Mitch, I wanted to write a novel like you, but I need professional help. The notes in parenthesis are the editor’s:
“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door. An Asian (RACIST) girl (SEXIST) about my age (AGEIST) stood (ABLE-IST) on the doorstep. She must have been shy (ASSUMPTION), she was holding a book against her chest the way girls do (SEXIST) and kept looking down looking at our feet (UNNECESSARY DETAIL). She was slender (FAT SHAMING) and short (HEIGHT-IST), with nice hair, dark (RACIST STEREOTYPE) and glossy, that fell around her face, hiding it (OFFENSIVE STEREOTYPE).”
Revised version:
“I was doing my homework when someone knocked on our door. A person stood there holding a book. The person had hair.”
I dunno – does it lose something in the translation?
Joe Doakes
And people ask why I made the villains in Trulbert the Methodists.
Conservatives, especially conservatives who are “out” critics of the mainstream media, get routinely accused of “hating” journalism. The late Nick Coleman was particularly, er, “acerbic” in his criticism of those who had the gall to criticize the news/industrial complex, claiming in one bout of hysteria that bloggers “wanted to kill the Strib”.
While we correctly savaged the Strib, and especially Coleman, on issue after issue, it was still baked wind. Self-government, small-“D” democracy, needs a functional, and above all trustworthy, media (among many other institutions) to survive.
And by “”trustworthy”, we mean “can be trusted to report the news, truthfully, regardless of its own institutional and individual political opinions.
In Europe, the media are pretty honest about their political points of view, on an editorial level; the Times of London and the Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right; Guardian and Die Zeit and Le Monde are all various degrees of left. You know the slant before you pick up the paper. You can account for it.
American media has built a myth of objectivity, or at least of being a so-called “neutral voice”, around itself; Minnesota Public Radio news even made “No Rant, No Slant” their motto for a while, and it’s not much different than the mythology American media built for itself over the past hundred years or so. In my freshman year journalism class,
And it’s never really been true. Some journos do in fact do their best to separate their personal views, of course – I’ve got nothing but respect for the best of them.
Many journalists also do their best, but inevitably reflect the fact that their entire frame of reference is left-of-center. Their education, their workplace, their social circle, are an ecosystem where some variety of The Left is the old, current and future Normal. When they confront a different point of view, they can seem a little like Jane Goodall venturing out among the gorillas.
And when things are chugging along like normal, who cares, right?
The New Abnormal . But then something pops up that threatens the order, and not in a good way. What then?
The media has been rightly seen as slanted to the left for close to fifty years. With the rise of talk radio and alternative news 30 years ago, you could sense that the “elite” media were starting to give up on the pretense of balance and detachment. The notion of the “neutral voice” has been
But with the election of President Trump, the floodgates got dynamited.
The “neutral voice”, isn’t.
“Oh, Mitch – you and your hyperbole”.
No. Not at all.
The Gatekeepers Speak: “On the Media” is a production of WNYC Radio in New York. It’s a public station, one of the flagship station in the National Public Radio chain. Like a lot of NPR productions, sometimes it’s excellent. Sometimes the smug rolls off it like fog off a loch.
And sometimes, it accomplishes its mission – which in the case of “On the Media”, is to serve as the exposed id of the “elite” media in this country.
With that in mind: this show was broadcast on December 1, 2016 – probably as fast as could be put together on NPR timelines. It had four segments:
The first gazed navel-ly about “how the media should cover President Trump“. Because conveying the facts and letting the audience make up their own mind was presumably not good enough anymore.
How talking about Trump “Normalizes” him – unless the media changes the rules when discussing him. This featured reprentatives, not from The Nation and Slate.com or Buzzfeed or Samantha Bee. No, they were from the NYTimes and Washington Post. That led to another segment…
And the media’s behavior in the three and a half years since has mapped to that template, as the media has grasped at every possible straw to try to “take down” the President.
We didn’t even need to get this leaked to us, like ‘Journo-list’ – although I suspect I may have been the only conservative listening to that groaningly pompous program, and I suspect that’s WNYC’s assumption as well.
TL:dr – At least some of the people at the apex of the “layers and layers of gatekeepers” have abolished the old rules of journalism, publicly but yet internally, as re Donald Trump.
The “elite” media’s entire coverage of Trump over the past four years, on every issue, has followed the template that’s suggested, sub rosa, in the four On the Media pieces above.
Will the rules change back when Trump leaves office? Of course not – the media had the same general attitude toward Republicans, conservatives and the issues of the right for a generation before 2016.
But the institutional imperative to use the media’s power toward political and social ends? That’s not going to end.
Distrust, but verify. And then, almost inevitably, if some smidgeon of partisan politics is involved, distrust some more.
In the statement, Klobuchar said [husband John] Bessler had a fever and was coughing up blood. He was checked into a hospital in Virginia and is receiving oxygen but is not on a ventilator.
“I love my husband so very much and not being able to be there at the hospital by his side is one of the hardest things about this disease,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
“While I cannot see him and he is of course cut off from all visitors, our daughter Abigail and I are constantly calling and texting and emailing,” she went on to state. “We love him very much and pray for his recovery. He is exhausted and sick but a very strong and resilient person.”
All these years pf campaign appearances and debates and fairground ops and every other kind of contact with her constituents, and I do not recall seeing any mention of John Bessier. Am I dense, or is the media softplaying his existence?
Or, for that matter their status (she’s in DC, he’s teaching law somewhere in Maryland)?
Speaking of Softpedaling: Ih this piece about John Bessier, the Channel 5 report helpfully finishes with this bit:
Klobuchar said she is working in the Senate to ensure Americans receive the help they need.
Sounds like reporter Rebecca Omastiak is bucking for campaign communications gig.
Minnesota’s Democrat congressional delegation sent a letter to Vice President Pence telling him it was unacceptable that doctors in our state didn’t have enough complete Corona virus test kits. Apparently, the test kits ship without an essential chemical and world-wide demand has been so high, there’s a shortage of the chemical. The law of supply and demand is unacceptable! Yeah? So roll up your sleeves and get to work, ladies. Start producing the chemical. Do something useful.
Or Shut The Hell Up and let the adults get back to work, dealing with the crisis as best they can with the tools at hand.
Joe Doakes
I’m wondering if episodes like this mean that Smith, Klobuchar, Craig, Phillips, McCollum, Omar and Peterson genuinely think the economy runs by command? (Don’t bet against that with Smith, McCollum and Omar). Or is it just election-year posturing?
During last Fridays press conference with Gov. Walz, the prospect of a statewide “Shelter In Place” order, rumors of which have been percolating for a while, got broached. The concept of “essential workers” – people who are allowed out and about without getting hassled – got broached.
Some were obvious – first responders, healthcare workers, people who work in grocery stores, pharmacies, in the supply chain, and similar businesses.
One of the reporters asked “and journalists?”
“Of course”, Walz responded, to a smattering of clubby chuckles.
But the questions keep popping up, especially on journos social media: they see themselves as genuinely essential.
Let’s ignore whether journalism is what journalists say it is, anymore – more on that in a piece coming up tomorrow morning.
The extent to which journos seem to need to think of themselves as class above and beyond the proles strikes me as a little unseemly.
I’m asking:
When you hear journalists scrambling to get themselves counted as “essential” workers, rather than mere lumpen proles, what jumps to mind?
— Mitch “Socially Distant” Berg (@mitchpberg) March 23, 2020
The four options in the poll strike me as about even.
Perhaps when this Covid flap is over, we can have a serious discussion about *every single thing* the modern left has to tell us about housing, transit and urban zoning and land use policy.
Mass Transit as it is today might not have actually been built as a contagion transmission mechanism – but if it had been, it’d be hard to see what they’d have done differently. I’m thankful my 18 months of daily use of the Vomit Comet (“Green Line”) didn’t coincide with a major pandemic – I’m pretty sure I caught a cold or two, and most likely the flu, from the train.
