You may have heard that police in a small Kansas town recently carried off the newxpaper’s computers as part of a search. At the link, a look at what happened and why.
Partly it’s “weaponizing” the courts against unfavorable coverage, as witness Wisconsin businessman/politician Cory Tomczyk sued a local paper that reported him calling a gay boy “a fag.”
Fox claimed an Afghanistan veteran’s family had to pay to ship the body home. The Pentagon cries bullshit. Fox yanked the story off its website without publishing a retraction.
Right-wing hatemonger and female misogynist Ann Coulter once told an interviewer she’d have been fine with Timothy McVeigh blowing up the New York Times. The NYT now gave her a byline for an op-ed piece — as if someone with her history of extremism and lies is now respectable. Another NYT pundit explains liberals will lose to Donald Trump in 2024 because we’re still fighting the cold war. No, we’re not, and no, the original piece (it’s not a direct link) doesn’t make sense. But then, the NYT has published David Brooks for years.
John Ganz looks at a general problem with pundit cliches: ” the “perversity thesis,” where any action actually result in the opposite of its intent, the “futility thesis,” where any action will actually accomplish nothing, and the “jeopardy thesis,” where any action will threaten some already accomplished social good. These three simple guides provide a template for the pundit for a long career in journalism. They give the appearance of thoughtfulness and counter-intuitive brilliance, when they are just methods to generate rote responses.”
Or there’s the dread “both sides” approach, such as an NYT article saying some people think Trump’s being persecuted, some thinking he’s guilty, as if it were all a matter of opinion. As Paul Campos says at the link, ” if one person says it’s raining and another says it’s not, a journalist’s job isn’t to report that disagreement, but rather to look out the window.”
Great work from the Miami Herald fact-checking DeSantis’ story about a baby who survived multiple abortion attempts — all of which took place before Roe v. Wade.
I know, Newsmax isn’t journalism, but it’s still worth noting Newsmax host Greg Kelly dismissed death threats against the judge in Trump’s case as no big deal.
Remember the case of the 10-year-old who had to cross state lines for an abortion? Forced-birth government officials insisted it never happened; journalists proved otherwise.
“How could these stories be too Black for Atlanta?” — a look at how the higher-ups at Atlanta Magazine appear to be pushing it away from black and LGBTQ coverage.
