Tag Archives: #FakeNews

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If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang! The professional media don't usually tell us outright lies, but their editorial and stylistic decisions sure do shade the truth!

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.

A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.

“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.

by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.

Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.

Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.

The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.

I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.

Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.

Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:

Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.

by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021

Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.

On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.

There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”

We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.

Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.

If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!

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The pot calling the kettle black: Jenice Armstrong tells us that cable news networks are biased The Philadelphia Inquirer laughably tells us that they "delineate between opinion and straight news."

I have said it many times before: I prefer to read the news rather than listen to it on radio or watch it on television. Part of that is because I have very degraded hearing, and part of it is because newspapers have the capability, especially now that digital newspapers have taken some advantage of being able to ignore the printed space limitations of the dead trees editions. Reading the news enables me to go back and reread a section if I found it confusing or contradictory. There’s also the personal point that I delivered newspapers from the sixth through eleventh grades.

But I had to laugh, and I mean a loud, trying-not-to-spill-my-Rice-Chex guffaw, at Jenice Armstrong’s OpEd column in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t watch cable news much anymore. Here’s why.

Recently, I hosted a screening of “Trustworthy,” a new documentary that asked Americans what they think about the state of media in the U.S. No surprise: It isn’t good.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

When I decided to pursue a career in journalism, it wasn’t that long after the glory days of the uncovering of the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon. Back then, Americans viewed us as heroes, champions of the people.

I worked at newspapers all over because I admired reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I sacrificed time I could have spent with my family — or even starting one of my own — because I wanted to do this work. I’ve watched my colleagues do the same, only to end up working for a shrinking industry that Americans rank not far above used car salespeople.

Today, Americans trust journalism less than ever. A recent poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup discovered that only 34% of Americans trust the news media to be accurate and fair; more — 38% — said they have “no trust at all” in the media.

Recently, I hosted a screening of Trustworthy, a new documentary on the subject of media distrust, at the Fitler Club, which was followed by a panel discussion. Executive producer Stephany Zamora, a Silicon Valley tech executive, created it after watching Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She woke up the following morning determined to explore the media and democracy and whether it’s possible to find common ground.

Despite having zero filmmaking experience, Zamora set off on a 5,300-mile bus journey across the country interviewing academics, journalism experts (including Inquirer editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar), and ordinary Americans about what they think about the state of media in the U.S.

The blurb to the right is a screen capture from Miss Armstrong’s column, and it’s certainly true. But the columnist is about to miss the entire point.

All it takes to discredit news media are two words, Escobar notes in the documentary: “Fake news. When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Mr Escobar said that as though the “work that journalists do” is somehow beyond criticism, beyond question. But I am old enough to remember ‘Rathergate‘, in which CBS News used forged documents to try to sabotage the younger President George Bush’s re-election bid. More, I watched CBS News coverage on election night that year, as Dan Rather kept asking reported Ed Bradley, who was doing the numbers that night, for another scenario in which Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) could somehow pull out a win, despite the numbers going against him as the returns rolled in, and the hang-dog expressions on all of their faces as they realized that President Bush was going to be re-elected.

Miss Armstrong wrote that she blamed the problems that journalism is facing on “cable news,” at which point she commented on the failures of CNN to revitalize itself after the firing of Jeff Zucker and hiring of Chris Licht, an effort which failed, and Mr Licht was let go himself earlier this month, after barely a year on the job. Amusingly, the Associated Press reported:

A lengthy profile of Licht in Atlantic magazine that came out on Friday, (June 2, 2023), titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,”[1]Internal link added by me; not in cited article. proved embarrassing and likely sealed his fate. Author Tim Alberta discussed how Licht’s effort to reach viewers turned off by CNN’s hostility to Trump had failed and damaged his standing with CNN journalists.

Another belly laugh here. According to the report, CNN’s journalists were complaining that, in effect, Mr Licht was trying to go for less strident anti-Trump stuff and trying to engage in less unfair more unbiased reporting.

Naturally, there was the Inquirer’s standard denigration of Fox News as slanted — which it is — but I was amused when Miss Armstrong told us that she used to keep cable news on as a “backdrop,” and “fall asleep listening to MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.” If you listen to Miss Maddow’s show, you’ll never run out of biased news, as she is as hard left, on an admittedly leftist network, as you can find.

Miss Armstrong concluded:

In the meantime, I have another solution: Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news. Also, turn off 24-hour cable news, which too often blurs the line between fact and opinion and hypes events to boost ratings.

That’s what I do. I’m way less triggered that way. I sleep better, too.

“Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news”? How many times have I noted the journolism — the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity — of the Inquirer? There are 68 stories on this website alone in which a site search for Inquirer journalism returned. We have noted how the Inky deliberately censors the police reports they use, refused to publish a story on a pro-life clinic, in Philadelphia, being vandalized, and we have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

Many of those stories were supposedly straight news stories, not specified opinion pieces.

But it’s hardly unexpected, because the Inquirer itself told us that, to meet publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ requirement that it become an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper would censor the news, saying that the newspaper would be:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.

