Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture media and media people

Objectivity’s So Passé

media, bias, objectivity

“Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” James Bovard headlined his latest column. 

At issue? Yet another call for journalists to abandon objectivity, and, as Bovard puts it, “take sides on the barricades.” This time it comes from Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who suggests reporters use a “‘pro-democracy’ frame.” 

But as Mr. Bovard explains: “Most Washington journalists reflexively presume that being pro-government is the same as being pro-democracy.” 

And even worse, when differentiated, “most Washington press poohbahs show more affection for Leviathan than democracy.”

For instance, “The Washington Post devotes far more newshole to publishing leaks from FBI officials,” he points out, “than to exposing FBI abuses.”

Of course, activist journalists might frame “democracy” in their own way or choose to advance another cause.

“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice,” argued Stanford Communications Professor Ted Glasser during last year’s presidential contest, “and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Howard University Communications Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones of New York Times’ 1619 Project infamy advocates that “all journalism is activism,” and condemns “even-handedness, both sideism.”

Five years ago this month, during the Trump vs. Clinton presidential campaign, The New York Times offered readers a front-page commentary wherein former media columnist Jim Rutenberg argued that America’s news hounds must “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using” and become “oppositional” to candidate Trump.

Though Mr. Trump triggered massive media partisanship, which continues to worsen, it is not new. Indeed, at this point, with the public’s trust in media flushing into the toilet bowl of history, objectivity would seem almost transformational.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Missing Fathers

father, father's day

Remembering my dad and father-in-law, who both passed away several years ago; being with my adult children, and two grandchildren, who were all pretty nice to me; and seeing friends and relatives celebrate their dads — Father’s Day was wonderful.

In the real world, folks know how precious and important fathers are. 

But yesterday morning, I was instead torturing myself with The Washington Post. Adorning the top half and more of the front-page of the Sunday “Outlook” section was a drawing of a kids’ party with a man delivering the birthday cake while a woman looks on from outside. 

Beneath the artwork, the headline reads: “Fatherhood reimagined.”

Why “reimagined”? 

Well, the paper offered two opinion columns under that banner. One, entitled, “Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are,” noted that “40 million at-home DNA tests have been sold, and hundreds of thousands of people . . . have gotten the news that the man they thought of as Dad is not their genetic father.”

I moved on to the second essay. “I wanted to be a better husband. So I planned my kid’s birthday party,” read the headline, the bad news in the sub-title: “As a psychologist, I knew men did less ‘mental labor,’ but I didn’t see my own shortcomings.”

I suppose fathers have ample room for improvement, but cannot we celebrate, or merely discuss, even for a day, the positive side of fatherhood? The relentless carping suggests not a penchant for improvement but something approaching an anti-fatherhood narrative.

Searching The Post for more on “fatherhood reimagined,” the second item is Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father.’” Back in 2017, I addressed Smith’s misguided argument that, essentially, in a super-charged government-welfare state, absent dads would not really be missed.

I miss my dad. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Thankfully, late in the day, The Post reported, “D.C. motorcade celebrates role of Black fathers on Father’s Day.” Hope!

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Day Off, Absurdity On

In the days of his on-air reign, Bill O’Reilly would make much hay of the so-called “war on Christmas.” One common retort among O’Reilly’s detractors was to scoff: “there is no ‘war on Christmas’; the old grump is just over-reacting to a rising tide of inclusive good manners” — the idea being that wishing a more vague but all-inclusive “Happy Holidays,” instead of a specific “Merry Christmas,” was being kind to Jews, Muslims, atheists, those who do not celebrate the ancient Christian holiday.

However much sense this strategy may have once made, nowadays it seems an absurd ploy: political correctness being so widespread, even domineering, that it extends deep into the minutia of life.

How deep? Just as the Confederate monument iconoclasm extended from General Lee back to Presidents Washington and Jefferson, now the spurning of traditional holidays reaches out beyond Christmas.

“The school board of Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey has decided to do away with named holidays on the academic calendar,” writes Samuel Chamberlain at The New York Post. “Now holidays like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as Jewish holy days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will simply be listed as ‘day off.’”

Behind this? The notion that the posited discomfort and possible offense taken by any person of a “marginal group” should completely override the conventions of a community’s traditional in-group. 

But where does it end? With less knowledge of others’ traditions, less understanding, and therefore less harmony among groups . . . including marginalized groups.

