Category Archives: culture

Dishonest Journalism

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Kyle Smith is too polite to call it that, but he comes very close in his National Review piece about an interview Robin Pogrebin gave to WMAL back on the 17th.

Some excerpts:

[Pogrebin’s and Kelly’s story [sic]] failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL.

“Behavior” that has already been shown nonexistent, repeatedly.  Of what piece, exactly?  And what incident? The principle doesn’t remember it, and the principle witness refused to be interviewed.

Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the [New York] Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy?

Not when she needs to be outed in order to tell a tale.

[Emphasis in the original]:

Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. … She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion.

And [emphasis in the original]:

If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter—the woman in question at the Yale party—in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.

And the kicker:

Of the woman at the party, she says, “Remember that she was incredibly drunk at that party as was everyone. And so I think we’re talking about memory here as really kind of a questionable issue. There are plenty of things that are conceivable that could happen when people are too drunk to remember them.” So the standard here is not whether something is true, it’s whether it’s “conceivable.” If a story is “of a piece with a kind of behavior,” even if such behavior is itself not established, and if a story is “conceivable” when filtered through that confirmation bias, and even if it’s undercut by the person the story supposedly happened to, and even if the person telling the story was “incredibly drunk,” you just go with it anyway.

That’s not gross journalistic malpractice, as Smith put it.  That’s blatantly, deliberately dishonest reporting.

RTWT.

“Trump Repeatedly Pressured Ukraine President”

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…regarding Biden’s intervention with Ukraine’s law enforcement in favor of his son.  At least that’s how The Wall Street Journal has characterized a phone call between heads of state.

Except that’s not what happened, and to call it “pressure” is to insult, grievously, the mettle and courage of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.  In that phone call, Trump did ask Zelensky to investigate Biden’s role in getting Ukraine’s Prosecutor Generall, Viktor Shokin fired in order to get a billion dollars in already promised aid to Ukraine.

No one serious, though, sees requests as pressure.  There were no or elses; not even the WSJ alleges that. Nor have the tabloids that have taken up the cry, The Washington Post or The New York Times.  Nor is there any reason to believe Zelensky is such a Milquetoast as to feel pressured because someone merely asked him to do something.  Indeed, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko was blunt and clear:

I know what the conversation was about, and I think there was no pressure.  There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.

And

President Trump is interested, his advisor, Giuliani, newspapers, Democrats, Republicans are interested in whether pressure had been put on Ukraine.  I want to say that we are an independent state, we have our own secrets.

No pressure.  Except, perhaps in the minds of Progressive-Democrats who are projecting their own responses to such questions.

Which brings me to Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Vice President (during the time of his threat vis-à-vis that Prosecutor Genera) Joe Biden and his distortion of the current situation.

He is violating every basic norm of a president. He’s using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me.

Because the truth is smearing.

On the contrary, the abuse of power and the misuse of every element of the presidency is Biden’s own interference with that Ukrainian investigation into his son’s role in what the Ukrainians were investigating as an illegal, if not criminal, activity.  He demanded Shokin be fired so the investigation couldn’t go forward, or he would withhold all that foreign aid.

And then Biden bragged about his successful interference at a US Council on Foreign Relations event.

I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. … He got fired.

That’s pressure, and it was successfully applied by a badly misbehaving American Vice President.

One more thing.  Progressive-Democrats and their communications facility, the press, all have the vapors because Trump is insisting misbehavior be investigated.  As though it’s OK to misbehave, so long as it’s a Progressive-Democrat government official doing the misbehavior.  It puts me in mind of a remark reported to have been made by then-President Richard Nixon (R), that “if the President does it, that means it’s legal.”  I’ll paraphrase, slightly. It seems to be the position of the Left that “if a Progressive-Democrat mucky-muck does it, that means it’s legal.”

No.  Wrong-doing should be investigated, thoroughly, regardless of who’s suspected of doing it.  And that’s what Trump is insisting on.

The Progressive-Democratic Party

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Today’s Party, the evolution of the Democratic Party, is little distinguishable from the modern Progressive movement as devised by that movement’s founders, Herb Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

Brief for instances:

Roosevelt and Wilson both wanted to nationalize broad swaths of the American private economy, and Wilson did so, until the Supreme Court struck his move and released his seizure.

