Tag: media

A portrait in conservative cluelessness

Can someone just get this chick the job she obviously wants on Fox already? I have absolutely nothing against attractive blondes babbling nonsensically in ignorance, I just don’t think it belongs on the op/ed page:

What have we come to when we believe drunken college students over police officers? That is exactly the case in Boston. Several “eye witnesses” claim the authorities overreacted when they shot at 20-year-old D.J. Henry’s car in front of a local bar, which resulted in his death and the injury of his passenger. It has been reported that D.J. was supposed to be the designated driver and was only there to pick up some friends. I find that hard to believe considering his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.

Understandably, D.J.’s parents are outraged and devastated, calling for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. I can’t imagine the pain they must be going through. This is a tough one because on one hand you have parents who just lost their son, and on the other you have a drunken kid who allegedly fled from the cops when he was approached and hit two of them with his car as he accelerated. It’s not like D.J. was just minding his own business and the cops walked up to the car and shot him. He put himself at risk when he knowingly got behind the wheel while he was intoxicated.

Where does personal responsibility come into play? D.J.’s blood alcohol level was .13. He was in the driver’s seat and the cops were called to the bar due to an “unruly crowd” outside. Should they have let him drive home? Of course not; they’re going to do their job and approach him. If the authorities hadn’t gone up to the car and instead just let D.J. drive home, what would the consequences have been? Driving under the influence could have resulted in an accident….

The cops were doing their job. It seems like when they do that, their investigations are “fatally flawed,” as D.J.’s family put it – but when they don’t do their job they’re incompetent and negligent. Are we to blame police officers when they try to protect and serve?

Americans will stop believing “drunken college students over police officers” when police officers stop destroying evidence, lying about what happened, and exonerating themselves of any wrongdoing after leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them. Someone needs to explain to little Chrissy Chatterfield that “protecting and serving” does not involve murdering men who happen to be lightly intoxicated behind the wheel of a car. Or legally carrying while shopping at CostCo. Or sitting at home minding their own business with a door left open to provide a breeze on a hot summer evening. There are no shortage of unjustifiable police murders for which none of the responsible cops were even prosecuted.

What passes for her logic is darkly hilarious; it’s good for the police to kill a man in order to prevent the highly unlikely possibility that he might kill someone else in an accident. By this reckoning, police snipers should be stationed outside every bar and nightclub parking lot in America, picking off anyone who looks like they might have had more than two drinks. And more importantly, the police had absolutely no idea that the guy was drunk. They didn’t shoot him because he had a BAC of 0.13, which despite the absurd legal limits is barely into the range that is even detectable without testing, they shot him because he didn’t follow their confusing and imprecise orders. (At his body weight, D.J. Henry had probably had all of 5 drinks that evening.) Randy Moss would be dead if the Minneapolis police were similarly inclined to homicide.

Take note of the scare quotes around “eyewitneses”. Does little Miss Chatterfield not believe that these people were there on the scene? Does she have any reason to doubt their eyewitness testimony, which just happens to be the primary foundation of every legal system dating back to the Old Testament? Of course not, she’s just a clueless, conservative cop-lover who believes that providing a psychopath with a blue uniform and a gun magically transforms him into a heroic and faultless doer of good.

Miss Chatterfield may be on the cops’ side, but what she is too young and foolish to understand is that they are most certainly not on her side. Since her interactions with the police are probably limited to Norman Rockwell paintings and crying to get out of the occasional speeding ticket, she has no idea of the extent to which the police departments of America have been militarized, corrupted by drug war money, and populated by criminals. This asinine article is exhibit A in the mindless conservative support for the police that must come to an end in order to restore legitimacy to what is presently little more than a lawless government badge gang.

UPDATE: I missed the fact that WND’s cheerleader for the police state didn’t even manage to get the right state, let alone city, in her rush to defend a police shooting. D.J. Henry was shot and killed in Thornwood, New York by the Pleasantville police. The case, exactly or otherwise, had no connection with Boston.

UPDATE II: Well, I suppose this would be one effective means of addressing police brutality: “The entire police force of a small town in northern Mexico resigned after gunmen attacked their recently-opened headquarters with grenades and assault rifles, local news agencies reported quoting the town’s Mayor on Wednesday.”

I suppose it’s not so fun to wave your badge and your gun when the people start shooting back.

