Fake News
July 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
News out just now that Michael Avenatti has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for attempting to extort $20 million from Nike. What’s his problem: doesn’t he understand that that kind of thing is a job for Hunter Biden? Anyway, keep in mind that Avenatti was only famous because the media made him famous—a perfect example of what Daniel Boorstin called a “pseudo-event,” or perhaps the media
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June 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One of the most elementary lessons of economics is that incentives matter. You’d hardly think this needs demonstrating, but apparently even the Wall Street Journal‘s news pages struggle with basic economics. Today the Journal reports that—lo and behold!—job growth is rising faster in states that have ended lavish unemployment bonus payments. I love the “gee whiz” language of this story: The number of unemployment-benefit recipients is falling at a faster
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June 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
For the past twelve months, the mainstream media has been peddling the view that President Trump had the U.S. Park Police use tear gas to disperse protesters in Lafayette Park so that he could have a photo-op in front of a church on the other side of the park. I never accepted this version of events because I never accept on faith the truth of anything the mainstream media says
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June 9, 2021 — Steven Hayward
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen what a complete shambles the mainstream media have become. First up, someone at the New York Times was formatting a fake story about watermelons on Mars—perhaps this was a training exercise for a new employee?—but somehow managed to press the “publish” button, and this appeared on the Times website: Now, I could go a long time on the idea of “fruit aliens.” Wouldn’t
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May 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I have never seen a movie in which Johnny Depp appeared, and I know that he was once married to Amber Heard, an actress otherwise unknown to me, only because of my ceaseless scanning of internet headlines. But it turns out that there is an interesting story behind the Depp-Heard divorce drama–a story that may illustrate widespread corruption among big-buck nonprofits. The Daily Mail reports: A bitter defamation lawsuit is
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May 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
If I may borrow Glenn Reynolds’s formulation, I would like to say that we’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hellworld in which Glenn Greenwald is the voice of reason. In his observations on what he calls “corporate journalism,” he is also the voice of fairness and responsibility. Over the weekend I wrote about the Giuliani corrections served up by the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC. In
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May 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
For a long time I have believed that the New York Times is America’s worst newspaper, with the Washington Post close behind. Sadly, news coverage in the Wall Street Journal, while not in that dismal league, has declined. If it weren’t for the editorial page, one wonders whether the Journal would be worth subscribing to. Its news coverage is liberal, and in these days, largely “woke.” A case in point
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May 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Needless to say, Power Line has a history with “60 Minutes.” Hence I thought it worth passing along a note from Robert P. George to “60 Minutes” this week. Prof. George—”Robby” to his friends—is the McCormick Professor at Princeton, the chair originally created for Woodrow Wilson, and subsequently filled by Edward Corwin and now by Robby. He is renowned for his genial nature (as you might expect from a proficient
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April 28, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I took the New York Post cover story by Laura Italiano that ran with the tabloid headline “Kam on in” at face value. I have treated the Post as a trusted source, but it turns out that this story appears to be fake news. The following correction is now appended both to Italiano’s original story and to a follow-up story by Mark Moore: Editor’s note: The original version of this
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April 26, 2021 — Steven Hayward
There are days when you wonder whether the New York Times editorial staff is working overtime to amuse us, or whether it comes naturally. They’re keeping alive the stale old sixties cliche, “Any country that can land a man on the moon can solve. . .” Of course, it is the perfect cliche for a president who hails from liberalism’s mesozoic era. Like this story from their gnomish jester Ezra
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April 19, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As the country going through a cycle of leftist madness last seen in the 1960s, we can recall that a number of liberals woke up to the defects of their creed, and became the founding generation of “neoconservatives,” that is, liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” That original generation were mostly academic social scientists of one stripe or another. Will we see a new generation of “neoconservatives” arising out
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April 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I know, it is a silly question. But seriously, some news items over the weekend really make me wonder. First up, the New York Times—a former newspaper, as Andrew Klavan likes to remind us—has run an “explainer” about the growing universe of potential personal pronouns. The first expansion took us up to something like 60 or so, but now we have moved on to “neopronouns” (seriously), which takes us way
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April 7, 2021 — John Hinderaker
One of several laughable aspects of the “Biden administration”–literally, God only knows how much poor decrepit Joe Biden has to do with it–is the way in which it claims credit for the Trump administration’s accomplishments. On Twitter, Omri Ceren illustrates the phenomenon while ridiculing the Washington Post: Lol the Washington Post. pic.twitter.com/aJLWvoayvq — Omri Ceren (@omriceren) April 7, 2021 One of the dumbest of all the anti-Trump conventions was the
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April 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
“The Great Liberal Death Wish” is Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous theme, which appeared in various iterations over the years. Here’s one version, from which we can extract the essence: I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. . . It’s difficult to convey to you what
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March 23, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As we noted at some length around the time the 1619 Project debuted, some of the strongest criticism of it came from the World Socialist Web Site, which sees identity politics as a hindrance to old-fashioned, orthodox Marxist class-conscious revolution. And they might be on to something here. It really is tempting to see the whole domain of identity politics as a right-wing plot to get the left to commit
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March 17, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Our news media . . . do I even need to continue this sentence? Of course not. But I’m going to. Because sometimes the media is so disgraceful and repugnant that the normal day-to-day epithets are insufficient. It was almost exactly 40 years ago (April 1981) that the Washington Post had to return a Pulitzer Prize for Janet Cooke’s completely fake story of the eight-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy’s World,” which
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March 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times has put out a job listing for its editorial page that shows it has decided to branch out into satire. Here’s some of it: The New York Times is looking for a proactive, creative, digitally-experienced editor to shape its Opinion report and help lead the department. . . We’re looking for an editor with a sense of humor and a spine of steel, a confident point
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