Liberal Bias

Certified demonstrative leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan on TV having a kind of fight with NPR's certified defender of Fortress Neutrality David Folkenflik refusing to tell Mehdi what he wanted to hear on the subject of the not exactly shocking revelations from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News,   that Fox's stars were knowingly peddling bullshit after the 2020 presidential election—who'd have thunk!?

The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

The really interesting part of the story, which Folkenflik was laying on pretty thick, was that Fox's insane coverage of the Big Election LIe was driven pretty much entirely by business considerations, not ideological ones: after the excitement of Election Night, when Fox (correctly) called Arizona for Biden, launching the (correct) narrative of Biden's overwhelming victory over Trump, which of course enraged Trump himself and became a central theme on his Twitter, the Fox powers began to worry that they were alienating their audience, poetntially driving viewers to the outlets with even lower standards than their own, Newsmax and OAN, and possibly even threatening the share price!

Literary Corner: Look at Pennsylvania!

 

One way to look at Pennsylvania. Via Philadelphia Magazine.

Look at the Numbers!

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

(after an interview with host Steven Inskeep aired on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, broadcast 12 January 2022)

It was too early to ask for fraud and to talk about fraud.¹
Rudy said that, because of the fact it was very early with the —
because that was obviously at a very, very — that was a long time ago.²
The things that have found out³ have more than bore out
what people⁴ thought and what people felt and what people found.
When you look at Langhofer,⁵ I disagree with him as an attorney.
I did not think he was a good attorney to hire. I don't know
what his game is, but I will just say this: You look⁶ at the findings.
You look⁷ at the number of votes. Go into Detroit and just ask yourself,
is it true that there are more votes than there are voters?⁸
Look at Pennsylvania. Look at Philadelphia.⁹ Is it true that
there were far more votes than there were voters?

¹ That would be 17 November 2020, when attorney Rudolph Giuliani told Judge Matthew Brann in federal court in Williamsport, PA, that two voters in Republican counties were not allowed to fix errors in their mail-in ballots, whereas voters in Democratic counties were: "The best description of this situation is it's a widespread, nationwide voter fraud," he said. 

“It’s a widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani said. He accused local election officials of being part of a “little mafia” and preventing Republican Party observers from watching ballots being counted. He said only cities “controlled by Democratic machines” had problems, and “you’d have to be a fool to think this is an accident.”

But when Judge Brann asked him to explain why these fraud allegations were not mentioned in the lawsuit he was litigating, Giuliani acknowledged that "This is not a fraud case." This was not because it was "too early to talk about fraud"; indeed Giuliani had started talking about fraud earlier still, in his celebrated Four Seasons Total Landscaping address on 7 November, the day the election was called:

Right Here in River City

Listening to NPR on location in Des Moines this morning to report the main story of the day, which was that they didn't have the story they were prepared for, the results of the Iowa caucus, through no fault of their own, I should say: as you know by now, blame goes to the Iowa Democratic Party, which—frustrated in its desire to have all the attendees vote by smartphone, which they had thought would be very groovy, but would apparently have been a security nightmare—had decided that precinct captains and secretaries would transmit all the results to headquarters by smartphone, through a specially developed app which apparently worked fine if you took the training but not if you thought you could just download it like Uber and dive in. It seems there were so many of the latter that the hot line set up to handle problems was immediately overwhelmed, and a lot of precinct captains and secretaries gave up trying to get through and went home. Republicans and/or Russians are already pushing conspiracy theories (the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns, and the Nevada Democratic Party, have been clients of the firm that developed the app), but I'd bet on incompetence every time. (Steve M has more to say about that.)

A thing that will stick in my mind was David Greene's interview with the Des Moines waitress who had told him 12 years ago that a Hillary Clinton had brought a party to her restaurant and stiffed her (which, it strikes me now, may or may not have been true) and now says that after voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 she voted for Trump in 2016 and plans to do so again, because "I'm not a racist but."

Annals of Derp: Unemployment in the Le Pen philosophy

Photo by AFP/Getty Images via Daily Mail.

NPR Tuesday morning, interviewing a member of the Le Pen campaign, Mikaël Sala:

GREENE: Let me just step back and look at Europe and the world right now. There was a lot of talk that there was this populist surge across Europe and in the U.S. But, you know, recently Austria rejected a populist candidate for chancellor. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands did not do as well as expected. Angela Merkel seems safer now in Germany than a lot of people thought politically. I mean, is there really still a populist surge that you're seeing?

SALA: Sure. I'm going to tell you why it is really powerful in France. In France, we have two problems. We have a problem with mass immigration that we cannot afford anymore, and we have a problem with our economy which is unable to grow. And it so happens that in the Netherlands and in Austria, they have one of those two problems. They're facing mass immigration, but their economies are still going about all right. So it's not that we're not compassionate, it's that we can't afford, you know, welcoming any more people because we are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Doesn't that suggest anything to you? Like maybe if the Dutch and Austrian economies are growing in the teeth of all those immigrants—to say nothing of immigrant-friendly Germany and Sweden and Belgium—maybe immigrants aren't the problem?

Monuments in Bothsiderism

Just a little more NPR, and a note on poor Cokie Roberts, who's been demoted for her courage in coming out to denounce the Trump, because God forbid NPR should ever suggest that one side in an electoral contest is better than other in objective reality, as opposed to public opinion standings; and must now be identified by the network as a non-journalist; they stopped calling her a "news analyst" some years ago, but now she has to share her Monday morning spot with some explicitly partisan hack, who on this Monday was a Trump supporter from the (gasp!) open rightwing propaganda vehicle Washington Times, Charlie Hurt. Bob Edwards wept.

This woman, the child of not one but two New Deal Democrat congresspersons and an uncloseted feminist (if of a pretty weak-tea variety, writing pop history focusing on women but always choosing her heroines from those who were married to Great Men, as if to mark her "moderation" with this territorial modesty), has been running from accusations of partisanship for a lifetime, but the dreadful taint has finally caught up with her.

The stupid! It scathes!

Happy Memorial Day! Another bloody long one—mostly because of all the quotes. I'd have made it shorter but I didn't want to take the extra time.

I vote for Gene too. Mara's honest-and-trustworthy numbers are going through the floor. Image tweeted sometime in late March by Stacy Smallwood.

Mara Liasson on NPR yesterday morning:

This was a bad week for Hillary Clinton. The State Department inspector general released a report that was very scathing. And it contradicted a couple of assertions she's made in the past about her using a private server for her emails. She'd said in the past that the arrangement was allowed. Now, she never said she asked for permission and got it. But she did say it was allowed. And the inspector general said no, it wasn't allowed. And if she had asked us, we wouldn't have let her do it, or we would've told her not to do it.

The report was "very scathing"? What was the thing about it that "scathed", "scorched", "seared", or "assailed with withering denunciation"? The next sentence begins with "And", indicating that it's about something in addition to the scathe factor, which remains unexplained. The report's conclusion, in full, states:

Annals of derp: Et tu, Shankar?

Image via New Schoolers.

I love the fact that NPR runs regular reports on social science research, and especially the Morning Edition appearances of Shankar Vedantam, a kind of indirect corrective to the vagaries of David Brooks, but today they ran a bit off the rails in discussing an extremely elegant study by Matthew Mendez and Christian Grose of USC.

Never metaphor I didn't like

NPR's Ari Shapiro thought he was the little kid at the Emperor's fashion show:

Typically the White House briefing room is a reserved place, where people wait their turn to speak. It was not my turn to speak.

But I couldn't help it.

"You see it as a ransom, but it's a metaphor that doesn't serve our purposes," I protested to Carney. "We're trying to be accurate in our description of what's going on."

Finally, I tried to sum up what we'd learned so far.

"You said we need to see whether they're serious about putting the matches and gasoline aside. You've also said they want to keep a nuclear weapon in their back pocket. So, is keeping the nuclear weapon in the back pocket the same as putting the matches and gasoline aside? Or, even better, can we stop talking matches and gasoline and nuclear weapons and start talking about what's actually happening?"

