Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well.  Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks.  Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.

[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes.  I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race."  I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman.  In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]

What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":

I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

Continue ReadingCiting Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Aaron Mate: There are Two Forms of Censorship

Aaron Mate asks why our news media doesn't not feature voices advocating for a negotiated peace that also acknowledges the historical U.S. involvement that led to the current situation. He states that there are two types of censorship. In Russia you will find the traditional version. Here in the U.S. we have a much more sophisticated version.

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Dozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine

Fascinating thread by Glenn Greenwald. Many topics related to the situation in Ukraine, including Google's decision to take down Oliver Stone's documentary, which discusses the history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (you can now view it on Rumble).

Many people on the political left would rather feed their brains with DNC-aligned "news." You'll know who they are, because they size up this complex conflict by walking around zombie-eyed uttering things like "Putin is worse than Hitler."  They are getting this "information" from "news" outlets parading out endless streams of retired military generals, all of them beating the war drums to crank up sagging ad revenue in the post-Trump era.  You would think that we would have learned some important and expensive lessons after our Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" post-mortem, but no.

Continue ReadingDozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine

Ukraine: Forbidden Discussions

I'm despondent that the mainstream news outlets are so intensely jingoistic, so focused on the logistics of war, so unwilling to look into the mirror. This is not surprising given the vast numbers of retired military and spy state talking heads who now work for the left leaning MSM. It's also unsurprising given that this is how war propaganda always works, illustrated brilliantly by "War Made Easy."

Here are a three snippets of conversation that I with the news media would take much more seriously:

First, this is from Freddie DeBoer's Substack:

[R]ight now, [the United States is] investing hideous amounts of treasure to maintain an order that we can’t afford and that no one really believes we can maintain. Perhaps the Ukrainians will beat back the Russians and they’ll be welcomed into NATO and we can all cheer that the good guys won. But hegemony does not last forever, and sooner or later you’re going to have to ask more adult, more useful questions than, “who’s the goodie, and who’s the baddie?” Otherwise the superpower eventually goes down the hard way.

I find myself considering this quote from a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?

It doesn’t take sympathy for Putin to see that this is a very good question.

Second, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted this:

Third, Matt Taibbi reminds us that history matters:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Fourth, this excerpt is from Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of our tribal dysfunction that mushroom when that exciting topic of war hits the tabletop:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

. . .

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

I will end with a photo:

Continue ReadingUkraine: Forbidden Discussions

A Tsunami of Fake News Supporting the Political Left (and Right)

Andrew Sullivan offers a long litany of stories that the left-leaning legacy media got extremely wrong. So incredibly wrong that it reveals more than journalistic malpractice. It reveals a news media industry that treats its readers like children who it thinks are incapable of making good decisions based on complex real life evidence. It's a new media that systematically makes shit up and hides stories that run counter to its narrative, its mission, which on the left side of the news media is to elect Democrats. It is the mirror image of FOX on the right. Both of these news "teams" violate many of the journalism rules of ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists. For instance,

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.

– Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. Give voice to the voiceless.

– Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.

– Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.

On the Democrat news media, recently concocted stories described by Sullivan involve: Kyle Rittenhouse:

Money quote from the defense lawyer: “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun (and your hands down) pointed at him, that he fired? Right?” To which Grosskreutz answered: “Correct.” Here’s how the NYT first described this a year ago, on August 26: “Video footage from the scene of the shooting appears to show Mr. Rittenhouse running and then firing his gun, striking a man in the head. He then flees and is chased by bystanders before tripping, falling to the ground and shooting another man.”

Here are many examples of how the news media are intentionally (or at least recklessly) misunderstanding the rule of law and our system of justice relevant to Rittenhouse.   One of the favorite tactics of Democrat media is to mention that Rittenhouse is "white" (how is this relevant?) while failing to mention that the three people he shot are also "white" (what's good for the goose . . . ) (See here and here). You might rightly think that the news media is revving up conflict pornography (stoking race conflict) in order to sell advertisements.

