Tag: bias

Categories
crime and punishment media and media people

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.” 

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people

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,”

PDF for printing

 

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

 

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.

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

No. No. No. No.

Chuck Todd, Meet the Press, right wing, left wing, propaganda, myth, bias, MSM

“Look, I think one of the best things going in Donald Trump’s favor — we know this — is the mainstream media,” David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s White House correspondent, told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd yesterday. 

“I hate to say it. I know I’m sitting on a Meet the Press roundtable, but the truth of the matter is 62 percent think the media is biased,” added Brody. “So, in other words, if you look at the approval ratings of Donald Trump versus the approval rating of the media —” 

“The conservative echo chamber created that environment,” interjected Mr. Todd. “It’s not — no. No. No. No. It has been a tactic and a tool of the Roger Ailes created echo chamber.”

“So, let’s not pretend it’s not anything other than that,” Todd insisted. (So, it IS something other than that?)

“Well, hang on,” Brody responded. “Yes and no. Because remember, the independents are part of Donald Trump’s base. . . . [T]hose Independents also distrust media. This is not just Republicans. It is many Americans across —”

“Oh, no. No. No. I take your point,” Todd again interrupted. “I’m just saying it was a creation — it was a campaign tactic. It’s not based in much fact.”

Hmmm. Todd does not dispute Brody’s assertion that a supermajority of the country sees bias in the Fourth Estate. Nor does he deny that in a battle between Trump and the so-called mainstream media, the approval-rating-challenged president bests the media most days.

Instead, the former Democratic Party campaign staffer-turned-journalist smugly maintains that one cable TV channel, talk radio and a spate of conservative websites have totally invented a fantasy of an anti-conservative bias where absolutely none exists.

Meet the press bias.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

PDF for printing

 

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Bias and Blindness

GAO, racism, race, boys, Roseanne, schools, education, bias

Neither stretching the truth nor ignoring it helps beat back implicit or explicit racism.  Yesterday, my Townhall.com column took the Washington Post to task for misstating the results of a recent GAO report.

The GAO noted wide discrepancies between the percentage of students facing disciplinary actions who are black, male and disabled and the relative percentages of these groups in the overall student population. Yet, the report also specifically stated: “Our analyses of these data, taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred.”

Nonetheless, the Post headline told readers: “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds.” The article claimed that “a government analysis of data . . . said implicit racial bias was the likely cause of these continuing disparities.”

The same discrepancies regarding boys of all races? And students with disabilities? Even the crickets had no comment.

In the Post’s Outlook section, yesterday, readers were treated to further edification on race — this time via C. Nicole Mason with the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest. “I feel alienated and slightly betrayed by the reboot” of the sitcom Roseanne,” she writes.

The title of her piece proclaims why: “‘Roseanne’ was about a white family, but it was for all working people. Not anymore.”

The “not anymore” refers to Roseanne’s support of (and Mason’s derangement syndrome over) President Trump. Interestingly, a more legitimate “not anymore” angle was completely missed — or ignored. The Connors now have a black granddaughter. The new show isn’t “about a white family,” but a racially mixed family.

When racism is finally extinguished from this planet, someone remember to tell the race-hustlers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing