Five journalistic profiles in courage.

Where “courage” = not very couragfeous

Watching Minnesota media step up to serve as a loyal PR firm for Keith Ellison, Dave Hutchinson, Ilhan Omar and Ryan Winker, it’s easy to see they’re learning from the greats.

Rebecca Brannon may be the best reporter in the Twin Cities.

Not “journalist” – reporter. Someone who goes out and gets the who, what, when, where, why and how of a story. Comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, as Nick Coleman used to say (but never do).

Speaking of saying but never doing reporting? The Twin Cities mainstream media is doing its usual job; serving as a PR firm for DFL officials:

This is “journalism” with all the heft of a Beanie Baby. Wonder if that interview came with a hot towel?

Brannon, on the other hand, is afflicting the politically comfortable, and someone doesn’t seem to like it:

Trying to intimidate reporters?

Why, isn’t that what authoritarian states do? What’s the term – we heard it all the time during the Trump administration, from reporters big and small…

“Chilling Effect on reporting and transparency?” (Whatever did happen to that term, anyway)?

Aren’t there groups of “journalists” dedicated to keeping the press free? Like the “Society of Professional Journalists of Minnesota?”

Oof. Not a whole lot.

Read Brannon’s whole thread, by the way.

It seems the relentless watchdogs of government in the Twin Cities media are at loggerheads with the government over the Hutchinson case:

You might say that I’m a dreamer – but I remember news media that’d take government to court to get to the bottom of a story like this.

Provided they’re not a DFLer, I guess.

UPDATE: It gets worse. More at noon.

A friend of the blog emails:

The Waukesha parade killer?

The MSP Terminal 2 brawlers?

The Miami high rise collapse?

Americans left in Afghanistan?

Alec Baldwin gun accident on the movie set?

And the list goes on…

Does the media have the short attention span or is it us?

(Redacted)

Not to mention Andrew Cuomo’s concurrent slaughter of senior citizens and sex crimes, Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother and her spouses gravy train from her campaign funds, Umbrella Man, Jacob Frey siccing “Anti”-Fa on Trump supporters, Keith Ellison’s domestic abuse allegations, hundreds of millions of dollars defrauded from Minnesota health and human services on the DFL‘s watch, Mark Dayton‘s disappearance from the office for months at a time…

Yeah, it’s got to be us citizens.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about a story I’ve been wanting to touch on all week:

You know those “Good Guy with a gun” stories that Liberals scoff at as Sexist White Supremacists Compensating for Something?

This Edina woman isn’t scoffing.

If only there were some way society could assume responsibility for protecting the public from violent criminals, some group of armed public servants sworn to uphold the law so that private citizens don’t have to.

Joe Doakes

Of course, the “good guy with a gun“ angle got buried so deeply, it’s a good thing the fact didn’t need oxygen.

You’ll never get our opinion class to admit it, but it was the good guy with the gun that saved the situation.

According to Dana Milbank…

…dissenting from Big Left/Big Media/the Brandon administration is “fascism”..

Not sure if they’re trying to foment a civil war.

If they were, what would they be doing differently?

(And how is the Brandon Administration “salvaging democratic norms?” Labeling everyone that disagrees a “white supremacist?”)

My blogfather from nearly 20 years ago, Andrew Sullivan, on the many, many ways modern media fails Democracy in its slavish service to the left’s narrative.

It’s hard to come up with a single pullquote, but I’ll run with this:

I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not? 

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.

I have a hunch most Americans won’t know the value of a conscientiously neutral media until the inevitable results of the lack of one become truly apparent…

…more than they are.

“A lie will travel around the world while the truth is waiting for its Keuirig to heat up” [1]

As re the “crossing state lines”, “shooting black men”, and many other issues that the Mainstream media will be parroting until they are forced to stop, that’s exactly what is going on.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a cocktail at a downtown Saint Paul bar when MyLyssa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, happens in.

SILBERMAN: Merg…

BERG: Er, hey, MyLyssa…

SILBERMAN: Last week, Kyle Rittenhouse was aquitted of domestic terrorism for shooting up a Black Lives Matter rally.