In a city which has averaged over 500 murders a year for the past three years, and could be headed that way again in 2023, I’m not sure how the newspaper could possibly ‘overemphasize crime.’

  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.

So, the newspaper has publicly committed to an “antiracism” mission, and that, rather than simply presenting the facts, will guide how it publishes the news.

  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Put plainly, Miss Hughes told us that the Inky would bend its coverage on “crime and criminal justice” with an organization which specifically labels itself activist, which wants reparations from media organizations, and which, despite Miss Hughes’ efforts, wants the newspaper to go even further to the left. The newspaper’s publisher wasn’t telling us about the Inky’s editorial and OpEd pages, she wasn’t “delineat(ing) between opinion and straight news,” but about everything that they publish!

Yes, Miss Armstrong is right: the cable news networks have biases, biases strong and obvious enough that News Nation has seen an opening for straight news programming, though I cannot comment on how successful they’ve been in avoiding bias.

But The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bias, too, and not just on the editorial and OpEd pages; they have already admitted it. It’s understandable that, as a newspaper employee and writer, she’d want people to get their news from newspapers, but to claim that newspapers, especially her own, “delineate between opinion and straight news,” is just laughably false.

References

References
↑1 Internal link added by me; not in cited article.
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Journolism: ignoring the “Five Ws + H” in reporting due to political correctness

Despite having spent two years on the staff of the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, I was never a journalism major. That does not mean that I have been completely uneducated on reporting and newswriting, though I must say that newswriting under 2022 standards is nothing like it was in the 1970s.

One of the most basic journalism standards is the “Five Ws,” frequently referred to as the “Five Ws + H.” It’s pretty simple: “who, what, when, where, and why,” with the addition of “how”. Who is involved, what happened, when and where did it happen, why did it happen, and how did it happen. These are the things for which every responsible editor looks, and will come back to the reporter or newswriter — not always the same person — if one of them is missing.

Sometimes, especially with a breaking news story, one or more of those “Ws” is simply unknown, and deadlines being what they were, and are, a story will get rushed to publication while missing one of the six important points. In most such cases, there will be a note at the end to the effect of “This is a breaking story and will be updated.” With the advent of digital publication, where newspapers have online versions, this can be fairly frequent, as newspaper editors, in competition with television and internet media, don’t want to sit on a story.

Which brings me back to something I covered Thursday evening, the decision of the Cherokee County School Board to not play the Highlands School girls’ volleyball team. Several credentialed media sources covered the story, and they gave us the “who”, the Cherokee County School Board, the “what”, the decision to forfeit all scheduled games with Highlands, the “when”, Thursday, September 21st, the “where,” the Cherokee County School Board meeting, and the “why,” because a “Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball”.

Except, as it happens, the credentialed media sources all censored part of the “why.”

Volleyball players spike the ball! They all try to spike the ball, to deliver a shot against the opponent with such speed and force that the defense cannot react quickly enough to prevent the ball from hitting the ground inbounds. That a player in a (supposedly) non-contact sport was injured by a spiked ball is infrequent, but certainly not unheard of.

If you read only the credentialed media stories, you might be scratching your head, wondering why the School Board would take such a decision, against one player on one team. Spiking the ball is, after all, part of the game, and if the Board were concerned that a spiked ball injured a player, and that somehow made the game unsafe, then a reader might wonder why the Board didn’t simply cancel all girls’ volleyball games, with all opponents.

And that’s the part of the “why” the credentialed media censored: the Highlands School girls’ volleyball player that so forcefully spiked the ball isn’t a girl! The unnamed-in-the-media player is a boy who “identifies” as a girl, and that’s why the Cherokee County Board of Education took the decision the way they did. The report from the Cherokee County Board of Education is here.

The Board’s report noted:

Mr. Jason Murphy stated to the Board that he hoped they voted on this issue based on their morals, ethics and Christian upbringing.

In other words, there was a political and religious aspect to the Board’s decision, as raised in the meeting, and it is at least possible, though the Board denied it, that political and religious considerations influenced the decision. Surely that would be a newsworthy part of the “why” of the decision.

Ms. Jordan Lovingood asked the Board to consider how their decision will affect the Highlands’ player this decision is being made about. She stressed how we are teaching inclusion and acceptance in our schools, yet making a decision to not play a team based on sex.

(Board member) Mr. (Joe) Wood commented that no one is basing their decision on sex; it’s based on safety.

This would normally be a very contentious point, yet the credentialed media completely ignored all of it, because to have included it in their stories would have been to inform readers that the player in question is not, to use a phrase in the Board’s report, “100% girl”.

I frequently use the word “journolism”, the spelling of which comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Perhaps some would find that unfair, but what better reflects when (purported) journalists ignore the basic principles of reporting and newswriting in order to protect the political position that ‘transgender’ girls are real girls?

The credentialed media got really, really upset when they were accused of #FakeNews, but what else would you call it when the media censor the news in the way they did in this story? If the media aren’t trusted, this is just part of the reason why.