“There is ample documentation that mass gatherings can amplify and spread infectious diseases,” a World Health Organization analysis on “mass gatherings in the context of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza” stated. “Such infections can be transmitted during the mass gathering, during transit to and from the event, and in participants’ home communities upon their return.” The WHO recommended, “Those who are ill should be strongly encouraged to avoid air travel or other forms of mass transit.”
A 2013 “Guide for Public Transportation Pandemic Planning and Response” prepared for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program Transportation Research Board of the National Academies stated that “although some pandemic plans for transportation systems existed, there were limited resources and plans targeted to rural and small urban transportation systems … As a result, although some agencies had all-hazards response plans available, measures for pandemics were not included.”
Last month, the Brussels-based International Association of Public Transport, in its “Management of COVID-19 Guidelines For Public Transit Operators,” conceded that “Public transport systems have to be considered a high-risk environment due to: high number of people in a confined space with limited ventilation; no access control to identify potentially sick persons; a variety of common surfaces to touch (ticket machines, handrails, door knobs, etc.).” Still, it also called public transit “an essential service to be maintained as long as reasonable.” When does mass death become unreasonable, the WHO might be asked in regard to mass transit.
I suspect we’ll see it suppressed sooner than later, if we let it.
Likewise – making it impossible to find anything but “high density housing” (especially by zoning out all alternatives, which has the inevitable, “unintended” effect of jacking up housing prices, which leads to people doubling-up on roommates or living in less-healthy housing they can afford) has *got* to be the dumbest idea out there, if a “resilient” society is what you seek.
On a semi-related side note: I can imagine things more hellish than a couple of weeks of “social isolation” stacked on top of and next to other potentially-contagious people “socially isolating” themselves – but unless all those neighbors get along *really* well, it’s not as easy as you’d think.
I get that the Coronavirus is The End Of The World As We Know It. I watch the media so I’m fully informed. But I’m also puzzled by the behavior of Liberals. Went to the store yesterday, saw shoppers hauling carts full of bottled water. Wait – I thought plastic water bottles were killing the planet. I thought we were supposed to be using Nalgene or stainless steel. What are you Liberals doing with them? And I thought Cheryl Crow spoke for all you decent people: one sheet of TP per session, to save the trees that eat CO2 and thereby prevent global warming. There are 500 sheets on a roll of TP. You’ve got enough in that cart for 6,000 dumps. How long a siege are you preparing for? Joe Doakes
I keep trying to tell people – do your panic shopping a few years before the panic. It’s much easier.
Patrick Neville – a survivor of the Columbine Massacre, and a Colorado State Representative – is pushing a bill that’d allow qualified Colorado school staff to carry their legal firearms for self-defense:
“The only thing that is going to stop murderers intent on doing harm is to give good people the legal authority to carry a gun to protect themselves and our children,” Neville said in a statement, according to The Hill.
“More of my friends would still be alive today.”
The bill put forward by Neville, a Republican, would let teachers with concealed weapons permits carry guns at the state’s schools in an attempt to halt future shootings.
Neville introduced the same bill last year, which failed.
“Unfortunately, the current system continues to leave our children as sitting targets for criminals intent on doing harm,” he said.
Big Left, of course, only grants a platform to the right survivors.
But this sort of thing needs to be pushed in front of the public early and often.
The TL:dw version: A bunch of entitled, overpaid people blessed/cursed with fame, are virtue-signaling the rest of us by “singing” the worst song in pop music history [1] – a mewling paeon to socialism and atheism from a singer who himself became so embittered and disconnected from the world by his fame and wealth that it had become something of a cultural punch line before he was murdered and became the icon for the death of every baby boomer’s innocence – as they hole up in their Manhattan condos, California estates and rural getaways…
…as millions of people wonder how long their paychecks are going to keep coming, or if they will, and the rest of the country waits to see if the army of homeless that crowd California’s streets get completely ravaged by this new plague.
I think “ex-Beatle preference” is a key dispositive indicator of political outlook and personal attitude.
