RUTHFULLY YOURS

A standard journalistic defense for publishing, or reporting on, the sort of thing BuzzFeed put on the web Tuesday night about Donald Trump’s alleged compromise by the Russians is that “the people” ultimately will sort it all out. You could say the same thing about tornadoes.

Conventional wisdom after the election held that the media had been chastened by its coverage of the campaign, that it had learned to be more careful about separating facts from the media bubble.

The past week’s news, if one still can call it that, was bookended by two Trump files. The first was the intelligence community report that Russia’s hack of the presidential election favored Mr. Trump. The second was a salacious opposition-research file on Mr. Trump published by BuzzFeed, which says it is about “trending buzz.” Below the site’s Trump-in-Russia stories Wednesday sat, “Lauren Conrad Just Posted The Most Adorable Photo Of Her Baby Bump.”
No one has learned anything.

When people played on real pinball machines, everyone knew that if you banged on the machine too hard, it would lock up. It would “tilt.” Because so many once-respected institutions are behaving so badly, the American system is getting close to tilt.

The interregnum between the election result and next week’s inauguration has become a wild, destructive circus, damaging the reputation and public standing of everyone performing in it, including Donald Trump.

Trumpians will resist that thought, but they should be concerned at their diminishing numbers. Quinnipiac’s poll this week puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37%. Building in even an expansive margin for error, this is an astonishing low for a president-elect.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks the “dishonest media.” He has a point, but dishonesty isn’t the problem. The internet, media’s addictive drug, is the problem. Whatever publication standards existed before the web are eroding.

Any person getting a significant federal job undergoes an FBI background check. These “raw” FBI files—a mix of falsity, half-truths and facts—are never published.

The BuzzFeed story about Donald Trump in Russia is a raw FBI file, or worse. Once it went online, every major U.S. news outlet prominently published long accounts of the story, filled with grave analysis and pro forma caveats about “unverifiable,” as if this is an exemption for recycling sludge.

This isn’t news as normally understood. It’s something else. CONTINUE AT SITE

There are two American women whose obituaries were reported in today’s NYTimes: one for the actress who played a princess in Star Wars and one for a ground-breaking physicist and astronomer. The former, Carrie Fisher, achieved fame through the character of Princess Leia and later through her books about her own bi-polar disorder and drug addiction. The latter, Vera Rubin, “transformed modern physics and astronomy with her observations showing that galaxies and stars are immersed in the gravitational grip of vast clouds of dark matter.” (NYT 12/28) As significant details of her life, the Times reports that Carrie Fisher had one marriage lasting less than a year and one daughter born out of wedlock; Vera Rubin was married to another prominent physicist for 60 years, bearing four children who all earned their own Ph.D.’s

A capsule description of Vera Rubin offers that she was “cheerful and plain-spoken, had a lifelong love of the stars, championed women in science and was blunt about the limits of humankind’s vaunted knowledge of nature” (NYT 12/28) A capsule description of Ms Fisher delineates that “she acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970’s and ’80’s and later said that she was using cocaine while making “The Empire Strikes Back” In l985, after filming a role in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” she had a nearly fatal overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program.” (NYT 1228)

I’m sure that everyone who heard of Ms Fisher’s death at age 60 was saddened that this woman suffered from mental illness and drug addiction which undoubtedly hastened her early demise from a heart attack. My question is which woman had her picture and obit on the front page of the Times and what does that say about a society more interested in casual fame and derelict behavior than in genius, hard work and a purposeful life – one that should serve as the ultimate role model for women young and old.

Apparently Kevin Williamson at National Review has jumped over that deadly lemming cliff, along with millions of Trump-maddened New York liberals.

Williamson writes in NR today that

“My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic…”

​Apparently NR editors didn’t read this piece, or worse, they read it and approved it.

That high-pitched grinding sound you hear is William F. Buckley drilling his way out of the grave to keep his beloved National Review from being kidnapped by a hysterical mob of establishment cons.

Uday and Qusay Hussein infamously dropped screaming human beings into industrial plastic shredders to kill them. Either Mr. Williamson is ignorant of that fact, or he has secret information about Barron and Eric Trump and Ivanka that we are not privy to. If so, I would like to ask Mr. Williamson and his neglectful editors to provide the evidence to the world. I am looking forward to Mr. Williamson’s next NR column, which will no doubt show us the cellphone pics.

It may be time for mass hara-kiri at the National Review, for descending into blithering idiocy on Christmas 2016.

Mr. Williamson wrote this NR column to argue for a return to civility in politics… and, in his next breath, committed what Jonah Goldberg has called “argumentum ad Hitleram.”

As a fan of Buckley’s magazine, I’m shocked and saddened.

Tell me it ain’t so, please!

