Tag: media

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Gray Lady Casts Shadow

Gray Lady, New York Times, NYT, political correctness, free speech, illustration

Earlier in the week, I noted how media manipulation of presidential poll results by not considering the Johnson and Stein campaigns distorting the race. I speculated why journalists would do such a thing, but didn’t have space for an exhaustive list.

But it’s clear that one of the things journalists aim to do is retain their once-​vaunted position as gatekeepers, as the idea-​people and fact-​dispersers who define the terms of allowable debate.

By ignoring the competition, they narrow the terms of this year’s presidential campaign, allowing their inexplicable favorite, Hillary Clinton, an advantage going to the polls.

But poll taking and reporting is not the half of it. Tim Graham, writing at Newsbusters, notes how the Gray Lady rigs the intellectual field. “The New York Times appears to be playing games again with conservative authors, trying to keep them off its vaunted (and secretively manipulated) Best Sellers list. This has happened to Ted Cruz, to Dinesh D’Souza, and to David Limbaugh.”

And now, Graham tells us, it’s happening to Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel, whose new book, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, has been doing gangbusters on BookScan’s bestseller list.

The new exposé is sixth on BookScan’s hardcover list. But it’s not even made an appearance on the Times’ “list of the top 20 hardcover bestsellers, despite outselling books that did make the list.”

Would the Gray Lady dare manipulate the figures … just to suppress an idea it doesn’t like?

That is, the idea that the Left suppresses speech.

It’s almost too rich to be true.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gray Lady, New York Times, NYT, political correctness, free speech, illustration

 

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Iconoclasm Spasms

Jefferson Davis

As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems … a tad … trivial.

First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.

He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-​living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.

And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861 – 1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.

Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”

I’m not convinced it did a thing.

And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.

Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jefferson Davis

 

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Gross Domestic Prevarication

Eternal Koch, meme, Paul Jacob, Koch Brothers, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

A sign of these sorry times for professional journalism: Time magazine runs a dishonest smear against Charles Koch, completely twisting the billionaire’s remarks at a recent meeting of major donors in Orange County, California.

“Charles Koch Says US Can Bomb Its Way to $100,000 Salaries,” screamed the headline. The sub-​heading added, “Building bombs and using them is one way to growth, the billionaire suggests to allies.”

What did Mr. Koch actually tell the assembled crowd of major donors?

“I think we can have growth rates in excess of 4 percent. When I’m talking about growth rates,” explained Koch, “I’m not talking about that GDP, which counts poison gas the same as it counts penicillin. What a monstrous measure this is. If we make more bombs, the GDP goes up — particularly if we explode them.”

In other words, while Time’s headline portrayed Koch as a warmonger, the billionaire businessman wasn’t suggesting this country “Bomb Its Way” anywhere. Certainly not “to growth.” In fact, Koch was making the opposite point: true economic growth can’t come from producing or using “poison gas” or other munitions.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had found this article’s headline to be a flat-​out concocted falsehood; Time soon changed the headline.

Yet, even the re-​written headline was sort of a slap: “Charles Koch Mocks Common Measure of Prosperity.” Only after reading the sub-​head — “Calls ‘monstrous’ the notion that GDP values bombs as much as medicine” — was it clear that Koch was making a very common sense point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eternal Koch

 

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national politics & policies term limits

Unlimited Gall

open mind, Columbus Dispatch, term limits, initiative, ballot, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/, political, politics, reading

Some claims don’t persuade. For example, the claim that starting a conversation is an effort to end conversation. Or that one “bullies” officeholders by telling constituents what officeholders are up to.

But so contends a Columbus Dispatch editorial (“Don’t let pledges close discussions”) chastising U.S. Term Limits, my old stomping ground, for spotlighting pols plotting to pulverize term limits.

U.S. Term Limits advised constituents of Ohio State Representatives Bob Cupp and Nathan Manning that neither will pledge to forbear from weakening Ohio’s state legislative term limits — and that both men serve on a commission scheming to weaken the limits.

The organization’s mailing is “out of line in two ways,” the paper opines.

First, lawmakers mustn’t “surrender their autonomy to bullying interest groups” but must consider issues “with open minds.” Should these open minds be closed to any reminders of the legitimate interests of constituents? The Dispatch editors write as if they’d never head of politics and political debate before; anyway, as if it should desist forthwith.

Second, the pledge itself is “misplaced,” because Ohio voters must approve any referendum Ohio lawmakers send to ballot; lawmakers can’t act unilaterally. True. But why take even one bad step on a bad road?

How can the Dispatch’s theme be that USTL seeks to “close” discussions of term limits? U.S. Term Limits would be delighted if all Ohioans engaged in loud and long discussions of term limits, as well as of what Ohio lawmakers hope to do to their constitutionally limited terms in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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open minds

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Times Misfires

NYT-NRA

Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?

Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-​bearing at its April convention.

According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life … the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy.… So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment.…”

But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”

So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues … but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.

The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.

It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.

This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.

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NYT-NRA

 

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Common Sense folly media and media people national politics & policies

Cruz Country

Cruz Country

The cultural differences between left and right may be stronger than the political.

When Sen. Ted Cruz answered a question about his musical taste posed by a CBS news correspondent, and he announced that his preference switched after 2001, 9/​11, the leftosphere fell of its rocker and into convulsions.

Why?

He said he switched from listening to classic rock to country, and did so because the country music culture responded to the 9/​11 atrocity so much better than did rock-​and-​roll culture.

Confession: my musical tastes lean toward classic rock. But there’s no way I would get upset about a politician’s musical choices — unless he started listening to Wagner while reviving an interest in National Socialism.

But boy, on the left there was a lot of outrage and indignation. At least, Matt Welch of Reason quoted a good spattering of it, and I found more on Twitter and elsewhere. On Slate? Snark. A YouTuber tubed Cruz’s change as “pandering.” And in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait identified Cruz’s professed change-​of-​taste “an incredible testament to his personal willpower.”

Huh?

You may or may not like country music, or appreciate the last 30 years of it, or its origins, or its commercialization, or the twang, but that stuff’s really not that important.

A conservative found political reasons to change his listening habits. Wow. A matter  of self-​definition? Whatever. It neither builds up nor undermines his philosophy or program.

Though certainly Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” provides more than a cultural context for understanding much of what happens in Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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