Daily Archives: 28 August 2019

Obliviously Dishonest

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Portland’s city government ran a survey of the residents therein to see if the government folks could understand the major problem facing those residents in the eyes of the residents.  Homelessness was the biggie, with 88% of respondents saying so.

Respondents also had decidedly mixed views of the city’s future.

…45% of respondents said they felt positively about the city’s future, while an equal number declaring [sic] their pessimism.

On the matter of race, there’s this:

Asked to react to the statement that Portland is “making progress on becoming a city where a person’s outcomes are not based on their race,” 40% of respondents agreed with its sentiment and an equal number disagreed. Black residents were most likely to disagree.

But here’s the money quote, and it throws the whole thing into a cocked hat.

Results likely would have been more unflattering if officials did not weight the survey responses based on the race of respondents. Responses from the 12% of survey takers who declined to state their race were disregarded. Those people were “more likely to feel negatively about the future of Portland,” according to the survey report. They were also more likely to name safety and trust in government as city challenges.

45% of a carefully selected subset of respondents.  Forty per cent of a carefully selected subset of respondents.

Hmm….

What we have here is city government deliberately skewing the results by throwing out responses it didn’t like or thought it wouldn’t like.  On top of that, they did the skewing right out in the open, which shows pretty conclusively their achievement of the near impossible: they’re simultaneously oblivious and dishonest.

This is the Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) influence.

 

h/t The Great Adventure at Ricochet

“Journalists”

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The NLMSM is getting their own tactics, on occasion, used against them.

And they’re squalling like stuck pigs.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets.

But, but—no fair! [emphasis added]

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for—or as a warning not to pursue—coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

Here, though, are a couple of examples of “news media scrutinizing people in positions of power” (I’m omitting the NLMSM’s conspiracy-peddling here):

[A] CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

And

[T]he Daily Beast reporter Kevin Poulsen doxed a black forklift operator from New York who doctored a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Naming the man would have been entirely legitimate.  Doxing, however, goes a bridge—a deliberate bridge—too far. Doxing someone publishes his address, his personal contact data, where he works, the names and place of work of his wife, and the names of his children—and it often includes where those children go to school.

But the screaming from pseudo-journalists is this: don’t you dare do to us what we do to you. You cannot hold us to our own standards. We’re special, and these are special tools.

Can there be any further question of the fundamental dishonesty of the press, or of the NYT in particular?

No, Mssrs Peters and Vogel. You’re not that special, and neither are the public’s tool of discourse and criticism.  You are that disgusting, though.  And Wright-Piersanti?  Look for him to be quietly repromoted in a bit.

 

h/t Grim’s Hall