At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didnât the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.
So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harrisâs 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was âjust no valueâ in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.
But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left columnist Will Bunch skeeted an editorial by the UK’s left-wing The Guardian about protecting journolists, oops, sorry, journalists.
The Guardian view on Trumpâs threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act
Bipartisan legislation offers historic protections for journalists, banning secret surveillance and ensuring source confidentiality
Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 1:40 OM EST
Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trumpâs second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director â given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January. Continue reading
It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle
MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST
MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading
My career, before retirement, consisted of arising at 4:15 AM, going to work, and working until the job was done. It meant, as I began, pouring and finishing concrete, in the heat of the August sun or the cold of January. It meant, after I moved from pouring concrete to producing concrete, being at work at 6:00 AM, and sometimes significantly earlier, and staying until the last customer was finished. It meant, though some work was inside, shoveling out under conveyor belts, climbing silos, stripping and resetting 2’x2’x6′ waste concrete blocks, greasing plants, running front-end loaders, fixing machinery, in all kinds of weather, and workdays that were almost never only eight hours long.
I was hardly the only working-class person that had to do stuff like that. Millions upon millions of us had to do the same things, five and six days a week, and when the restrictions that came with the panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; that is exactly how I define it! — that had some people assigned to work from home, many working class people laughed at the notion that what they did for a living could be done from home.
So, when I saw this, I will confess that I was not moved by the plight of these poor babies!
White House reporters already ‘exhausted’ by second Trump administration
One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it đ — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.
But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading
It is entirely possible that I have been, believe it or not, too charitable to our friends on the left. In my recent article, Will Bunch uses his Freedom of Speech and of the Press to tell us that he hates Freedom of Speech and of the Press, I mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch for his tirade against MSNBC’s (supposed) journalists, Joe and Mike Scarborough for having gone to Mar-a-Lago and meeting with former and future President Donald Trump. Mr Bunch told his readers about the brave âjournalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era,â but trashes two (purported) journalists who have gone to cover a story about the next President of the United States as somehow âsupplicants,â showing fealty and making obeisance to him. Uhhh, you canât âkeep asking the tough questionsâ to Mr Trump if you are unwilling to talk to him in the first place.
I would have thought that a journolist, oops, sorry, journalist like Mr Bunch would appreciate freedom of the press and the willingness of journalists to go into hostile territory, to get their stories, to report the news, even from people who didn’t like or respect them. Continue reading
Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for JosĂ© Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.
Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance
For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.
By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST
Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and âpeeping Tom.â
Rileyâs murder became a political rallying cry at this summerâs Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.
Wouldn’t the answer be, to children who might ask why former and future President Donald Trump beat current Vice President and future private citizen Kamala Harris Emhoff in the election, that the United States held a free and fair election, and as in every election, one serious candidate won, and one serious candidate lost? But no, the American left, having gone off the rails in their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, think something else is required.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
How do we explain this election to our children?
Children need us to accept their gift of hope, even if we aren’t feeling it, and they need us to use it to fight for them.
by Gwen Snyder, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST
The past two months have been a whirlwind of autumnal novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. There was Sesame Place, then her 3rd birthday, then her first day of school. Just as things began to settle, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, fast on their heels came the election.