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 didn’t 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 Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” 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 Trump’s 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 Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – 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
One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — 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
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 José 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 “peeping Tom.”
Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s 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.
“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, huh?
The Washington Post added that tagline to its masthead in February of 2017, claiming that it wasn’t an attack on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, deciding “to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee,” though nobody in particular believed that. I question the timing, as Robert Stacy McCain would say.
The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.
I am glad that my favorite reporter, Heather Long, stepped back from the newspaper’s Editorial Board a couple of months ago, so that she can’t be blamed for this drivel.
Trying to protect Biden, Democrats sacrificed their credibility
Democrats’ coverup of the president’s decline hurt their claim of being the party of truth.
My subscription to The Washington Post is very reasonable, and far less than subscriptions to The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers. Both the Times and the Inquirer endorsed Kamala Harris Emhoff, whom I regard as a crackpot, socialist, and unChristian supporter of prenatal infanticide, but I didn’t cancel my subscriptions to them over their endorsements.
I doubt that anyone would have cared had the Post endorsed Mrs Emhoff, and I also doubt that newspaper endorsements mean much, especially now that their circulation continues to decline. Newspapers are, as I have previously called them, 18th century technology.
We have previously noted how the butthurt left were cancelling subscriptions to the Post, but have apparently misunderestimated just how butthurt they have been! From National Public Radio:
Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement
Ville de Nice, France (4:08 PM local time) — My Twitter feed has recently been full of calls from people using their freedom of speech to stifle other people’s freedom of speech. Jay Michaelson, “author and journalist,” as he describes himself, wrote:
Like a pack of anguished Austrian nuns, progressives can’t stop singing this tune on talk shows and Twitter feeds. And for good reason: the world’s richest man has turned a once-essential social media platform into a far-right propaganda machine.
Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.
There’s more at the MSNBC original.
Even though I do not follow many leftist sites and people at all, my Twitter feed is full of posts supporting the Communist from California, and the antiSemites wishing death upon Israel and total victory for the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas. It’s pretty laughable when I read tweets by people in the United States whining about ‘stolen land’ and ‘white settler colonialists’ when that’s exactly how and why the US exists: white settler colonialists, white Christian settler colonialists, came to these shores and conquered the Indians who were here before them. If you are an American, if you live in the US, everything you have is something you owe to those white settler colonialists.
Somehow, some way, those opinions get expressed in my feed on Twitter. I am, of course, free to block them, but I haven’t.
Mr Michaelson wants us all to boycott Twitter, but it’s his self description as a journalist, paid and fed by MSNBC, which tells us something. The credentialed left have long hated that major thing about this internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that we commoners, we riff-raff, can extend our voices beyond local shouting distance, without the need to get approval by an editor of The New York Times or MSNBC. Their gatekeeping function has been lost.
Freedom of speech and of the press are, for people like Mr Michaelson, reserved for those who have been approved by the powers who control the media, and Elon Musk’s (mostly) libertarian attitude is just another, another very large, medium for the Little People to say things, sometimes things of which Our Betters disapprove. Freedom of speech and of the press for he, but not for thee, and me.
Our regular readers, both of them, will remember Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Miss Lorenz most significant claim to fame was her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, the owner of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. The left hated LoTT, because Miss Raichik’s schtick was to find the idiocy that the left were posting to TikTok — and there was a lot of it — and expose it far more widely, to the ridicule of the libs. At the time, Miss Raichik was working as a real estate agent, and the exposure was designed to cost Miss Raichik her job.
In the end, it simply made Miss Raichik more popular and wealthy, but it also made Miss Lorenz more of a public figure as well, invited to some of the hoitiest and toitiest of Hollywood soirees.
Of course, despite her insistence that everybody wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — though she subsequently deleted it, she informed readers that she was at least somewhat immunocompromised — as late as August of 2023, she didn’t wear one herself.
Well, in a true sauce for the goose moment, it seems that Miss Lorenz has been outed for something. From NPR, not exactly an evil reich-wing site:
‘Washington Post’ reviews star columnist Taylor Lorenz’s ‘war criminal’ jab at Biden
by David Folkenflik | Thursday, August 15, 2024 | 7:55 PM EDT
Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.
The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.
After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”
I am thoroughly amused.
A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.
NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.
Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.
“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.
The Post has already been cutting staff, due to the newspaper losing a lot of money. If Miss Lorenz loses her job over this — something which is certainly not guaranteed — would it not be a delicious bit of karma for trying to cost Miss Raichik her real estate position?
Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.
If that is true, then yes, Miss Lorenz has admitted posting it on Instagram. Perhaps she thought it was a joke, but as a social media savvy reporter, she should have realized just what a stink this would cause, as well as understanding that once something goes out into the internet, it can be seen by the wrong people, and used against her. Using utter stupidity as an excuse isn’t a good look.
Perhaps Miss Lorenz is now learning about sauce for the goose!