Media bias: it’s everywhere and becoming more and more subtle

It used to be that Big Media would simply ignore events prejudicial to the narrative they were pushing. Now under criticism they will report them only on the rarely read back pages of their newspaper or leaving them off their TV news and bury them on their Internet pages. No one can then point out they ignored the story.

The FISA Court’s stinging, stunning rebuke of the FBI application to spy on Carter Page was huge news, as it undercut the Democrat and media narrative that the FBI and the intelligence community were pristinely pure. Criticism was only from knuckle-dragging Republicans. So Big Media ignored this story: click here for details. And sure enough they later added minor stories to their websites.

Let’s now look at NBC, well known for editing George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make the ‘white Hispanic’ appear to be a racist murderer. Saturday December 14^th NBC Nightly News aired a story about how dangerous to elections fake or edited videos can be. Click here to watch the broadcast; the story starts about 15 minutes in.

This may appear innocuous and good reporting. But look at the examples chosen to illustrate how to fake a video. First we see President Nixon announcing his resignation on TV, followed by an edited version with a journalist’s head on Nixon’s body in which ‘Nixon’ announced he was not resigning.  Then there was an edited video of Obama uttering “I would never say these things.”

Devious third-grade level minds like mine see the 2020 election message immediately. Republican man bad. Democrat man good. Orange Republican man too need resign. If the examples had been balanced, we would have seen Clinton brag he did have sex with that woman.

It so happens that after arduous review the Inspector General determined there was no political bias in this NBC story, since there was no documentary or testimonial evidence proving bias. Those who see a pattern of bias need to grow up and accept that a better explanation is that there can no explanation for these patterns of bias. These random events just happen out of the blue. Russian and Soviet disinformation specialists know that it is far easier to deceive when the lie has a wrapper of truth. They and James Comey are nodding in approval of the IG finding.

Troglo (L. H. Kevil)         

The lynching of Steve King

King is a Republican congressman from Iowa long known for his conservative views on immigration and strenuous opposition to any form of amnesty for illegal aliens. The last few days he has been pilloried by the media, by Democrat politicians, and by his own fellow Republican members of Congress.

What is the charge? “Racist remarks.”

Here is what he said in an interview with the New York Times:

White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization – how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”…

May we postulate that there is zero evidence in his background that he is a white supremacist or a white nationalist? And if he were, would he spill the beans to a gotcha, bloody-minded reporter? Please note that the media only quote the first sentence, leaving out the second. His defense, which the media have ignored, was that the phrase “that language” referred only to Western civilization, not to white nationalists and supremacists or those ideologies. The words ‘our history and our civilization’ in the missing second sentence make perfectly clear that he is puzzled that Western civilization should be offensive to left-wing ears.

Analyzing his remarks

Clearly they are not remotely racist, nor do they imply support for racism. Liberals and radicals themselves hurl with abandon the terms ‘white nationalist’ and ‘white supremacist’ at people like Steve King whose views they disagree with. These insulting terms obviously do not offend them. The people they accuse of white nationalism and white supremacy do. During the interview King was talking about our language-constricting PC environment, mentioning white nationalists and supremacists and then in midsentence pivoted to another thought: the condemnation of Western civilization by the PC crowd.

Lefty guilt by association

Ignoring his explanation and suppressing the full quotation, his critics jumped at the opportunity to claim ‘without evidence’ that he was really defending white supremacy and so is proven to be the racist they have claimed all along on the basis of his views on illegal migration. In today’s upside-down PC world, if a white man says anything remotely about white privilege except to confess his guilt and seek absolution, despite logic, grammar, and commonsense, the mob will come after him. And mobs do not much care about real guilt.

