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Im-Politic: Will the Pandemic’s Real Lessons Ever Be Learned?

16 Monday May 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic, Uncategorized

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Great Barrington Declaration, Im-Politic, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, mandates, natural immunity, The New York Times, vaccines

Give The New York Times some credit here. On the one hand, its big, graphics-rich feature marking the grim news that about a million Americans have been killed by the CCP Virus has pinpointed a highly specific group of culprits for this towering toll, and an equally specific group of measures that could have held it way down (although it’s never indicated by how much).

Among the worst: “elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures” and “lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.”

So clearly, the authors insist, mask-wearing and lockdowns and social distancing should have been imposed much faster and more widely (without stating for how long), and more vaccinations required.

On the other hand, the reader is presented with abundant evidence that the benefits of such measures might have been limited – which is especially striking since not even a hint is provided that such steps might have inflicted considerable damage in their own right – including from other threats to public health that have been neglected.

Most strikingly, consistent with its observation that “The virus did not claim lives evenly, or randomly.” the piece reminds that in fact, the worst damage was remarkably concentrated in a single group. Specifically, “Three quarters of those who have died of Covid have been 65 or older.” Moreover, of that cohort, a third were 85 and over.

And then there was the related nursing homes disaster. According to the Times piece, a fifth of the roughly million CCP Virus-induced deaths in America occurred among residents and staff of these facilities.

Why longer and more sweeping lockdowns and the like would have reduced the virus’ damage to the nation as a whole, considering all the economic, educational, and health harm they produced for the vast majority of Americans who were far less vulnerable, is never explained.

The article’s case for vaccine mandates is similarly muddled. It repeats the widespread claims that most of those who died from the virus after vaccines became widely available were unvaxxed, and that “vaccinated people have had a much lower death rate — unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021 [when the eligibility for the doses became universally available].”

At the same time, readers learn that:

>“at least 50,000 vaccinated people, many of them older or without booster shots, were among the deaths reported since late April 2021….”; and that

>”People 80 and older who had gotten shots were almost twice as likely to die at the height of the Omicron wave as those in their 50s or early 60s who had not, according to C.D.C. [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data.”

Further, the article makes clear that, even forgetting about the decisive role played by age, claims about vaccine effectiveness are substantially exaggerated. Despite presenting the common contention that “unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021,” the chart presented to support this point shows that this ratio has held for only part of the period duing which vaccines have become widely available. The chart also that the gap has almost disappeared today.

In addition, the piece reports that “The C.D.C. has received data on deaths by vaccination status from only about half of the states….” As the authors explain, this data shortage makes it “impossible to know exactly how many vaccinated people are among the million who have died.”

Conversely, this data shortage – along with thoroughgoing ignorance about how many Americans have enjoyed natural immunity from the virus and therefore passed up the jabs, and how many who caught Covid asymptomatically and made similar decisions – also prevents figuring out what share of unvaccinated Americans died of the virus.

But because both numbers are doubtless both enormous, this percentage is doubtless much smaller than commonly supposed.  The Times authors (and their editors, who it should always be remembered greenlight every article’s journalistic methodology) might have adjusted their judgements, and recognized that alternative pandemic mitigation approaches — including those that took into account the difficult tradeoffs that needed to be made — have long been recommended, had they bothered to consult any of the impressively credentialed specialists who have been making these points. 

Yet they seemed as determined to ignore or marginalize their views as the official U.S. medical establishment has been.  As long as both America’s healthcare leaders and its Mainstream Media so doggedly oppose full debate on the real lessons taught by the pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that the nation will be prepared for the (inevitable) arrival of the next deadly pathogen. 

