The success of the Babylon Bee has apparently caused the mainstream media to try to horn in on the “Real-sounding fake news” thing, without quite getting what “satire” is.
CNN “reporter” Joe Lockhart on Twitter yesterday (via Hugh Hewitt, who’s noted the “Retweets” the “Reporter” got.
Moments later:
You just know that TV stations, local NPR affiliates and newspapers around the country are going to run the former and ignore the latter.
…the Babylon Bee is reinforcing itself as America’s news source of record.
Because this.
…that only does Democrat messaging make no logical or intellectual sense, but it isn’t intended for consumption by an audience that worries about moral and intellectual sensibility.
The idea – presented here – that forcing Congress to stop abrogating its responsibility to write laws and stop slothfully fobbing the job off on the Executive Branch, should be fairly uncontroversial.
Not – as the piece posits – a threat to the general order.
Hard as this may be to believe, it appears Greta Thunberg = sixteen year old autistic Swedish child and professional climate scold – just may not be the mind behind her presence.
“All it took to exploit the bug was opening a target page and checking the edit history of a post. Facebook mistakenly displayed the account or accounts that made edits to each post, rather than just the edits themselves,” explained Wired… If you’re one of Greta’s 3 million fans, you might be disappointed to hear that she is likely not the author of all of her posts. According to screenshots shared online, posts that are supposed to be written by Greta may actually have been written by her father, Svante Thunberg, and/or Adarsh Prathap, a climate activist and delegate at the UN’s Climate Change organization—who reportedly founded the page in December 2018.
Five’ll get you ten David Hogg’s social media presence is farmed out, too.
David Brooks is one of those people I simultaneously enjoy very much, and dislike myself for liking.
He’s a “conservative” in the northeastern sense of the term – and very, very much of the Northeastern media/political establishment. He’s the “conservative” that NPR will talk with.
And being of the establishment, he shares a perspective on the events of the day with the people he rubs elbows with.
Which, I theorize, led to this tweet last week:
There’s something to that, sort of. Trump isn’t just a symptom of this nation’s tribalism – he’s someone who’s profited politically by exploiting the tribalism.
But if you think the “decline in discourse” started with Trump’s election, I’ve got tickets to the Hillary Clinton inaugural ball to sell you.
Remember the Tea Party? The utterly egalitarian community of small-government activists that sprang up a little over ten years ago?
Back in those days before Orange Man was Literally Hitler (but after the Good Republican, John McCain, served as Literally Hitler for a few months), the establishment of which Brooks is a member acted like the Tea Party was Andrew Jackson’s supporters tracking mud into John Quincy Adams’s White House. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign was only deked out of being “the most identity-obsessed campaign in history” by Hillary, who will only be eclipsed by (NOTE TO 2020 MITCH – FILL IN THE NAME OF THE DEMOCRAT NOMINEE).
Trump may well be “stupid” – but he didn’t “make” anyone that way. He masterfully exploited the by-products of the “stupidity – tribalism, anger, arrogance, partisanship – that the Democrats have been cultivating for a couple of decades, now.
I listen to a fair amount of public radio – largely because, sans antenna, it’s the only non-music radio I can get in my car.
And public radio, especially the news and public affairs departments, take the news media very, very seriously.
And periodically, I’ll hear programs on which I hear a variety of people – pundits, academics, journos, talking heads of all varieties – talking about the imperative for a free press. For the regular hoi-polloi, much less so – but that’s a separate topic.
This is important, say the talking heads, because “journalists” are “trained to ask questions”, and feature an intellect noted for “insatiable curiosity”.
And I usually end up shouting at the radio: “Where? Where are these mythicsl curious journos?”
Because of people like this – about a Babylon Bee satirical piece about Democrats flying their flags at half-mast over the death of General Soleimani:
This tweet from Time – kids, ask your parents…
…explains a lot about how Greta Thunberg became their “Person of the Year”.
Among many other things.
The Babylon Bee may actually be giving the big media too much credit.
I used to ask Twin Cities media figures why they kept taking the likes of Heather Martens and the “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence seriously, treating them as legitimate sources on the news, when the leading intellectual lights of Minnesota’s gun control movement burned them so consistently on actual fact.
On a national level, the same question goes.
The media rolls its eyes and plays innocent about the attempted coup going on in Washington. They’re just reporting the news, maaaaaaaaaaaaaan:
Mollie Hemingway from Federalist points out the elephant in the room:
You could hear it, in plain sight (as it were), in November of 2016, when reps from the NYTimes and WaPo newsrooms.
