Good morning…

1. Now here’s a nice, professional, objective headline from the Times: ASSAILING HATE, BUT NOT GUNS.

Inexcusable. Several journalists have been arguing of late that it’s time for news organizations to openly and vigorously take a position on guns, and I bet you can guess which position that would be. (Of course, they have been taking that position for some time now, just denying it, like Brian Stelter denied that CNN’s coverage of the Mueller inquiry was slanted.) Have you been fooled?

The Times headline makes an assumption that is purely emotional rather than factual. There is nothing innately hateful about guns. “ASSAILING HATE, BUT NOT SPEECH”  would be an equivalent headline. “ASSAILING OBESITY, BUT NOT MASHED POTATOES”  is only slightly more idiotic.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias.

2. Speaking of unethical journalism…I was struck by a letter fromone of the knee-jerk liberals who frequent the pages of the New York Times Book Review supplement, which is always full of propaganda where it doesn’t belong (it is amazing how their guest reviewers can work in cheap shots at President Trump and the attendant Big Lies no matter what a book is about). Ellen Creane (she’s a community college English professor) wrote, “…Britain ultimately had to call on America’s democracy to save the island and indeed all of Europe. Who will America call on to save it from the current attacks on our free media? We must do this ourselves, strongly and now.”

Have you noticed the creeping trope that to criticize how our current journalists abuse freedom of the press is to threaten freedom of the press? I’m not sure if people believe this, thanks to thorough bombardment by the media itself (How dare you tell us how to do our job? Censorship!), or if the argument is just another intentional effort to protect an ally, and an unethical one, of the progressive culture wars. Continue reading →