I found out about this story not through the credentialed media, but due to definitely biased bloggers, and I put some effort into searching out confirmation of this through the credentialed media; it took the link to the Board of Education’s report of the meeting, in the Washington Examiner, certainly a conservatively biased source, to gain unbiased confirmation. But when biased bloggers report the whole story, while the professional media will not, there’s something wrong with our professional media.

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A few real journalists challenge the #woke journolism of the credentialed media

Bari Weiss is not a conservative; she’s very liberal in her politics, though just plain not #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough for the young wokes in The New York Times newsroom. Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative; he’s very much on the political left as far as an American would be defined, though he now lives in Brazil. And Andrew Sullivan is hardly a conservative, either.

But these three journalists have one thing in common: they stand for freedom of speech and accuracy in journalism!

    When All The Media Narratives Collapse

    In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

    by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, November 12, 2021

    The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

    But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

    And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

    Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

    Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.”[2]I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here. (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

    But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

There’s much more at the original, and I absolutely encourage reading it. Mr Sullivan goes into many examples of recent journalistic ‘errors,’ and notes what we wicked reich wing conservatives have been saying for years now: the mistakes the credentialed media make all seem to be on one direction, the direction which feeds into the narrative of the American political left, of the American Democratic Party.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse “a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense”? While I have never called him a “naïve, dangerous fool,” I have said, “Young Mr Rittenhouse helped to create the situation by traveling to Kenosha and appearing on the scene with a firearm. That does not mean it wasn’t self-defense; it seems pretty clear that it was. But he should never have gone there, certainly not armed.”

    We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

The trial of Mr Rittenhouse reminds me of that of George Zimmerman. Mr Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin, and certainly should have backed off when dispatchers told him to do so, but that did not give Mr Martin the right to assault him. Local law enforcement knew that Mr Zimmerman’s actions were legal self-defense, but political pressure pushed the state of Florida to appoint a special counsel and prosecute him anyway. It was really no surprise that Mr Zimmerman was acquitted, because the state had no case. The left waxed wroth, but they’d had their trial, and the jury exonerated Mr Zimmerman. Prosecutors in Kenosha surely knew, unless they are just boneheadedly stupid, that they didn’t have much of a case, but my guess — and it really is a guess — is that they were unwilling to take the political heat for dropping the charges against the defendant; they’re leaving it up to a (supposedly) anonymous jury.

But, as Mr Sullivan noted, the liberals in the credentialed media — even ones who masturbate during Zoom meetings — can’t escape their own narrative that he simply must be guilty!

This is why I have so often referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I have noted, many times, how publisher Elizabeth Hughes has openly admitted that her goal is to filter reporting, filter (supposedly) straight news stories, in The Philadelphia Inquirer through a political sieve, rather than report the unvarnished facts.

Newspapers can, and should, have editorial and OpEd sections; with word count and column inch limits having been mostly replaced by nearly unlimited bandwidth, there should be more, not less, of such sections. The credentialed media ought to be perfectly free to engage in expressions of opinion. But for the credentialed media to regain lost credibility, they need to report the news as straight news, and not report opinion as fact.

That’s the difference between journalism and journolism.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here.
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No #FakeNews here, huh?

The Washington Post tweeted:

And here’s the story:

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has sought to ban mask mandates in schools, tests positive for the coronavirus

    by Felicia Sonmez | August 17, 2021 | 5:48 PM EDT

    Abbott is among the Republican governors who have resisted public-health mandates aimed at stemming the tide of the virus’s delta variant, which has caused a new spike in cases as the country attempts to reopen schools, restaurants and other businesses.

    A spokesman for Abbott said the governor is “fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms.” Texas first lady Cecilia Abbott has tested negative, and everyone with whom the governor was in close contact Tuesday has been notified, the spokesman, Mark Miner, said in a statement.

    However, videos and photos posted online by Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign show him delivering remarks and mingling with a large, maskless crowd of more than 100 people indoors at an event in Texas on Monday night.

    Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it had contacted those who were present at the event in the wake of his positive diagnosis.

    “The Governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result,” Miner said Tuesday. “Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently. The Governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily.”

This is a screen cap of the Post’s tweet, in case the paper deletes it. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. But here’s the important part: though the Post was trying to slam the Governor for resisting mask mandates, today was his first positive test, and he has been “fully vaccinated” against the virus.

The other important part? The Post’s tweet was only 106 characters and spaces, meaning that there were 174 more characters and spaces available, yet the Post tweet couldn’t take the effort to note that the Governor is fully vaccinated. While it’s in the third paragraph of the story, and before the first ad, it can’t be considered ‘burying the lede,’ Washington Post stories are hidden behind a paywall,[1]Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content. and some people who saw the tweet couldn’t access the story. How many thousands and thousands of others read, and perhaps retweeted, the tweet without ever checking?

So, the Governor is fully vaccinated, and being tested daily, but the Post wants to slam him because he opposes mask mandates, something which puts him within what the people of the Lone Star State want.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content.