news media – M.A. Kleen

CNN Lawyers Admit Charges of Racism are a Smear

“CNN filed a motion to dismiss the suit in May on the grounds that accusations of racism are not actionable in defamation cases because the allegation can’t be proven true or false.”

A few days ago, CNN settled with Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann, who was suing for defamation over CNN’s coverage of the incident in January in which Sandmann and his classmates were accused of confronting and harassing a Native American man–until full video showed otherwise.

I used a quote from this National Review article as a subheading because it’s so important: Not only did CNN settle with Sandmann, tacitly admitting the news company was wrong, but its lawyers tried to argue Sandmann had no case because charges of racism are not meant to be defended against.

When someone accuses you of a real crime, it’s able to be proven true or false. Was a crime committed? Did you commit the crime or not? But what about when someone is accused of being racist or acting in a racist manner? Is that more opinion than fact? Most of the time, it’s litigated in the court of public opinion, and the accused have little recourse but to apologize for the perceived offense and hope things blow over.

CNN: It’s Not News, But What is It?

Chris Cillizza’s political “analysis” is a prime example of CNN’s fall from grace.

What is a news organization? Is it a public service designed to inform the public about significant events? Or is it just a business making money off sensationalism? I’m not sure what CNN considers itself, but in the Trump Era, its become a sad shadow of its former self; a parody of Fox News at its worst in the Obama years.

CNN has become nothing more than an outlet for clickbait, with Chris Cillizza offering probing analysis of “The 65 most outrageous lines from Donald Trump’s longest campaign speech ever”. What’s so outrageous, you wonder? Apparently Trump saying things like: “Remember when I first started this beautiful trip, this beautiful journey, I just said to the first lady, ‘You’re so lucky I took you on this fantastic journey.'”

“I wonder if Melania Trump would describe herself as ‘so lucky,'” Chris speculates. Well, she went from being born in Yugoslavia under communism, to Paris fashion model, to first lady of the United States of America, so yeah, she probably would. The list is literally just Chris Cillizza pulling random quotes from Trump’s rally and making sarcastic comments about them. Such probing journalism! Does he get paid per click, I wonder?

Trump Fact-Checkers Don't Get the Joke

Journalists fact-checking Donald Trump’s rallies and Twitter feed often end up looking silly, and they don’t understand why.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Nelson, the bully, tells Bart his “epidermis is showing”, causing him to get confused, lose his balance, and fall. Nelson turns to his friend and says, “You see, ‘epidermis’ means your hair. So technically it’s true; that’s what makes it so funny.” There’s another joke hidden here–epidermis really means ‘skin’. Nelson is trying to sound smart, but failing.

The people who fact check President Trump’s speeches are like the guy who, thinking himself more clever than the show’s writers, watches that scene and announces, “Actually, epidermis means skin,” oblivious to the underlying joke.

Last week at a speech at the Turning Point USA student action summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, President Donald Trump made a joke about bald eagles flying into wind turbines. The line was meant to get a rise from his audience, made up of young conservatives skeptical of renewable energy.

Trump said: “A windmill will kill many bald eagles… After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true. By the way, they make you turn it off. And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail. That is OK. But why is it OK for these windmills to destroy the bird population?”

When Politics and Fact-Checking Collide

Self-appointed fact-checkers engage in dishonesty when they treat matters of opinion or debate as black-and-white issues to be judged as true or false.

Hysteria over “fake news” on social media has led to a bevy of fact-checking by news outlets and other websites. CNN, for example, loves to catalog every exaggeration, misstatement, or falsehood President Trump says. Though claiming otherwise, these self-appointed fact-checkers are not immune to bias, and they often treat matters of opinion or debate like math problems that have a definitive right or wrong answer.

Case in point, a website called TruthorFiction.com recently rated Professor Noah Feldman’s argument that President Trump hasn’t been formally impeached until the House delivers their charges to the Senate as “not true“, despite Feldman supporting his argument with legal precedent and history.

Feldman, who testified before the House in favor of impeaching Trump, is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. The House chose him to testify because of his strong academic credentials. Truth or Fiction cited dissenting opinions from Twitter to come to their conclusion (later adding an opinion piece by Alan Dershowitz).

One dissenting opinion they didn’t cite was that of Robert G. Natelson, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Independence Institute. Writing on TheHill.com, Natelson cites two unrelated cases to argue that the President is impeached simply on the majority vote of the House of Representatives. One case pertained to ratification of state constitutional amendments and the other to presidential appointments. I fail to see how these examples specifically relate to the act of impeachment or rebut Feldman’s argument.

GOP Only Has Itself to Blame for Electoral Defeats

The Republican Party squandered its 2016 majority and failed to make a compelling case to voters.

Results are in for local elections in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi, and the trend is not looking good for Republicans. Democrats continue to make gains after the “blue wave” last year, and took control of the Virginia Senate and House for the first time in more than two decades. In one northern Virginia race, a candidate openly calling himself a Democratic Socialist won a seat in the Virginia Assembly.

Back in 2016 and 2017, Democrats were dismayed as it looked like they couldn’t win any important races. Republicans and conservatives controlled every branch of the Federal Government, but failed to accomplish even their most basic campaign promise of repealing Obamacare. We got one tax cut, which while nice, hardly makes up for squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who blames everyone and everything but herself for losing to Donald Trump in 2016, Republicans should look inward and re-evaluate their messaging and electoral strategy. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. Republicans and conservatives are constantly harping on how radical and out of touch Democrats are–but then why are the Democrats winning?

Illinois’ Miserable Superstition

How historians and journalists used witchcraft to ridicule immigrants, African Americans, and poor rural whites.

Nineteenth and early-twentieth century journalists and historians considered the persistence of witch beliefs in Illinois an embarrassing footnote in history, when they acknowledged it at all. Convinced of American progress, historians dismissed witchcraft as a “miserable superstition” and an “imaginary crime” long vanished from educated minds.[1] When it appeared, they ridiculed believers as ignorant, backwards, and even insane.

“In early times the inhabitants of Illinois were in a small degree tinctured with the absurdity and nonsense of witchcraft and fortune-telling; but in after-days this ignorant superstition has entirely disappeared,” former Governor and Congressman John Reynolds asserted in Pioneer History of Illinois (1852). “All this ignorance and nonsense have disappeared from the minds of the people by a proper education,” he concluded.[2]

Writing several decades later, attorney Milo Erwin echoed Reynolds’ sentiments. In his 1876 history of Williamson County, he asserted, “Happily for the honor of human nature, the belief in those foolish and absurd pretentions has been discontinued, for forty years by an enlightened public.”[3] Likewise, in his History of Effingham County, Illinois (1883), William Henry Perrin noted with great satisfaction, “Yet as widespread as were these beliefs in goblins and spells, there are to-day men and women in our county who grew up among such pernicious influences that will tell you of the terrifying beliefs of their childhood and laugh at them…”[4]

Even as they wrote, however, sensational stories involving witchcraft appeared in the press. In Franklin County, Illinois, just five years before Milo Erwin also claimed belief in witchcraft had been discontinued for four decades by an enlightened public, dozens of spectators flocked to a farmhouse to witness the strange spectacle of the Williams sisters, who claimed to have been bewitched. Three years later, in 1879, a Chicago man named Toby Allen complained of being tormented by a witch while he was incarcerated at the Joliet State Penitentiary.