage of everything he says or does, even though it increases political divisions in our society. He’s having fun giving the news media what it wants, and they have no scruples or restraint either. The rest of the country are victims.

We have almost a year of this to go. Isn’t that great?