Society

It’s not the best of times to be a statue — or even an icon. Last week Shaun King, a well-known campaigner on racial issues, wrote that icons and statues which depict Jesus as white should be removed. 'They should all come down,' King said. These icons are 'tools of oppression and racist propaganda...all murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down’. King received an enormous amount of abuse and even death threats — including from a group of retired police officers in Long Beach, California. Shaun King is an influential figure.

The internet is not a private place, but news outlets have decided that it's up to them to determine when someone loses their right to anonymity. Quite often, the media gets this calculation wrong and destroys lives in the process. Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger behind 'Slate Star Codex', deleted all of the content on his popular website after the New York Times revealed it was going to publish his true identity. In a long post explaining the debacle, Scott Alexander said that he was talking to a Times reporter last week who was planning on writing an article about his blog. The Times reporter apparently discovered Scott Alexander's identity in the course of reporting and cited a 'New York Times policy' requiring him to publish his full name.

When the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in 1967, the stated goal was to provide public financial assistance to producers and broadcasters of educational programming. And so PBS and NPR came into existence. They enjoy public funding from taxpayers today. But should taxpayers continue to fund these enterprises, when they clearly focus less on educating the public, and more on pushing commentary and opinion, and now, even libel?Public media has long been defended. Frequently it’s pointed out that public funding for NPR is only about two percent of their federal operating budget, the same excuse we hear when Planned Parenthood pushes back against calls to defund it. Just as frequently, right-leaning outlets seek to point out a clear bias in publicly-funded coverage.

When I spoke with NBC News earlier this week to talk about the media industry’s role in combating misinformation, I worried that the story might gain undue traction if any footage happened to get posted from my Zoom interview. In it, I was sitting in front of a bookcase full of chainsaw operation manuals and guides to dealing with invasive plant species. (Hello from COVID exile in rural Maine, where every day is Groundhog Day. Literally. A family of groundhogs has taken up residence outside the living room window.)Instead, the story turned out to be the fruits of a partnership between NBC News and a nonprofit called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The traditional newsroom is finally coming to terms with its slow metamorphosis into a college campus, taken hostage by younger progressive activist staffers.When Sen. Tom Cotton was granted op-ed space in the New York Times last week, many of the millennial staff were triggered into issuing social media claims that lives were being put in danger, namely those of their African American colleagues.The fallout has been swift and will have a chilling effect on speech and commentary in major newspapers for years to come. James Bennet, the Times’s editorial director, resigned from his position after defending the paper’s decision to run the column.

As civil unrest reverberated throughout virtually every corner of American life, culture, and industry this week, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company’s board of directors. He hopes that his seat will be filled by a black person. ‘I’m doing this for myself, for my family, and for my country,’ Ohanian (who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams) wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks, “What did you do?”’Later, Ohanian tweeted, ‘I'm seeing more and more people in tech who are frustrated and have been hitting a wall in their companies leaving!

What has happened to New York media? Just as the New York Times was experiencing its own Inner Mongolia Moment over the now notorious Sen. Tom Cotton ‘Send in the Troops’ op-ed, the Maoists at New York magazine were going after their best columnist, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan revealed on Twitter yesterday that his column wouldn't be appearing. The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots. https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1268564124423933953 Presumably Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong.

Cockburn was thrilled to see the New York Times take an interest in The Spectator last weekend, after the paper published an article about our London office’s ‘incestuous ties’ with the governing elite. Amazing that during a global pandemic and nationwide rioting, the NYT saw fit to dedicate few inches on page A8 to a political adviser on a northern European island. ‘Rogue Trip by Boris Johnson Aide Makes U.K.’s Spectator Part of the Story’, declared the headline. At least that was the revised headline — the first suggested, erroneously, that The Spectator was in ‘turmoil.’ The Spectator may be in many things, but turmoil isn’t one of them. The Gray Lady isn’t known for its fair-mindedness these days. But its coverage of the Speccie was surprisingly reasonable.

Twitter began ‘fact-checking’ President Trump’s tweets for the first time last week, raising questions about the role that social media giants play as gatekeepers of digital information.After the President asserted that mail-in ballots would be ‘substantially fraudulent’, a blue notification was placed at the bottom of the original tweet: ‘Get the facts about mail-in ballots’. The notification links to a fact-checking page with the heading ‘Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud’.

Uh oh, Chris Cuomo has been engaging with a nefarious Chinese media company. Like countless quarantined dads across the globe, the CNN host has been trying out dances and other trends with his daughter, Bella, on a popular social media app called TikTok that allows users to make and share short videos with assorted visual and sound effects.Never mind that the app may be sending personal data to the Chinese Communist party, Chris is begging for a fair dose of mockery for his dancing. Accordingly, Cockburn pulled out his notebook and fountain pen to critique some of Chris’s attempts to win over Gen-Z. https://www.tiktok.com/@bellavcuomo/video/6830824175419100422 What does the world need to see right now?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots. That raised all sorts of hell from a bombastic President, as well as more questions than answers. There are several problems with Twitter deciding to put its thumb on the scale of ‘truth’ on its social platform. The site has previously come under enormous scrutiny over widely perceived political and ideological bias. The charges against the company include its unfair and unbalanced actions in banning conservative or politically right-leaning accounts, as well as shadow-banning and limiting views and engagements on trending topics which it deems problematic.

COVID-19 is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma and hidden within a Chinese wet market, or possibly a CCP laboratory. World leaders are baffled by how to respond. The science keeps contradicting itself. The world’s greatest mathematicians can’t keep up with the ever-changing data sets. Who can the poor and frightened public turn to for help? Never fear, Greta’s here. That’s right. Little Miss Thunberg, a 17-year-old Swedish girl who dropped out of high school to sound the climate change alarm, is turning her mega-brain towards COVID-19, just when we need her most. On Thursday evening, CNN will host a live town hall called ‘Coronavirus: Facts and Fears’, featuring former acting CDC director Richard Besser, former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Miss Thunberg.

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) was planning to run a panel tomorrow called ‘The Rise of Misinformation’ sponsored by Huawei — a Chinese consumer electronics firm with suspiciously close ties to the Chinese Communist party. Sadly, just over 24 hours before the start time, the NABJ suddenly canceled the event. What happened?A statement released by the NABJ said that the panel had ‘become a distraction from other priorities’, as it ‘had come under attack because controversial technology giant Huawei was planning to sponsor the webinar though it had no editorial control’.

Kayleigh McEnany, President Trump's new White House press secretary, has breathed new life into the briefing room and already proven herself to be a formidable opponent for the media. Unlike her predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, McEnany has been preparing for her moment at the podium for years. She rose to prominence in 2016 as a CNN contributor by duking it out on panels where she was routinely outnumbered as the lone pro-Trump voice. McEnany later joined the 2020 Trump re-election campaign  as its national press secretary. Her time in front of the camera debating Trump haters clearly paid off — she has been prepared twice already for 'gotchas' from members of the White House press corps, throwing their questions right back in their faces.