“Obama argued that U.S. policy is still focused on the defunct Soviet Union instead of combatting the nuclear threat from rogue nations and terrorists.” AP
Huh? Still focused on the Soviet Union? With all the noise the Bush warmongers are making about Iran?
Isn’t Barack Obama a little young to be this out of date and out of touch? Where has he been the past couple of decades?
And where are the reporters who should have challenged that statement?
When I first saw this Yahoo news article, I figured there had to be more to the story:
A Spencer, N.Y., student was sent home from school last week for wearing a T-shirt that denounces homophobia.
Heathyre Farnham, 16, said she was not trying to be inflammatory by wearing the shirt that says, “Gay? Fine By Me.”
Contrary to what the lead sentence says, there’s nothing in that message about homophobia. (What would have been really interesting would have been a T-shirt that said, “Gay? Fine By Me. Homophobic? Fine By Me.”)
It turns out there are news articles with additional information, though it seems most of the information comes from one side of the conflict. The school doesn’t want to talk to the news media about it, which I suppose is reasonable. These types of stories can get spun one way or another so easily, as any parent or teacher who has had to referee a squabble can tell you.
But it’s interesting that all of a sudden, out of the blue, religion is dragged into it. Here it is, a non sequitur from another version:
Beeman [the kid’s mother] noted that religious issues had proven disruptive the previous school year, with students saying that their lessons at school contradicted their religious training.
Said Beeman, “There’re six churches in the area,” and added that the locale “tends to revolve around this religious hub.”
Added Beeman, “It tends to infiltrate into the school. Last year classes would be interrupted by period-long debates, that ’they shouldn’t be teaching this.’”
Said Beeman, “We’re very tolerant of people’s beliefs, but we don’t want them shoved down our throats and that tends to be what happens.”
Note the word “infiltrate.” It took me a while to realize why that bothered me. But now I remember. Back in the 50s, it was a word often used by people complaining about communists “infiltrating” schools and Hollywood. I know the folks using that word back then meant it was a bad thing. Sounds like this Beeman thinks it’s a bad thing, too.
Others might thing think it healthy that people with diverse beliefs can have their say and debate issues.
Here’s what one academic had to say about the subject of debates in the classroom. It’s something that’s posted in the library in the department where I work. You can find it in various places on the web, too.
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. — Jacob Bronowski
Sounds like that’s what’s happening at that school, in more ways than one. It’s too bad the news reporters didn’t do a little more questioning of their own, though, such as asking Beeman how she defines “shoved down our throats.”
Quote of the day.
MoveOn.org is going to send the Times a check for $77,000. The Times has apologized, which is sweet, but normally the FEC does not accept apologies in lieu of fines. –George Will
Thanks to The Main Adversary for pointing this one out to me. Normally I would have got it from Townhall.com, but I’ve somehow managed not to look at that site for a couple of days.
Another way to explain the latest revelations on the Hsu scandal:
Hsu was looking for people a) with lots of money to invest in his Ponzi schemes, and b) stupid enough and greedy enough to fall for them.
So where did he spread all of his bait? Among Hillary Democrats. He must not have expected that any Republicans would meet those criteria.
Maybe he needed to get out more.
I’ve been campaigning for reform in newspaper journalism for years. If a journalist receives an award from a group of fellow journalists, that should be grounds for instant dismissal. These people should be writing and reporting for us, not for each other.
The incestuous nature of these journalism awards seems to be so much a given part of the profession that I had little hope my suggested reform would ever come about. But now there is hope!
This is from the Best of the Web at OpinionJournal.com
Takes One to Know One
A very entertaining Washington Monthly story on New York Times columnist Bob Herbert brings this comment from Andrew Sullivan:My two cents: once I know the topic of a Herbert column, I can predict every single self-satisfied, self-righteous platitude that is about to come. He’s also a terrible writer–there’s no character to his prose, never a felicitous turn of phrase. He’s the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards. Even when he’s right he’s so insufferably self-righteous and humorless it’s a pain to read him. So I don’t.
Aside from the bit about journalism awards, has there ever been a better example of the pot denigrating the kettle?
If a good way to insult a journalist is now to say, “He’s the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards,” I’d say big progress is being made!
I’ve added The Main Adversary to the blog list here.
It started with an item in The Weekly Standard that came in today’s mail. It’s a Scrapbook item titled, “Hsu’s on First“. The Washington Post says “Some fundraisers with legal issues slip through campaigns’ vetting.”
In another words, The WP morphs it from being another Clinton Scandal into something about campaign finance in general. Next thing you know, instead of going after the crooks they’ll say the thing to do is shut down the first amendment harder than McCain-Feingold so people like Hillary Clinton will not be forced to take illegal campaign contributions to finance attacks on those who criticize her.
That also got me to thinking about the general lack of curiosity in the major media about WHY Hsu and/or whoever was financing him was motivated to provide all this money. And that got me to thinking about other lack of curiosity items, such as the shooting of Paul Joyal back in March. That one sure dropped off the radar screen in a hurry, despite the super-lame explanations given by the local authorities.
So I looked to see if there was any recent news. The most recent mention I found was in the blog of a Mark Newgent, who is a conservative running for Baltimore City council. Newgent didn’t have any more news on Joyal, but there are some other things in his blog, including an insightful analysis of the foreign policy statements of Ron Paul. I’ll probably end up voting for Paul. He avoids a lot of the usual libertarian goofiness, but on foreign policy he’s not a lot of improvement. Here’s Newgent:
Paul believes that we should not have an interventionist foreign policy because it invites blowback. That is his position, ok fine, but he never offers an alternative to the historical examples or the present day issues that complicate his simplistic view. It is like the peaceniks during the Vietnam War who sang, “all we are saying is give peace a chance.” That’s right, that’s all they were saying. They did not offer any arguments as to why giving peace a chance would have benefited the United States in Southeast Asia, furthermore look at the human tragedy that happened when peace was given a chance. Ron Paul is doing the same thing. Instead of peace, it is isolationism. Paul never offers a solution other than empty platitudes about the intent of the founding fathers. That is all fine and good, but it is not an argument. Paul never, makes an argument past stating his position of preaching non-interventionism in foreign policy and urging the GOP to return to its isolationist past (look how that turned out). Paul and his supporters spout their nonsense then sit back as if saying they have ended the argument, when at best, all they’ve done is start one.
