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Not Acosta

Jim Acosta, media, ass

In late April, Scott Johnson, cofounder of the political blog Power Line, a former attorney and an accredited reporter, was banned from the Minnesota government’s daily briefings about the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials also stopped answering his written questions.

Why?

Minnesota officials told the Washington Free Beacon that the briefings were limited to “professional journalists.” But if they regarded Johnson as something other than a professional journalist, why had he been allowed to attend to begin with?

More plausible is Johnson’s contention in his June lawsuit against the state that officials simply didn’t like his conservative political perspective or his questions. Johnson had been critical of the policies of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, in combatting the pandemic.

Months later, Scott Johnson has won his lawsuit. He can attend the briefings now. And officials must answer at least three of his written questions per week.

A question occurred to me as I was mulling this story: Isn’t what Minnesota did in banning Johnson from the COVID-19 briefings exactly like what Trump did to that CNN banshee, Jim Acosta, when he banned Acosta from presidential briefings?*

No, not exactly, I answer myself. Trump ousted a reporter who was persistently rude and disruptive. “Asking questions government officials dislike” and “being a constant ass” are not the same thing.

At Power Line, Johnson has posted many reports about the lawsuit and about the course of the pandemic in Minnesota.

He may not be welcome by those in government he probes, but we out here, far from power, are glad he is there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* CNN sued and a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the White House, after which CNN and the Trump Administration agreed Acosta could return as long as he followed rules of decorum newly written by the administration and applied to all reporters.

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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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Zucker’s Scold

Donald Trump, Kingsman meme

It was in bad taste.

The “meme” — an altered video — depicted extreme, murderous violence. But it was not “weaponized” as  incitement to real violence; it was, instead, “memeticized” contempt against the meme’s “victims,” the full panoply of media outlets along with a few iconic politicians.

The video was very popular over the weekend on social media. It took the church massacre scene from the first Kingsman movie, but with President Trump’s head placed over Colin Firth’s visage, crudely in “meme” fashion, and a few other heads put over other actors’, and the logos of major news outlets superimposed over most of the movie’s victims’ heads.

Cartoonish, yes, but done with élan.

Brooke Baldwin, however, is a paid agent of billionaire president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and she has her marching orders, as revealed this week by a Project Veritas scoop. So she lit into the president in high moral dudgeon: “Mr. President, why is it taking you so long to condemn this video? You tweet all the time. I don’t want to hear from your press secretary . . . who says you strongly condemn the video . . . I want to hear from YOU.”

What Ms. Baldwin and her boss don’t get is that a growing swath of the American populace does not want to hear from a news reporter scolding demands that the president “condemn” things he had nothing to do with.

Trump didn’t make the meme, after all, nor had it made for him. 

Brooke Baldwin’s effrontery shows why someone might make a meme like the one in question. 

Not because you deserve to be killed, Ms. Baldwin, but because you deserve derision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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CNN, You’ve Been Trolled

CNN, Trump, meme

The Cable News Network, known popularly and un- as CNN — and satirically as the “Clinton News Network” and “Fake News” — so hysterically hates the president that it has become completely unhinged.

Well, unhinged from decency and journalistic standards, anyway.

The latest slips downward?

First, some pseudonymous guy* on Reddit created a little gif** that placed a CNN-logo on the head of a wrestler whom Donald Trump “took down” in some weird bit of nonsense publicity the entertainer-entrepreneur was prone to, pre-presidency. Trump then retweeted a version of the gif, calling CNN (once again) “fake news.” This made CNN look silly,*** so CNN tracked the originator down and pressured him to make a humiliating apology — for it and other, more tasteless contributions. He deleted most of what he had done on Reddit.

CNN looks petty: a bully. And clueless about the free-for-all that is the Internet.

The Twitterverse erupted against the news outfit.

This went super-viral on July 4, the same day that CNN tried to humiliate Mr. Trump by tweeting a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”

How apt!

And yet . . . Lincoln did not say it. Not exactly. The “fake news” network faked a presidential quote.

CNN apparently doesn’t understand that responding to trolls feeds the trolls and makes you look bad, to boot.

I suppose you could blame Trump for all this. His ridiculous tweets and whoppers have so corrupted the culture that his enemies (CNN being the obvious media leader) have adopted his methods.

But I won’t. Not this time.

Just blame the people at CNN.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* He referred to himself as a “shitposter,” which is what satirists and trolls on the Web are called.

** A “gif” is an image file, and has been around since the beginning of the World Wide Web. Nowadays, when we talk about “gifs” we usually are referring to brief animated gifs.

*** Frankly, it made the president look silly, too.

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CNN, Trump, meme

 

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Monied Hopes Dashed

elections, Democrats, Republicans, left, right, CNN, Obamacare

Democrats had high hopes. Their come-back after the 2016 defeats seemed near at hand. After all, Trump is proving increasingly erratic and incompetent, and the Republican mis-handling of the ObamaCare repeal appears to be a disaster of ginormous proportions.

How could they not start taking seats in Congress back?

There were four open seats requiring new votes this late Spring. “Democrats tried an inoffensive moderate message in Georgia,” CNN’s Eric Bradner informs us. “They ran a banjo-strumming populist in Montana. They called in the cavalry in South Carolina and tried to catch their foe sleeping through a long-shot in Kansas.”

Democrats failed, 0-4.

Why? Well, the congressional vacancies were made by the new president’s appointments, and he may have targeted those districts that were especially safe. Nevertheless, CNN notes, “[t]he party got closer than it has in decades to winning some of the four seats — a sign they’ve closed their gaps with Republicans in both suburban and rural areas. . . .”

But there is a lesson here that CNN did not draw from the debacle. The much-lamented Georgia race, in which Jon Ossoff lost to Republican Karen Handel, was a race in which Ossoff out-spent Handel six to one in what is called “the most expensive House race in history.” And yet, somewhat oddly and perhaps hypocritically, Ossoff, the bigger spender, went on air complaining about money in politics.

All that moolah did not push him over the top. Ossoff and the Democrats — as well as the feckless Republican majority — might look for fewer excuses and stand for something voters actually want.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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