That couldn’t be the plan, could it? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A-word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a-word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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family / mind / JG

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education and schooling ideological culture social media

Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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De-colonize Our Music?

music, freedom

Music is, arguably, the crowning artistic achievement of our civilization. 

It grew out of many folk and ecclesiastical practices, but one of the great innovations that allowed both Bach and The Beatles, Beethoven and Broadway, Bartok and “beats,” is the theory of music. 

Which rests on that great innovation, musical notation.

Not my area of expertise, alas, but I tip my hat to the educators who know the physics and the art in precise and powerful ways.

Unfortunately, stupidly racist anti-racism has infected even music education. The latest example? The University of Oxford is considering a plan to get rid of teaching music through teaching notation.

“Sheet music is now considered ‘too colonial,’” explains The Telegraph, “while Beethoven and Mozart, and music curriculums in general, are believed to have ‘complicity in white supremacy.’”

While mainly an attack on classical music, our popular music rests upon a lot of basic western technique, too. The idea that musical notation is racist is itself bizarrely racist. Do these people think because whites invented musical notation, non-whites are oppressed by it? Yes, the opponents of western musical notation, who include “activist students” as well as “activist professors,” are apparently ashamed of a tradition focused on “white European music from the slave period.”

But until fairly recently, all civilization was “the slave period.” And Europe, which developed the tradition, wasn’t the world’s most slave-ridden society during the period of western music’s development: Africa and Asia were. 

Slavery is bad. Very bad. Freedom is good. Very good. But you don’t reject good things because they once upon a time touched bad things. We can have both freedom and music. 

And musical notation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from William Creswell

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Query Theory and “Microaggression”

microaggression, woke

“Microaggression” is the alleged sin of committing a verbal slip that the alleged victim, eager to be offended, aggressively interprets in the most invidious possible way. It’s one of many faddish notions used to rationalize the squelching of speech and to abrogate basic rights.

In October 2018, Kieran Bhattacharya, a medical student at the University of Virginia, attended a discussion on “microaggression.” He asked questions like: “Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”

Beverly Adams, an assistant dean, told him no, it isn’t, and the two argued about it for a bit.

Afterward, an organizer of the event, Nora Kern, filed a complaint against Bhattacharya that led to demands that he get counseling, and, ultimately, to his suspension. His protest was taken as proof that the complaint and demands made against him were justified.

Bhattacharya has sued the school for retaliating against him. His crime, so to speak, was nothing more than asking the wrong questions — or asking them wrongly. 

Even if he had asked them heatedly (which he denies), so what?

A district court says Bhattacharya has a point and is allowing his lawsuit to proceed: “Bhattacharya sufficiently alleges that Defendants retaliated against him. Indeed, they . . . suspended him from UVA Medical School, required him to undergo counseling and obtain ‘medical clearance’ as a prerequisite for remaining enrolled, and prevented him from appealing his suspension.”

Some kind of aggression is happening here, and it’s pretty macro.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Whitey Need Not Apply

UBI, black, white, slavery

“Oakland to give low-income residents $500 a month,” reads the headline, “no strings attached.”

Well, actually there may be just a little itty bitty filament attached to what CBS News calls “the latest experiment with a ‘guaranteed income,’ the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Though certainly not universal, “Oakland’s project is significant because it is one of the largest efforts in the U.S. so far, targeting up to 600 families,” notes CBS. It is different in another unique and important way . . . “it is the first program to limit participation strictly to Black, Indigenous and people of color communities.”

You read that right. 

But have no fear of excluding poor whites. The network immediately provided, “The reason: White households in Oakland on average make about three times as much annually than black households, according to the Oakland Equity Index.”

Even if accurate, how does this “on average” group statistic justify denying help to someone in poverty who is white? 

“It’s also,” CBS News informs, “a nod to the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the political movement that was founded in Oakland in the 1960s.” 

You see, the Black Panthers advocated for a basic guaranteed income or universal basic income. And so, since black people in a group with black in the name pushed the idea, it only logically follows that whites should be denied this assistance. Or, uh, hmm, er.

Oakland’s program is different in yet one more way: It is privately funded.

So, what’s the big deal?

Sure, people can privately send money to whomever they want, with whatever racial criteria they design. But, private folks may not create government-run programs that are racist even if they fund every penny of the cost.

This isn’t a pilot program for “guaranteed income” but for a racist America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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