October 17, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SHE’S STUDIED THE MAPS!

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S THEIR JOB: The Media Shouldn’t Overlook Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism.

CNN’s report on the Harris plagiarism accusation is headlined: “Conservative activist accuses Harris of plagiarizing passages in co-authored 2009 book.” Note that the identity of the accuser—of the plagiarism discoverer—was not at issue in the Melania Trump case. But here, mainstream media feels compelled to position Rufo rather than Harris at the center of the controversy.

Conservatives complain ceaselessly—and not without reason—that scandals involving Republicans, conservatives, and Trump world personalities are reported in straightforward fashion, whereas scandals involving Democrats, liberals, and the media itself are not. In these latter cases, the media focuses on the motivations, agendas, and responses of conservatives who are involved in surfacing the controversy. This is often done, in headlines, using the exact phrasing Republicans pounce on X or Republicans seize on X, where X is the thing Democrats did wrong.

This is such a well-worn trope by now the one might have expected mainstream media institutions to take greater pains to avoid it, if only to deprive conservatives of ammunition. And yet The New York Times write-up of the Harris plagiarism accusations is headlined: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.”

The article itself minimizes the extent of Harris’ wrongdoing, and cites a plagiarism expert, Jonathan Bailey, who claims that Rufo was “making a big deal” out of relatively minor transgressions. The Times did not share with him the full list of plagiarized passages in the book, however; on his website, Bailey noted that after reviewing all the allegations, the case is “more serious” than he first thought, although he maintains Harris did not engage in “wholesale fraud.”

It’s perfectly fine for journalists to report on the agendas of conservative activists making such claims; Rufo does not deny that he is politically motivated; on the contrary, he constantly explains his agenda, and strategy for implementing it, in posts on X. But perhaps The New York Times might consider whether the pouncing and the seizing are the most important parts of this story.

From their point of view, invariably it is:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN BRET MET KAMALA:

For a long stretch, Americans have hungered for real leadership. We’ve yearned for a figure who was sharp, well-versed on all the tough issues on our national political scene, and not afraid to get into the details. A level-headed thinker who challenges assumptions and rejects the knee-jerk rhetoric and partisan talking points. Someone on the hunt for genuine answers to the country’s questions, with little patience for blather. Whether it’s a moment of crisis or a relatively normal evening, we just want to turn on the television and see someone talking to us who’s poised, reassuring, and direct.

Finally, last night, the 2024 presidential campaign delivered us that figure.

The only problem is that Bret Baier isn’t running for president.

Last night marked the first time that Vice President Kamala Harris had ever sat down for a formal interview with Fox News. She had never done so as California state attorney general, or U.S. senator, or presidential candidate, or as vice president.

Last night was also probably the last time she’ll ever agree to an interview with Fox News.

How did it go? The Journolist got its marching orders: “Democrats and multiple media personalities took to X to do damage control because, as Mark Hemingway noted, ‘If Kamala had done well, they’d be posting her highlights from the interview, not attacking Baier, who was perfectly professional.’”

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

READY TO HELICOPTER AGAIN BACK INTO THE BATTLE ZONE! Amazon makes first foray into live news with election night special hosted by Brian Williams.

Amazon said Thursday it plans to host an election night special anchored by Brian Williams, marking the company’s first foray into live news coverage.

The one-night special will provide election results and analysis on Prime Video starting at 5 p.m. ET on Nov. 5, the company said. Amazon emphasized it will be a “non-partisan presentation” pulling information from a variety of third-party news sources.

Williams will lead the special and interview analysts across the political spectrum. Viewers will not be required to have a Prime subscription to access the stream.

“After 41 years in the business — from local news to network shows to cable news — this feels like the next big thing,” Williams, who left NBC News in 2021 after a 28-year run, said in a release. “And the global marketplace of Amazon is a natural home for this first-of-its-kind venture.”

Williams hosting election night brings together two of former NBC president Jeff Zucker’s most, err, unique talents. Regarding Williams, as USA Today reported in November of 2004:

Williams has more plebian interests than his soon-to-be rivals, CBS’ Dan Rather, 73, a friend from CBS days, and ABC’s Peter Jennings, 66.

A onetime volunteer firefighter, Williams talks excitedly about the prospect of handling hoses and climbing ladders again on an upcoming story. He has been a stock-car racing fan since childhood days at the Chemung Speedrome near Elmira, N.Y., and is part owner of a dirt-track stock car team.

“No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian,” says NBC president Jeff Zucker, who once produced Nightly News for Brokaw.

As part of the Blogosphere Full Employment Act of 2015, Williams would of course apologize for lying about being in a helicopter forced down by an RPG in 2003 during the Iraq War, arguably the biggest of the many fables he told as anchor of NBC’s Nightly News. Rather than being fired by NBC, Williams was merely sent down to host shows for the farm team at MSNBC, until 2021, when the man who once praised Antifa as being the equivalent of the men who stormed the beaches of D-Day, signed off by lying, “I’m not a liberal or a conservative.”

Additionally, as Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post fumed in 2022: Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump.

Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.

The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

Two decades ago, as an NBC executive searching for a way to goose the floundering network’s popularity, he gave the green light to a reality show, “The Apprentice,” featuring a flashy mogul whose soon-to-be-famous tagline was “You’re fired.” Trump had a checkered history of bankruptcies, racism and failed real estate projects, but his confident bluster made him a natural on television.

“The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish wrote in their 2016 book, “Trump Revealed.” The stunning rise of Donald Trump had begun.

Zucker created Trump the TV sensation, which was the necessary foundation for Trump the candidate. Years later, after moving from NBC to CNN, Zucker recollected very well that Trump was a self-proclaimed “ratings machine” — a rare instance of Trumpian truth-telling.

