Author Archives: eehines

Don’t Care? Or Don’t Care?

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Gerald Baker, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, worried that no one cares about news writers and news opinionators “harrumphing” about the doings of the Trump administration. His subheadline:

Journalists harrumph at Trump’s actions, but no one cares anymore. I say that with no satisfaction.

He then listed some horribles committed by those news writers and opinionators:

Moral affront that a president who has already answered more questions from reporters than his predecessor did in four years should choose which subgroup of White House journalists gets even closer to him. Panicked warnings about access to national-security information when the new team at the Pentagon moves some of the most entitled titles out of their privileged real estate in the building. Bilious incomprehension when a newspaper owner who has kept them in jobs for the last decade has the temerity to say he has a right to determine what editorial stance the paper should take.

Baker then lamented:

The ability of the traditional media to influence events is attenuated to the point of near extinction….
No one cares anymore.

That’s only the latest beginning, though. This crop of writers and opinionators have too often lied to us, whether by commission or omission:

• lying about Trump’s collusion with Russia over the 2016 election, when it was the Clinton campaign doing the colluding
• spiking the Hunter Biden laptop story
• lying about which “good people on both sides of the question” in a Trump Charlottesville speech, claiming he was talking about rioters when he was talking about the debates over which statues to take down, if any statures were to be
• lying about Trump’s claim that the Wuhan Virus was a hoax when he had plainly said that Democrat hyping of the virus was the hoax
• LATimes announcing that it would no longer print letters to the editor disputing, much less refuting, the idea that the climate crisis was overblown
• NYTimes announcing early in the 2016 campaign season that there could be no objectivity in news reporting; journalists had to pick sides in their reporting
• a major broadcast news speaker announcing that there were not two sides to every story, only one, the news speaker’s
• a major cable news opinionator smearing Tea Partiers as tea baggers
• spiked stories regarding ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) mental decline

That list goes on and on.

This remark of Baker’s, though, is central to his own egregious bias and why we don’t trust his “media:”

Holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported was always the most important role news played.

The most important role of honest journalists—a vanishingly small group—is most assuredly not holding powerful people accountable by reporting things they don’t want reported, and it never has been. Their role, their job, is—always and everywhere—to report the news objectively and completely, to provide their opinionating on separate pages from their reporting and to keep their opinionating solely informed by balanced facts and logic. Holding powerful people accountable will fall out of that naturally, and it is we consumers of news and opinion—actual, honestly presented news and opinion—who will do the accountability holding, not arrogant, self-important news writers and opinionators.

It’s not that no one cares about the harrumphing, however justified or not that harrumphing might be. It’s that no one cares about anything news writers and opinionators spill pixels and ink over—they’ve shown themselves as a group to be wholly and intrinsically dishonest.

No one believes what news writers or opinionators say or write or post. Baker closed his piece with this:

Can we get back to a healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism, so that it again becomes a vehicle for accountability?

He then proceeded to claim that AI could help today’s writers and opinionators achieve this. He’s wrong on both accounts. The current crop of news writers and opinionators have shown themselves too dishonest to ever be trustworthy again. A healthy, trusted objectivity in journalism cannot be achieved so long as these remain on our pages and televisions. They must be replaced en masse by an entirely new population of journalists, schooled in objectivity, factual and complete reporting, logical and factually informed opinion writing, and the ethical necessity of both.

This new crop, on taking their office, must do one thing immediately. Since journalists have long since walked away from their editorial requirement of at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims, the new crop must state in clear, concrete, and measurable terms what new standard of journalistic integrity they will follow and that us news and opinion consumers can follow and assess their performance.

That the current crop is incapable of satisfying Baker’s question or of satisfying the standards requirement is further illustrated by Baker’s repetition of his basic thesis in that last clause of his question. I repeat, then: it is not the job of journalism to hold anyone accountable; that’s the job of us consumers of news and opinion. It is the job of journalists to report and separately to offer opinion. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Defeated?

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Transgender track and field athlete Sadie Schreiner likely thinks he’s a big deal for having finished first in some USA Track and Field Open Masters Championships running events. Lots of girls chose to sit out those events, considering it a waste of their time to run against a boy.

I have some…quibbles…about the news writer’s characterization of those events’ outcomes. In the 200 meter dash,

Schreiner defeated 14-year-old runner-up Zwange Edwards, 16-year-old third-place finisher Zariah Hargrove, 15-year-old Leah Walker, and 18-year-old Ainsley Rausch.

Defeated? Nah. He finished ahead of those girls because he ran faster than they did.

Nor were Edwards, Hargrove, Walker, or Rausch runner-up, third-place finisher, or lower down. Among the girls who were competing in that race, they were first, runner-up, third-place, and fourth-place respectively.

“Defeating” requires there to have been a contest in the first place. There was none of that here, and there nearly universally is no contest in which a boy competes against girls.