BERG: You got one fact correct in that sentence, so I guess that’s a start.

SILBERMAN: What if that would have been a black man? Leaving aside the fact that he’d be dead right now, for a moment, what would all of you white male gun owners be saying about it? Would your reaction be any different?

BERG: Funny you mentioned that. Last week – the same day of the RIttenhouse verdict, in fact – Andrew Coffee IV was acquitted of murder, and attempted murder of police, when he shot at a no-knock raid on his house. No cops were killed, but Coffee was up for homicide in the death of his girlfriend was shot 10 times by a SWAT team. He was acquitted, for exactly the same reasons Rittenhouse was. He was a felon with a gun, so he might get some time for that, but he had nearly exactly the same self-defense case as Rittenhouse.

And we started finally getting some details about the acquittal of Jaleel Stallings, who returned fire at cops who were firing rubber bullets from a van without announcing their presence; Stallings fired back until the cops identified themselves (and beat the crap out of him), and got acquitted – again, for exactly the same reasons that Rittenhouse was.

Both were in reasonable fear of immediate death. Both used appropriate force. Both met their states self-defense rules. Both were acquitted.

And gun owners – presumably including many of us “white males” – supported them, as the facts got out, in their self-defense claims – albeit not necessarily Coffee’s having his illegal gun…

SILBERMAN: Mitch, Mitch, you’re missing my point.

BERG: Which is…?

SILBRERMAN: I asked if you white male gun owners would support a black man with a gun defending himself.

BERG: And I gave you two where the answer was “yes”,and that major media seemed to avoid covering. Including NPR.

SILBERMAN: You gave me concrete examples. I asked an abstract question. Please give me an astract answer…

BERG: Yes, we would and do…

SILBERMAN: …that confirms my prejudices.

And SCENE.

NOTE: This blog’s editing tool, “Word Press”, just keeps getting worse and worse. It ate the lede, literally, for this piece. We’ll try again.

I’ll cop to a certain amount of Schedenfreud, watching the array of reliably “progressive” and utterly un-funny late-night talk shows sinking beneath Greg Gutfeld.

Four years of Donald Trump made conventional late-night “comedy” indolent and lazy. Writers – many of them not very funny to begin with – seemed to think anything with Trump in the punch line would earn ’em a laugh. The “A-list” “talent” hosting these affairs – dismal talking heads like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, whose careers peaked at parodying “Red” media and watching women jumping on trampolines, respectively – aren’t helping much.

And few stories of of this decline make me happier than Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, which traded the (relative) wit and charm of Jon Stewart for…

…well, Trevor Noah. I’d normally tell a joke at this point at Noah’s expense, but it seems fitting to remain un-funny.

And between a lame host and “writing” that can’t quite find, well, any traction in any way, the Daily Show is sinking fast.

The “Daily Show” host is as reliably progressive as his peers, although he occasionally will smite his own side (at least far more than Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel). Still, his show’s most recent ratings snapshot isn’t bad

It’s abysmal

“Abysmal” may be charitable:

#Shrug.

How bad has it gotten?

Noah has sunk below the unctuous, priggish John Oliver. Below the hapless and abysmal Samantha Bee. Ahead of the pointless, Colbert-produced “Charlemagne Tha God”, and nothing more.

Will Hollywood learn?

It’s been 30 years, and newspapers still haven’t.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says — no mandate for you:

A federal appeals court has upheld its stay on President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with at least 100 employees.

In a 22-page ruling on Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was “fatally flawed,” and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from enforcing the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.

OSHA shall “take no steps to implement or enforce the mandate until further court order,” the ruling stated.

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The mandate, which was supposed to take effect Jan. 4, requires business with at least 100 employees to mandate their workers get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.

Two predictions:

• Biden and co. will ignore the court ruling; and
• The chorus of MSM scolds will try to justify whatever Biden does. Constitutional crises are so 2020, doncha know.

And to think some say the “elite” media is utterly delusional:

I mean, I get the theory – it’s not quite the puffery it appears to be at first glance. A media that conscientiously checks and balances government is, in fact, vital – not only to democracy, but to the functioning of a free society.

Quick example: In the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a place with both a relatively free economy and a relatively free press; the market evens out the economic distortion, and a free-ish media allays the panic-hoarding and the corruption, that are behind most modern famines.

Now – looking at the shortages creeping up around us today, do you think our media could be doing a better job of reporting on the causes?

As opposed to puffing up the Administration -and themselves?

The Kyle Rittenhouse case – involved in jury instrucitons today, and going to final attorney summations today – is plenty complicated, but about some fairly simple questions:

• Did Rittenhouse instigate or participate in instigating two different deadly-force incidents in which he used lethal force on four people, with two dead, one seriously injured, and one missed (who has disappeared from public view)?
• Was his fear of death or great bodily harm reasonable?
• Was the threat to his life immediate?
• Was his response reasonable – enough to end the attack on him?
• DId he make a reasonable effort under the circumstances to disengage?

Proving or disproving those five points for two incidents and four shootings has taken eight days of testimony and over a year of pre-trial wrangling – all very complicated – but the questions themselves are fairly simple.

But as far as the media and the large culture are concerned, this trial isn’t really about the facts of the case.

This case is about America’s tribes – the “four Americas” that George Packer talked about last summer – projecting their views of each other onto each other via a teenager who jumped into the deep end of the pool head-first.

“Smart” America, the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton crowd, see in Rittenhouse the bitter gun-clinging Jeezuz freak they picture that other tribe of Americans being; they earnestly exclaim “Nobody needs a gun like that” (ignoring the fact that four people tried to kill him). They think Rittenhoue is an intellectual symbol of all they detest about that other America. This includes most, but not all, media coverage; Big Media has cast its lot with “Just America”, and it shows in much of the coverage.

“Real” America seems. him as a lone sentinel of freedom, fighting back against the (politically favored, socially immunized) mob that is ravaging our centers of thought and commerce (and Kenosha). A kid from bedrock America, good and true, a bone to be chewed by a “blue” culture and media (ptr) who are siding with the rioters

“Free” America sees this as another show trial, like Bernard Goetz, a symbol of a state run amok that is actively crushing liberty.

“Just” America, naturally, sees Rittenhouse, the person and the case, as a symptom of “white supremacy” and the base, violent nature of the army of straw cis-men they face.

Indeed, with few exceptions, the higher the social status of the person commenting on Rittenhouse, the less their commentary actually has to do with the shootings in Kenosha or the facts at trial.

Everyone and everything in our society today is a metaphor, it seems.

This blog was founded primarily to lend my small, relatively insignificant voice to pointing out the growing bias and ethical turpitude the mainstream media.

That was in 2002 – a much more innocent time, relatively speaking.

As we’ve documented the proceedings in the Rittenhouse trial, I’ve noted the scabrous, depraved slant in the coverage.

Someone actually put ’em in the same place:

Local media is no better; most ran headlines similar to the above during Monday’s proceedings – only Channel 11 made a quick headline reference to the fact that Grosskreutz incriminated himself and upheld Rittenhouses self-defense claim against him (without saying it in as many words, naturallly).

Public media? NPR and MPR this morning ran a report from Wisconsin Public Radio about yesterday’s proceedings that focused on a dispute over whether the owner of the used car lot where the incident started did or did not pay, or even ask, civilians to provide security – which will have no impact on the verdict, other than perhaps gulling any potentially dim jurors…

…and ignored the county Medical Examiner and photographer Nathan DeBruin, who largely upheld Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim.

I tend to give people the benefit of a doubt. Reporters aren’t largely lawyers. Many of them aren’t curious enough to go much past the press releases that seem to make up so much of one’s morning newscast.

But this goes way past ignorance, and given the amount of reliable information that is available, incompetence as well.

They are pushing a narrative; protesters good, protests mostly peaceful, resistance entirely depraved and motivated by white supremacy.

To the narrative, the battle is a reductionist cartoon with white hats on one side and MAGA caps on the other, counting on news consumers to be too dim to know the difference.