Republicans quake with fear at unfounded accusations of racism

That Democrats and the media set upon King is not surprising. But that no one on the other side stood up to ask the mob to cool down and consider the evidence carefully is shameful. No one had the courage to suggest giving him the benefit of the doubt. Even if what he said could be contorted to imply approval of some aspect of white nationalism, is there no one brave enough to believe his explanation and confront the mob? Or even to report it fully and accurately? The take-no-prisoners PC mob is implacably intolerant and will accept nothing less than capital punishment for malefactors, their Stalinist total elimination from public life and expunction from history. All this is beyond shameful.

The whisper campaign against Republicans

Democrats keep winning elections they should lose through reliance on the whispers that Republicans all suffer from racial bias, concealed to win elections. Democrats, this narrative goes, are exempt from this racist leprosy. Logic and verisimilitude are routinely ignored without challenge. We desperately need forceful pushback and leadership from prominent conservatives against this racial juggernaut. Without it  our culture will be more and more ensnared in loss of freedom of expression, enforced with Red-Guardlike intensity built on delusions like diversity.

Troglo (L. H. Kevil)     

Commentary from Canada, where PC speech suppression is more engrained than here: https://tinyurl.com/ycqfzdtg

In the US there is very little protest against the PC mob. One example is here: https://tinyurl.com/y7ccuqxa

 

It’s about much more than Trump

Would it be too much of a simplistic exaggeration to say that the recent eruptions – anti-Trump, pro EU, marches for women’s rights – reflect the perennial struggle between the progressives holed up in their urban echo chambers and the traditionalists in fly-over country, between the globalist citizens of the world fighting to save the EU and its moribund emblem, the Euro, and the nationalists, always portrayed as disturbing Fascists, who love their country, its culture, traditions, and vibrant immediacy subject to gradual erosion by alien forces, between the Hegelian-Marxist millennium worshippers and those of us more than comfortable in our own skin, sex, marriage, career, locality, and religion?

Think of the rage if a long-cherished dream were at last just within grasp only to be snatched away by cruel, capricious fate. Just like a child stripped of the candy about to be enjoyed, so the Leftists of America were ever so rudely deprived of a Hillary completion of the Obama transformation of America. So the intelligentsia of Europe so enamored of their post-national, new non-country super state, the European Union, were shaken by the unexpected rebellion of their inferiors in the Brexit vote, soon to be followed by Italy or some other country whose people have decided that there is a deeply personal, life-enhancing and -deciding meaning to their country and its cultural identity worth fighting for.

The press against Trump, including the BBC, the portrayal of France’s Marine LePen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, and others as Hitlerian Fascists, the marches worldwide today for women’s rights all proceed from a worldview of radical, undifferentiated equality that admits of no mediating institutions between man and government, least of all the family. Multiculturalism proclaims all cultures equal, our own inferior one excepted. Non-discrimination leads to an Orwellian acceptance of the Lie as the Truth. One of the Queens chaplains was asked to resign after complaining of Islamic prayers denying Jesus’s divinity in a Scottish cathedral. Might offend Muslims, you know. But the rubes in the provinces know that regional, cultural, and other differences make life worthwhile, not least because they are ours and because they keep the progressives and the horror of their millennium at bay.

Women’s rights? The emasculation of America is nearly complete. Universities teach courses on demasculinization. Title IX star chambers rule. Women in combat roles is now law, although women cannot succeed as grunts. They haven’t got the strength, the endurance, or the culture to be the relentless killers we need our soldiers to be. Nor do they want to be. Men are portrayed on TV as dunces. Millions of men in their prime, ages 25 to 54, are completely outside the workforce, the jobs that should be theirs taken by immigrants, illegal and legal. Feminists crow that women need men as fish need bicycles and yet bemoan that single women occupied with their children don’t earn as much as men. NBC News regrets that while over half the drivers are women, less than 2% of mechanics are female. Division of labor by sex roles is the new unforgivable sin. Weak men gather this into their psyche and submit (and occasionally explode.) Strong men and women know they have work to do.   

