Category Archives: The Press

The Press

NY Times Fires Public Editor, Plans to ‘Listen’

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Listening to the wallWhen a much-praised reporter for the New York Times was found to have plagiarized and fabricated several reports, the newspaper that still holds a position in the public imagination as being “a paper of record” created its public editor position. The public editor is meant to be a visible face for journalistic ethics, a person who regularly criticized his employer for bias, editorializing the news, and other ethical slips.

Wednesday, the New York Times terminated its contract with Public Editor Liz Spayd for what National Review‘s Kyle Smith calls “resisting the Resistance.” For the foreseeable future, any public editing will be handled by the public in the comment section, about which Alan Jacobs tweeted:

I don’t think the @nytimes really plans to turn itself into a trollocracy; enabling comments is make-believe “listening to our readers.”

Smith offers several examples of fair-minded comments from Spayd, saying she “did her best to be even-handed in the eleven months she held the job. The angry Left could not forgive this.”

In a column entitled “Why Readers See the Times as Liberal,” she noted that many a liberal and centrist acolyte of the Times told her that they were seeking other outlets for balance. “A paper whose journalism appeals to only half the country has a dangerously severed public mission,” she said. That such a statement is now considered “controversial” does not reflect well on the media.

But maybe the Times doesn’t see a need for a public editor. Maybe it recognizes its innate fairness in every report it prints. I mean, look at the state of journalism today. These guys stick to the facts.

The Press

The Party of the ‘Aggressively Aggrieved’

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Hal Niedzviecki was the editor of Write magazine, a quarterly published by The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), until the other day when The Controlling Party (operating this time under the name of TWUC Equity Task Force) forced him to resign. The pressure came in response to an editorial in which Niedzviecki argued that cultural appropriation isn’t really a thing, but on the other hand is kinda cool.  Perhaps there should be a prize to honor writers who successful write about cultures that aren’t their own.

But if you’re going to accuse someone of the worst and Nazism seems so yesterday, then cultural appropriation should be your go-to charge. Niedzviecki and a member of the editorial board, who “would have strongly objected to this piece had I seen it prior to publication,” resigned.

Christie Blatchford labeled all “this is the thuggish attempted takeover of a public (and publicly funded) organization by a single aggressively aggrieved group of activists.” And they will not stop until they have victimized everyone in the name of vindicating their own victimization.

This is not healthy culture; if anything, it’s cannibalism.

Blogs, Socials, The Press

HuffPost Retracts Controversial Post Due to Lack of Author’s Existence

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Huffington Post South Africa was fine with an April 13 article arguing white men should be denied the right to vote, but when they could not contact the author and subsequently found no evidence of her existence, they pulled the article and an editorial defending it.

The blogger wrote that her argument “may seem unfair and unjust,” but “allowing white males to continue to call the shots politically and economically, following their actions over the past 500 years, is the greater injustice.”

HuffPo South Africa’s editor in chief, Verashni Pillay, supported this idea. “Those who have held undue power granted to them by patriarchy must lose it for us to be truly equal. This seems blindingly obvious to us.”

But when the supposed author of the piece went unverified, the whole argument fell apart. I’d like to say this is another example of how liberalism undermines itself, calling for the benefits of the virtues it works against, but that bit of sense seems absent here. This is simply nonsense.

Authors, Goofing, The Press

Linkage

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The great Dave Lull sends a link to an interview with Anne Kennedy on The Eric Metaxas Show. Anne is the author of the devotional book Nailed It, which I reviewed here.

And our friend Ori Pomerantz recommends this link to the Federalist, where John Ehrett imagines the “hot takes” (a new term to me, I’ll admit) that might have been published if C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books had been published today.

Reason: “Narnia Doesn’t Need Kings”
In “Prince Caspian,” the Telmarines were on the cusp of transforming Narnia into a successfully modern state that would’ve created job opportunities for everyone. Aslan’s violent return destroyed valuable capital and plunged the regime back into a preindustrial dark age. The GDP losses are incalculable. For shame, Aslan.

The Press

Don’t Read Newspapers

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In 1807, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Norvell:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

Did Jefferson go on to summarize his thoughts by saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed”? The Quote Investigator explains.

Blogs, Socials, The Press

For your Spectation

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A new column of mine, Letter to a Young Friend, has been published today at The American Spectator Online.

So here we are, post-election, looking at an outcome neither of us expected. I’m not about to do an end zone dance — this election wasn’t exactly a triumph for conservatism. Frankly, I expect the new president will do a lot more that will please you than you expect at this point.