Glad I Didn’t Say That! What a Difference Nine Months Makes

30 Saturday Apr 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Glad I Didn't Say That!

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Biden, David Brooks, Democrats, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Mainstream Media, pundits, The New York Times

“The Biden Approach is Working””

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, August 5, 2021

“Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn — Fast”

– Headline on David Brooks’ New York Times column, April 28, 2022

 

(Sources: “The Biden Approach is Working,” by David Brooks, The New York Times, August 5, 2021, Opinion | The Biden Approach Is Working – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and “Seven Lessons Democrats Need to Learn – Fast,” by David Brooks, ibid., April 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/opinion/seven-lessons-democrats-need-to-learn-fast.html)   

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Russia Sanctions May Be Sending a Crucial Message About U.S. China Policy

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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Adam Posen, Antony J. Blinken, Biden, Biden administration, Bloomberg.com, Chad Bown, China, dollar, Donald Trump, finance, Foreign Affairs, foreign policy establishment, Mainstream Media, multilateralism, Qin Gang, reserve currency, Russia, sanctions, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, unilateralism, Wang Yi, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has produced a genuinely strange – and potentially crucial – turn in the way American leaders and the political class of pundits and think tankers and the rest of the countrys influential chattering class are viewing and even conducting China policy. Because China could in theory significantly help Vladimir Putin’s never-impressive economy evade the full impact of global sanctions, they’re not only talking of only punishing the People’s Republic if it follows this course. They’re exuding confidence that Beijing could be cowed into backing down.

In other words, the conventional wisdom throughout the U.S. foreign policy,  economic policy, and media establishments now holds that Washington can bend China to its will because the Chinese ultimately need the United States much more economically than vice versa. Because this position looks like such a total reversal of what these folks insisted during the trade war supposedly started by Donald Trump with China, it raises these questions: If America’s leverage is great enough to change Chinese behavior that would mainly threaten another country’s security, isn’t it also great enough to change Chinese behavior that for decades has increasingly damaged America’s own economy, and also to pursue decoupling from the Chinese economy more energetically?

The Biden administration certainly is acting like it holds all the cards over China on anti-Russia sanctions. As a “senior administration official” told reporters in an – official – White House briefing last Friday, the President in his virtual meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping that morning “made clear the implication and consequences of China providing material support — if China were to provide material support — to Russia as it prosecutes its brutal war in Ukraine, not just for China’s relationship with the United States but for the wider world.”

The day before, previewing the Biden-Xi call, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said  “President Biden will be speaking to President Xi tomorrow and will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.”

And the national policy establishments are giving these statements their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. According to Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who emerged as the Mainstream Media’s go-to critic of the Trump trade wars, “On the pure economic question, if China were to have to make the choice – Russia versus everyone else – I mean, it’s a no-brainer for China because it’s so integrated with all of these Western economies,”

His views, moreover, came in a Reuters article whose main thrust was “China’s economic interests remain heavily skewed to Western democracies….”

A Bloomberg.com analysis posted a week ago similarly asserted that China “needs good relations with the U.S. and its partners to meet its economic goals, particularly as growth slows to the slowest pace in in more than three decades.”

And although that point was keyed to the current state of China’s economic health – as opposed to the situation during the Trump years, the article also noted that Beijing has “resisted taking retaliatory measures that would hurt its own economy even when the U.S. has directly targeted Beijing. During the height of the trade war, China threatened but never implemented an ‘unreliable entities’ list, and even state-run banks have complied with U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong. It also delayed imposing an anti-sanctions law on the financial hub after businesses expressed concern.”

In all, it’s a stark contrast with the days during that Trump period when the Mainstream Media – relying heavily on analysts like Bown, who work for think tanks heavily funded by Offshoring Lobby interests – routinely ran stories headlined “Why the US would never win a trade war with China.”

Now sharp-eyed readers will notice one big difference between then and now: The Trump China and other tariffs were unilateral. It’s assumed – quite reasonably – that any Biden China sanctions would be undertaken jointly, along with many and possibly most other major national economies.

At the same time, no less than Peterson Institute President Adam Posen has just written in (no less than) Foreign Affairs that it’s the strength of the West’s financial services industries that “are what has truly advantaged the West over Russia in implementing effective sanctions, and what has deterred Chinese businesses from bailing Russia out.”

But these advantages are overwhelmingly the product of the dollar’s reserve currency status and the dominance of U.S. finance in that dominant Western finance sector. So even he’s indirectly admitted that U.S. power specifically has been the key. As a result, wielding the finance cudgel could have pushed the Europeans and Japanese to join in with the Trump China tariffs.

Some other consequential conclusions could flow from this new confidence about China. Maybe even without putting other big economies in the finance cross-hairs, Trump should have threatened – and if need be, imposed – the same kinds of financial sanctions on China instead of tariffs to try to force Beijing to end its predatory trade practices, and/or to press China to accept more U.S. imports. Or maybe a combination of the two would have been best. Maybe President Biden should add the finance sanctions to his decision to maintain most of the Trump tariffs. And if the United States enjoys this kind of leverage over China, wouldn’t the same hold for other troublesome trade partners, even big economies?

But perhaps the most convincing signs of the U.S.’ paramount leverage are coming from China itself. Last Tuesday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Beijing would “safeguard its legitimate rights and interests” if hit by punitive U.S. and broader measures. But this language was pretty vague – and he also expressed China’s hope that it would avoid these sanctions to begin with. Moreover, yesterday, Beijing’s ambassador to Washington Qin Gang made clear that Beijing had rejected the option of sending Russia military aid – though he added that China would maintain its “normal trade, economic, financial, energy cooperation with Russia.”

Moreover, there’s no need to go all-in on the tariff, or other China specific sanctions (e.g., on tech entities) fronts yet.  Especially since China is facing mounting economic troubles at home (notably in its gigantic and thoroughly bubble-ized real estate sector) a string of increasingly aggressive “poke the dragon” measures could yield lots of useful information about how Beijing perceives its vulnerabilities without risking noteworthy countermeasures – and about the real extent of America’s capacity to deal with the China challenge.      

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

12 Saturday Mar 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

Im-Politic: You Bet Sarah Palin Got Shafted in Her NY Times Libel Suit

20 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Elizabeth Williamson, First Amendment, freedom of the press, Gabrielle Giffords, Im-Politic, James Bennet, Jared Loughner, Jed S. Rakoff, journalism, libel, Mainstream Media, media bias, press freedom, Sarah Palin, The New York Times

The more I read about it, the clearer it is that the outcome of the Sarah Palin libel suit against The New York Times was a complete travesty of justice.

Let’s start at the end. The presiding judge, Jed S. Rakoff – an appointee of former (Democratic) President Bill Clinton’s – who had already thrown out the case once ostensibly on the merits, and who therefore should have never been permitted to handle the retrial – decided to dismiss Palin’s charges a second time while the jury was still deliberating. What was the hurry, Judge?

Worse, the jury sequestration procedures were so slipshod that its members found out about his decision before their work was done. Rakoff said the jurors insisted that their own verdict against Palin wasn’t influenced by this news. Which means we’re supposed to believe that the ruling of the supreme authority figure they were dealing with for the entirety of the trial, whose very robe-clad figure symbolizes impartiality, and one of whose main duties is to instruct them on the legal dos and don’ts of their role, had no effect on their thinking. That’s remotely believable?

Just as serious – though not so unmistakably biased – was Rakoff’s view that there was so little evidence that Times editors acted with malice in producing an editorial that pinned responsibility on Palin for a failed assassination attempt on a Member of Congress that the paper should have been acquitted literally ASAP. And the jury got it just as wrong.

Here are the two paragraphs, from a June, 2017 Times editorial, on which Palin mainly based her case:

“Was this attack [by a shooter on Republican Members of Congress in 2017] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing six people, including a nine-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and nineteen other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

“Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask for of the right.”