No. Seriously. Listen to it. Be disgusted. I’m not a huge Trump fan – seriously, not. But listening to that? Let’s say Big Leftymedia doesn’t want to start a civil war.
If they did, what would they be doing differently?
Who am I talking about?
Am I referring to America’s universities and public education system!
Well, yeah – but not just them. It’s not quite that simple.
Freedom to Talk Freedom: If you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the history of underdog nations and peoples – the land of most of my forefathers, Norway, as well as Israel, Finland, the Baltics (particularly Estonia), Denmark, Taiwan, and of course Poland.
Now, in Poland’s case, it’s not a story of absolutely unalloyed heroism; the Communist reign in Poland was administered and run by Poles – and there were wartime observations that some of the rural Poles living around the extermination camps were every bit as antisemitic as the Nazis themselves. And antisemitism didn’t end there; after the war, waves of antisemitic violence killed many of those who’d survived (including the leader of a heroic extermination camp breakout); in 1968, the Communist government of Władysław Gomulka expelled many of the remainder. While many Poles are represented among the “Righteous Among Nations”, they truly did face an uphill battle in large, rural swathes of the country.
Like all collections of humans, there are good ones and evil ones, and a whole lot in the middle that just wanted to survive, let along prosper, under atrocious circumstances.
That being said, Poles have for for freedom – theirs and others – since the 1700s. Poles were among the first Europeans to fight for what we now call liberal democracy, in their own homeland and ours (the American Revolution owed a debt to Kosciuszko and Pulaski). And the first tangible cracks in the Iron Curtain happened in Gdansk – in 1956 as well as 1980. There is much in the Polish heritage to balance the evil that popped up, here and there.
Poland is currently ruled by an electoral majority for the “Law and Justice” party – a party the media call “right wing”, although along with their rather fervid nationalism they have established one of the most expensive social welfare states in the European Union – which doesn’t protect them from the hatred of the Big Media, who links them, not completely inaptly, to Orange Literal Hitler Man.
And, as befits a nationalist party, they’re leading with the things that make their nation proud, and de-emphasizing the parts that don’t. Law and Justice is exerting political clout on controlling the narrative about Polish history that gets presented – via some means that should give First Amendment supporters critical pause. They’re not above a little Polish jingoism.
“On the Media” – which is to New York’s “elite” media what Pravda was to the Politburo – “tackled” the story over the weekend, with a series by reporter Laura Feder on the rise of Law and Justice, and the way they’ve exerted their control over the official history.
And it’s not all bad – it certainly helps that it’s not produced by the show’s usual hive enforcers, Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone. There are certainly some questions worth asking of Law and Justice, if one is a Polish voter (as I definitely am not). And a few that could be asked of “On the Media” and Ms Feder; while she covers Gomulka’s forced expulsions, she softpedals the notion that that was as much Communist policy as Polish nativist bigotry.
I actually recommend giving the pieces, above, a listen, albeit a critical one; the progsplaining and the “liberals wear the white hats” schtick gets a little galling at times.
But here’s my real question: It’s a bad thing that Law and Justice is blocking free speech to spread their preferred narrative, squeezing out the honest, complete telling of the story.
So when will “On the Media” report on the very similar effort on the part of the American Big Left in media, academia and politics to similarly control, and dishonestly skew, their own narrative?
The mainstream media – specifically, the New York Times’ – coddling Joseph Stalin, including the genocide in Ukraine? The Times’ embrace of Hitler, and the burying of the origins of the Holocaust? Their extended french kiss of the Soviets during the Cold War? The modern left’s strong-arm take-over of the American narrative in academia?
It’s a rhetorical question, I know.
Jessica Kwong, progressive stenographer at former magazine “Newsweek”, on Donald Trump’s thanksgiving:
“it was written before knowing about the president’s surprise visit to Afghanistan-an honest mistake”
In other words, pre-written.
The Big Media aren’t “the enemy of the people”. They’re worse; after assuming the mantle of “guardian of democracy” (which, we are told, without their ministrations would “die in darkness”), they are doing something very, very different. They’re worse than an enemy; they are betraying a trust – however misbegotten.
They are swindling the people.
UPDATE: And apparently the once-mighty Newsweek can be shamed into decency; Kwong has been fired.
I’m sure she’ll be off the beach soon.
#3) Cancer
#2) Heart disease and its complications
#1) People dying while holding their breath waiting for the Star/Tribune, MPR News, and the Big Four TV stations to cover Ilhan Omar’s successive bits of corruption.
Fortunately, we’ve got that conservative-biased New York media to do it for them.
Rep. Ilhan Omar paid another $150,000 to Tim Mynett’s political consulting group in the three months after The Post first revealed allegations the pair were romantically involved, records show.
The 37-year-old Minnesota congresswoman’s campaign has funneled $146,712.63 to Mynett’s E Street Group since The Post in August reported allegations she was having an affair with her paid consultant, records show.
The latest payments to Mynett’s group were for digital advertising, fundraising consulting and video production.
When news of the alleged affair broke, Omar had already paid $223,000 through her campaign since 2018 for fundraising consulting, internet advertising, digital communications, and travel expenses to the E Street Group — taking the latest total to $370,000.
The real question is, how much shaming can the Twin Cities media withstand before they start even making cursory motions toward doing their ostensible job?
October/November, 2019: The Star/Tribune Editorial Board – presumably including member Patricia Lopez – endorses nearly every DFL candidate (with the exception of a scant few Republicans who are either shoe-ins or can’t possibly contend).
This pattern has been repeated in nearly every election in recent memory – the past 50 years, at least. Certainly since before Lopez joined the editorial board.
Lopez on Twitter last week:
November 2020: The Star/Tribune Editorial Board – presumably including member Patricia Lopez – will endorse nearly every DFL candidate (with the exception of a scant few Republicans who are either shoe-ins or can’t possibly contend).
I’m going to save this for the week before the next election.
We need to have a word to convey the most commonly-used idea in conservative media criticism. The idea, to wit, is:
Can you imagine what the media would do if a Republican had done something this stupid?
It is, of course, one of the most evergreen concepts in media criticism – the notion that if it weren’t for double-standards, the media would have no standards at all when covering Democrats.
South Bend mayor and current media flavor of the month Pete “No, I’m Not Beto O’Rourke” Buttigieg’s campaign used stock photos of Kenyans in publicizing their policies for black Americans:
[A reporter for The Intercept] tweeted that the public relations firm tasked with creating Buttigieg’s campaign material had simply taken a stock photo without checking the origin of the subject. “On top of everything else, the Buttigieg campaign used a stock photo from Kenya to promote its Frederick Douglass Plan for Black America,” Grim wrote on Twitter, adding, “The woman in the photo reached out to me very confused.”
Using non-American black people in photos (“hey, they all look the same!”) the same week as he used names of black endorsers who’d not endorsed him?
And yet the story is getting no coverage outside the conservative media.
And saying “Can you imagine if a Republican did this?” is time-consuming.
We need a word, or at least a snappy phrase.
Ideas?
To: Fred Smith, CEO, FedEx
From: Mitch Berg, Crabby Peasant
Re: Debating Big Left
Mr. Smith,
I applaud your challenge to the NYTimes’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, to a debate between him, his business editor, your tax executive and yourself over your enterprises’ relative tax burdens and financial contributions.
I also note that progs – whether in government or the media – never deign to debate.
In case you didn’t know that, I mean.
If so, carry on.
That is all.
ANCHOR: “There are some who say the death of Al-Zarquawi isn’t that important, given that he was at the head of an asymmetric worldwide terror organization. How important was his death, really?”
EXPERT: “While it is true that asymmetric terror organizations are built to survive, on the other hand, if you’re talking about the history of a putative “caliphate“, the death of the “caliph” might be considered an, I dunno, setback or something…”
California congresswoman Katie Hill is a pretty loathsome person (and that’s without even referring to her ideology, which seeks to do to the entire country what it’s done to Califonia, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, NOLA and Baltimore), whose sex scandal – she was apparnently doing with her husband (asterisk; west coast version), a female campaign staffer, and another guy on the side – is nothing more than her doing with three other people what the entire Democrat party is trying to do to the United States without the courtesy of buying dinner [1] first…
…but this article (which has NSFW photography, unless you work in a pr0n theater, an art gallery, a tabloid, or the curriculum office of a blue-city elementary school), among many others, makes a key story point out of the notion that she has a “Nazi” tattoo in the headline – a reference to a tattoo visible just outside her fun zone in one of the bluer photos in the article
Thats just wrong.
The Iron Cross was the emblem of Prussia, and then the German monarchy, for hundreds of years, up until 1918, and of the Republic until 1933. The Nazis kept it around as a decoration (the “Iron Cross” was sort of like the American “Bronze Star”), but it was German, not Nazi.
Those Eisernkreuze can be distinguished from the regular German ones by the, y’know, swastika the Nazis incorporated.
It’s what the kids call “Cultural Appropriation” these days.
But after the war, the “Eisernkreuz” survived Germany’s stringent “De-Nazification” with flying colors, seventy years ago, to become part of the utterly non-Nazi Federal Republic’s regalia. It is still the emblem of the German military; you find it today on all German planes, tanks and ships.