Other recent wretched excuses for journalism include:

Almost everything reported on the left about Trump and Russia, Rachel Maddow doing disgraceful reporting on this topic for years - See here and here.

Claims about the Covington Boys;

Claims that there were bounties on U.S. Soldiers;

Claims that the Lab-Leak origin of COVID was a conspiracy theory;

Claims regarding the motives of the Pulse Mass Shooting and the Atlanta spa shooter;

Claims that attacks on Asian-Americans were by "white supremacists," when they were "disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill;

The claim that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died;

The claim that a laptop was not property of Hunter Biden but, rather, it was Russian disinformation;

The claim that inflation was not increasing dramatically;

The claim that vaccines would end the pandemic;

The claims that critical race theory isn't in high schools and grade schools when CRT teachings are being pushed in hundreds of schools and school districts.

I could add a few things.  For instance, from the NYT/NPR/WP center of the news universe we heard almost nothing about extensive nightly riots and looting in the wake of George Floyd's killing.  Rather, we were told about the "mostly peaceful protests."  More specifically, it was as though Seattle CHAZ/CHOP and Portland Oregon didn't exist.

How do media outlets get away with these lies and corruption?  Here's my simplistic answer:

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

Andrew Sullivan's article is titled: "When All The Media Narratives Collapse: In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong." As Sullivan notes, all of these false stories he listed favored Democrats.

Sullivan, sounding demoralize, concludes:

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit? One comes to mind: the assurance that the insane amount of debt we have incurred this century is absolutely nothing to be concerned about because interest rates are super-low and borrowing more and more now is a no-brainer. But when inflation spikes and sets off a potential spiral in wages to catch up, will interest rates stay so quiescent? And if interest rates go up, how will we service the debt so easily?

I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not?

We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight. This is humanly understandable. It is professionally unacceptable. And someone has got to stop it.

Here's the "news media" getting it extremely wrong once again, a few days ago, on the Rittenhouse case, on of the ubiquitous intentional/reckless articles we are seeing from the Official Democrat News Media:

The NYP quotes Andrew Sullivan:

Some mistakes are natural, but “when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem,” warns Andrew Sullivan at his Substack. Agenda-driven reporting on the Kenosha shootings “effectively excluded the possibility that [Kyle] Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool . . . who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense,” so testimony that he did just that “came as a shock.”

Bonus Evidence: When Barack Obama visited Mount Rushmore, CNN described Obama's visit:

“Obama arrived there late last night and got a good look around Mount Rushmore — it’s quite a sight if you haven’t seen it,” said CNN anchor Rob Marciano.

“Barack Obama is in South Dakota today. He arrived there last night. Take a look at this. He got a good glimpse of the majestic Mount Rushmore,” fellow CNN anchor Betty Nguyen said later in the same broadcast.

A few days later, CNN’s Jim Acosta described Obama’s visit to Mount Rushmore like this: “It’s a fitting campaign stop for a presidential contender looking to make history. Standing before Mount Rushmore over the weekend, Barack Obama was asked whether he sees his face joining the likes of Washington and Lincoln.”

When Donald Trump visited Mount Rushmore, CNN had this to say:

“President Trump will be at Mt. Rushmore where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans told that [they are] focusing on the effort to, quote, tear down our country’s history,” reported CNN Leyla Santiago on The Lead with Jake Tapper.

Last year I would have thought that Glenn Greenwald's rhetoric (below) was over the top, shrill, hyperbole. No longer. I'm there too after seeing the unending flow of false news--fake news--from the left.

Virtually everyone who ends up having first-hand experience with the national media realizes they're amoral liars and smear artists with no scruples, who publish and broadcast things constantly that have no relationship to the truth. And the public knows this, too

On the national level, many news outlets that I formerly trusted no longer deserved any trust. I trust no outlet, whether it be FOX or any of the "good guys" on the political left, who have abandoned all of the principles they were ever taught in J school and now see themselves as servants of their favorite political party.

Continue ReadingA Tsunami of Fake News Supporting the Political Left (and Right)