Tag Archives: ethics

The Bias of the Press

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It’s going to continue, as Howard Kurtz, writing for FoxNews has recognized.

Many in the media, mostly on the liberal side, have come up with a verb that captures their disgust at the man who will be America’s 45th president.

It’s a word that clearly signals that they will remain in opposition, in a state of perpetual outrage, that, in truth, they don’t fully accept the results of the election.

Donald Trump, they say, should not be normalized.

Especially that perpetual outrage part.  That’s not normal; that’s pathology.  Here’s Slate, as cited by Kurtz, describing the typical NLMSM and its refusal (not inability) to accept Donald Trump as the duly elected next President:

In an essay for the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole wrote, of the days following Trump’s win, “All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion.” David Remnick told CNN, “We’ve normalized [the results] already. Less than a week after the election is over, suddenly Washington is going about its business talking about who’s going to get what jobs. You would think that Mitt Romney had won. It’s a hallucination.” …  “He is not normal,” insisted John Oliver over the weekend. “He is abnormal.”

The NLMSM as Fourth Estate?  Not anymore.

The Irony! The Irony!

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Outgoing President Barack Obama (D) was jointly interviewed by Germany’s public broadcasting network, ARD, and by Spiegel Online.  Obama had many things to say in this interview, but he had this in particular to say in response to ARD/Spiegel’s question about whether he would pardon Edward Snowden before he left office.  After declining to talk about the pardon itself on the grounds that Snowden hadn’t yet appeared in court, Obama said this:

I think that Mr Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community. If everybody took the approach that I make my own decisions about these issues, then it would be very hard to have an organized government or any kind of national security system.

Wow.  Just—wow.

Why Trump Needs To Stop Ditching The Press Pool

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At least that’s what Juan Williams thinks in his Fox News piece last Thursday.  He’s far from the only pressman who thinks so, too.

It seems that President-elect Donald Trump was rude enough to want to have dinner out with a few folks without the madding crowd of papparazi and other reporters hanging over their shoulders.  So he and his group evaded the press pool that was following him around.

“THERE’S GUNFIRE—WE’RE MOVING THE PRESIDENT.”

I heard those scary words from a Secret Service agent on October 23, 1983. I was covering President Reagan for The Washington Post and happened to be near the tiny group of journalists—the so-called “presidential press pool,” as he attended the Master’s golf tournament.

Then, as the president was leaving the Augusta National Golf Club the news broke that 241 American servicemen had been killed when terrorists bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Those were chaotic moments.

Those were the chaotic paragraphs with which Williams opened his screed over Trump’s presuming to decline to not cater to the self-important press.  This sort of thing is an outlier, too, and unlikely to be missed just because a President wants a (relatively) quiet dinner on the town.

Similarly, Trump did not take a press pool with him when he went to the White House last week for his first sit-down with President Obama. He did not have reporters on the plane he used during the campaign.

How rude!  He didn’t bring a gaggle with him to a business meeting.  Cluck, cluck.

These pressmen choose not to consider factors involved in Trump’s decision to ditch the press so he and his family could enjoy a steak dinner, to take one of these plaints.  Personal, individual decisions (which don’t matter to the NLMSM, since they don’t see Americans as individuals, they only see us as either cookie cutter, interchangeable, correct consumers of their stuff or as cookie cutter, interchangeable racists and homophobes who disagree with them), like other folks wanting to go to a restaurant to enjoy a steak dinner.

Now, when a President wants to go anywhere—a steakhouse, let’s say—he unavoidably must be accompanied by his Secret Service protection detail.  These additional six men and women (to pick a number for discussion’s sake) are going to take up space in that restaurant, but that’s unavoidable, and these men and women know how to be discrete and unobtrusive—that’s part of their protection job.

But the press?  They’re crowding around asking questions—loudly, so as to be heard above their fellows—pushing microphones and cameras aggressively, so as to get the audio and the video.  It’s their job to be heard and to be as disruptive as necessary in order to get their question(s) to be the one the President answers.  They’ll even try to get “reaction” shots and questions asked of the other patrons in that restaurant.  And that’s enormously disruptive, to the restaurant, to those other diners trying to enjoy their steak dinners, even to the passersby on the sidewalk outside.

Do the pressmen care?  Not a bit.  These self-important ones care only about their stories and their bylines.

Don’t ditch the press all the time, Mr President.  But unhesitatingly ditch them on occasion when you want to be out and about and don’t want to interfere with the doings of others who also want to be out and about and happen to be near you at the time.

Be Careful Out There

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…as you use your Android smartphones.  Some of them, courtesy of a People’s Republic of China company called Shanghai Adups Technology Co, are infected with malware at the point of manufacture.  Phone manufacturers include BLU Products, ZTE, and Huawei; although not all of BLU’s models are infected.  ZTE and Huawei both are State-owned, and both of these refused to answer Consumer Reports‘ requests for information.

The problem is that Shanghai Adups, a supplier of Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) update services for smartphones, has inserted code that it wrote for the purpose into these phones’ firmware that

transmit[] their owners’ personal data to a computer server in China. It’s not clear how the data was being used, though security experts say it could have been accessible by the Chinese government.

Heads up.

How Democrats View Civility

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A group of maverick history teachers at elite Beacon HS in Manhattan let their kids skip class Tuesday to join a Trump Tower protest, despite objections from colleagues, The Post has learned.

Roughly 200 kids from the Hell’s Kitchen public school were granted hooky passes at 11 a.m. and joined students from across the city to disparage The Donald, sources said.

This is reminiscent of the teachers unions in Wisconsin and of the Wisconsin and Indiana Democratic Parties during their wars on the States’ governments over worker rights not to pay money to unions to which they didn’t belong.  In those cases, the Wisconsin unions encouraged their teachers to lie about where they were as they missed work (with too many doctors complicit in the lies) to “protest” the State government’s legislation to rein in public unions and the Democrats in both States giving themselves permission to abscond from the States, shirking their duties, and halting those two governments because these minority parties didn’t get their way.

So now precious teachers are teaching precious little ones to emulate precious Democrats and these teachers’ unions.

The schools employing these teachers are receiving tons of State dollars under a broad range of programs and grants.  It’s time to review those programs and grants.