I suspect “progressives” prefer John Lennon. He was the angsty, prickly one, the one who seemed most prone to have a penchant for Sylvia Plath He died tragically, relatively young, and in the grand romantic tradition, illustrating and confirming the progressive’s innate hopelessness.
I’m going to guess conservatives trend toward the sunny, optimistic, irrepressible McCartney.
On Friday, when Minnesota had 14 cases of the virus, Governor Walz announced schools would remain open because health care workers needed daycare so they could go to work and fight the virus. On Sunday, when Minnesota had 35 cases of the virus, Governor Walz closed the schools except for children of health care workers who need daycare so they can go to work to fight the virus. Everybody else’s kids, stay home. But not to halt the spread of the virus – no, it’s to give administrators time to figure out how to teach kids who aren’t in school.
Basically, this is another “in service” week, when teachers and administrators try to recreate the wheel that Phoenix University already invented, what every home-schooled parent already uses: distance learning.
Now. In the middle of the pandemic. Now, you start thinking about the possibility of doing something different. Now, after all those years of criticizing and belittling home-schoolers as ignorant and fearful racists, afraid their kids will catch cooties from The Other; now, you’re adopting their methods without admitting they were right all along.
And the Twin Cities media praised keeping the schools open as bold leadership on Friday; and praised the decision to close the schools as bold leadership on Sunday; without ever mentioning the two decisions made two days apart are completely contradictory.
Here’s an alternate possibility. St. Paul teachers were on strike last week. If the governor had closed the schools, they wouldn’t have been paid. So they quick settled the strike and now they’re back to work at full pay when the schools close. Lucky for them, they settled. Almost as if they were tipped off.
As the city of Baltimore notches it’s fifth COVID-19 case, it’s mayor, Jack Young, has issued a plea to some of his most notable constituents; the city needs hospital beds for victims of the public health crisis, so please stop shooting each other.
No, seriously.
He really, really means it:
“I want to reiterate how completely unacceptable the level of violence is that we have seen recently,” Young said. “We will not stand for mass shootings and an increase in crime.”
“For those of you who want to continue to shoot and kill people of this city, we’re not going to tolerate it,” Young implored. “We’re going to come after you and we’re going to get you.”
I am no expert – like, the mayor of a city that’s been controlled by the Democrats for three generations – but something tells me that this should’ve been a priority before the city had a public health emergency, and if the city wasn’t “coming after and getting, criminals when times are relatively easy, the job is going to be just a little…
… well, Captain Obvious is going to skip straight over Major and jump straight to Lieutenant Colonel if he finishes that sentence, isn’t he?
It may turn out all for naught. But on the other hand, a very timely advance like that – almost deus ex machina, if not a maguffin – would be a wonderful break for the economy, wouldn’t it?
“Thanks to the Public Health Emergency I declared in January, more older Americans will be able to access healthcare they need from their home, without worrying about putting themselves or others at risk during the COVID-19 outbreak. Providers will be allowed to use everyday technologies to talk to telehealth patients, more telehealth services will be covered for millions more Medicare beneficiaries, and providers will be allowed to offer these telehealth benefits to Medicare beneficiaries at a lower cost than traditional services. From the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, President Trump has been knocking out every bureaucratic obstacle possible that stands in the way of a rapid and effective response. We are grateful to the hard work of those across HHS who put together these actions, and we’re grateful to American healthcare providers for working to take advantage of these options and continue their heroic work serving patients during the outbreak.”
What a week: liberals buying guns, people appreciating going to work, kids wanting to be back at school?
I’ve been saying for years – after a disaster, everyone becomes a conservative. Who knows?
Gas on Sunday at Sam’s Club was $1.98 per gallon. That’s the lowest I’ve seen in a long time.
Sure, it puts a couple extra bucks in my pocket. It also makes it possible for people to drive more, which creates global warming gases to kill the planet.
I’m saving money and have more freedom. That’s a bad thing.
I blame Trump
Joe Doakes 
This, and especially the ongoing slashers in regulation, certainly have their upsides.
