Category: media and media people

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First Amendment rights media and media people

Journalism Codified

The great revolutionary idea at the time of our nation’s independence rubs against the grain of politics and “statecraft,” as practiced by khans, kaisers, and kleptocrats: divide and conquer, divide and rule. It is no wonder that the art of making legal distinctions is so often based not on human rights but governmental convenience.

Take the right of a free press.

The notion of open government has it that the right to participate in the dissemination of knowledge (particularly information about government) is to be an individual right. Modern Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws are a great example of government accommodation of this right.

But the Michigan House is now attempting to restrict access to state information by trying to set up a definition of journalist, making it easier for journalists to finagle data from government, harder for lone individuals. The state’s House Judiciary Committee just approved HB 4770, which does a number of things, including setting very particular definitions of terms like “newspaper” and “journalist.”

All the better to make the practice of publishing information about government more of a privilege than a right.

This was made even clearer at the federal level, by Senator Diane Feinstein, whose support for a new “shield law” to protect journalists is best understood by its limitations: bloggers, you don’t count. And she actually referred to a “special privilege” to publish. Not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Politicians like it when they have credentialed, easy-​to-​identify (and easier-​to-​manipulate) professional journalists to contend with.

Citizens with those rights? Why, it drives them crazy.

Crazy enough to try to codify what a “journalist” is, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The Tyrants’ M.O.

Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”

Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.

If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form … you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)

The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:

  1. Information gets leaked.
  2. The government denies it.
  3. Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
  4. Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
  5. The government makes further denials …

And repeat ad nauseam.

Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.

Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.

And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.

Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Paging Woodward and Bernstein

The Federal Election Commission is now implicated in the Obama administration’s years-​long hounding of groups ideologically hostile to it.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Kimberly Strassel details how, at the behest of a lawyer in the Obama administration, FEC staff “have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS’s infamous Lois Lerner.” After the Obama lawyer filed a complaint with FEC against a conservative organization called American Issues Project in 2008, FEC staffers asked Lerner about the group. They went on to repeatedly challenge AIP’s non-​profit status, cooking up new report-​length rationales each time a previous one was exploded.

Papers like The Wall Street Journal as well as various blogs have published regular updates about how IRS personnel — top officers, not just a few file clerks — really did go after ideological critics of the Obama administration in the run-​up to the 2012 election. But a “paper of record” like The New York Times barely notices the story except to rationalize it away. Same with other “liberal” outlets.

How many dots must be connected before left-​leaning media mavens and their troops say “this is too much even for us! Letting IRS, now FEC, plus anyone in the Obama administration who winked and nodded get away with this would be hazardous to our own health! The next administration may be staffed by unscrupulous Republicans instead of unscrupulous Democrats! We’re going to start reporting on this! We may even criticize such abuse of power! Sharply criticize! Yeah!”?

How many?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people too much government

Cuban Luxury

The New York Times has an odd title for its report on the slowly increasing disposable income in some incipiently quasi-​post-​Communist corners of Cuban society: “Slowly, Cuba Is Developing an Appetite for Spending.”

What a starving man lacks is not the appetite for food.

It is true that in any production-​killing statist society, people may suppress ambitions and desires in psychological self-​defense. But they hear about what they’re missing. If wealth and opportunity are allowed to begin to return, it is not “appetite” that revives only slowly and tentatively. It’s long-​range planning of production, accumulating of capital, engagement in previously outlawed forms of trade. People must wonder whether the new hints of freedom will be expanded or capriciously reversed.

What counts as indulgence in the new Cuba? Watching a 3‑D movie not on the big screen of a theatre, but on a 55-​inch screen in an apartment. “This is novel — at least in Cuba,” says Manuel Alejandro, a Havana resident who recently saw his second 3‑D movie on that 55-​inch screen.

But those with disposable income to spend on a living-​room movie theater, backyard swimming pool or car washes “are strictly a minority in Cuba, where the state pays its four million workers [in a country with an estimated 11 million people] an average salary of $19 a month.”

Most Cubans “live humbly.” For them, the slow development of economic freedom at the margins of the failed communist utopia is way too slow.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Give PSA’s a Chance?

After the George Zimmerman verdict, a slice of the country protested, insisting on the guilt of the exonerated Zimmerman. The president went on air and pled “for understanding.” And Fox’s Bill O’Reilly took the occasion to chide the country’s black leadership for not doing the right kind of Public Service Announcements.

Much of what O’Reilly said was on target. The high rates of unwed parenthood in the African-​American community — 73 percent — and the consequent predominance of single-​parent households lies at the heart of many problems.

Yet, neither O’Reilly’s idea of PSAs “telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant,” nor President Obama’s efforts to give young black men “the sense that their country cares about them,” would likely change behavior.

Black unemployment and rates of illegitimate births were lower half a century ago than white rates. What happened?

Black Americans were hardest hit by the rise of the welfare state.

First, raising minimum wages placed low-​skilled workers at a disadvantage, with each wage floor hike doing more damage.

Second, the general switch in state aid from assistance to intact families to aid to mothers with dependent children took away a major disincentive for irresponsible sexual practices. Throw in the sexual revolution, and you have a powder keg.

Third, the War on Drugs established the market conditions for illegal activity, and encouraged the formation of gangs. Drugs made users unfit for most work, while providing a lucrative draw for those wanting to advance economically.

None of this is a mystery. But sadly, I fear America’s black leadership would rather do Bill O’Reilly’s PSA’s than really address these problems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Bees’ Knees News

Though the George Zimmerman trial ended in an acquittal, many folks are still confused as to the facts. One thing we learned during the case is that journalists are not always reliable, the infamous NBC redaction of the 911 call being only the most obvious example.

But if you are looking for media’s systemic failures, you don’t need to bring in race and shootings and Skittles. Look no further than stories about bees.

I’m not talking about “killer bees” of my youth — supposedly coming up from South America to “take over” the continent, and sting, sting, sting and kill, kill, kill.

Didn’t happen. Simple extrapolations based on movements of some bee populations did not spell eco-​disaster for the good ol’ USA.

But another bee story, much hyped, also turns out to be false, or at least only half, or quarter, true: “Bee-​pocalypse!”

Since 2006 we’ve been hearing how Colony Collapse Disorder has destroyed bee hives, vast populations of the insects, and worse, continues to threaten both natural and contracted pollination, and thus agriculture … and Life on the Planet.

Shawn Regan, writing for the Property and Environment Research Center, says that this story, once the media’s veritable bees’ knees, setting people “in the know” all abuzz, was mostly just bad reporting. U.S. honey bee colony numbers are stable, he shows, explaining that commercial beekeepers, “far from being passive victims, have actively rebuilt their colonies in response to increased mortality from CCD.”

Yes, capitalism has adapted.

If you had been suckered into this story, maybe you should have looked at the local supermarket: honey production has remained stable.

As has bad environmental reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.