Tag: bias

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Measures of Desperation

news media, bias, propaganda, PSYOP

Desperate times call for desperate measures, the saying goes, but since the Hillary Clinton/​Donald Trump contest of 2015 – 2016, the desperate measures that Democrats and media newsfolk lurched towards have been extraordinary.

Yesterday, as one of our Weekend Updates, we considered the current pickle in which the corporate news media finds itself. 

Fearing that they had contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by covering the news of her emails and other scandals, corporate newsrooms cooked up a new ethical rule: Do not report on stories based on data — no matter if confirmed — that may have been leaked by foreign malefactors, such as “the Russians.”

With that rule they suppressed, online, news about the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, calling it “Russian disinformation.” Twitter banned the news source long enough to get Biden elected, and then the “Russian” story unraveled.

Now that same rule would, if consistently applied, work against reporting on Trump’s current email leakage.

But it’s not just media malfeasance that is desperate, as Stephen Cox explains at Liberty. Referring to the ousting of Joe Biden from the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Cox writes that while this variety of machination is new to America, it is very old, historically: this is “the kind of thing the Roman imperial families used to do. This is the kind of thing the Bolsheviks used to do. The difference, of course, is that the Democratic Party oligarchs have lots and lots of money to enforce their will.”

Enforce it they do. Consider how many in the news media played along with Biden’s senescence, right up until they all proclaimed it obvious and disqualifying. They “turn on a dime.”

“Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them,” notes Cox. But why is it Trump who sends Democrats into paroxysms of terror?

Twenty years ago, Trump might have been dismissed out of hand. He isn’t now, and neither is Kamala Harris — a woman with all the charm of Hillary and all the competence of Sleepy Joe.

Desperate times, indeed. And Americans know it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom regulation

Criminal Discrimination?

The Joker, Uncle Sam, racism, business, regulations, quota

It’s okay.

You don’t have to associate with criminals. You don’t have to employ them and worry how they’ll act on the job. It’s not your duty to give criminals or persons with a criminal record access to your life or property and hope for the best.

If only we could leave it at that. 

That’s not our world though. In our world, our government, working hard to rip America apart in every way possible, is suing the Sheetz chain of convenience stores because it doesn’t hire applicants with a criminal record.

The “problem” is that too many such failed applicants are nonwhite.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accuses Sheetz of “disproportionately screening out Black, Native American/​Alaska Native and multiracial applicants.” The agency babbles that “employment practices causing a disparate impact because of race or other protected classifications must be shown by the employer to be necessary to ensure the safe and efficient performance of the particular jobs at issue.”

Of course, the “disparate impact” exists not because of these classifications but because the denied applicants have criminal records. Sheetz didn’t decline these applicants because of their skin colors.

Nevertheless, Sheetz is supposed to have somehow “shown” that refusing to hire applicants with criminal records reduces Sheetz’s own risks and the risks for customers.

Elon Musk, commenting on this story, has it right: “You know The Joker is running things when the law-​abiding are being prosecuted by the government for not hiring criminals!”

These days Uncle Sam and The Joker do look alarmingly similar.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Nightmare Narratives

Beware the America we see on our screens.

A friend posted something on Facebook tying three recent stories together, what he called “brazenly false narratives many progressives have peddled.”

The first being that those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were treated more gently than Black Lives Matter activists would have been. Back in January, then President-​Elect Biden made a point of offering this stark racial takeaway, sans evidence.*

The second narrative? That the Atlanta shooting spree was motivated by anti-​Asian hatred, six of the nine people shot, eight killed, being Asian. But there is yet no evidence of racism; another, quite different motive appears to have spurred the massacre.

Nonetheless, on NBC Meet the Press last Sunday, Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. said the Atlanta shooting was part of “this panic around the whiteness of this country.” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart echoed that emotion in a weekend column, “Asian Americans must not fight white terror alone.”

Yet, weeks ago, The Post informed readers, “Tensions between Asian and Black communities also date back decades and have been reignited by videos that show Black perpetrators in many of the recent attacks on Asian Americans.”

The terror is diverse.

Lastly, the Boulder shooter was taken alive — which “must” mean (if you are catching on) that he is … white. Some referred to the killer as a “white Christian terrorist” … problem being (you guessed it) he turned out to be a Syrian immigrant — and Muslim. Causing mass tweet deletes, including by Vice-​President Harris’s niece.**

Like me, you probably meet a lot of nice people, white and black and Asian and Middle Eastern … of both sexes, various genders, differing religions … all the time … before the pandemic, anyway. 

