RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Fairfax alumna Lisa Pryor has taken to the pages of the New York Times to insist that Australians, like the editors who chose to run her piece, are scared and sobbing that Hillary Clinton will never be president. Pity about what she got wrong and left out.
Long ago, when the bloom of youth was yet upon my cheeks and adventure in my heart, I carried aboard a jet bound for San Francisco a letter from Mum to be opened once the flight was airborne. It was all good advice … don’t drink too much … behave yourself … don’t drink too much … be polite to police officers … don’t drink too much. Sound counsel in every respect, the note concluded with an admonition that today seems both quaintly dated and sadly so, ‘Be a good ambassador for your country.’ Alas that former SMH opinion-page editrix Lisa Pryor (left) was not similarly encouraged to avoid bringing Australia into disrepute. It might have stayed her hand from tapping out the embarrassing missive that appears in the New York Times international edition.

Doctor Pryor’s topic (for a genuine, pill-prescribing doctor she has made of herself since leaving Fairfax) is Donald Trump’s presidential victory or, to be more accurate, the utter catastrophe of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Times readers are alerted early to the newly minted medico’s fragile emotional condition, which has seen her dissolve in tears “many times, in the shower, in the car.” It would be presumptuous for one other than a physician to recommend an increased dose of the psyche-smoothing medications that she elsewhere notes have done her a world of good, but all that bawling really does suggest a suitable case for stepped-up treatment. Likewise a visit with her optometrist, as it seems she has quite some difficulty reading the charted results of survey questions. But more on that in a tick. First, the paragraph that says so much, not about how Americans “let us down” by rejecting a corruptocrat hypocrite in favour of a vulgarian tycoon, but about the author and the US publication whose front page is moist with its contributor’s latest weepings.

The election of Mr. Trump feels like a sudden plunge after a gradual decline. Already he is goading China, befriending President Vladimir V. Putin, disregarding climate change and refusing daily intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person.” None of this, we fear, will end well for any of us.

What you mean “we”, white girl? Moving in the circles she does and re-tweeting with approval the asininities of Crikey!’s Bernard Keane and others, it might well be that she has never met anyone other than the sort of people who still regard the SMH as a serious publication, a very small congregation indeed. Were she to get out more it would come as a surprise to learn that some of her compatriots are actually quite pleased to see a bull at the door of the Washington china shop, as the American enterprise has been running in the red for far too long and could do with a top-to-bottom renovation and re-staffing. The paragraph above, representing as it does the cognitive dissonance of the New Establishment, makes the case.

“…a sudden plunge after a gradual decline”

So Obama’s eight years of profligate spending, of fecklessness and impotence, haven’t lifted anyone’s boat, yet US voters must be held to account for electing the man who noted as much and tapped his nation’s dyspepsia.

“…he is goading China…”

Much as Churchill goaded Germany, perhaps, by noting that it was intimidating its neighbours and laying claim to their territories?

National Geographic magazine announced last week that it will feature its first transgender model on the cover in January, a 9-year-old “girl.”

“She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender,” wrote National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg in a letter announcing the issue. “Today, we’re not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls — we’re talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.”

Avery Jackson, the 9-year-old transgender from Kansas City, Kansas, will appear on the cover wearing hot pink cheetah-print pants. Confident, laid back, and poised with pink-dyed stripes through shoulder-length hair, she does indeed look like a girl, but is 9 — or 5! for that matter — an old enough age to determine one’s own gender? Especially if it is opposite her biological sex?

The magazine’s issue focuses on the “Gender Revolution,” pointing out 80 different 9-year-olds in eight different countries. It hits shelves on December 27, and is guaranteed to stir up controversy.
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Indeed, shortly after the announcement, a Twitter user named Mark Romano declared, “I used to love National Geographic. Unfortunately, it has become nothing but a cesspool of Left-wing insanity.”

Beneath Avery Jackson’s picture stands the single quote, “The best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.”

Some progressives will do anything to avoid confronting the realities of why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and one diversion is the complaint about fake news, which is provoking even worse responses. Facebook announced this week that the social-media platform will weed out some stories, and that the company will deputize “fact-checkers” to decide if an article is credible. What could go wrong?

Facebook says it is testing technology so that a story shared on its site that is flagged by users, among unknown other indicators, will be checked out by the Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact or others. If these high priests declare a story fake, it will be denoted as “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” and perhaps demoted in a news feed.

This appears to be a response to the fake news story that Mrs. Clinton lost the election because false information duped people into voting for Donald Trump. There is zero evidence that invented events—an article that said “The Pope Endorsed Donald Trump,” for example—swayed the election.

More than 80% of Americans told Pew Research in a recent poll that they can spot fake news, and only a third report seeing it often. Fakery and exaggeration exist on the web. But this does not qualify as a democracy-killing “epidemic,” which is how Mrs. Clinton described it last week.

It’s certainly curious that the consternation over fake news seems aimed above all against Mr. Trump. Politico this fall rolled out a fact check of the Republican, claiming that every three minutes he told one “untruth.” Here’s one of those supposed falsehoods: Mr. Trump said Islamic State is evil “the world has not seen.” Politico concluded that this was false because “judging one ‘level of evil’ against another is subjective.” Well, judging what is true is also often subjective.

That’s certainly the case with PolitiFact, which pretends to be even-handed but has its own biases. In 2008 PolitiFact helped bless ObamaCare with a “true” rating for candidate Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” In 2009 the website demoted the remark to “half true,” adding the non-insight that ObamaCare would “surely change the current health system.” By 2013, as Americans lost their insurance, PolitiFact changed its judgment and called Mr. Obama’s line the “lie of the year.”

Tendentious PolitiFact ratings are a classic genre of bad journalism. When Texas libertarian Ron Paul said the U.S. federal income-tax rate was zero until 1913, PolitiFact called that “half true.” (We would have called that true.) Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb later said the same thing and notched a mark of “mostly true,” and maybe he earned extra points for being a Democrat.CONTINUE AT SITE

Facebook in planning to launch a mechanism with which they can brand news feed entries as “fake news.” The information behemoth plans to bring in third party “fact-checkers” and enlist the help of Facebook users to flag content for scrutiny. Some of the third party “fact-checking” entities include Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and ABC News. These anointed entities will determine if the offending post and/or source are “fake news.” Those posts and sources will then be branded with the “scarlet letter.”

Some critical issues arise with this effort and all of them are disingenuous and dangerous. The first issue has to do with the selection of the “deciders.” In the end, the authority to brand a source as a “fake news” source is the authority to destroy credibility.

As with anything that requires a determination, the threshold for what will be deemed “fake news” will rest with the “deciders.” The same quandary exists with “hate speech” laws. Those deciding the fate of the information – and the information sources – will be intellectually hobbled by their biases, i.e. one man’s “hate speech” or “fake news” is another man’s truth. Because we live in an era when journalism schools (and the mainstream media itself) have accepted as standard operating procedure the inserting of opinion into news, truth is now, sadly, subjective. This is significant.

This reality means that the bias of the “fact-checkers” is relevant. Each of the entities tapped by Facebook to act as “fact-checkers” has been accused of – and, in many cases, rightfully so – skewing some of their more critical determinations to a more liberal bent. This presents a fundamental credibility issue, not to mention – where “fake news” fact-checking is concerned, a fundamental danger to free speech. Additionally, installing “deciders” who are even wrongly deemed bias advances the societal fear of censorship and the ability to delegitimize.

Then there is the issue of the coordinated political effort to attain power. As we witnessed during the 2016 presidential race, some political campaigns place more worth on winning than they do in adhering to the truth. The Clinton campaign and her Progressive supporters employed the “slash-and-burn” tactic of the politics of personal destruction in their failed bid to maintain control over the White House. Secretary Clinton, herself, routinely cherry-picked statements from President-Elect Trump’s speeches to inaccurately and disingenuously paint him as a xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobe, among other things. Her claims and rhetoric were anything but honest.