Archive for 2017

JOHN HINDERAKER: Media “Truth” Meltdown: It’s 2004 All Over Again.

“Who owns the truth?” was about the Rathergate episode: how we and others exposed 60 Minutes’ attempt to swing the 2004 presidential election to Democrat John Kerry by publishing lies–fake news, one could say–about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.

I remember the Time cover collage very well, because I am in it. The photo in the lower left was taken in the loft of my house. That is Scott Johnson sitting with his back to the camera, and my left foot is barely visible next to the chair to his right.

The liberal media’s current hysteria about “truth” is eerily reminiscent of what we went through in 2004. We even have Scott Pelley, a thoroughly dishonest journalist, extolling the virtues of liberal editors who supposedly keep watch on liberal journalists:

Scott Pelley: Well, the benefit of intermediaries is having experienced editors check things out and research people. Check the facts before it goes out to the public. You don’t do any of that.

Was Pelley not around in 2004? Has he forgotten how stupid that refrain sounded then (“Layers and layers of fact-checkers”)? Does he not realize how false it rings today?

We have been here before: the liberal media are in a panic because their authority is being challenged. It must be worse now, though, than it was in 2004. Then, Time’s refrain was a relatively benign “Who owns the truth?” Now, they ask, “Is truth dead?” We can translate: “Is the liberal news media monopoly dead?”

Actually, none of the current controversies has anything to do with the nature of truth, or whether truth is (figuratively speaking) on its deathbed. Liberal journalists are just getting the vapors because, once again, they have been found out.

Yeah, pretty much. Plus:

The crisis that we face is not epistemological, it is political. There is no shortage of evidence, and the truth is rather clear: liberal governance has failed. The country is awash in debt, its influence around the world is in decline, its social programs have mostly failed, its borders are porous, its governing class is corrupt and incompetent, and in recent years its leaders have not even tried to advance the interests of the American people.

That is the truth. That is why Donald Trump was elected president, and why Republicans now dominate at every level of government. And that is why liberal journalists are in a panic.

Again: Yeah, pretty much.

MEET THE SCIENTIST WHO’S BUSY DEBUNKING FOOD MYTHS.

Can I just say that the “activists” had it backwards anyway: We should, in fact, ban yoga mats because they contain a substance found in Subway sandwiches.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO GROPE! Woman admits groping female passenger on flight.

Heidi McKinney, 27, of suburban Portland, was arrested May 8, 2016, after the Alaska Airlines flight landed at Portland International Airport. The victim told authorities she had been touched on the breast and genitals without consent by another female passenger.

“Miss McKinney did so with the intent to humiliate and harass the victim,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ravi Sinha said at U.S. District Court in Portland. “(She) both made contact with victim’s body, including her inner thigh, and made a series of profane and lewd statements to the victim.”

A federal grand jury originally indicted McKinney on a charge of abusive sexual contact. She ultimately pleaded guilty to assault with the intent to commit a felony.

The maximum penalty is 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. However, Sinha and defense attorney Lisa Ludwig plan to jointly recommend a sentence of three years on probation.

10 years seems awfully stiff for groping. But I wonder what they’d recommend if she were a man? And if she’d groped a man, would she have been prosecuted at all?

SADLY, TRUE:

When political commentators talk of the emergence of a post-truth world, they are really lamenting the end of an era when the truths promoted by the institutions of the state and media were rarely challenged. It’s a lament that’s been coming for a few years now. Each revolt of sections of the public against the values of the elites has been met with the riposte that people are no longer interested in the truth. What the elites really mean is that people don’t care about their version of the truth. So when the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy asserted that people have ‘lost interest in whether politicians tell the truth’, he was venting his frustration at an electorate that no longer shares his values.

For a while it kinda looked like it was getting there. That’s got to make them extra-sad.

OUCH:

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Feel the Urge to Jump — The science and philosophy of looking down from a high place.

“The French explain it as L’Appel du Vide, or call of the void. Are they just French, or can the void really beckon you to kill yourself?”

(Via Terry Teachout.)

THE BOTTOM LINE ON MIKE PENCE: Feminists have managed to create an employment atmosphere where men walk around on pins and needles wondering when something they say might be taken out of context or when a woman might decide to ruin a man’s career with a false accusation.

It’s funny, because all the spinoffs of the Atlantic piece on Pence seem to go on about Christianity, but if you read the comments to the Atlantic piece, they overwhelmingly sound the theme above. Here’s the top-rated one:

1. Greatly expand definition of sexual harassment.
2. Make any accusation of sexual harassment career-ending.
3. Proclaim that women should always be believed when they accuse a man.
4. Complain that men won’t have 1-on-1 meetings with women.

This article reinforces the old stereotype that women aren’t logical…

Ouch. Here’s another:

I have battled to stay awake through more of those HR lectures than I care to recall, and I am long past the point at which I can ace the computerized exams without reading any of the material, because the PC position is usually screamingly obvious. I get the impression that many of those criticizing Pence have never worked in a business, professional, or government position where an inadvertent remark in a social setting can go nuclear. Nor do they seem to realize the danger that the person with whom one is bantering today may be a disgruntled employee two years from now (a bad review, passed over for a promotion), and suddenly everything is subject to retroactive reinterpretation.

But to admit that gives away the whole feedlot. So instead we have to instruct Mike Pence on why he’s doing Christianity wrong.

UPDATE: Rape Culture!!! Rape Culture!!!

CBS’S SCOTT PELLEY LOSES A FIGHT RIGGED IN HIS FAVOR: Ever since it was created by Don Hewitt in 1968, CBS’s Sixty Minutes has functioned as a sort of ritual kabuki for its audiences: it made stars of its left-leaning investigative journalists, who would grill the offending conservative politician or businessman of the week. By the mid-’80s, the show’s formula was summed up brilliantly in the classic parodies by Martin Short’s Nathan Thurm character on Saturday Night Live, who would be drenched in sweat and chain-smoking Marlboro 100s by the time he was done attempting to survive the hammering from the crusading journalist on the other side of the desk.