It’s a shame it takes an international crisis to discover it.
First prediction: there will be a Coronavirus vaccine.
It may arrive sooner, it may arrive later. Probably somewhere in between. I have no idea.
But it’ll come rom a country with a relatively free market for healthcare. The US? Norway? Germany? I don’t know – but it’ll be someplace that hasn’t nationalized healthcare.
Feel free to mark my words on this.
Beyond that ?
Last week on Twitter, Scott “Dilbert” Adams wrote:
In the next two weeks we will witness a breathtaking degree of human ingenuity. It’s starting to bubble up now. The most capable among us are now fully engaged. That virus doesn’t know what’s coming for it. #WuhanVirus
The shortage of ventilators is the thing that’s terrifying people. The stories from Italy about doctors choosing who lives and who dies are pretty mortifying, especially if you have older relatives and family with lung conditions.
So people are innovating:
The doctor stresses this is a last ditch measure – to be used in cases where doctors are making life or death choices among 2-4 people at a time.
Despite the ongoing pandemic, spring break regulars are crowding beaches, bars, and other vacation hotspots along the gulf coast.
Many of them, being 20 somethings and ergo knowing everything, I have heard that people in their 20s always recover, and rarely get sick, from Covid19.
So they cavort about the gulf coast and the south Atlantic, doing what 20 somethings (who can afford to travel to the gulf coast for spring break, which for some reason was never something I or anyone I knew could actually do, and when the hell did this actually become a thing?) on vacation tend to do; hang out in bars, hang out in crowds, and jam together like a colony of penguins.
I saw the footage from Florida, South Padre Island, and New Orleans showing throngs of drunken, loudmouthed, teeming hordes of addlepated bobbleheads. The footage didn’t focus on the bartenders, hotel workers, Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts and retail and hospitality workers in the area, of course. But they will be catching the virus from the throngs of idiots they serve.
And, inevitably, passing it along to their friends, significant others, similes, people in stores – You know, the usual epidemic thing.
And inevitably, the virus will get past to the other great population along the gulf coast; retirees. People in their 60s through 90s. The people who are far and away the most susceptible to the ravages of Covid 19. 
Sorry to say, I am afraid there’s a solid chance of absolute carnage along the gulf coast. I hope I’m wrong.
On Friday, when Minnesota had 14 cases of the virus, Governor Walz announced schools would remain open because health care workers needed daycare so they could go to work and fight the virus.
On Sunday, when Minnesota had 35 cases of the virus, Governor Walz closed the schools except for children of health care workers who need daycare so they can go to work to fight the virus. Everybody else’s kids, stay home. But not to halt the spread of the virus – no, it’s to give administrators time to figure out how to teach kids who aren’t in school.
Basically, this is another “in service” week, when teachers and administrators try to recreate the wheel that Phoenix University already invented, what every home-schooled parent already uses: distance learning.
Now. In the middle of the pandemic. Now, you start thinking about the possibility of doing something different. Now, after all those years of criticizing and belittling home-schoolers as ignorant and fearful racists, afraid their kids will catch cooties from The Other; now, you’re adopting their methods without admitting they were right all along.
Joe Doakes
Public institutions, like education, or if nothing even more subject to “not invented here” syndrome than the private sector.
But since we are talking about revising “progressive” assumptions about the world?
Perhaps jamming everyone into “high density housing” isn’t the best strategy for (and yes, progressivism is in the midst of corrupting this term as well) “Resiliency”..
I’m trying to imagine people in long rows of apartment buildings, “socially isolated” from their neighbors but unable to escape them, either.
Dan Crenshaw on the “why” that our media just can’t seem to bring itself to put out there:
Scoring cheap political points is easy, but also dishonest. In the US, our tests for coronavirus have been delayed and difficult to get. We recently addressed the problem by loosening regulations.
But why’d it take so long? Who is really to blame?
Some people say “the Coronavirus is a very real thing, and it’s going to kill a lot of people, and we’re past the point of no return on a whole lot of misery already [more later today], and we really need to clamp down on social interaction for a while to try to get it under control and save a whoooole lot of lives”.