And there’s more good stuff over there, too. A young politician who knows all about Whittaker Chambers can’t be all bad, even if he knows how to think and write.
There’s a good analysis over at SCSU Scholars of how George Will, as the token conservative at a lot of newspapers, gives the left a way to lie with statistics and to claim the nation’s newspapers are not biased hard to the left.
(I can’t figure out how to link to the specific individual article over there, though. )
It followed an unauthorised press conference by members of the Reporters Without Borders campaign group, who called for the release of about 100 journalists, online dissidents and free speech activists who are imprisoned in China. After the event, uniformed and plain-clothed police physically prevented foreign journalists from leaving the area, in some cases for more than an hour, according to reporters present. “If this is going to be the behaviour for the rest of the time until the Olympics, then I think China will be paying a rather high price in terms of its international image,†said Jocelyn Ford, a journalist who was covering the event.
No, not necessarily. It isn’t necessarily China that will pay a high price. If we become complicit in this behavior, putting a tacit stamp of acceptance on it, then we’re the ones who will pay a high price.
Financial times article:Â China ‘breaks promise’ on media
One way to get started on paying that price is to do things like putting the words “break promise” in quotes in the headlines. That’s a way of disdaining any responsibility for our own behavior.
The Grand Rapids Press is promoting a power-grab by the state of Michigan. Reforming townships deserves debate, it says. That’s some debate, if it’s going to use the term “reform” to describe a transfer of township functions to the state. It should really be thought of as disempowering people in exchange for governmental corruption.
The Press says, speaking of those who would object to this hostile takeover, “Fear of lost of control and access are understandable…” I agree that it’s understandable, but the Press either doesn’t understand it, or it does and it doesn’t want to help its readers understand. Or maybe it has forgotten about such concepts as government by the people.
It goes on to say, “… but the need to shrink government should be just as important.” I don’t know who they are trying to fool, but taking government out of the hands of the people and centralizing it in a more powerful entity has never yet in the history of the universe been a way to shrink government.
Think of it this way. Should we remove all the smaller retail outlets in the country except for Wal-Mart, and let that company take over their functions? It would certainly reduce the duplication and redundancy. Is that going to make the retail industry more efficient for us consumers? I think we know the answer.
So if monopolies are bad in the private sector, where individual persons can still vote with their pocketbooks, what makes them so wonderful in the public sector, where people cannot exercise that type of control?
Added title, 23-Jul-2007
The space in newspapers, even the Wall Street Journal editorial page, is usually reserved for articles in which professional journalists and columnists can look down their noses at bloggers. Here’s one that’s different, though. It’s an article titled Redefining Journalism, by Scott Gant.
Some excerpts:
…Members of the House and Senate have introduced identical versions of the “Free Flow of Information Act of 2007” … This legislation would enact a statutory “shield law” protecting journalists from having to divulge certain information…Some of the challenges facing earlier legislation stemmed from disagreement about who should be covered….To qualify as a journalist, the organization must have the “processing and researching of news or information intended for dissemination to the public” as one of its “regular functions.” This constricted conception of who qualifies as a journalist is employed in many state shield laws. The Free Flow of Information Act of 2007, however, adopts a dramatically broader view of journalism and journalists….The sponsors of this legislation have appropriately resisted calls to regard journalism as something carried out only by employees of established news organizations…As journalism returns to its status as an activity rather than a profession….
That last phrase is helpful: journalism as an activity rather than a profession.
There is a reason why government should not be carving out special privileges and exemptions for certain people — especially when those people are partisan agents of the government itself who tend to treat all affairs as an issue of government vs the people. And carving out special privileges for government people tends to foster this unhealthy mentality of government vs the people.
I’m thinking of the corrosive effect of cop-killer laws, or special legal protections for judges, or special income-tax-exemptions for university graduate students, or special protections for journalists. These people should be working to provide justice for everyone, not just the privileged few. And they will be more motivated to do that when they have to eat the same dog food as everyone else.
Now some may question why I’m thinking of journalists as government partisans. Don’t journalists hate the Bush administration, for example? Well, yes, they do, but that’s because they and the government establishment view the Bush administration as an imposter, not as one of them. Note how when Clinton was elected, journalists were whooping it up along with Democrats who were preparing to replace Bush partisans with their own. Now when Bush-2 does the same thing, it’s treated by these same people as an abuse of power.
And why am I lumping journalists in with the government establishment? It’s mostly because the path to becoming a professional journalist is through university schools of journalism, which seem to suffer an advanced case of the disease that is destroying what we used to value in academia. As far as journalism schools are concerned, I say this as an observer from a distance. But as a closer observer of academia as a whole, I note that while there is still is some room for diversity of thought, it is becoming rarer. Ever since sputnik, universities have more and more been becoming agents of the government with less and less tolerance for intellectual diversity and dissenting views that are uncongenial to the government establishment. See, for example, the type of opinion that was ruled out of bounds for posting on an office door at Marquette university, in my blog entry Academic Intolerance.
Even if I am wrong about how journalists get to be the way they are, any special protections ought to be made (as Scott Gant puts it) for the activity of journalism, and not for the profession.