As the 2020 elections, the California recount, and the recent election in Austin Texas show, its not wrong.

Newsweek calls it an “attack”.

I think it’s more of a “pounce”.

We are told is that not enough Minnesota farmers are black.

Let’s talk “root causes“ for a moment; i’m also told thatvery few farmers in Norway, Sweden and Germany are black, either…

…I’m pretty sure the Secretary of Transportation is one of the Cabinet offices, like Education and Energy, that we could get rid of tomorrow and nobody would notice.

But with that said:

If Trump were still president, and Elaine Chao were sitting on the sidelines during a national crisis squarely involving (for better or worse) her corner of the bureaucracy, I’m pretty sure we’d be hearing about it.

By the way – during the nomination process, it seemed Buttigieg’s main qualification was that he was kind of a train geek as a kid. Too bad he wasn’t a ship geek, like me (and most rural North Dakotans).

…I really would like to know who those 36% are…

Even liberal Democrats are figuring out the “Moderate Joe Biden” image was a bill of goods. A canard. A gull for the gullible.

Baked wind.

…when Cillizza, of all people, devotes a column to “the utter radicalness of Joe Biden’s presidency,” maybe it’s time to acknowledge that Biden is trying to implement extremist policies considerably outside the mainstream. Biden’s initiatives, writes Cillizza, amount to a “massive outlay of federal spending” that “will add massive sums to the federal budget deficit.”

Of course, Cilizza was one of the people behind building the myth in the first place – meaning he’s either a PR flack or an idiot.

CBS News tales a break from its saturation coverage of the murder of Gabby Petito to bring up the elephant in the media room:

The discrepancy is even greater among missing women and girls. From January 1 to September 27, the number of Black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander women missing were a greater proportion of cases than their respective demographics nationwide.

Hm.

If only there were institutions, with satellites and transmitters and printing presses and cable systems and huge websites, staffed by, I dunno, a pseudo-monastic order of self-appointed high priests of information-relaying, to deal with this imbalance…

…but I believe what goes around, comes around.

Dr. Ana Navaro, celebrity physician of sorts, spends months wishing ghastly ill on the unvaccinated.

Dr. Ana Navaro on The View, last week:

Hope she gets better soon.

And yes, that means I am a better person than her.

A “Minnesota” Poll – which ,as we’ve noted in the past, has historically favored Democrats, sometimes to an absurd extent with deeply suspicious and one-sided patterns, even after numerous reboots and changes in management and pollsters – shows Governor Walz under water:

The crosstabs are even more ominous for Walz, and show President Biden to be a bit of a drag down-ticket.

Fearless predictions:

• The Strib, Channels 4, 9 and 11, and the rest of the media will switch into full PR mode for the DFL for the next 13 months. Indeed, they have; Esme Murphy’s interview with Jennifer Carnahan – complete with the sort of on-air toenail-painting she normally reserves for DFLers – can be seen as nothing but an attempt to keep the MNGOP even more divided and impotent than normal.
• MPR will be a little more artful about it – but the output from the DFL’s opposition research will get prominent placement.
• And a quick reminder to Tom Hauser, perhaps the only genuinely detached journalist in Twin Cities TV or print news: drapes don’t have shoes.

I’m going to put a pin in this.

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds’s approval rating has been moving up well into positive territory.

Current polls in the Des Moines register show 53% of Iowans approve of her job, while 43 do not – which, at +10, pretty decent ratio in this very polarized society.

The article in the Des Moines Register is actually fairly comprehensive about reporting the story.

With one exception.

Go ahead, read it.

In what paragraph this very favorable story is the governors party mentioned?

Answer below the jump.

I haven’t written here recently (sorry, Mitch!), mostly because I did a fair amount of traveling in August. I attended my high school reunion in the wilds of Wisconsin, then a week later headed east to a family wedding in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio (highly recommended, by the way).

In the course of my travels, I spent time in six different states — Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Given that the howling over the dread Delta Variant has been in full effect for much of the summer, I was particularly interested in what I would see in my travels. Were people paying attention to the renewed demands for masking and social distancing? Were the entreaties of the Powers That Be having any effect?

