Tag: Barack Obama

RIP journalism

By Steve Woodward

In another lifetime I was a young newspaper journalist who had fallen in love with the profession as a teen after reading The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. It was a book about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, but it also was a book about Kahn’s experiences as a cub newspaperman who eventually covered the team during a bygone, or more precisely, long gone era.

The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957, and Brooklyn never was the same. It was part of a decaying New York City in the 1960s and ‘70s. Today, pre-Wuhan virus, Brooklyn has made a ferocious comeback. All the cool New Yorkers want to live there, real estate is (was) sky rocketing. Brooklyn once again has a professional sports team, the NBA Brooklyn Nets. 

Journalism is not making a Brooklyn style comeback. Sportswriters are, today, cultural commentators. They have no time for games, box scores or the crack of the bat. Journalists generally have forsaken everything that moored a Roger Kahn.  Apart from sportswriters, newspaper legends such as Jimmy Breslin, or Jack Anderson, or even, in his prime Bob Woodward, are not being replaced. 

Unlike Don McLean who can pinpoint “the day the music died” (1959), I cannot say for sure when journalism died. It’s demise probably is similar to a senior relative who is the life of the party until, one day, he’s not. It just happens and you do not see it coming. 

Journalism’s illness probably was undiagnosed, or, in the current vernacular, asymptomatic, around the time that the political media dropped all pretense of objectivity to worship at the altar of Barack Obama. And, thus, began the revolution that would deem all of American life irredeemable and racist. Before we knew what had hit us, journalism was compromised and became an agenda driven cause, no longer a legitimate profession (although they’ll still take the money to masquerade as hard-hitting reporters).

This is a rather lengthy pretext to explain why I am not capable of being shocked by the revelation, reported by our new generation of citizen journalists, that the editor of The Pilot, John A. Nagy, and the Director of Communications of Moore County Schools, Catherine Murphy, are partners in a real estate transaction that will result in ownership of a lot on which, presumably, a home will be built. 

If you are surprised that journalists are readily compromised by the company they keep, you have not been paying attention. This is small time collusion, friends. In Washington, the celebrity journos are married to scions of power and influence. Their children attend the same private schools. They attend the same parties in the Hamptons and on Martha’s Vineyard. And at 6 am weekdays, they all receive the “talking points” issued by the keepers of the Deep State. This is not conspiracy theory. This is certainty. But be not dismayed. Journalism is committing suicide right before our eyes. Knowing this, we can do their jobs for them until there are no more jobs. For them. 

Hurricane Deception

By Steve Woodward

The tweet was snarky, as is to be expected. It speculated that President Donald Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Poland, not because of the looming threat of Hurricane Dorian, but because he is lazy and needed an excuse to spend the holiday weekend playing golf, as usual.

Imagine the false outrage had Trump made the trip to Poland? The twitter-sphere would have condemned him for abandoning the homeland amid yet another climate change-generated natural disaster. Dorian is Trump’s Katrina!

Over on Facebook, we’ve encountered a chorus of whiners reacting to Trump’s forthcoming appearance in Fayetteville, NC (Sept. 9), on the eve of a special election for a U.S. congressional seat in NC-9. The outrage centers on a narrative that Trump’s 2020 campaign is saddling municipalities with unprecedented costs, closing in on $1 million, for additional security and other logistical needs when he rolls into to town for his signature rallies.

Naturally, no one mentions how the campaigns of sitting presidents seeking re-election handled these costs in the past. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were called out for similar fiscal “abuses”. Obama used Air Force One to travel with then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a 2016 joint campaign appearance, but a Bush era ethics lawyer had no issues with the arrangement.

It’s an unavoidable problem, Richard Painter said in an interview with ABC News, for presidents who are simultaneously commanders-in-chiefs and the leaders of their respective political parties.

“I don’t think this is controversial,” Painter said. “A president that won’t campaign for his own party isn’t the leader of his own party. If someone claimed that President Bush was abusing taxpayer money to campaign, we would have laughed at that.”

But in the era of Trump this type of reasoned analysis is no longer possible. The narratives build one upon the other in the media’s endless quest to diminish him and marginalize his administration and supporters. His campaign doesn’t reimburse? Of course not, as a businessman he was famous, or so it goes, for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed.  Everybody knows that (because it has been repeated for three years running). He’s lazy because he plays rounds of golf despite working more hours than any president since perhaps Abe Lincoln (never mentioned), and granting more media access than any president ever (not even close).

Authors Gary Marcus and Annie Duke explain how unrelenting fake news perpetuates Trump delusion syndrome in a piece they co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, which lays out how the Left and its compliant media hold the truth hostage so effectively. It is a simple matter of exploiting behavior.

In a world of information overload and distraction wrought by technology and daily life as we know it “we tend to assume that whatever we hear is true.” Admittedly, this is an objectionable generalization but it is not aimed at readers of this blog. It is aimed at the growing sector of society identified by Rush Limbaugh as the “low information voter.”

The authors site numerous studies that have demonstrated how vulnerable human beings are to being snookered. A 2017 study by faculty at New York University examined around 500,000 social media messages. Subtle words such as “hate”, “destroy” or “blame” accelerate the spread of these messages by 20% per emotional word.

“Fake news tends to avoid nuance or neutral language and frequently adds layers of emotion and moralizing — all of which makes false items spread much faster than the real thing,” Marcus and Duke wrote. They conclude a war can be waged on fake news by teaching “information literacy” across all age groups.

In WSJ August 31 – September 1 editions, the newspaper profiles prolific novelist Salmon Rushdie. His 14th just-published novel is a contemporary version of a 17th-century classic, “Don Quixote”. His motivation for writing it partially draws on the fake news and reality TV phenomena from which almost no one readily escapes.

“We live in a moment in which truth is stranger than fiction,” Rushdie says, “and so the fiction has to decide how strange it needs to be in order to get close to the truth.”

This week’s fictional thread, which inevitably will work its way back to the Trump White House, is that Hurricane Dorian is another in a series of monster storms delivering “unprecedented” fury.

“The truth is that the storms that are hitting the Caribbean with this intense magnitude are historic, unprecedented, and these storms are manmade storms,” contends Emory University Prof. Tiphanie Yanique in a televised interview with the independent news hour Democracy Now.

The guest and her interviewer, both clearly in lockstep with the climate change narrative, failed to address a well documented chronology of Category 5 hurricanes. The first Cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin was recorded in 1924, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), followed by 34 more through this year. Only four have hit the United States as a Cat 5 across 95 years.

Now, test your information literacy as you read this concluding sentence: The most intense Cat 5 hurricane to make U.S. landfall hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. President Roosevelt was blamed, along with climate change.