Not defending Ms. Hill – that’s MSNBC’s job. Just checking facts.
Something nobody in the media seems to care about doing anymore.
[1] And heaven forefend the Democrats socialize “dinner”; it’ll be a 2,000 page bill that costs $400 billion a year for ten years and feeds us dogfood.
It’s become a little like the classic movie “Groundhog Day”.
A new scandal comes that will supposedly rend the Trump Administration to its core.
It turns out to be a damp squib.
Lather, rinse, repeat, until 2020.
Why do people still trust the media at all?
Joel Kotkin – who’s moved from being America’s foremost urban planning critic to one of our best social critics – has noticed:
This divide can be seen in public perceptions of the news media. Although somewhat improved from its low point in 2016, only 40 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, trust the media, compared to over 50 percent in 1999. As befits the media’s increasingly partisan stance, the small improvement over 2016 comes almost entirely from Democrats. Only 15% of Republicans and barely a third of independents now trust media compared to nearly 70% of Democrats.
Once the news business had enough sense of propriety and professionalism to at least maintain an appearance of objectivity. There’s ample reason, as Glenn Reynolds suggests, to see many mainstream journalists as little more than “Democrats with bylines,” willing participants in what long-time leftist and fiercely anti-Trump reporter Matt Taibbi describes as the upper bureaucracy’s “permanent coup” against Trump. If this “coup” now actually succeeds, it will be one that will simply accentuate hostility to the media among a large segment of the population.
The whole thing is worth a read, naturally.
And it matters, because democratic society needs institutions – law-enforcement, courts, a news media – that it can trust to hold all parties accountable.
And this past decade has shown that we really have none of them.
Oh, look – the Trib has another badly worded poll intended to elicit results to be used as blunt-force DFL rhetoric. In this case, on Minnesotans’ views on gun registration – AKA “Universal Background Checks”
And yes, it’s dishonest. I add emphasis:
A strong majority of Minnesota voters support universal background checks on all gun sales and a ban on semiautomatic military-style rifles like the AR-15, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.
It’s not “gun sales”. It’s all transfers; lending or borrowing, inheritance, any transfer at all.
And – again – there is no way for “background checks” to be “universal” without trackjng the various transfers through a firearm’s lifetime.
Each of those transactions over time is a data point.
In the world of IT, we have a term for tracking data points; a database.
You can not call this anything but gun registration – and given the DFL’s tack on guns, you can not look at it as anything other than a prelude to confiscation.
Not. One. More. Compromise.
Lara Logan has figured out the problem with modern journalism – namely, having spent the past couple of decades leading with bias and advocacy have left them less trusted than used-car dealers:
Today, as a whole, we are not at our best. Just ask people in towns and cities across this country, as I do. Everywhere I go, people tell me they have lost faith in journalism. It comes from all people, all walks of life and all political stripes. Frankly, I don’t blame them. Responsibility for this begins with us. It is a fact that the vast majority of journalists in this country are registered Democrats. The colleges we come from are similarly dominated by one political ideology. This matters today because the reporting has become so one-sided. As we try to figure out why people have lost faith in our profession, let’s start by being honest about who we are.
We dismiss conservative media outlets for their political bias, but we don’t hold liberal media outlets to the same standard. Many journalists who claim to be objective have publicly taken a political stand, saying the urgency of the time justifies a departure from journalistic standards. Yet they ask us to believe their reporting is still unbiased?
There may no be a more self-unaware institution in America today than Big Media.
In response? The first rule of being part of the big media club is you never speak against the big media club.
I don’t suspect Logan will be doing lunch in New York or Washington again any time soon.
The Texas Air National Guard memos were fakes.
There was no “Republican War on Women”.
Elizabeth Warren isn’t really Cherokee, and wasn’t fired from a teaching job for being pregnant.
Beto O’Rourke isn’t really Latino.
Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez isn’t really a working stiff-ette from the block.
Ilhan Omar isn’t really much of anything she claims to be.
Joe Biden’s family weren’t killed by a drunk driver:
…people are killed by drunk drivers every day in this country. Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were not among them, in spite of his libelous claims that they lost their lives in an accident involving an irresponsible truck driver who, as Biden put it, “drank his lunch.” The man who oversaw that investigation, Delaware Superior Court judge Jerome O. Herlihy, repeatedly has confirmed that there is no evidence alcohol was involved. The survivors of the driver, who has since passed away, have publicly asked Biden to stop telling this lie and besmirching the memory of their father. Investigators at the time determined that the accident was not even the other driver’s fault — Mrs. Biden seems to have driven accidentally into the path of the truck.