The crucial tests that must be passed by libel charges against a public figure (like Palin) are (1) that the statement in question is false (The Times admitted as much a corrections it ran soon after); and (2), created by the Supreme Court in a 1964 case involving The Times, that the statement was published either with “actual malice” or with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

As should be obvious to anyone knowing standard English, the key portion comes in the first paragraph, which notes the 2011 attack on Rep. Giffords and others, claims that “the link to political incitement is clear” and directly proceeds to recall a map contained in a Palin political ad. The only possible sane interpretation is that the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate’s organization played a role in inciting shooter Loughner. And for good measure, this accusation that Palin’s ad activated Loughner was repeated in the second paragraph.

The allegation about the ad’s effect was not only false, but false on every count. What was depicted under crosshairs in the ad were not pictures of Giffords herself or any other Members of Congress, but their districts on a map of the continental United States. (As shown below, the lawmakers’ names were included under the map.)

And Loughner was so certifiably insane that, as was totally predictable, no evidence has ever emerged that he knew of Palin’s ad. Nor did he have to, as he had become preoccupied with Giffords years earlier. And indeed, as alluded to above, the Times admitted the falsehood in two corrections it ran within a day after the editorial came out.

These corrections have been cited, including by Rakoff, as evidence that the paper was not aiming to smear Palin, but simply committed an innocent mistake. But does he really believe that such brief ex post facto statements, inserted at the end of the new version, are seen by nearly as many readers and have nearly the impact of the original?  Moreover, this new version still describes the Palin ad as an example of the dangerous and indeed “lethal” “viciousness” of much American political rhetoric nowadays – before abruptly somersaulting and tacking on the qualifier that “in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.”

Rakoff found even more convincing of the Times‘ benign intentions an email sent by editorial page chief James Bennet – who rewrote the commentary and added its most controversial language – to original drafter Elizabeth Williamson once his rewrite was finished (and, as both of them knew, finished very close to the deadline they were needlessly determined to meet, as described below).  In it, Bennet asked her to “Please take a look” at his changes, which he acknowledged – rather apologetically – were substantial. 

As explained by Washington Post media critic Erik Wempel, Rakoff judged that the email established Bennet’s good faith because “No matter what you believe about Bennet or his colleagues, he’d be foolish to ask for Williamson’s review of the draft if he’d been committed to planting damaging falsehoods in it.”

But nothing in Bennet’s message alerted Williamson – who, as made clear above, also believed in a Palin-Gifford shooting connection – to the possibility that he’d exaggerated the Palin angle in any way.  It doesn’t appear that this aspect of the rewrite was even mentioned.  (I haven’t managed to find a copy of the entire message, but am relying on the reproduction contained in the above-linked Columbia Journalism Review article.)  If anything, the last-minute nature and apologetic tone of the message indicate most strongly that Bennet viewed it as a sop to a colleague whose work he found thoroughly unsatisfactory 

Moreover, Williamson’s response shows that the last issue she was thinking about was whether Palin’s role in the nation’s violent politics had been misrepresented. 

For his part, Bennet contends both that he was unaware of previous Times reporting, and that when he wrote about the “clear” “link” between the type of “political incitement” represented by the Palin ad and the Giffords shooting, he never intended to argue that there was a clear link between the two.

Amazingly, when he presided over the first case in 2017, Rakoff simply ignored this transparently feeble attempt – from a highly educated individual who for decades had earned his living and carved out a distinguished career at the very top of his profession through his skill at using words – to argue that the words he set down on paper had nothing to do with the message he wished to convey.

Instead, the judge declared (in his above-linked 2017 ruling) that “What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected. Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.” That is, nothing of legal significance to see here.

But during the retrial, evidence came out undercutting his reading of events. First, as mentioned above, it became apparent that the editorial was a rush job where there was no need to rush. In fact, as recounted here, the morning that news appeared of the 2017 attack on the Congressional Republicans appeared, Times editorial staffers weren’t even sure that any commentary was warranted, much less what it would say.