Media is educated

Just not, you know, about anything more intellectually demanding than the fall season’s hit new [insert type of television show] on [insert television network]. And Instapundit snickered:

ATLAS SHRUGGED, HAYEK WEPT. And the rest of us are kind of snickering. “The reporter covering the tea parties for the New York Times appears to think that ‘the rule of law’ is some sort of exotic term of art invented by right wingers.” Remember, the people who can’t get this stuff right regard the electorate as their intellectual inferiors.

And apparently they don’t know the difference between S corps and C corps either.

An article on Wednesday about the business culture at the Tribune Company after its acquisition by Sam Zell referred incorrectly to federal taxes on an S corporation, which Tribune became after the deal. S corporations pay no federal taxes because shareholders are responsible for all taxes; therefore, taxpayers do not become “essentially silent partners in the deal.”

The problem isn’t that people who work in the media are stupid, although they don’t tend to be brilliant either. From what I’ve observed in nearly two decades of working tangentially with them, they tend to fall in the +1SD to +2SD range. But what makes them look so stupid on such a regular basis is that they are almost uniformly and grossly ignorant. This is direct result of their narrow educations combined with a complete lack of experience of the non-media world.

Like teachers, journalists don’t actually learn anything useful or broadly applicable as part of their professional training. It’s mostly a lot of jargon and industry-specific minutiae that the average individual could pick up within six months on the job; in fact, that’s exactly how the media used to learn to do its job. And since the nature of the job is so fast-paced, they have to learn how to sound informative while making do with very superficial knowledge. That’s why they so often confuse having heard of something with actually knowing something; they actually believe the two concepts are synonymous on a subconscious level.

Of course, the problem has only gotten worse as a generation of media whores have gone into the business with the objective of reading teleprompters on camera. And now that the other networks are following Fox’s lead by hiring journalists on the sole basis of their sex, hair color, and facial features, the downward spiral is approaching its nadir just in time for the industry’s final collapse.

It’s all good.

Dorito Night must-see

I have to admit I am a little surprised at the backbone of the BBC. But Withrow is right and the orientationally-challenged of the world will have to learn that if they want to be celebrities in the public eye, they have to accept being mocked just like everybody else:

Gill sparked the row with his comments in a review of her new show ‘Britain by Bike’ in the Sunday Times last weekend.

He wrote: ‘Some time ago, I made a cheap and frankly unnecessary joke about Clare Balding looking like a big lesbian. And afterwards somebody tugged my sleeve to point out that she is a big lesbian, and I felt foolish and guilty.

‘So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise. Sorry. Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation….

Balding was so incensed at the critic’s dig about her sexuality that she raised it with his editor, John Witherow of the Sunday Times.

But she was astonished when Mr Witherow told her she should accept occasionally being made the butt of jokes. His reply stated: ‘In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.

‘Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the epitome of the heterosexual male, is constantly jeered at for his dress sense (lack of), adolescent mindset and hairstyle. He puts up with it as a presenter’s lot and in this context I hardly think that AA Gill’s remarks were particularly cruel, especially as he ended by so warmly endorsing you as a presenter.’

Besides, who is dumb enough to put a fat lesbian on any form of two-wheeled apparatus and NOT expect someone to make a crack about “dykes on bikes”.

There goes the “angry white man” angle

Ah well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again:

Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen from Pakistan, in connection with the attempted Times Square bombing. Shahzad is believed to be the purchaser of the SUV used in the plot, and was apprehended at about 11:00 P.M. Monday while already on-board a flight to Dubai from JFK International Airport:

I know I’m astonished. How about you? Let’s face it, about the only way a bomb would ever be planted in Times Square by a white guy is if he’s a Federal agent acting on orders.

Hispanics in the mist

One must salute the bravery of these two intrepid amateur zoologists as they go out into the deep, dark, wilderness of Los Angeles:

Can journalists only report about the issues of their own race? That’s the question being debated about two white journalists who decided to embed themselves in a home in the MacArthur Park neighborhood with at least seven undocumented Mexicans to “learn Spanish so that we can better report our native city.”

Reporter Devin Browne and photographer Kara Mears are documenting the yearlong project on a blog called The Entryway. The name is derived from the fact that the two share a bed in the apartment’s front entryway. They both pay rent to the host family. The blog, which started in March after a two-year search for a host family, has led to fair deal of criticism, and praise, from reporters and bloggers. Some call the project voyeuristic.

