Category: media and media people

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Accountability media and media people

Democracy Thrives in Out-of-Court Settlement

Nick Sandmann, MAGA, Washington Post

Nick Sandmann has won again. The Washington “Where Democracy Dies in Darkness” Post has agreed to settle out of court with young Mr. Sandmann — for an undisclosed amount. We learned this from Sandmann himself, on Twitter:

On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit. Thanks to @ToddMcMurtry & @LLinWood for their advocacy. Thanks to my family & millions of you who have stood your ground by supporting me. I still have more to do.

CNN settled in January. Suits against ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC are still pending.

At issue?

“The Washington Post falsely reported in 2019 that a group of Covington Catholic High School students, including Sandmann, harassed a man named Nathan Phillips with taunts and racial slurs,” explains Beckett Adams in The Washington Examiner. “The students did no such thing, as video evidence available at the time made clear. In fact, footage of the incident shows the teens were accosted not only by Phillips, who clearly sought out a confrontation, but they were also being harassed by a nearby gathering of members of the racist, anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelites. The Washington Post chose to give glossy, glowing news coverage to the Black Hebrew Israelites, a known hate group, all while portraying the Covington Catholic students (some of whom were black) as racists.”

Enflamed by the Post and CNN and other outlets, a self-righteously woke online mob jumped on Sandmann and other students — included were many calls for violence, and much harping on the fact the kids wore MAGA hats.

If ever a lawsuit of this kind made sense, this one did.

But will these media outfits learn their lesson?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people U.S. Constitution

The Mobs Attacked and Defended

Portland, riots, protests, Ted Wheeler

It’s “mobocracy” — the riots in major cities around the nation, but especially in Portland, Oregon, where the president sent federal agents. Local police had stood back for weeks as Democratic politicians — such as Joe Biden — referred to the rioters as “peaceful protesters.” Even as the mobs lit fires in the streets, defaced property, and attempted to break into government buildings.

Buck Sexton, writing at The Hill, makes the obvious linkage between the “anarchists” and the “Democratic” Party. 

But Sexton doesn’t really answer the key questions: “Why are anarchists terrorizing Portland? What was the real purpose of the Seattle ‘Capital Hill Autonomous Zone’? Why were ‘Occupy City Hall’ protesters allowed to fight with police in lower Manhattan for a month, until officers cleared out their encampment on Wednesday?” Sexton rejects the official reasons give by the movements’ apparent leaders, but doesn’t go very far beyond Democratic Party attempts to leverage the riots.

Which may at least offer amusement. “The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler assured the mob as he put on goggles. “So if they’re launching the tear gas against you, they’re launching the tear gas against me.” But that same night, his security detail “scuffled” with “protesters” and his own police department threatened to use tear gas and impact weapons on the incendiary horde.

Is this really about legitimate protest, as Biden insists?

Fighting federal fascism, as Democrats and many others insist?

Americans are all-in for criminal justice reform and the right to protest. Many, me included, have peacefully taken to the streets in recent weeks.

But there is nothing peaceful about assault, arson, property destruction.

And Democrats who aim to use the fracas to beat Trump in November may find that ‘playing with fire’ . . . burns. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people

The Four Froms

freedom, positive, negative, undefined

Liberty was a straightforward concept.

Once. 

Then The New York Times got ahold of it back in April with a featured editorial: “The America We Need.” 

“Our society was especially vulnerable to this pandemic,” the paper alleges, “because so many Americans lack the essential liberty to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.”

The fight against the Wuhan virus has been deficient due to a deficit of . . . “essential liberty”? 

This isn’t the Merriam-Webster definition of “liberty,” i.e. the “quality or state of being free” or “freedom from physical restraint.” Dump that retro “narrow and negative definition,” advises the editorial; it represents an “impoverished view of freedom” that “has perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities and kept the poor trapped in poverty.”

Freedom of speech, religion, the press, etc., are all negative. Trade them in for a “broad and muscular conception of liberty: that government should provide all Americans with the freedom that comes from a stable and prosperous life.”

Prosperity for all! For free! Come on down!

Noting the “extraordinary nature of the crisis,” the editorial calls for “permanent changes in the social contract” to take the nation “beyond the threadbare nature of the American safety net.”

Free stuff from the government, housing, healthcare — all very positive ideas of liberty. 

But what about these positives’ negatives?

“A government big enough to give you everything you want,” former President Gerald Ford once explained to Congress, “is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

The cost of “positive freedom” is our freedom from dependence, from interference, from coercive control, from . . . oppression.