It’s important to realize here that, unlike their news division counterparts, the editorial page staff was under no competitive pressures from rival news organizations to keep releasing breaking, originally reported material. And especially, as noted above, since editorial page chief Bennet didn’t even receive the first draft of the piece from Williamson until very late in the production day, any responsible publication should have proceeded with caution on such a highly charged topic.

That’s an even stronger point considering that, as even Rakoff has acknowledged,

“Certainly the case law is clear that mere failure to check is not enough to support ‘reckless disregard’ in the context of any libel claim. But … where the assertion is that someone incited murder: That is such a strong statement that even under a reckless disregard standard, it calls for more assiduous checking than would be normally the case.”

And revealingly, despite the ongoing confusion about what focus the editorial should take, Palin was fingered from the beginning as a culprit behind what looked like a national outburst of political violence. As argued in the first draft (cited in the 2017 Rakoff judgement linked above):

“Just as in 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a nine year-old girl, Mr. Hodgkinson’s [the Congressional Republicans’ attacker] rage was nurtured in a vile political climate. Then, it was the progun right being criticized: in the weeks before the shooting Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”

Weirdly, the draft included a hyperlink to a post from ABC News debunking the Palin-Giffords shooting connection. But upon seeing an insinuation that someone – especially a national politician – had incited murder, Bennet didn’t engage in the kind of “more assiduous checking” Rakoff suggested is called for (even when a public figure is involved) when it comes to libel claims revolving around such grave charges. He didn’t make any effort at all. Instead, he decided that itwas much more important to meet the 8 PM deadline for making the following morning’s edition. And in the process, he wound up actually dialing up the anti-Palin rhetoric.

As reported here, in pre-trial testimony, Bennet “cited deadline pressures as he explained that he did not personally research the information about Palin’s political action committee before approving the editorial’s publication. He said he believed the editorial was accurate when it was published.”

But this is the crucial point: Why did he swallow the Palin claim so easily? Because it was Sarah Palin. Someone who, in the milieu in which he spent his entire professional life, was almost uniformly derided as a ditz at best (“I can see Russia from my house!”) and at worst as a demagogue who paved the way for Public Enemy Number One Donald Trump. And if this unmistakably blithe assumption that Palin was of course a hate- and violence-mongerer doesn’t amount to a reckless disregard for the truth, it’s hard to imagine what would,

Fortunately, Rakoff’s legal but bizarro and gratuitous decision to jump the gun on the jury seems likely to increase the odds of a retrial -and perhaps a Palin victory. Unless a U.S. justice system that’s fallen flat on its face in this case gives him yet another chance to allow a news giant to abuse its power.

Im-Politic: A Colleyville Media Terrorism Cover Up

16 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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Aafia Siddiqui, ABC News, Biden, Colleyville, domestic terrorism, hostages, Im-Politic, Islam, jihadism, Kamala Harris, Mainstream Media, media bias, Muslims, terrorism, Texas, white supremacy

Here’s something I don’t often say – and may never have ever said: Congratulations to ABC News. As of this writing (just shy of 4:30 PM EST yesterday), they’re the only national news outlet I’ve looked at that’s mentioned  the distinct possibility (based on a claim from “a U.S. official briefed on the matter”) that the person who took hostages in a Dallas, Texas area synagogue was “claiming to be the brother of convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui” and was “demanding to have the sister freed.”

According to ABC, here’s who he wanted freed: Someone with “alleged ties to al-Qaida” who was “convicted of assault and attempted murder of a U.S. soldier in 2010 and sentenced to 86 years in prison.”

The ABC News report must have come out before 3:18 PM EST because it was referenced in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram posting at that time. (As of posting time – Sunday morning – this link and those appearing below have been superseded by updates, so it appears you’ll have to take my word for the following information having been accurate when I grabbed them yesterday at the URLs presented at which they were found then.)