But no film at 11.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I made a point here of calling him on it — thanks to David Bernstein’s excellent analysis at The Volokh Conspiracy. 

** The removed tweet by 36-​year-​old attorney and author Meena Harris, had declared in part: “Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.” 

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Let’s String Up Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson, lynch, right wing, hit piece, PC, bias

“Ask Tucker Carlson whatever happened to Tucker Carlson,” writes Lyz Lenz for the Columbia Journalism Review, “and he gets upset.”

Hmm. I guess some rich, white, male, conservative television hosts just don’t like being pigeonholed and belittled.

Lenz’s profile, entitled, “The mystery of Tucker Carlson,” details Carlson’s descent from apparent good guy — that is, a journalist once working for CNN and MSNBC and writing articles that sometimes skewer Republicans — to racist bad guy with 2.7 million viewers on Fox News and a conservative position on immigration. 

On CNN’s Reliable Sources, however, Lenz offers, “If you look at a lot of his early writings … there has always been kind of a latent racism.” Evidence for this? She dredges up this confession from Carlson’s past: “The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me.”

Readers learn that Carlson is “worth over $8 million” and stands to inherit even more because his step mom is “Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune.” Lenz, in old-​fashioned “New Journalism” style,* contrasts that with her own struggle as “a single mom, a freelance writer with two kids, swiftly facing a future with no health care.”

Lenz is divorcing her husband of 12 years, who is … [gut-​punch] … a Republican. Their split “didn’t come because of the election,” she says, though “the election certainly revealed a lot of huge problems that we couldn’t overcome.”

Just as Tucker Carlson cannot understand his responsibility for all Caucasoid sins, he probably doesn’t see how her divorce is in any way relevant, either.

Racist!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Lenz acknowledges that journalists are “not supposed to make it about ourselves,” but does anyway. CNN Money describes this as “daring,”

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard national politics & policies Popular

Re-​Segregation

segregation, bias, right, left, conservative, liberal, water fountains

It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition.

We see this in 

  • higher education, dominated by left-​of-​center professors and administrators; 
  • in the news media, overwhelmingly filled with Democrats; and 
  • even in the corporate world, especially in HR Departments.

That some areas of life are filled with one type of person, and others with a different kind, should shock no one. But the intolerance of this? It has recently become extra extreme on the left: De-​platforming, physical attacks on free speech, censuring and firing employees who dare offer facts inconvenient for progressivism. When a senior Facebook engineer attempted to bring in tolerance and diversity, what should have been a non-​story received national attention.*

It amounts to a new segregationism. 

People are segregating more and more in their communities based on income and culture (see Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort) — despite many of these same self-​segregators support for Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda of de-segregation. 

Another current trend is shunning. When it was discovered, the other day, that the In-​N-​Out burger chain had contributed $25,000 to the California Republican Party, the Twitterverse cooked up something special: “#BoycotInNOut — let Trump and his cronies support these creeps” … well, that gem is from the chair of the California Democratic Party.

Apparently, this Democratic Party official is demanding separate eating establishments for progressives and conservatives.

But hey, where would I eat?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Arguably, many of the stories we fret about should be non-​stories — as in, “none of our business.” But when some people make others’ business theirs, the stories just will not stay local.

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Categories
education and schooling government transparency national politics & policies Popular Second Amendment rights

A Faulty Gun Report

While statistics are generally unreliable, data about gun crimes often qualify as “anti-​data.”

“This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015 – 2016 school year, ‘nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-​related shooting,’” National Public Radio told us yesterday. Like previous stats we’ve seen cited on social media, that seems unbelievably high. 

And yes, it is — “far higher than most other estimates,” reporter Anya Kamenetz noted. “NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-​thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”

Were they fibbing? Well, never underestimate the power of incompetence. 

Even that’s harsh: remember that reporting requirements are a burden. And filing bureaucratically-​designed forms with the Education Department may be no easier than filing tax returns with the IRS. One of the biggest errors in one school district report resulted from a simple data entry error.

That is not a sophisticated statistical problem, but a simple typo.

Not that there aren’t some difficulties of a not-​so-​easy-​to-​understand nature in the story. For one, the degree to which the report was off is said to lie within “the margin of error.”

So, how big was the error, exactly? What’s the number? Well, of the 240 supposed “shootings,” NPR claimed to be “able to confirm just 11 reported incidents.”

Yet the Education Department bureaucrats will only affix an erratum note to their ridiculous report. 

Nor will it be withdrawn or replaced, as it should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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