Category: media and media people

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media and media people

The Itch to Edit

Glenn Greenwald

There is a place in this world for editors, but not for censors. 

What’s the difference?

Ask Glenn Greenwald: “editors should be there to empower and enable strong, highly factual, aggressive adversarial journalism, not to serve as roadblocks to neuter or suppress the journalism.”

This is from Greenwald’s statement, this week, about his resignation from The Intercept. 

Greenwald co-founded the online journalistic platform in 2013, with the proviso that he could publish what he wanted with minimal interference. But slowly, over time, the editors he and his co-founders put in place have flouted the spirit as well as (Greenwald insists) the letter of those original agreements. So much so that they refused to publish a piece by Greenwald unless he removed “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.”

Greenwald has published that “censored” article on Substack, a platform you may be familiar with for publishing Greenwald’s fellow leftist journo, Matt Taibbi.

This fracas is not a public issue, in one sense. Greenwald lost control of an institution he set up. That’s between him and that institution and all their lawyers.

But it does show the extent to which “the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of [Greenwald] being censored by [his] own media outlet are . . . the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom.”

We can understand why they might desperately itch to hourly edit the Twitterer in Chief. But it is a bit harder to understand that while they complain Trump has broken with established “norms,” they themselves violate long-established norms of their own profession.

I mean journalism.

Not propaganda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Babylon Bee in Facebook’s Bonnet

H.L. Mencken, satire, free speech

Would the likes of H.L. Mencken and Jonathan Swift be free to say much on the “open” platforms of modern social media — that is, before being suspended, blocked, demonetized, stomped?

Depends.

Imagine: 1920s-vintage tweets by Mencken lambasting literary Puritanism and “chiropractic” or 1720s-vintage tweets by Swift pummeling prejudice against poor people — neither would likely inspire high-tech gendarmes to swoop in swinging their truncheons very immediately.

President Trump would also be an acceptable target.

But let HLM or JS skewer Democratic Party panjandrums, and the skill of the skewering would constitute the first bill of indictment. Especially during the last days of a presidential election.

As the often funny and spot-on Babylon Bee has learned, plenty of faux-high-minded rationalizations would be spouted from Twitter, Facebook, and Google mouthpieces as the social media behemoths go about suppressing the satiric discourse . . . as if scripted by satirists!

Thus, Facebook has just demonetized the Bee for “inciting violence.” And how was this violence incited? By spoofing the silliness of a senator.

Are such suppressors of satire somehow led by — say — an invisible hand to . . . self-satirize?

Apparently, yes.

But what is the answer to invidious discrimination by “neutral” platforms?

Andrew McCarthy of National Review is not alone in wondering whether the giant tech firms are abiding by the terms of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects them from prosecution for the speech of others on their “open” platforms. But maybe the bottom line is . . . we should just outlaw punch lines. 

They’re pretty painful if you’re the one getting punched. I mean, c’mon, man. “Punch” line? Pretty violent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Twitter’s Election Interference

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Twitter, censorship,

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube . . . they sucked us in by pretending to be non-biased platforms for everybody, yet now suppress content that chiefly rubs against one set of clients, supporters of the Democratic Party.

The current case regards the water-damaged computer of (reportedly) Hunter Biden, the content of which reached the New York Post by way of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. But the bigger story is that Twitter won’t allow links to the Post’s reporting, going so far as to lock the Post’s primary account; Facebook has also tried to suppress the story. 

Now it’s blowing up everywhere.

It’s bad for the Bidens: emails suggest the former Vice-President played more of a role than previously claimed in what has always looked improper — no, corrupt — except to most mainstream media.*

No wonder, then, that we hear calls for government regulation of social media.

Shivers down my spine.

But what I have not heard? Giving Democrats a dish of what they love: federal campaign finance law.

Does not social media’s clearly uneven content suppression amount to material support for one set of political candidates over others? Why not stick Democrats with their own beloved regime?

But great minds think alike: while proofreading the above, I found a tweet by Lee Spieckerman, a Texas media specialist: “The @TheJusticeDept should immediately begin investigating @jack [Twitter’s CEO] for illegal in-kind campaign contribution to @JoeBiden.”

While I oppose campaign finance regulation, we must not** let such regulations only be used by one side against the other. 

Yet maybe if we make the threat, social media will come to its senses, and Democrats will see the error of McCain-Feingold.