The thing is, no. There is no question that the language of our political discourse is at least as corrupt as it was in George Orwell's 1946 (if you've never read this brief essay read it now, it is far more important than anything going online today) and perhaps far worse—a catacomb for dead metaphors crawling with worms and choking with bone-dust. But it really isn't Jay Carney's job to sweep it out. To the contrary! It is his job to tell us what is going on in the White House without saying it, or to allow for a minimum of two different interpretations, a task for which the dead metaphor is ideally suited. It is the reporter's job to interpret it, including making up your own damn metaphor when you need one. Are you a writer or what? If you want the spox to supply you with the metaphors that "serve our purposes", you should have gone to secretarial school instead of J-school. Does secretarial school exist any more?

In the present case, the broad message Carney needs to present is actually very simple, and well understood by all the participants (including Shapiro, I would hope), but contradictory, or "paradoxical" to use the (incorrect) term the White House press corps would prefer: that it is an essential part of the president's negotiating strategy that he not negotiate. This is a very old political approach, going back I'm sure to the Spring and Autumn period in China, but you really can't expect Carney to stand before the gaggle and say something along the lines of, "The president stands firm in refusing to negotiate except to the extent that saying that is a form of negotiation." So he hauls out the rhetorical matches and gasoline instead.

In the case of the "ransom", it's not even a metaphor: according to Merriam Webster,

Full Definition of RANSOM

1

:  a consideration paid or demanded for the release of someone or something from captivity

2

:  the act of ransoming

Speaker Boehner literally, not figuratively, holds the ability of the United States government to function under his control, and refuses to release it unless he gets—well, some kind of consideration, anyway, he hasn't quite made up his mind.

Still from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Truth terrorism lives!

In a victory for truth terrorists everywhere, with some wonderfully heartening news from Jay Rosen via Kos's The Troubador, National Public Radio has issued a new ethics handbook (This is NPR. And these are the standards of our journalism) clarifying the network's policies on the issue of "balance" vs. truthfulness, and come out in favor of the latter:

we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

A detail I especially like is the recognition in that "all sides" rather than "both" that it isn't ever just a question of adopting what she said or what he said but of developing an independent understanding.

This does not constitute an endorsement of Mamma Stamberg's frozen cranberry relish.

Zombie pin-up girl tote bag from BuyZombie: The Undead are Online.

Airborne elephant watch

Among those unpanicked by the Friedman Fear of Egypt's being overrun by Islamic fanatics, count the Google person turned revolutionary Wael Ghonim, currently on a well-deserved book tour; asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep if it didn't upset him that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections by working door to door while he and his fellow liberals were online, he replied something like, "Yes, perfect--we should learn from them."

Ectomorphic government

Also from NPR this morning, an example germane to the spurious debate of big government vs. small government and what makes it spurious, in a report (only the sound file, no text, available online so far) on the MSHA report on the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. As the radio report (from Howard Berkes) makes clear, the agency report makes it clear that the agency shares reponsibility in a major way for the disaster with the company that ran the mine, but the agency never actually says it. That is, they knew all about the mine's problems with ventilation and gas buildup and danger of explosions well in advance of the explosion that killed 29 people, but they didn't succeed in doing anything about it. This is a case of government that is neither too big nor too little but too fat (apologies to anybody who feels that this line of metaphor is prejudicial to the plump, but I really need it). MSHA was clearly big enough, but it wasn't effective:

Morning addition

A cool example of properly sourced evidence that the postulates of Republican geometry just don't correspond to reality surfaced on NPR this morning: the theory says a 2% surtax on personal income over a million dollars will prevent small businesspersons from hiring workers, but in fact you can't find a small businessperson who will be so prevented. Tamara Keith, the reporter, asked numerous senators and representatives and multiple business organizations for an appropriate example, then went on Facebook to look for themselves, but nobody could come up with a single one. NPR did find a couple of qualified millionaires, but they didn't think the tax would have any effect on hiring, and in fact they turned out to be Democrats. Okay, just because you don't know any black swans doesn't prove all swans are white, and this informal inquiry doesn't prove that no such millionaires exist, but I think we know where the burden of proof just went. The Republican theory applies basically to proprietors who report company profits as personal income, and I'm guessing that there really aren't any such people paying themselves a million-dollar salary--if you're picking up that kind of profit you'll surely prefer paying corporate taxes on it.

[edited to note the reporter by name, and then messed with some more because I can't keep my hands off it]