News Media

A microphone

With Democrats in power, the sobered-up MSM is starting to promise not to beat the public anymore.

By Justin Katz | June 5, 2021 |

At any rate, that’s my interpretation of a moment between MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and CNN’s Jake Tapper that Ben Johnson described on The Daily Wire: “How do we do a better job?” Scarborough asked Tapper. “How do we be more fair to candidates, whether we’re talking about somebody like Hillary Clinton, where we’re getting leaked information…

Joe Biden's smile.

It sure does seem like this kind of thing would be a bigger deal if Biden were Republican.

By Justin Katz | May 23, 2021 |

Hank Berrien reports for The Daily Wire: In an investigative piece published Thursday, the Daily Mail‘s Josh Boswell reports that former FBI Director Louis Freeh donated $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016, when Biden still served as vice president, but during that same year he was soliciting Biden’s son Hunter and…

Media logos

The “conservative” news organization is probably the most balanced.

By Justin Katz | May 22, 2021 |

The structure of this “survey” is interesting, as Mark Tapscott describes it on Instapundit: AllSides recently showed a balanced sample of 2,000 people news stories produced by five news organizations but without their brand names, then asked them to read the stories and rate them according to where they would place them on the political spectrum.…

Meerkat tells a secret

It’s up to the reader to spot when journalists are merely passing along PR.

By Justin Katz | May 22, 2021 |

A paragraph that Ed Driscoll quotes on Instapundit from a Glenn Greenwald Substack essay deserves consideration of its broader application: Let’s express this as clearly as it can be expressed. Any journalist who treats unverified stories from the CIA or other government agencies as true, without needing any evidence or applying any skepticism, is worthless. Actually,…

Spinning trees

Repeated narratives in the mainstream media do affect votes.

By Justin Katz | May 12, 2021 |

Although Jonathan Swan appears to have positioned a recent essay on Axios with a view toward explaining away President Trump’s electoral gains among Latino voters as a “counterintuitive” political benefit-to-him of the coronavirus, I think the real lesson is quite different. Swan argues that by “shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact…

Calgary pastor arrested in the street.

Another narrative of victimization is right there for the media taking. (Spoiler: they’ll leave it alone.)

By Justin Katz | May 11, 2021 |

As we watch the cycle of moral panics churning over one another — each being replaced for a season or two and then resuming for another turn — it’s important to keep in mind how easy it is to construct narratives.  On a continent of hundreds of millions in a world of billions, a well-networked,…

Bill Fischer's sighing tweet

Twitter can be a good place to pick up on RI-insider mutual credulity.

By Justin Katz | May 11, 2021 |

Each instance is a small thing, and especially in a small state, one wants to limit one’s time spent lurking around social media like a sort of contrarian anthropologist.  (Of course, most insiders aren’t on there purely for fun and distraction, but are working angles, too.) Still this subtle dynamic may be one of the…

Image of a man reflected in a puddle.

At this point, racial strife results from the friction between reality and a media-created perception.

By Justin Katz | May 7, 2021 |

Political science professor Eric Kaufmann recently appeared on City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast to discuss diminishment of academic freedom as well as increasing gaps in our perceptions of reality.  The latter he attributes to a “new ideology… that sacralizes race, gender, and sexuality which then means that people aren’t able to get an objective story…

Kamala Harris disembarks from Air Force 2 in RI

Under RI’s Act on Climate, can I sue Kamala Harris for her strange visit to Rhode Island?

By Justin Katz | May 6, 2021 |

A photo that Governor Dan McKee posted on his Facebook page, shown as the featured image for this post, caught my eye.  That’s an awfully big plane to carry one person hundreds of miles for tarmac handshakes with VIPs, a photo op with some local professionals, and a quick run to a neighborhood bookstore.  How…

Aerial image of Bessemer, AL, Amazon

The Amazon union vote is another flashpoint worthy of study.

By Justin Katz | May 5, 2021 |

In the end, it wasn’t even close.  Of 5,800 warehouse workers at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, 3,215 (55%) voted in the union election, 2,536 ballots were considered valid, and 1,798 (71% of the valid ballots) were against unionization.  Yet, judging from media reports before the election, this couldn’t possibly have been the case.…