Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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I’ll take “Stories we didn’t see last summer for $500, Alex.”

During the Summer if Fire and Hate, I saw a bunch of things on Twitter from conservatives, with pictures of violent Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter rioters, trying to get them recognized so that they could be arrested for arson and assault, but I never saw the credentialed media doing that. The Washington Post even published an ‘analysis’ by a thoroughly biased college professor claiming that This summer’s Black Lives Matter protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, our research finds; Police and counterprotesters sometimes started violence. CNN ran the justifiably mocked banner noting “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

Contrast that with this, from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Recognize someone in photos from the DC riot? The FBI wants to hear from you

By Tanasia Kenney | January 7, 2020 | 11:56 AM EST | Updated 2:04 PM EST

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants the public’s help in identifying individuals who wreaked havoc and prompted a lockdown at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

A mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol building as lawmakers met to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s win, sparking violence that left four dead, several injured and dozens arrested, McClatchy News reported.

The FBI is now accepting tips, photos, videos and other digital media showing the chaos and destruction that unfolded on Jan. 6. Witnesses are asked to submit tips online, or call the FBI tip line at ‪1-800-CALL-FBI (1-‪800-225-5324) to provide any information that may be helpful to the investigation, according to the agency’s website.

“Our goal is to preserve the public’s constitutional right to protest by protecting everyone from violence and other criminal activity,” the FBI said.

I have no problem at all with attempting to identify and prosecute those protesters who broke the law, but the hypocrisy of the credentialed medias in trying to help law enforcement on this, coupled with their totally standing down during the left wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests is obvious and blatant.

We had states and cities imposing all sorts of restrictions on the right of peaceable assembly, yet turning a blind eye to the not-so-peaceable assemblies of last summer’s riots. We even had very liberal Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) violating his own restrictions to join the protesters in a rally in Harrisburg.

The right of peaceable assembly allows protesters to make their voices heard; it does not confer the right to storm the Capitol, or any other building, and destroy property. A relatively small number of the hundreds of thousands who descended in Washington stormed the Capitol building, but somehow, some way, you never see the credentialed media mentioning that part. Odd, because they were certainly willing to do that for last summer’s protests!

I suppose that’s what happens when the credentialed media have surrendered to the #woke.
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You cannot tell the truth in The Philadelphia Inquirer

Around 10:00 AM yesterday morning, I read the story Archdiocese of Philadelphia spins off Downingtown psychiatric center where pedophile priests were sent in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I made two comments. Several hours later, my initial comment was still there:

This article ignores one important point: the accused priests sent to Vianney couldn’t be reported to law enforcement, due to patient privacy laws. Accusations made to the archdiocese could be reported, but it was the archdiocese, not the Vianney Center, which took the decisions as to what to do with accused priests after receiving reports from the Vianney Center.

The Inquirer’s website does not provide separate links to individual comments.

However, I made a second comment, which the system accepted, and was posted, noting that the majority of victims of the predatory priests were teenaged boys, yet that couldn’t be mentioned, because it might be seen as condemnatory of homosexuality. By 5:12 PM EST, that comment has disappeared, but there were, at that time, nine red tabs noting “comment disabled.”

Now there’s a new article up, Former adviser to Monaco’s royal family and DeSales University priest charged in Philly child porn case. In it the readers are told that the Rev. William McCandless, from the Wilmington-based religious order Oblates de St. Francis De Sales, has been arrested on possession of child pornography charges.

But the charges unsealed Wednesday were not the first time McCandless had been accused of misconduct. In fact, his overseas assignment in 2010 was announced the same summer the clergy sex abuse watchdog group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests called for his suspension, saying his name had surfaced in an ongoing clergy abuse lawsuit.

According to the organization, a sex abuse victim said in a sworn deposition filed in Delaware courts that McCandless had once admitted to him that he abused a 14-year-old French boy attending a church camp.

Details of that deposition could not be immediately confirmed on Wednesday.