But here’s where I haven’t yet read about the suspect’s possible identity (in the order in which I checked these news sites out):

CNN as of 4:32 PM EST.

The New York Times as of 4:36 PM EST.

The Washington Post as of 4:37 PM EST.

CBS News as of 4:45 PM.

NBC News as of 4:46 PM.

Even Fox News as of 4:44 PM.

The Associated Press as of 4:32 had mentioned a Fort Worth Star-Telegram report that “The man, who used profanities, repeatedly mentioned his sister, Islam and that he thought he was going to die….”

Reuters as of 4:47 PM mentioned the Siddiqui angle.

It’s still possible that the reported Siddiqui connection proves to be completely wrong, as it’s officially unconfirmed, or somehow tangential to the hostage-taker’s motives. But can anyone doubt that if any claims of a white supremacist angle or a Trump-supporter angle – as opposed to a Muslim or a jihadist angle – had surfaced that these descriptions would have been shouted from the rooftops, and immediately?

In fact, there can’t be much reasonable doubt that Mainstream Media articles also would have prominently reminded readers of the Biden adminstration’s recent decision to set up a new domestic terrorism unit in the Justice Department, in line with the President’s declaration that “domestic terrorism from white supremacists is the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland.”

(It’s similarly revealing that a President and Vice President quick to jump to racially charged judgment regarding several recent violent incidents – see, e.g., here – were much more cautious this [Sunday] morning. The former simply stated that “There is more we will learn in the days ahead about the motivations of the hostage taker.” The latter echoed this reticence practically word-for-word.)  

Last Wednesday, Gallup published the results of a poll presenting American respondents’ views of 22 professions, ranking them from most honest and ethical to least. Newspaper and television reporters came in fifteenth and seventeenth, respectively. The early coverage of the Colleyville hostage situation adds to the abundant evidence why.

 

  

 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why So Few are Impressed with the “Biden Boom”

09 Thursday Dec 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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Associated Press, Biden, Bill Clinton, conjunctions, grammar, incomes, inflation, living standards, Mainstream Media, polls, prices, stimulus, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

What a difference a coordinating conjunction can make!

You remember coordinating conjunctions, don’t you? They’re the little words that “join two verbs, two nouns, two adjectives, two phrases, or two independent clauses.” In English, for those of you who cut or snoozed in your “parts of speech” classes, they’re “for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or”, “yet”, and “so”.  (Here‘s the source.)

I bring them up because an Associated Press (AP) article today just illustrated how important they can be, and in the process, added to the burgeoning mass of spoken and published material lately making clear how completely many of the usual suspects in America’s chattering classes have forgotten the fundamental purpose of the national economy and economic policymaking.

It isn’t to generate more growth, more jobs, more spending, or any other specific great performance metrics. (See, e.g., here and here.) Instead, the fundamental purpose is to help improve people’s lives. Better numbers on the above fronts and others obviously can help achieve this goal. But they’re no guarantee.

That’s why the header on the piece used the wrong conjunction. It shouldn’t be “AP-NORC Poll: Income is up, but Americans focus on inflation” – which at least to me connoted, “Why are those Americans accentuating the negative?”

Much better would have been “AP-NORC Poll: Income is up, and Americans focus on inflation.” Because the results of the survey itself are sending the exact same message as the most important figures from an individual or family perspective: Prices this year have been rising faster than wages, which means that despite all the encouraging data nowadays, the typical American is falling behind economically, not getting ahead.

To cite just a few examples from the poll:

>”Two-thirds [of respondents] say their household costs have risen since the pandemic, compared with only about a quarter who say their incomes have increased….Half say their incomes have stayed the same. Roughly a quarter report that their incomes have dropped.”

>”Most people say the sharply higher prices for goods and services in recent months have had at least a minor effect on their financial lives, including about 4 in 10 who say the hit has been substantial. The poll confirms that the burden has been especially hard on low-income households.”

>”U.S. households, on average, are earning higher incomes than they did before the pandemic. Wages and salaries grew 4.2% in September compared with a year earlier, the largest annual increase in two decades of records.”  But as RealityChek readers know, the cost of living in September rose by 4.4 percent on year according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, and by 5.4 percent according to the more widely followed Consumer Price Index.

>Similarly, government stimulus checks and other supports “combined with higher paychecks, lifted Americans’ overall household incomes by 5.9% in October compared with a year earlier. Yet inflation jumped to 6.2% that month, the highest reading in three decades, negating the income gain.” (And then some!)

When he first ran for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton touted the importance of “Putting People First” as the lodestar for economic policy. As the AP article indicates, that’s advice that urgently needs learning or re-learning by the numerous reporters and commentators puzzled by why Americans are less impressed with the current supposed economic boom than with their falling living standards.

Im-Politic: American Journalism’s Editing Crisis Deepens

12 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Biden, Bloomberg.com, China, Donald Trump, editing, Im-Politic, imports, Jeff Bezos, journalism, Mainstream Media, Michael Bloomberg, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war, Washington Post

A RealityChek post last month suggested that America’s news media are experiencing a genuine editing crisis, and just yesterday appeared an example that left even me – someone who for decades has been tracking these lapses (or biases?) and the misinformation they’ve often spread – speechless.

Well, OK, not exactly speechless. But here’s what I mean.

The Bloomberg.com article in question, titled, “China’s Response to U.S. Trade Talks Shows Gap Between Two” was almost entirely unobjectionable. Indeed, for the most part, it focused quite competently on recent statements made by top U.S. and Chinese officials showing how far the two economies remain from resolving the trade and broader commercial issues they’ve clashed over for many years.

But then came this chart:

Surging Surplus

From the title, you’d expect it to show both that the immense U.S. trade deficit with China currently stood at an all-time high, and that the increase was being driven largely by still soaring American imports from the People’s Republic.

Except if you eyeball the chart with even a little care, you see that if America’s imports from China (the solid white line) are now in record territory, it’s not by much compared with the previous peak in mid-2018. Moreover, since they’ve barely budged since then, and the U.S. economy has grown by some ten percent during this period, the China shortfall has clearly become smaller as a share of gross domestic product – a crucial piece of context.

Moreover, it’s absolutely clear that the Chinese trade surplus with the United States hasn’t been surging at all lately. Indeed, according to the vertical orange-ish bars it’s represented by, it’s slightly below last year’s peak and has fallen slightly  since early 2018. Yes, there’s been a surge. But it took place during the decades before.

And kind of mysteriously left out: Mid-2018 is when former President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs on imports from China.

But that’s not the main point here. I’ve seen and written about headlines that misrepresent the body of the article they accompany. (That last post on editing provided one example.) But I don’t ever recall seeing a chart’s title contradicted by the chart itself. Like Amazon.com co-founder Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post, Bloomberg.com co-founder and majority owner Michael Bloomberg has more than enough bucks to at least try preventing such embarrassing goofs. Time to start opening up that wallet.  

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Vaccine Derangement Syndrome

03 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Glad I Didn't Say That!

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Associated Press, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Delta variant, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Mainstream Media, MSM, vaccination, vaccines, Wuhan virus

“Tens of millions of Americans have refused to get vaccinated,

allowing the highly contagious delta variant to tear through the

country….” 

– Associated Press, October 2, 2021

 

“Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates”

– Associated Press, October 3, 2021

 

(Sources: “COVID-19 deaths eclipse 700,000 in US as delta variant rages,” by Tammy Webber and Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press, October 2, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-dead-us-milestone-80209c66802902e42adfbe075ff5272b and “Virus surge hits New England despite high vaccination rates,” by Wilson Ring, Associated Press, October 3, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-pandemics-vermont-d25aae90b2dda65b3d1c2c0d5d00156c)

Im-Politic: A Small Step Toward Quality Journalism ( I Hope)

22 Wednesday Sep 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Atlanta, crime, editing, Georgia, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, Sally Buzbee, Tim Craig, Washington Post

It was not only great news that the Washington Post‘s new Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, has just announced that the paper will hire 41 new editors. It’s urgently needed news, as made painfully clear by this September 13 article on rising crime in Atlanta, Georgia – which violates one of the most important rules of good journalism: Don’t try to shoehorn an article into a certain narrative when you’ve presented almost no supporting evidence.

The narrative chosen by reporter Tim Craig and evidently approved by enough editors to warrant publication is plainly stated in the headline: “Brutal killing of a woman and her dog in an Atlanta park reignites the debate over city’s growing crime problem.” It’s hardly unheard of for headlines to clash with the body of their story, or to exaggerate the findings. After all, nearly news organizations are private businesses, they need to make money, and what better way to generate the kinds of eyeballs that will make advertisers pay top dollar than clickbait – which of course is journalism’s version of flashy packaging.

And sometimes, headline writers just make innocent mistakes, and place such labels on stories too late for the reporter to object – or even an editor to spot it. That’s not a capital crime, especially when we’re dealing with a form of communication that’s often necessarily hastily composed.

But the claim of a “debate” on crime convulsing the city wasn’t confined to the headline. Craig himself wrote that Atlanta’s crime rate is dominating the political debate in Georgia, a state that is expected to be key in next year’s midterm elections. Georgia Republicans believe a tough-on-crime message offers them a chance to win back suburban Atlanta-area voters after the party suffered punishing losses in last year’s presidential and U.S. Senate contests.”

Meanwhile, “many Democrats,” readers are told, dismiss [such] concerns as a partisan effort to rally conservatives to the polls by stoking fear….”

The above link documents that Atlanta crime is definitely influencing city and state politics. But what’s weird about Craig’s story is that it per se offers almost no examples of such clashing opinions.

Toward the end of the article, Craig quotes a single resident fretting that “state Republicans will use the city’s crime problem to their political advantage.” But even she both acknowledges a “crime problem,” calls it “unbelievable” and “said she thinks some of the city’s Democratic leaders went too far last year by embracing calls to shift resources away from the police.”

The only Democratic politician whose views are presented – Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, told Craig that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who’s up for reelection next year and has focused on the crime issue, “is right to be concerned” because “the city’s criminal justice system is overwhelmed amid a shortage of police officers and ballistics experts needed to help solve crimes.”

This is a debate on crime? Or even close?

In fact, the rest of Craig’s article is devoted almost exclusively to a wide variety of Atlantans emphasizing how serious the city’s crime problem is and worrying that if some dramatically different strategy to fight it isn’t adopted soon, its economy could suffer and its “community cohesion, vitality and civility” could be damaged. (One exception to the head of a local business booster group – who’s basically paid to be optimistic.)

Just as important, no one mentioned in the article voiced any support for defunding police or “reimagining public safety” to focus on non-coercive ways to reduce crime or any of the other police reform proposals that mushroomed following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

Spotting such internal contradictions isn’t the only editing problem experienced lately by the Post (or other major news organizations). As known by RealityChek regulars, the output of these outlets regularly contains major factual mistakes, ignores crucial context, presents too narrow a range of opinion, and relies on experts plainly not worthy of the title (to name just a few of their leading shortcomings).

So let’s hope Buzbee’s hiring decision stems from a recognition of these problems (rather than a desire to add new bells and whistles to their websites and the like), and that lots of other news organizations follow suit. Her newspaper’s latest motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” spotlights the essential role journalism plays in protecting Americans’ freedoms. She and her peers should also remember that the trust on which this role is based will weaken further in incompetence.

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Alastair Winter

Chief Economist at Daniel Stewart & Co - Trying to make sense of Global Markets, Macroeconomics & Politics

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Real Estate + Economics + Gold + Silver

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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Kausfiles

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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Sober Look

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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