Positively negative, if you ask me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration adapted from Liberty Leading the People (La liberté guidant le people) by Eugène Delacroix (1830)

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Indecent Exposure

Joy Reid, MSNBC, homophobia,

Next week, when Joy Reid begins hosting her new primetime MSNBC program, “The ReidOut,” I will not be watching.

But not because of her progressivism.

You see, those progressive bona fides “were called into question in 2017,” a New York Times feature on Reid’s promotion to cable TV’s evening lineup notes, “when homophobic posts and comments from ‘The Reid Report,’ a blog she wrote in the mid- to late 2000s, resurfaced on social media.”

When those writings were discovered, Reid publicly claimed her blog’s archive must have been hacked. 

“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online . . . blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,” her attorney told CNN in 2018.

But the offending posts were captured by the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, and were obviously not the result of a hack. 

No one bought her dodge. 

“Later,” as The Times puts it, “she acknowledged that there was little evidence that the posts had been faked.” 

“Little” . . . meaning zero.

The Times also refers to Reid’s “lengthy apology” to viewers. “The person I am now is not the person I was then,” she offered. But she never owned up to writing the “hateful” posts. 

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things,” she argued, “because they are completely alien to me.” 

But she did write them. And lied to the FBI, apparently, to hide the truth.

In a time of unbridled shaming and social-media-mob recriminations for any lack of keeping up with the dominant wokeness, how is Reid able to insult gays and (to top it off) everyone’s intelligence with such bald-faced lies?

And to be rewarded with a primetime cable TV gig. Lying works!

That’s indecent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs media and media people

Bolsonaro’s Little Flu

CNN, Covid, Coronavirus, Bolsonaro,

“I know that nobody can recover from dying, but the economy not working leads to other causes of death and suicide,” said Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro regarding his reopening of his country’s economy. “We have suffered very harsh criticism in this regard, but today it shows that we are right. The fact that I am infected shows that I am a human being like any other.”

Some of that strikes this reader as not well put, but there are two important points: shutting down commerce does lead to horrendous consequences, especially for the poor, and . . . President Bolsonaro — who is often characterized as a Brazilian Trump-like figure — has been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and has COVID-19, if in mild form.

He has taken hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the much-disputed treatment. 

The news report from CNN mentions his diagnosis and immediately follows it up with “after months of downplaying the virus.”

Now, downplaying threats is one way of handling them, for psychological reasons: sometimes the worst thing to fear is, as FDR said, “fear itself.” In the beginning, Bolsonaro called the virus a “little flu.”

“More than 65,000 people have now died of the virus in Brazil, according to figures released by the country’s health ministry on Monday,” CNN explains. “So far, 1,623,284 cases have been confirmed.”

That’s a 4 percent lethality rate — but that rests upon an under-tested population, and CNN admits that “some local experts say the real number of people infected could be 12 to 16 times higher.”

Like so many major news reports, CNN does not describe the curve of coronavirus deaths, just says they’re up.

Apparently, good reporting has a high lethality rate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Rates that Matter

fear, Covid, Coronavirus, epidemic, pandemic, propaganda,

Millions more Americans have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than are considered “confirmed cases,”* at rates ranging from 6/1 (Connecticut, early May) to 24/1 (Missouri, late April), making the fatality rate of COVID-19 much lower than feared.

Unfortunately, we cannot trust our news sources to be forthright about this.

The “death count” had been the pandemic’s repeated headline for months, Dr. Ron Paul noted yesterday, “all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about ‘cases’ and has always been all about ‘cases.’ Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant.”

There’s a reason for this re-focus. Since peaking in April, deaths, you see, “had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.”

And the case number increases do look ominous, despite being almost innocuous: “This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more ‘cases’ you discover.”

And that is not the only change of spin regarding the pandemic, as Jeffrey Tucker dramatized on Twitter:

“Flatten the curve!”
“What does that do?”
“Pushes infections to the future”
3 months later
“There are new infections!”
“What should we do?”
“Flatten the curve!”

At Mr. Tucker’s stomping grounds, the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis wrote last month that the “most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death.”

We have something to fear from the virus and its attack upon the respiratory system, but we have more to fear from fear itself.

That staple of propagandistic media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*  A confirmed case is of a patient who has seen a doctor for symptoms of the disease and has tested positive with the diagnosis seconded and logged by scientists associated with a national health agency.

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