Mainstream Media

A rapid test and masks

Rapid-test scarcity is a crisis of headlines.

By Justin Katz | December 24, 2021 |

Headlines are proclaiming the difficulty of finding at-home rapid COVID tests.  Some folks might not get what the big deal is, considering that, in the government’s eyes, rapid tests don’t count for anything. My personal research prior to Thanksgiving led me to conclude that rapid tests probably won’t catch every trace of the disease, as…

A Salvation Army bell ringer

The Salvation Army’s slide is only a mystery inside the mainstream bubble.

By Justin Katz | December 22, 2021 |

Kelly O’Neill reports for WJAR that the Salvation Army is 11% behind on donations in Rhode Island and 30% in New Bedford.  Whether the percentages are “behind the goal” or “behind last year” isn’t clear, but it amounts to tens of thousands of dollars in this area.  Rhode Island’s state coordinator, Roger Duperree points to…

A ring of doctors and nurses

RI’s COVID experience should inoculate us against socialism.

By Justin Katz | December 20, 2021 |

The headlines of doom are coming! Above a Brian Amaral report in the Boston Globe readers will find this:”R.I. health care system ‘is currently collapsing,’ emergency doctors warn“: The crisis has led to long wait times and inconsistent standards of care: “rationing resources, unable to provide privacy, and certainly unable to provide any COVID-19 isolation…

A water drop and ripples

Why would there be accountability for droning children in Afghanistan?

By Justin Katz | December 14, 2021 |

Remember when the American military accidentally blew up an aid worker and seven children in his family? Yeah, well, nobody will face consequences for that: “What we saw here was a breakdown in process and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership,”…

A water drop and ripples

More audience-guilting, this time from an NPR host.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Without making too much of it, I thought this was interesting.  NPR host Sam Sanders received a letter from listener saying he (Sanders) is distracting in the amount that he “grunts and murmurs (‘Uh!’, ‘Mmm…’, ‘Ahhh…’) when a guest is speaking.”  Perhaps because the letter writer went a bit far in likening it to the…

Reporters taking notes

NPR misses both important points when aligning politics and COVID.

By Justin Katz | December 6, 2021 |

Judging by social media comments, mainstream media types have been thrilled to hear from NPR that people are dying with COVID-19 at a higher rate in Trump-supporting counties across the United States. Of course, substantive analysis would require many more caveats than our social-media-driven culture tends to address.  As the article concedes, the analysis does…

A water drop and ripples

Why is the Western media always selling a story about the evil of the West?

By Justin Katz | December 4, 2021 |

You’ve probably heard the mainstream media claim that we’re facing the Omicron variant (which may represent the merger of COVID with the common cold) because greedy, racist Westerners were refusing to share their vaccines with Africa.  Drew Holden and Aaron Sibarium suggest in the Washington Free Beacon that this analysis is all wrong: In fact, several…

A water drop and ripples

Material from Hunter Biden’s laptop references Joe Biden’s dimensia?

By Justin Katz | December 3, 2021 |

Sheesh!  As Stephen Green suggests, getting this sort of information out to the public before an election seems like exactly the sort of thing that justify investing power in a news media: Ablow was close to Hunter and also served as his onetime landlord, the book says. In February 2019, Ablow and Hunter discussed hosting a…

A man with a bullet mask

Some keywords are strangely missing from news about increased shootings in Providence.

By Justin Katz | November 30, 2021 |

According to a chart published as part of WPRI’s report on the increase in victims of shootings in Providence, the city has regressed nearly to its 2015 level after steadily falling until 2020.  The number hit a low of 35 in 2019 and then more than doubled in 2020 and has increased from that point…

A water drop and ripples

The coverage trend of the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre was predictable.

By Justin Katz | November 26, 2021 |

As I predicted, the murderous attack on a Christmas Parade in Wisconsin isn’t getting as much air time as it objectively merits: Prominent media outlets have already lost interest in the vehicular massacre that took place on Sunday at the Waukesha Christmas parade, a Washington Free Beacon analysis has determined. Since I last wrote about it, the narrative…