Today’s Progressive-Democrats take pride in their Progressivism, including seeking to nationalize broad swaths of today’s economy: Barack Obama seized our health care and health care coverage industries, and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to expand on that.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want to go further and replace our health industries with Medicare-for-All and to eliminate altogether all vestiges of privately obtained health insurance.

Both want to seize our wealth property in the form of much higher taxes—in Warren’s case, an explicit tax on the mere possession of wealth.  Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D) is even clearer, if that’s possible: he says there’s plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands.  And we need to seize it and put it where we say it belongs.

Beyond that, today’s Progressive-Democrats are proud of their Progressivism: Hillary Clinton is a proud Progressive, Biden says he’s the most Progressive of the current Party candidates.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) have averred their pride in their Progressive policies.  Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) are so far Progressive, they’re openly Socialist.

Today’s Party shares, also, the movement founders’ contempt for ordinary Americans.  Croly said the average American was inadequate to his duties as a democrat, and Wilson wrote that Americans generally could not handle a republican form of government and that blacks in particular were so incapable that they should be grateful for the protection of segregation.

This is echoed with ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dismissal of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clingers and gun-toters, Hillary Clinton’s slur that tens of millions of us are irredeemably deplorable, racist, and homophobic.  Others in Party dismiss Republicans as Trump-cultists and say that anyone who supports Trump is necessarily racist.

The list goes on for a long distance.

Censorship

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Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) seems to have failed her Progressive-Democratic Party’s purity test.  She votes for what she views as right rather than knee-jerkishly IAW Party diktat.  As a result, she

may face a censure vote by Arizona’s Democratic Party because she votes too often in favor of President Trump’s agenda
…
Since joining the Senate in January, Sinema has opposed Trump 81% of the time, The Arizona Republic reported, citing data from the FiveThirtyEight Trump Tracker.
That’s apparently not often enough to satisfy many of her fellow Democrats in the Grand Canyon State.

Here’s Dan O’Neal, Progressive Democrats of America (a Progressive-Democrat PAC) National Field Team Director and Arizona State Coordinator:

[T]he way she is voting is really disappointing. We want Democrats to vote like Democrats and not Republicans.

Think about that.

Sinema was elected to the Senate by her constituents, the good citizens of her Arizona district, not by the Progressive-Democratic Party.  She, like all elected politicians in an ideal world, was elected to do her best to carry out her constituents’ instructions, and where those instructions are unclear—where there is no consensus among her constituents—to carry out her best judgment.  The quality of that performance, and the consequences of unsatisfactory performance, are up to her constituents to decide.  They’re not up to Party.

This is what bipartisanship looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  This is what free speech looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  Remember this in the fall of 2020.

Judgment, Again

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Recall the New York Times‘ publication of an article slandering Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with an unfounded accusation of sexual misbehavior toward a young woman decades ago at a college party.  Recall further that the NYT later “corrected” its claim with an “Editor’s Note” buried in the original smear piece instead of placing its Note prominently.

There’s more to this story.  The smear piece, excerpted from a forthcoming book as part of a marketing effort for that book, was written by the authors of the book.  They excerpted their own book.

They omitted the key information themselves.

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, the authors of the book and the authors of the excerpted smear, claim they had the substance of the Note in the draft of their article, and that “editors” cut it out.

This, of course, is, to put it politely, utter nonsense. It’s entirely plausible that editors cut the critical information (and what does that say about the underlying integrity of the NYT?), but Pogrebin and Kelly did not have to agree to the censoring.  They chose to accept it; they chose to publish a blatant, dishonest smear.

But wait—mightn’t the editors have made the cut and gone to press without a faretheewell to Pogrebin and Kelly?  Maybe.  In that case, though, the two would have been all over the media hours after publication squawking to high Heaven about the cut and how the cut utterly changed the meaning of what they wrote. If they disapproved of the cut.  But they weren’t, because they approved the cut. Whether they did the cut or the editors did it, Pogrebin and Kelly fully approved of the cut and the smear that resulted from the cut.

When asked about that bit of editing and the Note during an interview on MSNBC, Pogrebin offered this:

We discussed it. We felt like there was so much heat, there’s so much– everyone has been has been [sic] seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn’t want it to be an issue anymore and we certainly never intended to mislead in any way. We wanted to give as full of a story as possible.

As full a story as possible.

Right. I might know of some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.