Others say “The media and left (pardon the redundancy) are using this as one of the crises that Rahm Emanuel told them never to waste, to try to undercut the Administration, draw attention away from the dumpster fire that is their endorsement process, and jam down funding and civil rights restrictions they favor”.
Still others: “Our bureaucracy – which was started neither by Trump nor Obama – has completely crapped the bed on things like developing and distributing tests. And our “elite” media, which seems to be increasingly a PR firm for the establishment, hasn’t done jack to hold them, or the creeping socialism that has presided over this catastrophe, accountable – which is supposedly their mandate”.
1/As a San Francisco resident and business owner, I’m wondering—can I trust the health judgments of leaders who let thousands live on the streets in their filth? And if we are now getting homeless into shelter, why couldn’t that have happened earlier? Doesn’t their health count?
Emergencies happen. Emergency powers exist for a reason (and we will get to that today or tomorrow).
But when citizens – taxpayers, business owners – can expect the government to always side with lawlessness, against them, how is popular self-government supposed to survive?
It can’t.
I do, sincerely, wonder how this nation can carry on as one big entity. Either it needs to re-embrace federalism (and neither major party is really on board, at least not nationally) or confront the notion that authoritarianism is creeping in (and no, not from the Bad Orange Man) in ways that this small-d democracy was never supposed to allow and decide if we’re OK with that…
…or re-evaluate the whole “unbreakable union of 50 states” thing.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed (late last week):
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control recommended elderly patients stock up on medicine in case the virus causes a supply chain disruption.
I called my pharmacy to stock up. The insurance company won’t let me, it’s too early, I still have pills left.
Yes, but I’m trying to get ahead of the supply chain disruption. I need a refill now. Plus stay on my existing refill schedule. This 30 days supply is just to put in the back pocket for emergencies
The doctor is reluctant to write the prescription, since I already have one and an additional 30 days supply now does nothing to solve the supply chain problem, it’s simply empties the warehouse and moves the problem forward in time.
The experts recommend it, she doesn’t want to write it, he doesn’t want to pay for it, and they don’t want to fill it. Gee, I can’t imagine why the public is confused about who to believe, and in a panic over what to do about it.
Looks like I’m going online. How do you spell metformin in Mexican?
Joe Doakes
While some of the administration’s moves on regulation over this past few days have, perhaps helped this, the bureaucracy – private and especially public – has not covered itself in glory so far during this crisis.
Thanks to everyone that’s donated so far! I appreciate it more than I can express.
———-
After 18 years of doing this blog, I’m continually humbled and amazed that people keep coming by. I say I’d keep doing it even if I still had five readers a day (as I did, back through most of 2002) – but seeing people actually keep coming back certainly makes it even more fun.
I stopped by the Roseville Target yesterday morning on my way back from another errand. It was 7:50 AM.
I don’t need toilet paper – a 12 pack tides me over for good long while, now that I have no kids at home – but I took a stroll past the paper products aisle. There were maybe a couple dozen packages of toilet paper scattered about the place. Call it 95% empty.
I thought “must’ve been a busy night“.
Then I talked to one of the girls at the coffee stand. She said trucks came in mid-evening last night and completely restocked the toilet paper (and the produce, which was picked pretty clean last night). And they sold out again before closing at midnight.
And then, more trucks came in, and restocked the paper products overnight – and what I saw was what had gone out the door between opening and 8 AM.  she chuckled recalling that they were 50 people in line to get in when the store opened at 7 AM.
So the good news is, apparently, the supply chain is working as well as it can. And if you own Target stock, you are going to be very happy next quarter.
In fact, I noticed a few tweets like this from young “socialist” fops over the past few days:
I tried to ask Mr. Ackerman if stores in Venezuela were upstocking several times a day between bouts of empty shelves. For some reason – dare I say, “unexpectedly” – I haven’t heard back.
The bad news? There are a lot of panicky ninnies out there.