Not a chance.

My high school reunion had over 100 attendees, a good result for a class with 144 surviving members. Classmates returned to my Wisconsin home town from California, Washington state, Colorado, Maryland, and New York, among other places. One classmate arrived masked, but took his mask off about 15 minutes into the festivities. The venue was a local brewery with a beer hall and the entire event was indoors. My masked classmate was the only person I saw wearing a mask all weekend, outside of some of the staff at the hotel. Social distancing? Not much of that, either — as you would expect at a high school reunion, it was hugs galore.

The following week was the family wedding; we took a convoluted path so we could pick up our college-age daughter, who attends school in Missouri. We stopped in Waterloo, Iowa, for lunch — not a mask in sight. We got gas in Hannibal, Missouri — no masks at all. Our overnight hotel was in downstate Illinois — again, no masks or social distancing in sight, and a full buffet breakfast available. We stopped for lunch in Indiana — again, no masks anywhere. We gassed up again on the Indiana/Ohio border, in a town that looked like nothing had changed since 1978. No masks. We reached our destination — no masks at the hotel. We had an out-of-town guest reception — saw every face in the place.

The wedding the following day was wonderful — joyous, raucous, with an open bar and food trucks from Columbus for the meal. There were probably 250 people in attendance; not a soul was wearing a mask. It was an outdoor event, but if social distancing was a factor, no one seemed to realize it. Nothing changed on the return trip. No mask? No problem!

Over this past weekend, we attended the Great Minnesota Grease Together. Everyone had to mask up on the shuttle buses, but once we were at the fair, mask wearing was about 1%, even in the queues for a Sweet Martha bucket before leaving the fairgrounds.

We are reminded daily the Delta Variant is still in full swing, an implacable foe, with future variants lined up like planes in a holding pattern at O’Hare; Mu is coming next, and all the other letters of the Greek alphabet are getting ready to ravage the countryside, so many that we’re likely to run out of letters eventually. Presumably another naming convention waits in the wings — perhaps future variants can be named after Kentucky Derby winners (the “Seattle Slew Variant” perhaps), assuming we can independently verify that neither the horses nor their jockeys ever used Ivermectin. As anyone with a television or a smart phone knows, the hectoring and self-congratulatory moral tutelage continue unabated, all of it fact-checked, verified, or otherwise given the J.D. Power award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

But you know what? Even after a summer of harangues and a phalanx of Tik-Tok Cassandras, people are doing as they please, at least here in flyover land. 

Yes, yes, everything I’m presenting here is anecdotal, but current behaviors are easy to observe and if a skeptic made a similar sojourn, the skeptic would see the same things. There will remain a cohort of those who follow every word and every directive from Drs. Fauci, Osterholm and their colleagues. Most readers of this feature likely see social media posts featuring our bien pensant  betters dutifully wearing their masks and keeping a yardstick or two between them as they struggle to take a selfie. And that’s fine — let your freak flags fly!

In the end, though, it’s highly likely the Safety Dance is over, unless our betters are willing to force compliance. What’s been happening in Australia has given me pause, but mandates and lockdowns will be difficult to enforce. And our betters know it.

Rep. Matt Gaetz exonerated of allegations of sex trafficking.

He was the victim of an extortion attempt:

Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has been exonerated after 62-year-old Stephen Alford was recently indicted by the Department of Justice for extortion.

“Stephen M. Alford did knowingly and willfully devise, and intent to devise, a scheme to defraud and for obtaining money and property by means of material false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and for the promise of executing such scheme, did cause, and attempt to cause, a wire communication to be transmitted in interstate commerce,” the indictment states.

So, all you Democrats in the comment section (you know who you are) who were measuring the drapes in a Supermax cell for Gaetz? Anything to say?

By the way – Rep. Gaetz’s father, Don…

…was a student of my father’s, back in Rugby, ND, back when I was a toddler.

I’m not gonna claim it gives me absolute moral authority or anything.