But now seems to me a good time for a thought experiment.

Non-fiction, The Press

How Media Bias Influences Americans

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Professor Tim Groseclose released a book in 2011 with his eight years’ of research into political biases in newsrooms and communities. He pushed for a way to quantify someone’s ideology–to slap a number on it–with as much accuracy as possible. As a result, he developed the political quotient (PQ).

” A person’s PQ indicates the degree to which he is liberal,” Groseclose explains. “For instance, as I have calculated, the PQs of Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) are approximately 100. Meanwhile the PQs of noted conservatives Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) are approximately 0.”

The main point of his book is that most media outlets are liberal, far more liberal than their readers and viewers. Naturally, their PQ comes through in their reporting, and their perspective is moving Americans in a liberal direction. Get a rather detailed overview in this lecture to an audience at the Cato Institute.

Media bias, he says, is largely in what is not reported, “true statements they are leaving out, not false statements they report.” He illustrates this by recalling a report on voter limitations, saying nothing in the article was a lie, but there were several things that should have been stated to give proper context for the truth. Also what the press chooses to report on and what to ignore shows their biases (Van Jones being a communist, for example).

If it were possible to remove the influence of media bias on Americans, what would the result be? Continue reading How Media Bias Influences Americans →

Authors, The Press

I Trust Tantaros, Carlson

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Our blog doesn’t have a narrow topic list. We do want you to find our posts interesting, but I think Lars and I usually allow our own interests to guide the subjects of our posts and only occasionally rule something out as off-topic. This post is probably in off-topic territory. It may even be gossip, but I hope you’ll find it worthwhile.

Several weeks ago, long-time Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against network chairman Roger Ailes, who has since resigned. She called him a serial harasser, claimed he said many outrageous things over the years, and hindered her career because she refused him.

Granted, I don’t know Carlson personally, but I have heard her many times on the radio, occasionally on TV, and have complete faith in her. She seems to be an intelligent person who does not toe a party line but perseveres in independent thinking. She never impressed me as someone trivial or petty. When I heard of her lawsuit, I believed it on its face, because she has credibility with me. Though I’ve seen some defense of Ailes and discrediting of Carlson by other Fox News hosts, several women have also told their stories to Carlson’s lawyer.

Now we learn Andrea Tantaros is also suing Fox News executives for condoning, if not contributing to, sexual harassment, and I believe her, not because of any suspicion I have of Ailes or the people she names, but because I trust her. She impresses me as a strong, intelligent, capable woman. In the suit, she describes  at least some of the process she walked through to get grievances like this addressed within the system. Her accusations were dismissed, so as not to rock the boat.  Continue reading I Trust Tantaros, Carlson →

Non-fiction, The Press

Ethical Editing Must Be Hard for Journalists

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Photographer Steve McCurry, who is still admired by many photojournalists according to Gianmarco Maraviglia of Echo Photojournalism, has breached ethical lines by editing his photos to be more clutter-free. As the Associated Press puts it, “We do not alter or digitally manipulate the content of a photograph in any way.” To do so is at least to open themselves up to charges of altering the truth being shown in the photo.

Now McCurry calls himself a “visual storyteller.” He said, “Even though I felt that I could do what I wanted to my own pictures in an aesthetic and compositional sense, I now understand how confusing it must be for people who think I’m still a photojournalist.”

Yeah. Some of us still think Katie Couric is a journalist or perhaps in league with the journalist ilk, so we were surprised to learn that her people edited a documentary on guns, rights, and violence to show the Virginia Citizens Defense League dumbfounded when Couric asked them a basic question.

“If there are no background checks for gun purchasers,” she asked, “how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?”

In the video, you hear that question and then see members of the group looking at each other or at the floor as if unable to give an answer, but in the audio, which you can hear in this article, the group dives right in. The first voice states that if you aren’t in jail, you should still have the right to purchase a gun, a point which others pick up on later when they say the government cannot predict a crime before in happens. There’s always a first time, and generally speaking we can’t foresee when that will be.

But if those answers are given in the documentary, they aren’t given as direct answers to Couric’s question to the Virginia group, and that has a few people upset.

“Katie Couric asked a key question during an interview of some members of our organization,” their president said. “She then intentionally removed their answers and spliced in nine seconds of some prior video of our members sitting quietly and not responding. Viewers are left with the misunderstanding that the members had no answer to her question.”

The director of documentary said he had just wanted to give the viewer space to think about the question.