But CBS made its bones during the days when, as Rob Long wrote of NBC’s Johnny Carson, “There were three big channels—and maybe an old movie on one of those fuzzy UHF stations—so if you didn’t like what was on, you were out of luck. Network television didn’t compete with cable channels or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It competed with silence.”

And such lack of competition allowed the networks’ news divisions to create self-contained worlds where they could absolutely control the dialogue, as Walter Cronkite did throughout his career at CBS, while signing off each night “And that’s the way it is.” His successor’s career at CBS ended there with a Sixty Minutes segment…well, we all know how it ended there, right?

Which brings us to CBS’s Scott Pelley and his recent interview with Mike Cernovich, whom Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis describes as “a lawyer, independent blogger/author/filmmaker, and a dominant voice on Twitter,” and whom BuzzFeed describes as “a troll.” The latter Website of course is home of the infamous Trump golden showers with Russian hookers story and an editor who believes covering Trump “sometimes…means publishing unverified information in a transparent way that informs our users of its provenance, its impact and why we trust or distrust it.”

Whatever Cernovich’s excesses, assuming this transcript of the full unedited interview is accurate, it’s fascinating much more for what it reveals about Pelley, watched by six and a half million viewers on the CBS Evening News, than for Cernovich. Here’s how the transcript begins:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

In 2008, Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Ben Rhodes, who until January was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Katie Couric, whom Pelley succeeded as Evening News host, read a poem on her broadcast to shill for the passing of Obamacare, and after leaving CBS had a Rathergate-like moment of her own, attempting to marginalize gun owners.

But back to the transcript of Pelley and Cernovich, where eventually, the hunter is captured by his prey:  

Scott Pelley: You wrote in August a story about Hillary Clinton’s medical condition the headlines said, “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease. Position confirms.” That’s quite a headline.

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, Dr. Ted Noel had se-sent a story to me anonymously, that I checked out, analyzing her medical condition. And –

Scott Pelley: It isn’t true.

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, she doesn’t seem to have any signs of Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day caught by a citizen journalist.

Scott Pelley: Did you, well, she had pneumonia. I mean –

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, because that’s what was reported.

Mike Cernovich: By whom? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Mike Cernovich: Why would you trust a campaign?

To ask the question is to answer it. In a post headlined “‘Shamefully Stupid’: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in His Favor,” Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis adds in response, “Pelley has no answer for those six words — ‘Why would you trust the campaign’ — as his entire profession goes berserk with literal-minded fact checks for every tweet from President Trump. Pelley also seems to forget the fakery that Clinton World attempted hours before its pneumonia statement — with the candidate smiling and waving outside her daughter’s apartment, greeting a little girl, and assuring reporters everything was a-okay.”

More:

Mike Cernovich: So let’s be, let’s be honest with one another, which is that you are reporting that the Hillary Clinton campaign-

Scott Pelley: I didn’t report that she had Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: You just told me she’s healthy though. Based on what was told to you by the campaign. See? That’s what I’m saying about the double standards which is I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton’s going to say at all as true. I’m not going to take her on her word. The media says we’re not going to take Donald Trump on his word. And that’ why we are on these different universes.

Scott Pelley: Why should anyone take you on your word?

Mike Cernovich: Oh, you should always double-check. You should always fact check. And if people don’t agree with me, people express that disagreement, and I’m completely, completely open to criticism.

Insert Glenn Reynolds’ Rathergate-era comments about the positive nature of the Internet being a low-trust environment here. Not to mention Michael Crichton’s Gell-Man Amnesia Effect.

Let’s give Pelley the exit quote: “Well, the benefit of intermediaries is having experienced editors check things out and research people. Check the facts before it goes out to the public. You don’t do any of that.”

Mary Mapes could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: “Was Pelley not around in 2004?” John Hinderaker asks at Power Line. “Has he forgotten how stupid that refrain sounded then? (‘Layers and layers of fact-checkers’) Does he not realize how false it rings today? We have been here before: the liberal media are in a panic because their authority is being challenged. It must be worse now, though, than it was in 2004. Then, Time’s refrain was a relatively benign ‘Who owns the truth?’ Now, they ask, ‘Is truth dead?’ We can translate: ‘Is the liberal news media monopoly dead?’”

HOW TO MAKE OLD LUXURY CARS valuable again. I question the value of this approach.

WAIT, JUSTIN TRUDEAU WAS beaten up by Matthew Perry? “I think he was the only kid in school that we could beat up.”

NEW SECURITY MEASURES FOR DISNEY’S MAGIC KINGDOM START MONDAY. “Visitors to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom will go through metal detectors and get bags checked at the Transportation and Ticket Center starting Monday.”

Really? You mean can’t just walk past the borders in front of a location owned by Disney without being screened first? That seems to be inconsistent with the opinions on border security held by their news division — though not by President Clinton, oddly enough.

READER BOOK PLUG: From A.H. Lloyd, A Man Of Destiny.

I THINK THE DEEP SEVENS ARE UP TO SOMETHING: Supersonic Plasma Jets Have Been Detected in Earth’s Atmosphere for the First Time. “Weirdly enough, thanks to some other recent observations from the Swarm satellites, we now know that similar systems are at play both in Earth’s upper atmosphere and deep inside its liquid outer core. Back in December, the ESA team announced that their Swam satellites had detected an accelerating river of molten iron some 3,000 km (1,864 miles) below the surface of Earth, under Alaska and Siberia.”