Why It’s Useless…

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…to look for, much less work toward, bipartisanship with the Progressive-Democratic Party. Party is spending millions on an ad campaign targeted at a number of Republican Congressmen that centers on Party’s claim that

Last week, Republicans betrayed the American people—breaking their promise and paving the way to strip millions of men, women, and children of their health insurance[.]

Of course, this is a straight up lie by Party. While the Republican caucus is working overtime to find the billions to trillion-and-a-half dollars to cut in order to balance the tax reductions on offer, not a single red cent from Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security is included in those cuts or potential cuts. Indeed,

GOP lawmakers have consistently pointed out that Medicaid and other federal aid programs are not mentioned in the text of their framework for that legislation.

Beyond that, President Donald Trump (R) has made it clear that he will not accept cuts whatsoever to any of those programs, full stop.

But since Party has no alternative solutions to offer—they don’t even accept that a problem exists, so married and consummatory are they to their taxing and spending Big Government ideology—all it has is knee-jerk opposition (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) is already bragging that not a single Party member will work with Republicans on the current budget outline or on any subsequent allocation bill) and outright lies.

That dishonesty and automatic, unthinking, opposition makes it a wasted enterprise to try to seek bipartisanship or any form of compromise with the party that emphasizes opposition in its loyal opposition role.

When it comes to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), in particular, nothing that he says or writes can be relied upon, including any “and” and “the.”

“Austerity”

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I do not think this means what some news writers think it means. In a Wall Street Journal article, the news writer used the term this way:

A budget deficit contributes…by injecting more demand into the economy via spending than it subtracts via taxes.
…
But deliberately shrinking the budget deficit, via fiscal austerity, or expanding it, via fiscal stimulus….

What he’s talking about here is reducing government spending as austerity. Government spending is one component of the overall spending that is the demand component of GDP; the other component of demand at the GDP level is consumption spending by us citizens. But reducing government spending, while reducing that overall component of demand, isn’t austerity. That reduction simply reduces the level of competition between government on the one hand and us citizens and our private enterprises on the other hand for the same goods and services. That reduction in the government’s side of that competition at the very least reduces upward pressure on the price we citizens and our businesses face for those same goods and services, even eliminates pricing pressure in some areas, and in some few areas, allows prices to fall.

That’s not austerity, that’s an early step in prosperity.

The news writer again misused the term:

Fiscal austerity does the job with much less collateral damage than tariffs. Inflation goes down instead of up. Trading partners don’t retaliate. There’s no special-interest lobbying or corrosive uncertainty over who gets hit with tariffs for how long.
Austerity’s main drawback is that it slows growth.

Reducing government spending isn’t the only path to private prosperity, and done by itself can be decidedly reductive of that. Taxes directly take money away from both us citizens and our private enterprises. Some taxation is necessary for our government to do the things we hire it to do—pay our national debt, see to a defense capability adequate to the threats we face, and satisfy our nation’s general welfare in the ways delineated in our Constitution. Leaving taxes alone—or raising them—whether in isolation or in order to fund spending unrelated to those three purposes takes money away from us and our businesses that we’re better situated to allocate to our actual needs and wants.

Those taxes are the source of austerity inflicted on us by government. Reducing those taxes to the more minimal level needed to satisfy those three Constitutional requirements reduces austerity far more directly than reducing spending: every dollar left in our and our businesses’ pocketbooks and not taken by government is a dollar we can allocate more efficiently than government is capable of doing.

Reducing government spending—the news writer’s definition of austerity—actually indirectly facilitates prosperity if not actually increases it, and reducing taxation—not addressed at all by the news writer—directly increases prosperity by reducing real austerity, the taking of money from private coffers and putting it in government coffers. Doing both in concert with each other—that’s the far opposite of austerity.

Progressive-Democratic Party Version of Free Speech

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A Conservative legislator in Maine spoke against boys competing in girls’ sports, and she posted the image of the State’s Class B girls high school pole vault champion—a boy competing against girls and who as a boy competing against boys the prior year who could do no better than fifth.

Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party legislators promptly voted 75-70 to censure the Conservative, Congresswoman Laurel Libby (R, 90th District). Nor does Maine do an ordinary censure: under the Maine constitution, by censuring Libby, they have denied her any right to speak on the Maine House of Representatives floor, or even to vote on any legislation before the Maine House. As the WSJ editors noted, that also denies her constituents any representation, disenfranchising them.

Of course, Party knows that, too. Party politicians claim that speaking and voting would be restored to Libby were she to apologize. But for what would she apologize? Having done nothing wrong, apologizing would both be dishonest intrinsically, and it would be cowardly appeasement.

Libby is made of sterner stuff, and she has said she will not apologize.

Those WSJ editors also posited a warning:

Democrats should be considering whether they really want to go down the road of regulating posts on social media.

But that’s what the Progressive-Democrats have been doing for some years already—see Twitter and Facebook during the first Trump administration and throughout the Biden administration.

This is the censorship which we can expect to be inflicted nation-wide if Party ever regains control over our nation. Speech is free when Party permits it.