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general freedom media and media people

No Culture, No Future

Corinne Masiero

Actress Corinne Masiero, on stage at the César Awards — France’s version of the Oscars — shocked the nation by what she wore. And didn’t wear. 

Invited to present an award for best costumes, Masiero started the night in an ultra-​significant yellow vest emblazoned with the motto “No Culture, No Future.” But she came on stage wearing a bloodied donkey costume, then doffed it for a bloodied dress, and then removed that, too. On her naked front she had scribbled: “No Cultur, No Futur.” And on her back, but in French, “Give us back art, Jean.”

“Jean” being French Prime Minister Jean Castex.

While this is in the style of typical artsy antics, this was not just gratuitous. It was a protest. She wants theaters to open.

Unique — in the sense that it was by an artist protesting the anti-​lockdown cause, in a dramatic way usually reserved for more lefty causes. But not at all unique — in being against the lockdowns. All around the world folks are protesting the shuttering of society.

But why go to such lengths on stage?

Well, I might advise against … still, I haven’t seen much previously on the news about those protests?

Major media apparently does not have time, space or desire to cover protests over harsh, extremist “mitigation” efforts that “lock down” commerce and normal human interaction.

LifeSiteNews, a “non-​profit Internet service dedicated to issues of culture, life, and family,” had the best I found. 

“The world demands its freedom back: Anti-​lockdown protests sweep the globe,” runs its March 22 headline. 

“I don’t think I’ll be invited next year,” Masiero said, walking off stage. “We’ll see.”

What we need to see is more coverage … in the news.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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.” 

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The Uninvestigated

We have long relied upon journalists in major media to cover actual news. And investigate leads to juicy stories of major import to clear up confusion.

But the mainstream media has become mainly propagandistic: “journalists” today rarely “report,” they propound and pontificate. And help spread disinformation for major political factions.

Is it really that bad?

Well, one way to test how bad is to track juicy news leads that get left unexplored.

In June I commented on Harvard’s Dr. Charles Lieber, arrested and charged with not reporting his activities with the Chinese at the Wuhan labs — which have been associated with SARS-​CoV‑2. In October, Lieber sued Harvard for not backing him up in his legal troubles with the U.S. Government.

There could be a huge story here. Or maybe a mere bureaucratic snafu.

But it is not “in” the news; I cannot find any decent reporting on it.

From the beginning, the idea that the virus could have been grown in a lab “to help discover new vaccines” (or even as a cultivated bioweapon) has been a real possibility.

A year after its public acknowledgment, there is still disagreement.

While we expect reporters to dig deep, instead we see a plethora of premature declarations — as at egregious “fact-​checking” sites — that the matter is settled. “Leading researchers have debunked this notion,” as Snopes confidently stated in February. But since then, the origins of the pandemic have remained murky. And allegations of bioweaponry keep re-appearing.

The World Health Organization is on the ground in Wuhan now, investigating.

Belatedly.

Long past time for American reporters to get on the beat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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partisanship social media

Consigned to Outer Darkness

mass media, establishment media, censorship, free speech

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are on a de-​platforming binge.

The official rationale? Anyone “associated” with rioting must be expelled from virtual society. 

Yet these social media outfits have hardly ousted endorsers of violence against innocents with anything like consistency. Iranian Boss-​man Ali Khamenei still has a Twitter account. Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez, who has opined that some people “have no choice but to riot,” is still merrily blathering on Twitter.

The latest victim of Big Tech’s assault on speech is not an individual but a competing platform, Parler, whose support for free speech is its main selling point.

Apple has kicked Parler off its app store, and Parler got booted from the Google Play store, too.

Now Amazon, which provided storage for Parler, is kicking Parler off its servers with essentially zero notice because Amazon employees “were lobbying the company to disconnect Parler from AWS for hate speech,” which is like arguing that USPS or the Constitution must be shut down because it enables hate mail.

