Fake News
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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February 12, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I rarely look at the New York Times, since it abandoned any pretense of being a real newspaper years ago. Still, I was shocked when I saw the Times’s online front page a little while ago. Here is a screen shot of the top of the page: Trump’s defense is “incendiary”? I guess that means his lawyers aren’t going along with the absurd charge against him. And by “reframing Trump’s
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January 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
There remains a lot more to be said about the events of the week and the new circumstances now facing us. Herewith a few observations that I may expand into longer treatments at some point. • The events of the week have emboldened the vindictive and radical spirit of the Democrats and their allies in the media-academic-cultural complex—not that they weren’t radical enough already. You can see this in things
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January 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Guess which state has been more successful fighting back COVID-19—Florida or New York? According to the media, the answer is obvious: New York, on account of its totally awesome Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In fact the death rate per 100,000 people in Florida is about half that of New York (96 per 100K for Florida, versus 188 per 100K in New York). Over on Twitter, DC communications pro Drew Holden has
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January 1, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Whatever else might have once been said about liberal bias at the New York Times, at least you could say that they covered the elites. What else can you say about their wedding announcements section, which, as I think David Brooks once joked, reads more like a mergers and acquisitions page, since the couples spotlighted are invariably ivy league uber-overclass climbers. But now it seems the Times mission is to
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December 27, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I know, taking note of media double standards is an insult to shooting fish in a barrel, but every now and then you find something that stands out for special recognition. One of the things we hear endlessly from the media is that the Trump Administration has been hostile in unprecedented ways. Oh? As it happened, I stumbled across an account of the Kennedy Administration’s treatment of the media as assembled
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