Troglo (L. H. Kevil)

Name that Party: the return of an old parlor game

This little game, popular several years ago, had apparently fallen into desuetude. I’ve written earlier about this game here, here, and here. To play, you read a news story about a politician caught with his pants down or his hand in the cookie jar. According to the rules of the game, the politician’s party affiliation is not mentioned. It is up to the reader to guess what it is. The public soon became tired of this game because the unmentionable party was always Democrat. Republican miscreants were always identified.

This particular instance involves serious allegations of voter fraud by the Mayor of the St Louis County municipality of Berkeley. The FBI was involves in an investigation of improper handling of absentee ballots. In this case we have two two-fers: not only is the party affiliation not mentioned, but also the race of the suspected cheater. There are two news accounts, one by St Louis Post-Dispatch reporters here and another, based on the Post story, by the Associated Press. The latter story was picked up by the Kansas City Star and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

In the AP story neither the party nor the race of the miscreant was mentioned. (The Post story showed a photograph of the Mayor, revealing his race.) We leave it to the reader to play this game and get the correct answers. It is rather delicious that the reportage mentions that a St Louis County elections official was a Republican, but declines to specify the party of the Mayor. This reminds me of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune refusing to call Somali Muslims implicated in terrorism anything but “Minnesota men.” The Powerline blog had extensive fun with this politically correct reflex.

“Name that party” of course raises the issue of journalistic bias. Interestingly, in  the same issue the Columbia Tribune published an article from a retired University of MIssouri journalism professor disputing “the attacks by Donald Trump’s campaign against my colleagues.” I’ll comment on that article in the next post.    

Troglo  (L. H. Kevil)

Roseburg and the Rose Garden: Obama goes for the slime

In much too typical fashion President Obama feigned indignation over the massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon in order to deflect attention from the horrors of the recent videos about Planned Parenthood’s grisly procedures. Also typically the mass media have not pointed this out. Not only does Planned Parenthood murder children in the womb by burning them alive with saline solution or ripping off their limbs one at a time – like drawing and quartering regicides and heretics centuries ago –, it also dispatches those unfortunates born alive. Then it sells the body parts for cash. President Planned Parenthood stands so much behind this criminal organization that even in the Illinois Senate he would not support legislation to spare children born alive. To him and others the right to choose is the right to have a dead baby, no matter the means or the torture inflicted. He threatens to veto any spending bill that removes the money Planned Parenthood receives as direct appropriations from the Federal Government. Scores of millions of deaths since Roe v. Wade have not moved him. Retaining the political support of those supporting abortion on demand – the central dogma in their religion – is too important to let something as inconsequential as his conscience stand in the way.

But in response to the murders of the nine students in Oregon the President steps up to the bully pulpit, but not to offer prayers, or a word of consolation and healing. Rather does he divide the country and attack Republicans for not passing legislation that would remove “easy access” to guns. In his world evil should be confronted with legislation and rhetoric. But if access to guns is no longer easy, those who need them for their line of work, like drug dealers and future mass murderers, will make all necessary efforts to procure them. This is Obama at his partisan, destructive worst. He offered no positive proposals, stating he is mainly going to talk about the problem. But he could have done the following.

• Use the bully pulpit to encourage abolition of gun-free zones, which offer mass shooters easy targets.
• Encourage cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C. to allow citizens to defend themselves against armed criminals.
• Direct administration agencies to enforce existing gun laws strictly.
• Encourage the news media not to publicize these mass murderers by showing their photos and revealing their names. Notes from the Roseburg murderer show he was a Satanist who wanted to be in the “limelight” and then welcomed in hell. There is some research suggesting a copy-cat effect in mass shootings and teen suicides. Giving the murders international attention and ordering the national flag lowered gives the shooter just the kind of infamy he wanted. It also might encourage others.
• Obama also could have announced that he will veto the criminal sentencing reform bill going through the Senate. This bill would release felons who carried guns when committing their crimes.
• He will of course do none of these.

