Archive for 2019

JOURNALISM: When The Press Sees Red: “Like so many stories that supposedly conveyed the reality of Trump’s America, that so perfectly displayed white Christian menace, it turned out to be fake. Fake, like the Ohio University student who sent herself anti-gay hate mail; manufactured, like the racist harassment on a bus that Hilary Clinton tweeted about; an attempted frame-up, with liberal credulity made into the co-conspirator, like the vandalism of a Jewish cemetery done by a progressive reporter. But good enough to share, good enough to cause doxxing, and justify the harassment and assault of children. I’m still chuckling at the New York Times and the Washington Post rushing out misleading and false stories — the latter with three bylines — without doing any original reporting besides a phone call to the Native American Elder, and a survey of reactions on Twitter.”

UPDATE:

Really, to hell with these people.

BETWEEN THE BUZZFEED DEBACLE AND THE COVINGTON CATASTROPHE, maybe we need to think about overturning New York Times v. Sullivan and returning libel law to its traditional state. Reliance on the professionalism of journalists is clearly misplaced.

Related: Anatomy of a Narrative.

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D SEE OPEN RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY IN WASHINGTON. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Mazie Hirono can’t stop talking about Catholics.

UPDATE: #JOURNALISM:

This is all a spoiling attack aimed at keeping Amy Coney Barrett off the Supreme Court. I’m not sure, though, that open displays of anti-Catholic bigotry are such a wise tactic outside the SJW bubble.

OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?

NEO: Reporting on each other: the Covington boys, the Native American, and the smart phone vs. the telescreen.

Today’s smart phones (not envisioned by Orwell) can record, as well. But what they record, how it is edited and used and described and slanted, is the task of social media and the MSM. If the viewers of such videos don’t have a huge amount of skepticism, they are easily taken in by people using videos to mislead. Even people with a great deal of skepticism, such as Scott Adams, can apparently be taken in by the right video presented in a very clever way.

This is obviously a grave danger, because videos (like photos before them) can easily give the appearance of being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and can whip the crowd up into enormous hatred. And yet the actual truth can be something very, very different.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Note this part: “One of the sadder things about this particular incident is that many on the right, as well as the boys’ Catholic school, jumped on the leftist bandwagon—at least to a certain extent. And some jumped on it to a greater extent and have yet (at least, as of this writing) to retract their words.”

REGULAR ADVIL USE CAN BE DAMAGING TO YOUR TESTICLES. “The researchers went so far as to say that the striking dual effect of ibuprofen on Leydig and Sertoli cells suggests that ibuprofen, of all the chemical classes considered, has ‘the broadest endocrine-disturbing properties identified so far in men.'”

I’ve blogged on this before, but it’s worth repeating.

THIS STORY (AS ALREADY NOTED BY ED AND GLENN) IS ANOTHER NICE CASE STUDY OF “PERCEPTIONS OF NEWSWORTHINESS ARE CONTAMINATED BY A POLITICAL USEFULNESS BIAS”: If some anonymous teenager in a MAGA hat is rude (or maybe isn’t even rude!) to a Native American drummer, that’s a big story.  But if a Democratic Congressional candidate (now a Congresswoman) has written “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” that’s not newsworthy.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: “Europe was never a full partner in its own defense.” But wait, it gets worse: “The very question—Will Europe ever fully partner with the U.S., or will the European Union and NATO continue to downplay the necessity of military readiness?—is no longer meaningful as posed, because the political energies of Europe’s elites are absorbed as they try to fend off attacks on their legitimacy by broad sectors of their population. The notion that Europeans and Americans were full partners in the NATO alliance and that this ‘kept the Russians out…etc.’ was always a fiction, albeit a useful one. Today it is dysfunctional, an obstacle to all sides’ understanding of what useful cooperation may yet be possible.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Radical evil, and the online lynching of a kid from Kentucky. Will journalists apologize if their portrayal of the Covington students vs Indian Elder incident turns out to have been wildly wrong?

Total non-sequitur of a question. When is the DNC-MSM ever wrong?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When do they ever apologize? (Except to offended lefties, that is).

But some better people are apologizing:

Maybe the reason journalists assume that James O’Keefe’s videos are deceptively edited is that deceptive editing is the ordinary course of business for them.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): More good people apologize:

This guy hasn’t apologized yet, though. People on the right need to be more skeptical of this kind of thing, rather than rushing to jump on the “we’re better than that” (by which they really mean “I’m better than that”) bandwagon. Lefties rely on that to give momentum to their hit pieces. Instead, hold back and wait for facts to develop. Often — possibly more often than not — the facts will show things to be different than they first appeared.

