Category Archives: culture

Propaganda and the Press

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At the Monday President Donald Trump-hosted daily press conference about the status of the Wuhan Virus situation in the US, a reporter representing Hong Kong Phoenix TV asked a question prefaced with a long tout of the People’s Republic of China shipping medical supplies to the US (coincidentally omitting to mention how defective PRC-originated medical supplies tend to be).

Trump called her on her affiliation; she mumbled about representing Hong Kong Phoenix TV, but weasel-worded her employer’s association with the PRC government.

However. According to an ex-Phoenix TV news director,

Phoenix TV’s content is subject to the dictates of the leadership of the Central Communist Propaganda Department, Central Communist Overseas Propaganda Office, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which often directly sent instructions to Phoenix Satellite TV.

As Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) put it,

So to recap, the WH Correspondents Assoc gave a seat at the WH press briefing to an employee of the Chinese Communist govt, to ask globally televised Qs to POTUS, at the same time China is waging a propaganda campaign to hide their culpability & coverup of the Wuhan virus?!?

Meanwhile, this same White House Correspondence Association has barred the One America News Network from these briefings, necessitating Trump’s invitations to the news outlet in order for its reporters to gain entrance—standing at the back of the bus press room.

This is what we have, then: American journalists actively suppressing a right-leaning news outlet while equally actively promoting a propaganda arm of the PRC government.

Think about that.

The Coming Wuhan Virus War

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Daniel Henninger worries about the next Wuhan Virus war (he refers to it with the more press’ saccharine, more politically correct label, “coronavirus” war).  This is a political war between the American Left and the rest of our American nation.

In the course of his piece, though, he had a couple of remarks that I’m not sure he really understood.

A federally led policy is appropriate in a national crisis like this.

Indeed, but federally led, not centrally led.

But once it passes, the issue will be whether to revert to the freest private economy we had in a generation or whether deeper, explicit social direction and economic protections by the national government are justified.

This depends entirely on whether Americans in general understand the difference between “federal government” and “central government.” That’s a distinction Progressives, Progressive-Democrats, and their “education” divisions of teachers unions have been working so hard for so long to muddy.

We’ll need to turn out in force in the coming election to prevent Progressive-Democrat destruction. Yes, that’s part of the war which worries Henninger—but the answer to Progressive-Democrats’ divisiveness and destruction cannot be, at this crossroads for our nation, simply to turn the other cheek or otherwise ignore attacks on our freedoms and our personal responsibilities.

Wuhan Virus Tracking

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Many nations are using cell phone data and/or apps installed on cell phones to track folks known to be infected in order to identify those persons’ contacts and to build up anticipatory data of pending and developing hotspots. This is intended to facilitate more efficient targeting of medical resources, to more efficiently target more limited populations, and so to more quickly free up economic resources and activity.

The US Federal government, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is creating a portal that will compile phone geolocation data to help authorities predict where outbreaks could next occur and determine where resources are needed, though the effort faces privacy concerns.
… Alphabet Inc’s Google said Thursday it would share a portion of its huge trove of data on people’s movements.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an app to track Covid-19 patients and the people they interact with, and are in talks with the federal government about its use, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The EU is going even further, developing and propagating apps that track individuals, ostensibly with their permission.

These moves are being sold as necessary for the present situation, even though they badly risk individual privacy—cue Ben Franklin.

Such sales pitches would be believable—and stipulate arguendo that the tradeoff might be minimally acceptable—if these surveillance moves had sunset clauses in them. Such surveillances need to be automatically terminated after some specified period of time or at some easily measurable milestone—Wuhan Virus infection rate drops below a particular threshold, for instance. Sunset clauses also must include destruction of the surveillance databases, with that being verifiable by anyone who asks—the present FOIA procedures would provide an example of how that would work.

Unfortunately, sunset clauses are notably absent from these moves toward government surveillance of us citizens—the danger of which is emphasized by the example of the People’s Republic of China and by our own FBI’s abuse of its surveillance authorities, along with our own FISA Court judges’ cynical acceptance of those abuses.

Resistance to Change

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Matthew Hennessey, writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal commented extensively on the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not his) situation and its impact on education, specifically the forced switch to a measure of home schooling.

Many families have found themselves running pop-up homeschools. Most students will return to traditional classrooms when the crisis passes. But some families—perhaps many—will come away from this involuntary experiment with a new appreciation for home-based education. They may even decide that homeschooling is not only a plausible option, but a superior one.

It’s that last bit, coupled with the article’s subheadline, that drew my attention. That subhead was

Education has long been resistant to change, but it can’t dodge the pandemic.

Education can’t dodge the pandemic any more than any of the rest of us can.  But it isn’t education that’s resistant to change.  The rapidly increasing demand for voucher schools, charter schools, straight-up homeschooling, and other variants to providing education for our K-12 children demonstrates the error of that claim.

It’s the parents who are pushing for those changes, and they’re supported by a few politicians and a few State and local governments who are, if not pushing for these changes, at least are staying out of their way.

It’s many other State governments and especially teachers unions who are actively opposing these changes. It’s the managers of education systems who have been long resistant to change, and remain so. The consumers of education systems, and especially their parents, are clamoring for these and an unfettered expansion of these changes.

Making the Case

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) decried journalists’ touting America’s Wuhan Virus death rates as being greater than the People’s Republic of China’s.  “Grotesque,” he tweeted about it.  And he’s being generous, I say.

Naturally, journalists’ feelings were hurt by that, and they bellyached loudly.  Michelle Goldberg, for instance:

Journalists are concentrated in cities that are being ravaged by a plague that could have been better contained with a competent president. They’re lonely and scared and reporting while homeschooling their kids. No one feels glee or delight. Some of us feel white hot rage[.]

Taking advantage of the Wuhan Virus situation to attack the President, while carefully ignoring her fellows’ attacks of racism and xenophobia for the steps he did take early on. Sure.

Laura Bassett:

This tweet [Rubio’s “grotesque” tweet] is grotesque. Delete it.

There’s that censorship sewage so favored of journalists who can’t abide others disagreeing with them or their pre-established narrative. That so many other venues also favor this implementation of censorship in no way excuses these guys—who have a grotesque way of acting as our filters, our gateways, to information.

Sam Stein:

Senator, either you have no clue what you’re talking about or you’re being a jerk. I have friends in this industry who have the virus. We have to make exceptionally challenging calls about sending reporters into hot spots or places where they could get it. Do better[.]

Crocodile tears about friends whom he’s now fashioning into weapons for another attack on the President. Some friend. And his “exceptionally challenging calls” on what to cover? It’s his and his editor’s “challenging calls” to wholly ignore areas that aren’t hotspots; to wholly ignore recovery rates; and to choose to focus, ghoulishly, on body counts.

These wonders—every single one of them—make Rubio’s case, pretty dramatically.