At the time, McCandless had been assigned to the Salesianum School, a Catholic private high school in Wilmington. He had also previously served for seven years as a chaplain at North Catholic High School in Philadelphia.

I am surprised that the article author, Jeremy Roebuck, mentioned that there was an allegation that Father McCandless molested a “14-year-old French boy” rather than just a “14-year-old.” The story said to check back later; I wonder if that part will be changed.

The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

The Inquirer doesn’t have a nifty masthead tagline like The New York Times’ All the News That’s Fit to Print or The Washington Post’s Johnny-come-lately Democracy Dies in Darkness, added after the horrible Donald Trump was elected, but if it did, it should read something like All the News That’s Politically Correct . . . and noting that the sexual abuse problem among the Catholic priesthood is primarily one of homosexual attraction to teenaged boys is anything but politically correct.

The credentialed media like to believe that they are the guardians of truth and the defenders of a democratic society, but what so many of them have become is the guardians of truthiness. When the facts are inconvenient, when the truth does not fit the editors’ notions of what can be said, when the facts upset the #woke, well, the Inquirer has its problems with the idiots, and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski was fired resigned because he published the article “Buildings Matter, Too,” which expressed concern that some historic buildings in Philadelphia had been and more could be damaged in the #BlackLivesMatter protests.

If we cannot expect the Inquirer to print the truth when the truth is not what they want their readers to see, how can we have any confidence that what they do print is the truth, rather than just some shaded version of it?
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Cross-posted on RedState.

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Do they not even see themselves?

I have previously noted how the Associated Press surrendered to political correctness on language, saying that, when referring to race, it will capitalize “black” but leave “white” in lower-case.

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

I found the whole thing not only obviously silly, but poor grammar. The use of “white” or “black” is simply shorthand for large racial groups, Caucasian and Negro, which are properly capitalized. Irish or French should be capitalized, as they refer to the inhabitants of countries as well as ethnic groups, while white should not be. Similarly, I would capitalize Kenyan or African, but not black. That the Associated Press would treat the words differently is just not very bright.

And now The Philadelphia Inquirer has provided, through its apparent adoption of the Associated Press stylebook, the silliness of it. In an article entitled “Why the term ‘legal votes’ is racist,” Jeffrey Barg wrote:

News media use the descriptor Black three times as much as white, which normalizes white and others Black. Similarly, legal vote others ballots from areas that aren’t predominantly white.

One would thing that a writer who styles himself The Angry Grammarian would have the capitalization of “Black” without a similar capitalization of “white” almost jump off the page at him as an obvious error. More, it would be discordantly harsh on the perceptions of the reader, especially the white reader whom one would expect Mr Barg to wish to influence.

Then again, one would not expect someone who claims to be a “grammarian” to write sentences such as, “It’s the insinuation of illegality in service of eliminating Black votes”, or “Adding the adjective legal implies the presence of illegal votes, which lawsuits, the Department of Justice, and even super-sleuth Rudy Giuliani have been unable to provide evidence of.”

Then, in the article “Haverford students end strike after getting demands met,” Inquirer writer Susan Snyder wrote, “But concerns about the college’s treatment of Black and brown students had been mounting long before the college leaders sent the email”, and “Raymond, who is white, announced last week that she would step down as the interim chief diversity officer, a position she didn’t intend to keep, and that provost Linda Strong-Leek, who is Black, would step into the position.”

https://i0.wp.com/www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif?w=612&ssl=1 I suppose that the Associated Press’ and the Inquirer’s stylebook failed to consider whether “brown,” when used as a racial identifier, should be capitalized. One wonders: will “brown” readers of the Inquirer be offended?

In the end, the decision by the Associated Press, one followed by many but not all media organizations, paid homage to political correctness, but wound up exposing the folly of it. In arriving at their decision, the AP might have limited their discussions to what they said in their press statement, but when the stylebook change effects are seen in print, in actual stories meant to inform or persuade the reader, the ridiculousness of it becomes apparent.

Cross-posted on RedState.

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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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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 – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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