MORE (FROM GLENN):

Also, I see that NRO’s big dump on the Covington boys now returns a Page Not Found. Why doesn’t it return an apology for jumping the gun?

Or maybe it should just go to this Kyle Smith piece: Nathan Phillips Lied. The Media Bought It. Including NRO. But the media didn’t just buy it. They were co-conspirators.

Plus, from the comments: “Anyone who thinks these recent attacks on these Catholic boys and on the Knights of Columbus aren’t geared to the next Supreme Court opening is kidding themselves.”

Stand up to bigotry: Support Amy Coney Barrett!

Also from the comments: “Amazing that this story occurred just 24 hrs after the BuzzFeed/Cohen fiasco with its obligatory non-stop MSM impeach-o-rama. Gellman amnesia at its finest. And when you see the Catholic hierarchy rush to throw these innocent kids to the wolves, you begin to understand the dimensions & persistence of the Church’s pedophile crisis. They are not the faithful & reliable stewards of our children they claim to be. CYA > justice.”

NRO needs a full, sincere apology here, and better behavior in the future. I mean, otherwise what do they bring to the table? CNN will already call people on the right bigots for free. NRO piled on the people they should have been protecting, out of a cowardly reflex to assume the worst and isolate the people the media were attacking. They should have looked into the story first, rather than relying on the word of people they should have known were untrustworthy. It was just two days ago that CNN was hyping the Buzzfeed “scoop.” Gateway Pundit is all over this story — and more creditably than NRO.

MORE STILL (FROM GLENN): An Apology From Rich Lowry of NRO: “I deleted my original tweet and we also took down a strongly worded post by my colleague Nick Frankovich that relied on the incomplete video. It’s another reminder — even for an old hand like me — that it’s best not to make snap judgments and to wait for all sides of a controversy to have a chance to be heard.”

You can’t trust what the likes of CNN and Buzzfeed say about people on the right. You absolutely need to do your own due diligence before piling on.

And for the record, here’s the archive version of the now-deleted NRO piece by Nicholas Frankovich The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.

Related: The Media Wildly Mischaracterized That Video of Covington Catholic Students Confronting a Native American Veteran.

A bogus story about Trump supporters. Who could imagine such a thing?

Plus:

Related:

They deserve an apology. People who owed them fairness and consideration chose virtue-signaling instead.

JOHN ELLIS: Unicorn Armpit Hair Is a Harbinger of How Bad Things Can Get in 2019. “Body positive campaigns aren’t about ensuring that those who don’t match society’s beauty standards aren’t mocked and ostracized for things they have no control over. Body positive campaigns exist to shame people for having personal standards of beauty. . . . Holding society hostage by expecting everyone to find the whims of feminists attractive is an act of ideological war that deserves to be resisted.”

UPDATE: Drop the “Body Love” Nonsense. “‘Body love’ is a term used mainly by people who fixate on their bodies, feel like crap about their bodies, and then broadcast to the world the exact opposite. They want you to believe that THEY believe every dimple and crevice of their flesh is attractive, so they’ve created a movement to make it socially acceptable to shove their belly rolls in our faces. But talking about how much you love your body means you’re probably trying to convince yourself of something you really don’t believe.”

MEDIA IN VARIOUS STAGES OF GRIEF OVER COLLAPSE OF BUZZFEED TRUMP/COHEN STORY:

Rachel Maddow, and MSNBC generally, is in the bargaining phase. BUT HE’S STILL A BAD MAN! Don’t stop trying to impeach him just because Buzzfeed may have screwed up, and anyway, maybe Buzzfeed’s report is false but accurate! RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA!

It took Maddow 10 minutes to conclude “Happy Two Years of the Trump Administration” before turning to Ben Smith, who defended the story.

See what she did there? Mueller’s rebuke of Buzzfeed becomes an afterthought.

And former and current Democratic activist Chuck Todd isn’t taking it too well, either. Fortunately, Mollie Hemingway is pushing back:

To be fair, NBC has a lot invested in BuzzFeed, literally and figuratively: Flashback to 2015: NBCUniversal makes $200-million investment in BuzzFeed.