It turns out that Alek Skarlatos, one of the three Americans who subdued a Muslim would-be mass murderer on a Paris-bound train last August, is a student at Umpqua Community College. Who would you rather have in the classroom with one of your children during an attack, Alek, recipient of the Légion d’honneur and Christian, or President Pusillanimous? 

Troglo

Political quickie: a question for Barack Obama

Given on the one hand the President’s hand wringing over the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, not to speak of his Justice Department’s ‘civil-rights’ investigations into the deaths, and on the other his silence about the murder of Kate Steinle, we wonder why the press has not asked him this simple question:

Do white lives matter?   

Troglo

AP bias uptick: it must be election season

Regular readers know our thoughts about the left-wing bias of the Associated Press (AP.) Now that the warm-up to the 2016 elections is upon us, we are starting to see an increasing number of blatantly biased AP articles. Most of these articles are unsigned, perhaps for obvious reasons. As one example we read today the astonishing news regarding same-sex couples that we live “in a nation that recognizes their marriages.” One would think that the writer would try to present this fatuous assertion a bit more artfully.

Our main point in this post is the reporting of the debate about funding welfare for the next fiscal year in the Missouri State legislature. This story will be typical of the AP’s coverage of the upcoming elections, as it seeks to portray Republicans in a negative light. We read the following about the Republican war on the poor and downtrodden:

• Cutting social services priority for GOP lawmakers
• Republican lawmakers are using their large majorities this session to try to limit the social safety net on a number of fronts
• Republicans looking to trim the state’s social safety net
• Lead budget writer Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, is pushing for funding cuts to the state’s social services, health and mental health departments next fiscal year

None of this is of course true. Weasely reporters have a long history of portraying actual increases as funding cuts. They do this by implicitly comparing the actual funding not against the previous year’s funding, but against requested funding or projections. The AP can only get away with this whopper by not reporting the context. Since Senator Schaefer is a candidate for Attorney General in the upcoming election, he has an AP target on his back. Below are the details the AP omitted to report, based on what Senator Schaefer has said himself here.

Welfare spending has been increasing at an unsustainable rate, threatening to gobble up every new dollar in revenue the state receives as the economy improves. Something needs to be done. The safety net cannot become a hammock.The legislature has had a difficult relationship with the Governor and the department heads, who will not cooperate and help the legislature fund the most pressing needs first. Social Services requested an additional $1 billion over what had been spent the previous year. Senator Schaefer’s proposal would give Social Services an $800 million increase over the previous year’s expenditures. An $800 million increase cannot honestly be characterized as a cut. Senator Schaefer proposes to give the department heads their entire budget allocation in a lump sum, the equivalent of block grants, and thus the responsibility for prioritizing what is needed where. This strikes us as a sensible policy until we get a new Governor, at which time accurate measures of the effectiveness of the expenditures should be put into place.   

Troglo

Leftist media bias: be prepared for the onslaught

With the competition for the Republican presidential nomination heating up, we can expect a stepped-up payload of bad reporting. For example, you can read about a recent case of fraudulent reporting about Scott Walker from the New York Times here and here.

Now with the Brian Williams scandal front and center, we might be tempted to think that lack of accuracy and truthfulness are the main issues. However the problem with Williams and his fellow lefties is not just falsehoods or embellishments, nor is it limited to accepting sloppy research if it puts conservatives in a bad light. A major problem is their judgement about what is newsworthy. As the managing editor of NBC News Williams determined that the Benghazi cover-up, Solyndra, or the IRS targeting of conservative organizations leading up to the 2012 elections were just not very newsworthy and so were hardly reported at all. Stories important to Democrats were more numerous and often highlighted.

