The awful coverage of Bernie Sanders by the ‘liberal’ media

I can understand why the conservative media hates Bernie Sanders. He is a democratic socialist who has scathingly castigated the oligarchy and their supporters for creating vast inequality in wealth and incomes in the US and called for a radical restructuring of the government and the economy that will serve ordinary people rather that further enriching the already wealthy. And he has been fighting for the rights of the marginalized all his life.

What his candidacy has revealed is how the so-called ‘liberal’ elements in the media also hate him, using all manner of false claims and trivialities to discredit his candidacy. They talk more about the optics than the facts of where he stands with issues. It reminds me of how in 2000, the liberal media ran with the idea that George W. Bush was a better companion to share a beer with than Al Gore, as if that were an important factor in voting for a president.

This clip, that supposedly was created by a Sanders supporter and is being distributed by the campaign, juxtaposes the ‘liberal’ false characterizations of Sanders with what he is really like.

I am fed up with these private expressions of misgivings

As Donald Trump continues to act like a deranged king, issuing orders and statements that reveal a dangerously lawless mindset, some of those around him are trying to have it both ways. They continue to serve him and are thus accomplices, while seeking absolution for their complicity by whispering to sympathetic reporters that they disapprove of what he is doing. They are no different from the enablers of celebrity sexual predators.

The media write these stories to suggest that the Trump administration is in disarray. That may well be true but at some point they have to realize that by writing such stories, they are also part of Trump’s enablers, since they are salving the consciences of those who continue to serve him and enable him to continue the actions they say they deplore. These people who do not have the courage of their convictions to publicly rebuke Trump and resign (or even be anonymous whistleblowers) are the kinds of people who, when they do leave the administration, end up using their sympathetic reporter contacts to find jobs in the media. This revolving door between anonymous sources and media punditry is a well-oiled one.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right to call out these crocodile tears and the reporters who provide the crocodiles with handkerchiefs.

The unbearable whininess of New York Times columnists

It is extraordinary how brittle are the sensibilities of people who have major media platforms. I recently highlighted the absurd over-reaction of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens to a tweet by an until-then obscure professor who called him a bedbug. This turned out to be a beautiful example of the Streisand Effect because Stephens’ ridiculous response went viral and was used as an example by many (including me) about how these who often use their platforms to denounce those whom they accuse of silencing the speech of others, have feelings that are hurt so easily that they denounce any critics of themselves, however innocuous. It reveals what sheltered lives they live, in a cocoon of like-minded people who pat each other on the back at their social gatherings.
[Read more…]

Shaming hospitals to do the right thing

A ProPublica report from back in June exposed the fact that a nonprofit hospital system in Memphis, Tennessee that was affiliated with the Methodist church had been aggressively suing poor people who had not been able to pay their bills. It had created its own aggressive debt-collection agency that had gone to the extent of garnishing the wages (i.e., deducting money from paychecks) of those who owed money, even though the money they were earning was barely enough for them to live.
[Read more…]

Kareem Abdul Jabbar weighs in on the Shane Gillis/SNL issue

The basketball star who has become one of the sharpest social analysts has an excellent take on the firing of comedian Shane Gillis from Saturday Night Live soon after his hiring was announced, when it was revealed that Gillis’s past comedy routines indulged in sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

I will excerpt just two paragraphs to whet your appetite to read the whole thing.

It’s tempting to open this column by repeating Shane Gillis’ homophobic, anti-Asian and misogynistic slurs that got him fired from Saturday Night Live to show just how desperately unfunny, derivative and dripping with flop sweat they are. But their level of funniness is not the point. Comedians have the right to be unfunny sometimes, just as athletes have the right to lose games, and actors to be in bad films. But when a comedian makes hate-based comments, as Gillis did on his podcasts, we do have an obligation to take a closer look to see whether they are insightful provocateurs of culture and the human condition, or just another middle-schooler blowing milk out their nose for a quick laugh, not caring who they spatter with milky snot in the process.

[Read more…]

The ‘singular they’ has arrived!