Apparently, once enemies of speech employed by a big-​tech service provider scream “Deplatform so-​and-​so,” any erstwhile reservations of top management — Jeff Bezos, in this case — pop like a soap bubble under a hot iron.

Parler was one possible landing place for the President of the United States, booted from Twitter for allegedly inciting the capitol riot.* It now seems that Trump may find refuge at Gab​.com, where his tweets expunged from Twitter have been republished. 

But note: Gab has long been out in the wilderness, denied service on Google’s and Apple’s systems.

Folks who demand inclusion sure do practice exclusion well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account in protest of Twitter’s action. And I deactivated mine as well — something I meant to do when Twitter blocked the New York Post’s truthful reporting on Hunter Biden during the election.

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Prognosis: Negative

wolf, authoritarianism, totalitarianism

Ah, the Law of Unintended Consequences!

It doesn’t apply just to government programs. It also applies to journalistic crusades.

What am I talking about?

Well, by now, it is pretty clear that the mask mandates, social distancing efforts, and lockdown policies have not worked very well, if at all. But that hasn’t stopped corporate newsmedia.

From what? 

From inducing panic by playing up the negative aspects of the COVID epidemic, and downplaying — even suppressing — information that would mitigate … their propagation of panic.

And policies of an extreme nature.

Jacob Sullum, writing at Reason, calls our attention to recent research: “Based on an analysis of news stories about COVID-​19 that appeared from January 1 through July 31, Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote and two other researchers found that 91 percent of the coverage by major U.S. media outlets was ‘negative in tone.’ The rate was substantially lower in leading scientific journals (65 percent) and foreign news sources (54 percent).” 

It has consequences: “This unrelenting, indiscriminate negativity fosters suspicion and resistance. Journalists and politicians who repeatedly cry wolf should not be surprised at the lack of cooperation when the beast actually appears.”

Which suggests that corporate media’s approach to the disease and our responses to it has had effects quite the opposite of what leftist Yellow Journalists aim: total government control of the populace in the cause of fighting a disease.

By overstating their case, and even flagrantly fibbing, they may be inoculating us from the very disease they promote.

That disease being not COVID, of course, but Therapeutic Totalitarianism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs media and media people

Maybe Next Year?

Time Magazine, Person of the Year, cat

Once again, TIME is skipping right over you and me for consideration as the magazine’s “Person of the Year for 2020.”

What am I saying, YOU were named back in 2006!

TIME’s choice can be important recognition for someone working against all odds to make a very positive difference in this world. Lech Wałęsa in 1981, for instance, and Gandhi in 1930.*

Last year’s pick of Greta Thornburg? Not. So. Much.

While presidents often get the coveted cover, President-​elect Joe Biden garnered only 3 percent of the public “advisory” vote. “Essential workers” had the most support at 35 percent. Seems too amorphous … a catalyst mostly for endless debate.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the federal government’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years, was next at 31 percent of respondents. No one else had more than 5 percent.

Don’t choose Fauci, please! Despite his experience, his pandemic performance has been less than expert. Under his leadership, Americans were told for months that masks would be of no benefit, then suddenly mandated to wear them.

Last June, Sen. Rand Paul, who is a physician, tried to get Fauci to address the ample scientific data indicating it was safe to open the schools. Fauci deflected and dithered until flippantly declaring last week: “Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say.”

That is certainly not, Fox New’s Tucker Carlson exasperatedly explained, what Fauci was “really” saying months ago.

Forget Fauci. For leading the best national response to COVID-​19, TIME should name Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-​wen 2020’s “Person of the Year.”

It would send a powerful message about leadership. And freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The magazine has also named dictators and mass murderers: Hitler served as 1938’s “Man of the Year” and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took the top spot the next year, and again in 1942; in 1979, with Americans held hostage in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini glared at us from TIME’s cover. 

Note: My biggest disappointment was in 2013, when TIME cowardly choose Pope Francis over Edward Snowden.

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