By Becket Adams
Sunday, February 25, 2024
It has been an especially embarrassing week for our
vaunted Fourth Estate.
If you thought this industry was on the upswing,
course-correcting for the crisis of credibility that dogs the entire business,
you would be sorely mistaken.
The week began poorly when, on Sunday, PBS celebrated
Black History Month with an interview that included, among other things, praise
for the infamous former Black Panther Assata Shakur. Absent from the fond
acclaim was any mention of the fact that Shakur murdered a police officer in
1973. We call this “burying the lede.” Shakur escaped from prison in 1979 and
later claimed political asylum in Cuba, where she lives to this day.
Later, on Monday, the New York Times announced
that one of its freelance photojournalists, Gaza-based Yousef Masoud, had won a
George Polk Award for his efforts to document the war between Israel and Hamas.
Masoud has also been accused of collaborating
with the Hamas terrorists who carried out the October 7 massacres,
rapes, and kidnappings.
Elsewhere, CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee suggested
Monday that the Republican Party is responsible for the death (probably murder)
of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in a penal colony.
“Mr. President,” she shouted at President Biden, “would
you go so far as to say that Alexei Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House
Republicans right now?” Even Biden appeared taken aback by the question.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post, reminiscent of its 2012 coverage, published a 3,500-word news article
complaining that Nikki Haley’s high school was too white when she attended in
the mid 1980s. The article also complained that the school didn’t focus enough
on lessons about past racism. Haley, whose parents emigrated from India to
Canada in 1964 and then to the United States, was raised Sikh.
The headline on that story was “Haley’s nearly all-White
high school lacked lessons of racism, some say.” That’s some some,
that “some say.”
As of this writing, there is no similar Washington
Post article fussing over the whiteness of the president’s high
school, which admitted exactly one black
student for the entire time that Biden was a pupil.
That same day, Politico published a
report that suggested Christian extremists are plotting to remake the federal
government to incorporate, among other things, the idea that human rights are
derived from God. The article, written by Alex Ward and Heidi Przybyla,
includes the following paragraph (emphasis added):
[Former OMB director Russell
Vought] is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of
the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort
is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve
constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second
term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership”
states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
For reference, the Declaration of Independence states in
its preamble, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
On Tuesday evening, MSNBC aired an interview wherein host
Stephanie Ruhle complained bitterly that people, including wealthy ones, are
allowed to speak freely on social media “with no consequences.”
“These people are going far beyond their expertise,” she
said, referring specifically to Elon Musk and hedge-funder Bill Ackman. “Right?
And that’s amazing to me. And they face no consequences for the idiotic things
that they say.”
Her guest, Puck News co-founder Bill
Cohan, responded, “Well, they face no consequences because they’re hugely
rich.”
On Wednesday, ABC News sounded downright proud after the
Biden administration touted its legal workaround to the Supreme Court ruling
that bars the president from unilaterally canceling student-loan debt.
The workaround “is a far cry from what the president
initially promised, but after the Supreme Court struck down his initial plan
last year,” said ABC’s Mary Bruce, “the president is well aware that voters and
Americans are feeling frustrated, and he wants to show that he is still trying
to fulfill this pledge.”
We are not, in fact, all behind the president’s
extraordinarily cynical vote-buying scheme.
“The Supreme Court blocked it,” the president bragged
later. “But that didn’t stop me.”
The same news organizations that are usually so quick to
denounce unprecedented assaults on our core democracy, and all the dangerous
rhetoric that goes with it, had little, if anything, to say regarding the
president’s boast.
Elsewhere, the Washington Free Beacon published an exclusive on
Wednesday, exposing the U.S. newsrooms that have accepted millions of
dollars from the Chinese on the condition that they publish Chinese propaganda.
That same day, CNN commentator John Avlon jumped into
politics, announcing a congressional campaign aimed at cleansing these fair
lands of the MAGA Right. Later, MSNBC contributor Claire McCaskill, who fell
into media after failing out of politics, suggested that “every newspaper in
America [quit] doing any fact checks on Joe Biden until they fact check Donald
Trump every morning on the front page.”
On Thursday, the New York Times worried
whether Google’s Gemini, a
weirdly racist robot that insisted on erasing white people from history,
poses a threat to — you guessed it — people of color.
“Images showing people of color in German military
uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have
amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s
already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues
around race,” the paper reported.
Perhaps the story should have been the bigger issue,
which is that Google’s AI had been programmed to decline requests
for images depicting white people, including even in historical settings.
(Also, just for the record, people of color did don the Nazi uniform.)
Elsewhere, the New York Post reported that CBS News,
which recently let go one of its star reporters, Catherine Herridge, had taken
the extraordinary step of seizing her confidential files. Before her dismissal
from CBS, Herridge had been investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story. The
move by CBS is severe and unusual enough to earn the newsgroup a public rebuke
from the SAG-AFTRA union (the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists), meaning that something very unusual indeed is
happening at Black Rock.
Meanwhile, Politico’s Przybyla
appeared Thursday on MSNBC to discuss “the mainlining of Christian nationalism
in the GOP base,” suggesting along the way that the concept of unalienable
rights is somehow unique to Christian extremists.
“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists —
not Christians by the way, because ‘Christian nationalist’ is very different —
is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t
come from any earthly authority,” Przybyla said, echoing her earlier reporting.
“They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They
come from God.”
Her remarks were shared later on social media, resulting
in a downpour of mockery, criticism, and outright befuddlement. Przybyla
attempted the next day to defend herself, claiming her analysis had been taken
out of context.
“I said men are making their own policy interpretation of
natural law. MLK did so [with] social justice,” she said, adding then
about her critics that they “don’t speak for all Christians [and] certainly not
for God.”
If you watch her remarks in full, there’s more than just
her questionable analysis of “unalienable rights,” the dubiousness of which is
consistent with her reporting from earlier in the week. Przybyla also conflates
mainline Evangelicalism, which includes the more liberal denominations, with
that of the mainstream variety. She then alleges that extremist Christians want
to apply natural law to marriage, abortion, etc. That’s not fringe
Christianity. That is mainstream Christianity.
Last, if you spent any time this week casually following
the Alabama IVF case, where a court ruled that frozen embryos are children
under state law, you’ll probably be shocked to learn the insane details of
what prompted such an opinion. The case heard by the judge
involved an IVF-capable facility that failed to protect human embryos from a
rogue patient who wandered into the room, accessed the freezer, and then
accidentally dropped the embryos on the ground, killing them all. The case
sought to answer the question: If an organization’s negligence allows for a
random actor to kill human embryos, do the parents of said embryos have
standing to sue the organization?
At CNN, a morning anchor alleged that a doctor had
accidentally dropped a dish.
Oh, well. Maybe they’ll get it right next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment