RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you believe the Age, SMH and our national broadcaster, FBI Director James Comey is in a whole lot of trouble for nobbling Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. Actually, the cited document suggests it is the failed candidate and her cronies who are in the hottest water.
The business of journalism is actually pretty simple — or should be — especially when it comes to re-writing press releases. Your garden-variety hack reads the hand-out from a company, government agency, PR outfit or whatever, re-writes it and submits the copy to an editor who casts an eye over the offering and, allowing that there is nothing glaringly stupid about it, places the reporter’s effort in the paper or, these days, on the news organisation’s website. If there is a problem, an eye-smacking incongruity or doubts about the veracity of the source, checks are instituted and corrections made. That’s the theory, anyway.

Idiots could do it, one would think. But that expectation, alas, is beyond the wit and means of the click-baiters at the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC, all of which today (January 13) published a Reuters report that asserted, as the Fairfax headline put it, “FBI, [sic] director James Comey’s actions during US election to be probed“.

The shame of this story is that it is no better than 10% correct. Its original sin is the confirmation bias of the editors who chose to run it as is.

First, the headline’s errant comma suggests grammatical incompetence, once regarded as a damnable journalistic vice, but difficulty with the language is the most petty of the account’s flaws. Of much greater concern is that the Reuters wire copy is not merely wrong but reekingly so by virtue of its misrepresentation by omission. A competent foreign-desk editor, one who keeps abreast of his or her assigned beat, would have spiked it at a glance. Actually, make that “editors”, because the national broadcaster is no better and quite possibly more culpable, as its story is longer but every bit as guilty of distortion by what is left out.

The press release from the US Department of Justice’s watchdog Office of the Inspector General can be found here. A Google search require precisely .75 of a second to locate it. Below, interspersed with explanations, are reproductions of its key points.

The leftwing online “news” outlet Buzzfeed disgraced itself by publishing a widely discredited document making unsubstantiated charges against President–elect Donald Trump, purporting to tie Mr. Trump to compromising information that the Russian government had allegedly collected on him. The allegations regurgitated by Buzzfeed came from a “dossier” which, Buzzfeed said on its site, was “compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official.” The site tried to cover itself with a warning: “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.” Buzzfeed’s own editor, Ben Smith, admitted that he has “serious reason to doubt the allegations” in it. Nevertheless, Buzzfeed went ahead and published the unverified allegations with the flimsy rationale “that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” Ben Smith tried to put lipstick on his pig by claiming that “publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.” If the job of reporters is to knowingly publish completely unsubstantiated, sensationalist stories whose only “value” is to further polarize the country, the media are in big trouble. Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly,” which Gallup has been polling since 1972, will continue to hit new lows.

CNN amplified the false story by giving prominent attention to it on the air, without the warning it was unsubstantiated and contained errors that even Buzzfeed published. In fact, CNN described the source for the story as “credible.” Subsequently, CNN lamely tried to defend its reporting, instead of apologizing for running with a story that even the New York Times described as “a summary of unsubstantiated reports.” And then, in an attempt to change the subject, CNN conducted what it called a “reality check” of claims that Mr. Trump made during his news conference on January 11th . In the process, they ended up doing even more damage to their own credibility. For example, CNN critiqued Mr. Trump’s claim that “I have no deals in Russia.” Note that he spoke in the present tense and said that he has no deals in Russia, meaning actual completed commercial agreements currently in effect. CNN tried to refute this claim as “misleading” by themselves misleadingly pointing to a deal he had been negotiating in 2013, with a Russian billionaire, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Even CNN admitted this approximately 4-year-old negotiation was never finalized. CNN even reached way back to 1987 when Mr. Trump “visited the Soviet Union with his first wife, Ivana, and announced plans to develop a luxury hotel there.” Of course, whatever the president-elect, his family or his company may have tried to do in Russia years ago, or said in the past about business prospects in Russia, has no relevance to whether his claim that “I have no deals in Russia” today is true.

The media has created a new standard for reporting “news”: it is appropriate to report anything, anything at all, as long as you preface it by saying it is “unsubstantiated.” That is the new standard for reporting about Donald Trump. But what if the media applied the same reporting standard to Democrats?

1) Would Politico post unreliable reports about Congressman Charlie Crist and his alleged relationship with a certain Green Iguana?

2) Would the Washington Post hypothesize about whether George Stephanopoulos is still mentally ill?

3) Would The New York Times suddenly change its tune and start speculating about where Obama was really born and what his real religion is?

4) Would ABC News run with speculation about who Vera Baker is, and what her alleged relationship with President Obama is or might have been?

5) Do you think we could expect to see unsubstantiated reports about Senator Cory Booker’s dating preferences?

6) Might the media published unsourced documents detailing Hillary Clinton’s alleged involvement in Vince Foster’s death?

7) Would the media publish claims from an anonymous source about the precise nature of the relationship between Hillary and her “body woman,” Huma Abedin?

8) And whom has Bill Clinton been violating lately? Wave some cash around hookers in Harlem and report whatever they say!

Can you imagine the media doing any of this? No, of course not. Because these are all Democrats, and the media holds them to a different standard; they never publish damaging personal information even if they are sure of the veracity.

The celebrated British war correspondent Clare Hollingworth died Tuesday in Hong Kong at 105. The news reached me via her obituary in the Daily Telegraph, which a friend emailed. It was fitting that the Telegraph published one of the first reports of her death, as the newspaper also published Hollingworth’s most famous article and arguably the biggest scoop of the 20th century: the outbreak of World War II.

In late August 1939, Hollingworth was a 27-years-old cub reporter for the Telegraph in Poland. After talking a British diplomat into allowing her to borrow his car, she drove across the border into Germany, where she observed large numbers of troops, tanks and field artillery lined up along a road.

As she wrote in her autobiography, when the wind blew open burlap screens “constructed to hide the military vehicles . . . I saw the battle deployment.” Her story appeared in the London newspaper on Aug. 29 under the headline “1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier.” Germany invaded Poland three days later.

The young reporter’s scoop heralded the rest of her journalism career, which took her to the four corners of the Earth. She was a journalist of the old school—daring, dogged and open-minded. She was interested, above all, in “getting the story.” In pursuit of that goal, she would talk to anyone, travel anywhere, endure any discomfort.

Hollingworth spent six years covering World War II in dangerous assignments that took her to Central Europe, the Balkans and northern Africa. Next she covered the war in Algeria, two wars between India and Pakistan, conflicts in Aden, Burma, Borneo and Ceylon, the Vietnam War, two Arab-Israeli wars, the bloody birth of Bangladesh, and the Cultural Revolution in China.

In 1946 she was staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when a bomb went off, killing 91 people. “I was not being brave,” she once wrote about her adventures. “My over-riding feeling was enthusiasm for a good story.”

Her sources included high government officials and military officers as well as soldiers and ordinary people. When I knew her in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong in the 1980s and ’90s, she was as welcome at the governor’s sedate dinner parties as she was at the raucous bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club or with the local patrons of sidewalk noodle stands.

In what was perhaps her sole concession to being a female reporter in what was then mostly a man’s world, she often made a point of befriending sources’ families, secretaries and household help. Such sources came in handy, such as when she broke the news, in 1963, that British double agent Kim Philby had defected to the Soviet Union. The wife he left behind in Beirut was one of her sources.

Since the early 1980s, Hollingworth made her home in Hong Kong. She would hold court at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where she often could be found in a corner of the bar sipping a G&T and attired in her regular working uniform of a custom-made safari suit and rubber-soled Chinese slippers. She was a marvelous raconteur, and I heard some of her best tales over dinner in the club’s upstairs dining room. CONTINUE AT SITE

A standard journalistic defense for publishing, or reporting on, the sort of thing BuzzFeed put on the web Tuesday night about Donald Trump’s alleged compromise by the Russians is that “the people” ultimately will sort it all out. You could say the same thing about tornadoes.

Conventional wisdom after the election held that the media had been chastened by its coverage of the campaign, that it had learned to be more careful about separating facts from the media bubble.

The past week’s news, if one still can call it that, was bookended by two Trump files. The first was the intelligence community report that Russia’s hack of the presidential election favored Mr. Trump. The second was a salacious opposition-research file on Mr. Trump published by BuzzFeed, which says it is about “trending buzz.” Below the site’s Trump-in-Russia stories Wednesday sat, “Lauren Conrad Just Posted The Most Adorable Photo Of Her Baby Bump.”
No one has learned anything.

When people played on real pinball machines, everyone knew that if you banged on the machine too hard, it would lock up. It would “tilt.” Because so many once-respected institutions are behaving so badly, the American system is getting close to tilt.

The interregnum between the election result and next week’s inauguration has become a wild, destructive circus, damaging the reputation and public standing of everyone performing in it, including Donald Trump.

Trumpians will resist that thought, but they should be concerned at their diminishing numbers. Quinnipiac’s poll this week puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37%. Building in even an expansive margin for error, this is an astonishing low for a president-elect.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks the “dishonest media.” He has a point, but dishonesty isn’t the problem. The internet, media’s addictive drug, is the problem. Whatever publication standards existed before the web are eroding.

Any person getting a significant federal job undergoes an FBI background check. These “raw” FBI files—a mix of falsity, half-truths and facts—are never published.

The BuzzFeed story about Donald Trump in Russia is a raw FBI file, or worse. Once it went online, every major U.S. news outlet prominently published long accounts of the story, filled with grave analysis and pro forma caveats about “unverifiable,” as if this is an exemption for recycling sludge.