The most amusing part of what should prove to be a thoroughly amusing anthropological experiment on the two white girls was the fact that it took them two years to find a place they were willing to live. My guess is that the reporter will come to her senses and quit both the project and journalism the first time a cockroach gets in her hair while the photographer will get pregnant after a series of short affairs with gangbangers and eventually be arrested for being in possession of a handgun used to murder a convenience store clerk.

I do so enjoy the NPR/SWPL approach to every subject they “investigate”. It doesn’t matter if they are ice-fishing in Minnesota, climbing mountains in Tibet or chewing qat with jihadists in Yemen, look past the details and the story always ends sounds exactly as if Dian Fossey had written it. Because no matter what the subject nominally is, the only thing NPR/SWPL ever write about is how the nominal subject makes them feel.

The dangers of journalistic knowledge

To me, the amusing thing about this eye-opening experience is that it is apparently the first time this journalist has ever experienced the phenomenon. To those who actually possess more than a modicum of knowledge about anything, it is distinctly clear on nearly every page of every newspaper every single day:

Unlike most of the journalists covering the event, I was not an expert on that particular industry. It wasn’t my normal “beat.” The reason I was there was because I’d been interviewing the company’s CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn’t an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company’s “secret” product than any other journalist in the room.

It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of major news outlets and publications were represented at the press conference following the announcement. A few very general facts about the product had been released, but the reporters had only been introduced to details about it a half hour earlier. There was still a lot about how it worked, how it differed from other emerging products, and why the company felt so confident about its evolution and economic viability, that remained to be clarified.

But the reporters’ questions weren’t geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized–because I had so much more information on the subject–that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren’t being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story.

Almost every single time a major media outlet has done a story on me, someone related to me, or something related to me, there has been at least one factual error. Sometimes it is a big one, usually it is something pretty trivial, but it’s always there. Naturally, this renders me somewhat skeptical about the factual reliability of all the other stories I read in the media. Think about the last time a travel magazine or the New York Times wrote an article about a place you know well. Did they nail it or did they write about a few well-known places that are known to every tourist and no local actually goes?

The increasingly useless Wikipedia

It’s no myster why fewer and fewer people are bothering to contribute:

The research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year. Such contributing editors are vital to the integrity of Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers to create pages and check facts.

The study, conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

They’re all being driven off by a small cabal of privileged editors who camp on sites and attempt to push their left-wing ideological agenda. From what I’ve seen on the transformation of the page about me over time, they appear to be mostly college students who have plenty of time on their hands and a complete inability to understand the either the concept of objectivity or an encyclopedia.

Look at the difference between the page for Sam Harris and my page, for example. My page is little more than an attack on my views and attempts to minimize anything that might be viewed as positive, whereas Harris’s resembles a defense lawyer attempting to exonerate his client. The part about “conversational intolerance” is hilarious. On my page, for example, it’s very telling that the editors go out of their way to inform people about certain members of my family and not others, even though the positive story was a much bigger one in the global media than the negative story. Of course, it’s not at all Sam’s fault that his defenders are overly enthusiastic propagandists, but the difference between the two pages is indicative of the intrinsically flawed nature of Wikipedia and its uselessness with regards to anything even remotely controversial.

On the radio

Here’s a link to yesterday’s interview on Morning Magazine. It was a relatively slow day… only four interviews. This one, however, was not about the book, but the wars and Veteran’s Day.

The Obama administration’s dithering over whether or not to accede to the theater commander’s request for more troops is a good example of the sort of thing Michael McSorley and I were discussing. If you can’t make up your mind about such a relatively minor decision, then you clearly have no idea what you’re doing in the strategic sense. If Obama doesn’t have enough confidence in General McChrystal to grant his request without hesitation, he should either replace McChrystal or end the occupation and bring the troops home.

Personally, I suspect the troop request was a political CYA on McChrystal’s part. He knows he can’t win there because the US lacks sufficient loyalty from the famously fractious locals and he also knows Obama has zero desire to send more troops to Afghanistan, so the request for 40,000 troops is essentially McChrystal washing his hands of responsibility while hoping Obama has the balls to withdraw U.S. forces. I think he’s miscalculated and that Obama will ultimately send the requested troops because, like most individuals with weak characters, Obama is terrified of being correctly perceived as weak. If the general is fortunate, Obama will send fewer troops and give him the ability to claim that he wasn’t given the necessary forces required to do the job.

Of course, none of this ritual dance between commander and commander-in-chief has anything to do with either the U.S. national interest or the interests of the individual American soldier.