Daily Archives: 22 May 2024

They’re Not Journalists

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Just the News had a Saturday article that debunked the claims—claims actively supported by the press—by a plethora of insurers that climate change is responsible for their changing policies, increases in premiums and deductibles, and growing numbers of exclusion clauses in the policies they do sell.

I’m interested in one apologia for the press offered by Ryan Maue, a research meteorologist [emphasis added].

Journalists aren’t equipped to go into the studies. They’re not economists. They’re not climate scientists. They’re journalists. They’re supposed to ask questions and dig deeper by going to ask all the sources, or go find experts either to talk on the record or off the record. And for whatever reason, this field just does not do that.

No, they’re not journalists. Among other criteria for journalism and those who claim to practice the form was a long ago editorial criterion requiring a journalist to produce two (or more) on-the-record sources to corroborate any number of anonymous claims the journalist might include in his piece. The journalism practice, the practice’s editors, and the practice’s writers have long since walked away from that criterion.

The question then becomes: what concrete, publicly measurable standard of journalistic integrity is used today in the practice of journalism? The answer is none. At least that’s the implication from the myriad times I’ve asked that question of a number of those claiming to be journalists, and the zero times I’ve gotten a response.

The current crop are not journalists; they are proselytizers when they’re not being propagandists.

Trading with the Enemy

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section put it succinctly regarding free global trade:

I support free global trade except with countries that cheat and steal and use slave labor.

He wrote that in the context of his decrial of the People’s Republic of China as attempting to rule all of Asia and the global economy.

The PRC’s goal is broader than that; PRC President Xi Jinping has said in so many words that his goal for the PRC is to supplant the US as the world’s sole superpower, which would give the PRC the political, economic, and military power to control our own national actions.

From that, I would add to the letter-writer’s criteria for free global trade: no trade, free or otherwise (beyond, perhaps, non-critical commodity goods), with enemy nations. That would include Russia, Iran, and northern Korea, as well as the PRC.

An aside (but not too far over): it’s common to decry northern Korea’s use of slave labor, but I submit that that is something of a misnomer. Using slave labor implies that other laborers aren’t slaves, holding their jobs—or not—voluntarily. In northern Korea, though, all of the unfortunates resident there—every single one of them—are slaves of the thugs that rule over that gang territory.