Compromise and Democrats: a very bad deal

The big news from D.C. is the fight over funding the Federal Department of Homeland Security past the February 28 deadline. The House of Representatives passed legislation funding all of the Homeland Security Department, but prohibiting expenditures in furtherance of President Obama’s illegal executive actions creating amnesty. As this bill reached the Senate all 44 Democrat Senators and both of the two ‘Independents’ filibustered against it. Their action will effectively strip Homeland Security of all funding starting March 1. A minimum of five Democrats and one Independent had expressed concern over the illegality of the President’s amnesty. Yet despite their principled concern, they joined to form the 100% solid Democrat bloc. Details here and here.

This has happened time and again. Democrats act in unison, while Republicans almost never form a solid bloc. If there is to be compromise, the Democrats have the advantage. Ideally in compromise, each side brings forward the issues most important to it that might be acceptable to the other party. The result is a kind of win-win for the country. But when one party will not give in to the other, compromise means the Democrats get the permanent change they crave, while Republicans can barely manage to get something they want and then often only on a temporary basis. With the news media biased in favor of Democrats, they can now dishonestly claim regarding Homeland Security funding the Republicans are shutting down the government and perhaps win the opinion-poll wars. [See note 1 below.] Over time this leads to a ratcheting effect, with the Federal government drifting inexorably leftward. With a progressive President in power and the ability of the Federal government to bully states and localities by threatening to withhold Federal funding, we have a very dangerous situation. Congress should stand its ground.

In our view, the Republican Party needs to change. Not drastically, but substantially in several respects.

Ferguson, Missouri: the path forward

A few facts about Mike Brown and Officer Wilson.

That fateful day Brown, having robbed a convenience store, was deliberately violating the unwritten compact between the police and the community that jaywalking would be tolerated, but not walking in the center of the street.

• When told by Officer Wilson to move to the sidewalk, Mr. Brown reacted violently, slamming the police car door shut so Officer Wilson could not get out
• He then punched the officer in the head and reached for his service weapon
• The officer managed to fire two shots inside the car
• Brown was intoxicated on marijuana, with an elevated concentration of 12 ng/ml in his blood. This may help explain his rage and self-destructive behavior
• Brown ran away, but then turned around charging the officer as if to make a football tackle or wrestling takedown
• In a fight Mr. Brown could easily have overwhelmed the much smaller Officer Wilson
• Brown was shot when he was dangerously close, less than 10 feet from the officer
• If Officer Wilson had not fired, he would have suffered severe bodily injury, possibly death
• Wounding in the leg or arm was not an option; police training emphasizes that multiple torso shots are sometimes needed to neutralize the threat of an enraged criminal
• In these situations Missouri law authorizes the use of deadly force
• In the ordinary course of events this open-and-shut case would not have been brought to a grand jury

Liberals and radicals will not be persuaded by facts. For them somehow Mike Brown must be declared innocent and someone or something else guilty of his death. Thus the emphasis on non-issues such as that Mike did not deserve to die. (The issue is not deserving death, but that his own actions put him in jeopardy of death.) Thus the Brown family is pursuing a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Officer Wilson. Thus the President is calling this a matter of civil rights. Liberals are accustomed to conservatives cowering at the threat of being labelled ‘racist,’ but react with bullying outrage when their ‘facts’ are challenged.

Are we not permitted to be as blunt as the liberals and the protestors? Responsibility for his death belongs to Mr. Brown himself and responsibility for the riots belongs to the black community and its supporters. Pointing out self-inflicted wounds is not blaming the victim. Rewarding bad behavior (see here) leads to more of it, just as paying ransom for a kidnapping leads to many more.

Justice for Mike Brown? What injustice has he suffered? There was no injustice. He is responsible for his death. Nor is there anything relating to civil rights. The Eric Holder investigation is a sham. It is a truism that prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich. Civil rights laws have been stretched to the point at which they are used to coerce behavior that the government desires, under threat of prosecution by hundreds of ‘Justice’ Department attorneys. If Officer Wilson is indicted, it would be a violation his civil rights, the consequence of black racism and the crime of policing while white.