Putin didn’t buy the election. Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t a rapist.
“Anti-Fa” isn’t the opposite of “fascist”.
Assault rifles are a statistical blip, gun crimes in Chicago are not causally related to the availability of guns in Indiana, the Second Amendment was not written specifically to defend slave owners, gun control has no effect on criminals or crime, and good guys with guns are disproportionally effective against both street crime and mass shootings.
Democrat messaging seems to have entirely morphed into saying whatever Progs want the gullible, ill-informed and emotion-driven to believe, without regard to truth, much less punctilious accuracy.
“Liberals”, 2004: “Question authority! Free speech is *the* most essential right!”
“Progressives”, 2019: “Free speech is too dangerous for people without tin ‘journalist’ badges to be using”
In the old Soviet Union, citizens used to joke that when a shortage of butter was anticipated, the state media would start running stories on how *bad* butter was for you.
I couldn’t help but think about this over the weekend. And not *just* because our media is resembling the old Soviet media more and more, either.
Following on the NYTimes’ op-ed on free speech being too “dangerous” for mere proles, NPR’s “On the Media” – which is to the big media what a fawning mall cop is to your local blue-and-white – took up the same refrain, giving Marantz a full hour to reiterate his claim (and in so doing giving a whole new spin on “physician, heal thyself”).
Oh, they wrap it in a dirty-sounding word, “absolutism” – but like the NYTimes piece…
…it’s all a rationalization for turning speech over to the “professionals”, to whittle that right (or “right”) down to a size that proles can handle.
And we’re seeing a *lot* of this lately; how checks and balances are just tooooo haaaaard, and the Bill of Rights is just tooooo complex for the herd to deal with.
Makes me think of Soviet Radio. Apropos nothing.
Just saying, Democrats – I liked y’all better 15 years ago.
While driving about yesterday during the mid-day, I caught a piece on MPR – basically a recycled “Documentary” podcast on “Education” looking at the tension between free speech and “inclusion” at the U of M, viewed in the context of a squabble over a panel on the Washington Avenue bridge in 2016, where Campus Republicans wrote “build the wall”, spawning the usual suspects’ usual performances about the need to make free speech not nearly so free.
I sat, mostly dumbfounded, as a series of academics, consultants and activists responded to the notion of the importance (to say nothing of sanctity ,and vitality to a democracy) of free speech with an ever-increasing series of “Yabbuts”.
There were too many chilling moments to pick just one pullquote; I’d read or listen to the whole thing, if you’re in the mood to feel immense forboding.
But this part here caught my attention; I’ve added some emphasis:
Over the course of [Rebecca Ropers, a vice provost for faculty and academic affairs at the University of Minnesota]’s career, she has witnessed an increasing ability for people that are marginalized on campus to articulate what is going on in their lives, but she doesn’t see administrators and other students showing a commensurate ability to hear and acknowledge those experiences. She said that the university now knows more about managing diversity and free speech, but school officials don’t always implement what they know.
“If administrators and faculty could have students’ backs and continue to articulate the importance of free speech, while also saying, ‘Yeah, and I really find that reprehensible,” I think maybe that’s a good strategy for academic leaders to take at this point,” Ropers said.
“Acknowledgment”. It’s the “bring me a rock” of modern sociology; the “acknowledgment” sought is never, ever the kind offered; there’s always a bigger, better, different form that’s really demanded, although it’s up to the acknowledgor to figure that out.
If the modern academy – at least, outside most engineering and hard science departments – expends energy in anything other than endless self-flagellation over the current view of identity politics, what is it?
Although I’ll clarify – it’s not so much self-flagellation; call it flagellation of some “other” on the part of the upper-middle-class academics and activists doing the flagellation, who are never called upon for any meaningful sacrifices as a result.
It’s an oldie but a goodie. And as we head toward another election sure to be driven by Big Left’s narratives and Trump’s responses to them, this bit here is worth committing to memory:
Journalism is always about “asking the questions that matter” – where “matter” in this case means “furthers the narrative”.
The media are devoting lavish coverage to homelessness, that’s why.
And, somehow, less to this sort of thing.
Look – not only is a recession going to happen one of these days, a recession [1] is a necessary part of the business cycle. But the contortions Big Left and Big Media [2] are going through to downplay the currently good economic news are downright unseemly.
[1] In a normal, healthy economy with sound fundamentals, of course. Which we have. Of course, that’s true only if the recession kills of bad ideas and unsound enterprises, and frees up labor and capital for good ideas and sound investments – which the Fed hasn’t really allowed a recession to do since 1993.
[2] Pardon, as always, the redundancy.