This isn’t news as normally understood. It’s something else. CONTINUE AT SITE

There are two American women whose obituaries were reported in today’s NYTimes: one for the actress who played a princess in Star Wars and one for a ground-breaking physicist and astronomer. The former, Carrie Fisher, achieved fame through the character of Princess Leia and later through her books about her own bi-polar disorder and drug addiction. The latter, Vera Rubin, “transformed modern physics and astronomy with her observations showing that galaxies and stars are immersed in the gravitational grip of vast clouds of dark matter.” (NYT 12/28) As significant details of her life, the Times reports that Carrie Fisher had one marriage lasting less than a year and one daughter born out of wedlock; Vera Rubin was married to another prominent physicist for 60 years, bearing four children who all earned their own Ph.D.’s

A capsule description of Vera Rubin offers that she was “cheerful and plain-spoken, had a lifelong love of the stars, championed women in science and was blunt about the limits of humankind’s vaunted knowledge of nature” (NYT 12/28) A capsule description of Ms Fisher delineates that “she acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970’s and ’80’s and later said that she was using cocaine while making “The Empire Strikes Back” In l985, after filming a role in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” she had a nearly fatal overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program.” (NYT 1228)

I’m sure that everyone who heard of Ms Fisher’s death at age 60 was saddened that this woman suffered from mental illness and drug addiction which undoubtedly hastened her early demise from a heart attack. My question is which woman had her picture and obit on the front page of the Times and what does that say about a society more interested in casual fame and derelict behavior than in genius, hard work and a purposeful life – one that should serve as the ultimate role model for women young and old.

Apparently Kevin Williamson at National Review has jumped over that deadly lemming cliff, along with millions of Trump-maddened New York liberals.

Williamson writes in NR today that

“My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic…”

​Apparently NR editors didn’t read this piece, or worse, they read it and approved it.

That high-pitched grinding sound you hear is William F. Buckley drilling his way out of the grave to keep his beloved National Review from being kidnapped by a hysterical mob of establishment cons.

Uday and Qusay Hussein infamously dropped screaming human beings into industrial plastic shredders to kill them. Either Mr. Williamson is ignorant of that fact, or he has secret information about Barron and Eric Trump and Ivanka that we are not privy to. If so, I would like to ask Mr. Williamson and his neglectful editors to provide the evidence to the world. I am looking forward to Mr. Williamson’s next NR column, which will no doubt show us the cellphone pics.

It may be time for mass hara-kiri at the National Review, for descending into blithering idiocy on Christmas 2016.

Mr. Williamson wrote this NR column to argue for a return to civility in politics… and, in his next breath, committed what Jonah Goldberg has called “argumentum ad Hitleram.”

As a fan of Buckley’s magazine, I’m shocked and saddened.

Tell me it ain’t so, please!

Here’s a paradox for you. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack, the immediate response from government officials and the media is: “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Yet when there are breaking reports that Muslim or Arab Americans were allegedly victimized by bigots in some hate crime, the response is instant credulity, outrage, and hand-wringing.

This doesn’t really even scratch the surface of the double standard. When there’s a terrorist incident, there’s deep skepticism at every stage of the unfolding story. At first we’re told there’s no evidence that the attack is terror-related. Then, when reports come in that a shooter shouted “Allahu akbar!” or has an Arabic name, we’re assured there’s no evidence that the shooter is tied to any international terror groups. Days go by with talking heads fretting about “self-radicalization,” “homegrown terror,” and “lone wolves.” This narrative lingers even as the killer’s Facebook posts declaring allegiance to ISIS emerge.

Now, truth be told, I think some of this skepticism is understandable. Often, the media and the pundit class on the left and right are too eager to win the race to be wrong first. It’s perfectly proper to not want to get ahead of the facts.

More annoying is the Obama administration’s studied practice of slow-walking any admission that the War on Terror isn’t over, but at least it’s understandable. President Obama came into office wanting to end wars and convince Americans that terrorism isn’t such a big deal. It seems to be a sincere belief. The Atlantic reported that Obama frequently reminds his staff that slippery bathtubs kill more Americans than terrorism. It took Obama six years to admit that the shooting at Fort Hood was terrorism and not “workplace violence.”

Regardless, my point here is that I can understand why politicians and the media want to be skeptical about breaking news events and even why they try to frame those events in ways that fit a political agenda.

The best defense of that agenda isn’t the sorry effort to pad the legacy of our Nobel Peace Prize–winning president. It’s the desire to err on the side of caution when it comes to stigmatizing law-abiding and patriotic Muslims with the stain of acts of terror in the name of their religion. The media don’t want to give credence to the idea that all Muslims are terrorists, not least because that attitude will only serve to radicalize more Muslims. As we are often told, ISIS wants peaceful Muslims in the West to feel victimized and unwelcome.

And that brings me back to the media’s instant credulity for stories of anti-Muslim bias. This eagerness to hype “anti-Muslim backlash” stories has been around for nearly 20 years, and it has always been thin gruel. According to the FBI, in every year since the 9/11 attacks, there have been more — a lot more — anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Muslim ones. Which have you heard about more: the anti-Jewish backlash or the anti-Muslim backlash?

Amazingly, the “experts fear an anti-Muslim backlash” stories keep popping up after every Islamic terror attack, despite the fact that the backlash never arrives. To be sure, there have been hateful and deplorable acts against Muslims. But evidence of a true national climate of intimidation and bigotry has always been lacking.