Too crazy? Or the right amount of 2020 crazy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* A state-connected Chinese bank and a well-connected Russian woman lathered Hunter up with millions and billions of dollars for only one plausible reason: his father’s position in our government. Hunter Biden joined that Ukrainian oil company board after Joe Biden became point-man for our country’s Ukrainian policy.

 ** In the past, I have addressed this notion of applying bad regulations equally, including campaign finance laws specifically.

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Running from “Riot”

War is Peace, doublespeak, Orwell, riot, language, propaganda

Whenever it got started — ancient Sumer, maybe — doublespeak is linguistic legerdemain, a sad sign of modern times.

Consider the Associated Press’s recent pronouncement about the word “riot.” Use the meeker word “unrest,” the stylebook editors suggest. “Unrest is a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt.”

Nothing like vagueness and timidity to make reporting as crisp and specific as possible.

The AP adds: “Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used . . . to stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s.”

Why the new recommendation? 

Well, all that . . . rioting by the swaths of rioters raises the question — if you regard the rioting as politically inconvenient — how not to report it.

Of course, one could consistently say both that “policing and the law should be reformed in such-and-such a way” and that “people should not destroy the property and lives of others.” Moreover, violating the rights of others should have a social cost. Criminal activity should be stigmatized. There is a major difference between protesting injustice and committing injustice.

Orwell defined doublethink, the method and goal of doublespeak, as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Whether a mind can actually do this is debatable. But disguising from oneself and others what we can all see is one way people try.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Train or Dumpster?

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Presidential, Debate

If you sent Trump into a meeting with Xi Jinping, you’d worry that Trump might say something that maybe he shouldn’t. But you wouldn’t have to worry that China’s warlord would go “Wo-ho-ho! Would you sign this? And drink this?!?!” 

With Biden, well, you would worry, no?

That’s my prime takeaway of Tuesday’s terrible debate, which is near-universally described as a “train wreck” or “dumpster fire.” 

My “meta” take is that the debate format itself was doomed to derail or blow up in flames (depending on metaphor).

It started out with a reasonable “two minutes for you; two minutes for you” method, and then lurched into a free-for-all, with far too many interruptions and back-and-forth. 

You can tell when a moderator lacks control: he talks all the time. 

Chris Wallace talked too much. 

Did you notice that both debaters attempted to answer questions before they had been fully formulated? Once, twice, thrice . . . at first you wonder, “Hey guys, can you calm down a bit?” 

Of course,

  • it is hard to calm down in those situations, and
  • at a certain point you realize the problem lies with the person asking the questions.

Why, pray tell, is there a 62-part interrogative barrage?

To allow the questioner to sneak in something tangential but of a “gotcha” nature, of course — an element of some media-spun controversy. 

Must we select the moderator by sortition?

More structure seems a good idea. And gain the ability to turn off microphones.

Or do the opposite: Put both men in a studio all alone* with live mics and let’s see if they could negotiate the 90 minutes like adults. They might learn something.

And so might we.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Maybe a couple security guards, too, just in case.

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“Despacito” Desperation

Joe Biden, election, pander

When Hillary Clinton talked about carrying hot sauce around in her handbag, on the popular Breakfast Club show featuring the annoyingly monickered Charlemagne Tha God, did anyone believe her? It was such an obvious and shameless ploy to get African-Americans to see her as “relatable.” For Mrs. Clinton, however, that was ‘a bridge too far.’

Now Joe Biden provides the cringe.

“I just have one thing to say,” Biden informed his audience at an event celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Looking down at his phone, he struggled for a moment. “Hang on here.”

And then he played a song. “Despacito,” which means “Slowly.”

Try not to think too much about this, for the song is a little sexually suggestive. The Daily Wire reprints a translation of the lyrics, for your disgust or delectation. 

First element of cringe: It was an obvious play for Latino sympathy. The song itself had nothing to do with anything other than that it was a popular song from “the community”  When you are this pandering, this patronizing, this transparent about your play to the cliché, what kind of respect do you hope to get?

Second element: It’s such a desperation move — with the Florida Spanish-speaking vote in jeopardy. Cuban-Americans, especially, are turned off by the Democrats’ move further left, having themselves left Cuba to come to American freedom. And the generally woke-socialist mindset of the Biden-Harris team (or is it Harris-Biden?) is a bit hard to take for the generally culturally conservative folks hailing from the south.

When will Democrats try authenticity again?

Third element: Assuming riots and conflagrations aren’t precisely that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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