As anyone knows, referring in the third person about some one whose gender you do not know was a problem even in the days when gender was seen in purely binary terms. Repeatedly writing ‘he or she’ or ‘his or her’ gets tedious very quickly. The growing recognition and acceptance that gender was not binary but fluid initially seemed to compound the problem of the third person singular pronoun.

But as often happens, it is when a problem gets acute that people start looking for new ways to address it and the suggestion that rather than inventing a third term, we use ‘they’ in singular as well as plural form was an idea brilliant in its simplicity.
[Read more…]

Cokie Roberts, a Villager of excellent standing, has died

Today came news that Cokie Roberts, was a major player at NPR and ABC as a political commentator, has died. I do not celebrate her death but found her to be utterly tiresome and am dreading the deluge of appreciations of her as some kind of wise and sagacious analyst. As far as I could see, her analyses consisted almost invariably of conventional wisdom or quoting poll results. I cannot recall a single original idea or compelling insight to come from her. Eric Alterman described her best: “With no discernible politics save an attachment to her class, no reporting and frequently no clue . . . a perpetual font of Beltway conventional wisdom uncomplicated by any collision with messy reality.”
[Read more…]

The ethics of accepting ‘anonymous’ donations from bad actors

Thanks to a comment by John Morales, I read this article by Kelsey Piper that looks at a possible justification given by MIT for why they went to such lengths to keep the money they got from sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein secret. It is an argument I had not heard before.

The obvious question: What on earth were they thinking? The MIT Media Lab — an interdisciplinary research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — was well regarded, well funded, had great publicity, and was attached to one of the world’s best universities. Why would they risk it all to attract donations from someone like Epstein? And how could people write emails like the ones revealed in the New Yorker piece — “jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous” — without realizing they were on the path to disaster?

On Sunday, we got a partial answer via an essay by Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He knew all along that the MIT Media Lab was taking Epstein’s money, he said. He thought it was the right thing to do. So, he says, did the team at the Media Lab.

Their justification is simple: If someone is a bad person, taking their anonymous donations is actually the best thing you can do. The money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it.

This argument isn’t that eccentric. Within philanthropy, it has been seriously raised as a reasonable answer to the challenging question of how organizations should deal with donations from bad actors.

[Read more…]

The fact that ‘both sides’ criticize you does not mean you are neutral

Mainstream media journalists and editors like to pride themselves on their ‘political neutrality’, that they do not take sides. Some even claim they do not vote in elections because of their commitment to this neutrality. Thoughtful media analyses have long since debunked that idea, pointing out that though some journalists might not consciously bias their reporting (though others of course do), the institutional filters that exist in media institutions ensure that only people who have a certain limited range of views can survive in the media institutions. These people are then given the freedom to say and write what they want without explicit orders from the top because the media entity is confident that they will stay within the boundaries. If on occasion a journalist goes rogue and challenges the consensus, they are taken to task or dismissed, thus warning any other journalists of the dangers of straying from their assigned path
[Read more…]

Why you should never listen to the foreign policy establishment on war

It is a predictable pattern. As the US gears up for war, any war, the foreign policy establishment reacts like soldiers to a bugle call, quickly lining up to support it, irrespective of where they supposedly stand on other political issues, and whether they are self-identified as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

On the occasion of the death of Leslie Gelb, one of the many ‘liberal interventionists’ who cheered on the Iraq war, Philip Weiss reminds us of something that Gelb said when asked later to explain why he initially supported the invasion of Iraq, something that he said that he later regretted.

“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

That pretty much sums it up. ‘Credibility’ is not dependent on being right but on being supportive of wars. All these people in the establishment media know the unwritten rules of the game, that if you oppose, or just even seriously question, any of America’s wars, you are not considered ‘serious’ and will immediately become a pariah and lose your media and professional platforms. As the cliché goes, they know which side of their bread is buttered.

For these people, it is easier to quickly support the war and then when things turn sour, as they almost inevitably do, to express regret and say that ‘everyone’ agreed with them. In this way, blame is spread so thinly that no one gets expelled from the ranks of punditry and they can respond enthusiastically to the next bugle call. This is why we still see Andrew Sullivan, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and the rest still around pontificating in the media, while people like Phil Donahue who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning were sent into the wilderness and remain there.