Here’s a paradox for you. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack, the immediate response from government officials and the media is: “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Yet when there are breaking reports that Muslim or Arab Americans were allegedly victimized by bigots in some hate crime, the response is instant credulity, outrage, and hand-wringing.

This doesn’t really even scratch the surface of the double standard. When there’s a terrorist incident, there’s deep skepticism at every stage of the unfolding story. At first we’re told there’s no evidence that the attack is terror-related. Then, when reports come in that a shooter shouted “Allahu akbar!” or has an Arabic name, we’re assured there’s no evidence that the shooter is tied to any international terror groups. Days go by with talking heads fretting about “self-radicalization,” “homegrown terror,” and “lone wolves.” This narrative lingers even as the killer’s Facebook posts declaring allegiance to ISIS emerge.

Now, truth be told, I think some of this skepticism is understandable. Often, the media and the pundit class on the left and right are too eager to win the race to be wrong first. It’s perfectly proper to not want to get ahead of the facts.

More annoying is the Obama administration’s studied practice of slow-walking any admission that the War on Terror isn’t over, but at least it’s understandable. President Obama came into office wanting to end wars and convince Americans that terrorism isn’t such a big deal. It seems to be a sincere belief. The Atlantic reported that Obama frequently reminds his staff that slippery bathtubs kill more Americans than terrorism. It took Obama six years to admit that the shooting at Fort Hood was terrorism and not “workplace violence.”

Regardless, my point here is that I can understand why politicians and the media want to be skeptical about breaking news events and even why they try to frame those events in ways that fit a political agenda.

The best defense of that agenda isn’t the sorry effort to pad the legacy of our Nobel Peace Prize–winning president. It’s the desire to err on the side of caution when it comes to stigmatizing law-abiding and patriotic Muslims with the stain of acts of terror in the name of their religion. The media don’t want to give credence to the idea that all Muslims are terrorists, not least because that attitude will only serve to radicalize more Muslims. As we are often told, ISIS wants peaceful Muslims in the West to feel victimized and unwelcome.

And that brings me back to the media’s instant credulity for stories of anti-Muslim bias. This eagerness to hype “anti-Muslim backlash” stories has been around for nearly 20 years, and it has always been thin gruel. According to the FBI, in every year since the 9/11 attacks, there have been more — a lot more — anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Muslim ones. Which have you heard about more: the anti-Jewish backlash or the anti-Muslim backlash?

Amazingly, the “experts fear an anti-Muslim backlash” stories keep popping up after every Islamic terror attack, despite the fact that the backlash never arrives. To be sure, there have been hateful and deplorable acts against Muslims. But evidence of a true national climate of intimidation and bigotry has always been lacking.

CNN is making a desperate pitch to further enflame the ideological war on cops while it still has a sympathetic ear in the White House. The CNN website is promoting a laughably incomplete study of police use of fatal force under the headline “Black men nearly 3 times as likely to die from police use of force, study says.” Utterly ignored in the study and in CNN’s write-up is any mention of violent-crime rates, which vary enormously by race and which predict officer use of force. Absent such a crime benchmark, analysis of police actions using population data alone, as this latest study has done, is worse than useless; wielded as a bludgeon in the current anti-cop crusade, it is dangerously irresponsible.

James Buehler, a public-health professor at Drexel University, found documentation in public records for 2,285 civilian deaths at the hands of the police from 2010 and 2014. Of those deaths, 96 percent were among males. This gender disparity is magnitudes greater than any racial disparities in officer use of force, but no cop-hater ever complains that males are massively overrepresented in police-civilian interactions. The reason for this double standard is that when it comes to males, it is acceptable to acknowledge, however implicitly, the vast gender disparities in criminal offending; it is not acceptable, however, to acknowledge racial disparities in criminal offending. And the victimology racket, of course, takes no interest in males per se unless they are minorities or gender-fluid.

Buehler’s public-health-data sources presumably contain no information on the circumstances around the deaths — whether the decedents had been attacking the officer, for example, or threatening another civilian. Nor does he suggest that such information would be relevant. He simply reports that even though non-Hispanic white males account for the largest number of deaths at the hands of the police, the number of deaths per million of population was “2.8 times higher among black men and 1.7 times higher among Hispanic men, respectively.”

This finding, CNN tells us, is “disturbing.” CNN is apparently not “disturbed” at the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not whites, but other blacks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at 9.3 times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The elevated black death-by-homicide rate is overwhelmingly a function of the astronomical black homicide-commission rate; in fact, a much smaller proportion of black homicide victims (4 percent) die from police shootings than the white and Hispanic homicide victims (12 percent) who die from police shootings.

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.

What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.

No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.

When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.

The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, Communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.

That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the Internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.

Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.

Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.