CNN infamously took his campaign speeches live, sometimes going so far as to broadcast images of an empty lectern with embarrassing chyrons such as “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak.” You can’t buy that kind of media.

Zucker also brought on the air Trump surrogates who should have had no place on a national news network: people like the bully Corey Lewandowski, the sycophant Jeffrey Lord (who praised Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care) and Kayleigh McEnany, who later became a White House press secretary bad enough to somehow make one pine for Sean Spicer.

When Trump became the Republican nominee for president and started trashing Zucker’s network and staff with invective about its “fake news,” it was too late for second thoughts. By then, the standard had been set. Every Trump utterance became breaking news, and CNN, like many other news organizations, never figured out how to responsibly cover Trump throughout his democracy-damaging presidency.

Zucker expressed a modicum of regret in late 2016. “If we made any mistake last year,” he said, “it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run.”

But he excused his decision-making: “You never knew what he would say.” Audiences were riveted, so what could he do?

Not to mention thinking Trump would be a pushover for Hillary. How did that work out in 2016?

After Zucker was pushed out of CNN in 2022, Wikipedia notes:

In December 2022, Zucker was named an executive with Redbird IMI, a consortium with majority funding from Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President of the UAE.[49] The consortium is a joint venture between Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners and International Media Investments, a media investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates.[50] The position also includes an active role in the XFL, a professional football league partially owned by RedBird.[51]

The consortium’s planned purchase of The Telegraph, a prominent British newspaper, has caused controversy in the United Kingdom, as concerns were raised that the newspaper would be coming under the control of an autocratic state.

I wonder if Zucker gives any thoughts to the ramifications of what he set in motion twenty years ago, and how its aftermath will come together in November like a bad hangover? And I wonder if Jeff Bezos has thoughts about who he’s hired to cover that night?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Russian Interference in American Presidential Elections.

The New Hotness? British Interference in American Presidential Elections! British Labour Party sending staff to campaign for Harris in US swing states.

The left-leaning British Labour Party is sending nearly 100 members to U.S. battleground states to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election.

Sofia Patel, head of operations for the Labour Party, shared the plans via LinkedIn Wednesday. She claimed current and former party staff will target key swing states like North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“I have 10 spots available for anyone available to head to the battleground state of North Carolina – we will sort your housing,” Patel offered in the post.

Patel also noted she plans to arrive in the U.S. two weeks prior to the election and stay in Washington, D.C., for a few days afterward.

Patel’s profile shows she previously spent time in the Hillary Clinton campaign from October to November of 2016. She included the description “travelled to the US to campaign for Clinton in the presidential election.”

Reacting to Patel’s post was Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who suggested via X it was “yet another reason to vote for President Trump.”

Heh, indeed. But would this move the needle in either direction? I’m finding it difficult to think of many undecided voters thinking, “Well, I was on the fence about who to vote, but now that Keir Starmer and Sofia Patel have spoken, it’s definitely Kamala for me!”

But turnabout is fair play. It would be fun to see Trump officials parachuting in to Old Blighty to offer the Tory Party a boost should he win next month.

Posted at 6:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Illegal, too.

Where are the cries of “foreign interference!” from Democrats?

Posted at 5:23 pm by Stephen Green

I AM NOT STUNNED:

Plus: “ABC does fake fact-checks to help Kamala. CBS stealth-edits an interview to help Kamala. New York Times withholds evidence to help Kamala. This is endemic—and only visible now because we have X.”

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

UNLOVED, EVEN BY “HIS” PEOPLE:

Posted at 3:36 pm by Stephen Green

AND WE DIDN’T EVEN GET A LOUSY T-SHIRT: NASA Spent Millions on ‘Environmental Justice’ and ‘Equity’ Grants Despite Budget Woes. “Another grant, this time worth $250,000, was paid out to Los Angeles as part of NASA’s Predictive Environmental Analytics and Community Engagement for Equity and Environmental Justice (PEACE) program, per federal records. To remedy its observation that ‘people of color often face higher exposure to air pollutants,’ NASA’s PEACE program paid the city to provide pollution data to its residents in ‘a way that works across communities and cultural differences and specifically analyzes, engages and responds to needs for environmental justice.'”

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

SINWAR DEAD: The Israelis Get Their Yahyas Out! — Live in Concert.

For the State of Israel, Sinwar was literally the single most wanted man in the entire world, more so than any Iranian official you could name. Sinwar was the monster who planned and executed the most traumatic terrorist attack in Israeli history, kicking off a regional war. When the Israelis brilliantly targeted the leadership of Hezbollah a few weeks ago, the attacks were a spectacular execution of tightly orchestrated spycraft involving high and low technology, the sort of work that will be professionally studied by other intelligence agencies for years to come.

But this? Sinwar was apparently found completely by chance. A young IDF tanker merely nine months into his first deployment, doing a random patrol, spotted a terrorist poking his head out a window. An online friend suggested that the American analogy to this would be like Osama bin Laden getting taken out by a random artillery regiment of the Iowa National Guard instead of SEAL Team Six, but I prefer to think of it as Sinwar getting iced by the Israeli equivalent of Harold Ramis and Bill Murray in Stripes. (ZISKEY RATES HAMAS: “They’re P***ies!”) Either way, the world became a better place for his absence in it.

And as America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Washington Post Gives Entire Staff Day Off To Mourn Loss Of Hamas Leader.

The staff of CBS News, Te-Nehisi Coates, and Roger Waters are all likely in mourning as well, as well as many in the Biden-Harris administration:

UPDATE: And here we go!

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll