When social media opinion replaces reporting
The Friday Letter / No. 478 / Feb. 4, 2022
Here is how Yahoo! News reported Tucker Carlson's reaction to President Biden's decision to consider only black women for Breyer's seat on the Supreme Court: “The Fox News host has been apoplectic since the president confirmed he would nominate a Black woman to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. . . Carlson, in lockstep with other right-wing Fox News personalities, ignored the part about qualifications and dished out more hate fodder for his millions of viewers.”
Nothing is unusual about this type of editorializing on Internet websites that present themselves as news purveyors. The problem is that young people, especially, are not skilled in telling the difference between news and opinion. And sites like Yahoo! are where many of them get their information. Notice we do not call this information “news.”
“Most young people are keeping up with the news passively, by consuming it where they happen to be most: on social media platforms and on their phones,” says a report at ypulse, a 17-year-old subscription-based research firm that calls itself “the leading authority on Gen Z and Millennials: today's tweens, teens, college students, young adults, and young parents.”
(As we always note, “Gen Z” is an incorrect term for Generation XII).
“This shift from established news sources to social platforms,” the report continues, “is not only affecting how they consume news but their overall attitudes towards the news. Fake news on these platforms, for example, is a growing problem, and YPulse's latest News Consumption and Trust report reveals how much this is affecting their overall trust.”
YPulse is is no right-wing propaganda machine. Its clients include Instagram, Amazon, and YouTube – all supporters of state-approved Big Tech censorship. From what we can tell, it conducts academic-level research and reports its findings, without bias to the extent that is possible.
To be fair – to the extent that is possible – Yahoo News did report Tulsi Gabbard's criticism of Biden's decision on both the upcoming SCOTUS nomination and his pick of VP Kamala Harris on the basis of race and sex, not on qualifications. The story rightfully avoided the kind of snarky opinions that appear in the piece on Tucker Carlson.
The difference? The Gabbard piece was picked up from National Review, an establishment Republican publication. It was not Yahoo's writing, though it was a Yahoo editor's decision to run it.
Did Yahoo treat Tulsi Gabbard fairly and Tucker Carlson viciously because she is a Democrat, a former Member of Congress who endorsed Biden after she dropped out of the 2020 race, and Carlson is an anti-war intellectual with libertarian proclivities? Opinions will differ, we are certain.
From our point of view this story is further complicated by our past arguments that the left differs from the right in this important respect: The right tolerates dissent; the left does not. And here we have an anti-Trump Democrat with a very liberal voting record who just skewered Joe Biden for basing his appointments on ideology, not qualifications. She's also against our involvement in endless wars, as is Carlson.
“I want to rebuild our Democratic Party, take it out of the hands of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, and truly put it in the hands of the people of this country,” she said in a policy statement while seeking the 2020 presidential nomination. Since then, she has come out against going to war with Russia over Ukraine. None of this sits well with the military-industrial complex and its hawks in both parties.
Add to this the fact that Tulsi, who served eight years in Congress from Hawaii, is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves.
This has to be getting under the skin of retired Army General Lloyd Austin, our highly-partisan, wholly incompetent Secretary of Defense, whose interests lie in turning the nation's military into a social services agency unconnected to its mandated mission of protecting the country.
And just to top it off, Gabbard has written, “I was raised in a multi-faith family studying both the Christian and Hindu scriptures. We observed Christmas and Janmastami (the birth of Jesus and the birth of Krishna).” If that doesn't rile the Atheist Left, we're at a loss to imagine what will.
A functioning Fourth Estate would sort out all of this and explain the issues dispassionately and honestly. Our crystal ball doesn't show that happening anytime soon.
Short takes on the news
When ideology trumps constitutionalism. Since our record on prognosticating is spotty at best, we forward without endorsement Paul Gottfried's reporting at American Greatness that a judge called Ketanji Brown Jackson is the leading contender to succeed Justice Breyer on SCOTUS. Gottfried predicts that Senate Republicans will roll over and confirm Jackson or some other liberal black female Democrat without a fight.
Gottfried says fear of black voter backlash drives the strategy.
“There are certain problems with this calculation,” Gottfried writes. “If Brown-Jackson or someone like her is the replacement for Breyer, you won’t just be trading one liberal judge for another. You’ll be exchanging the courtly, verbally restrained Breyer, who opposed Biden’s plan for court packing, with a proven political actor, who will do everything in her power to weaken the political Right. The Republicans will also be showing us what we can expect of them if they take over the Senate: more timidity in the face of an aggressive opposition.”
Jackson had been a federal public defender before Obama appointed her to the federal district bench in 2012. She has several rulings against the Trump Administration.
Gottfried has ample support for his prediction. Lindsey Graham voted to confirm both Elena Kagan and the highly-partisan, fact-adverse Sonya Sotomayor on grounds that a president is entitled to his picks. Now he says he will vote for anyone Biden nominates. Throw in the likely support of liberal Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and possibly Mitt Romney, and this fight folds like a yard sale card table.
Collins, Graham, and Murkowski joined all Democrats in voting to confirm Jackson last June for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
If you are waiting for Republican senators to bring up the unpleasant fact that SCOTUS considers Biden's nomination policy a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you might want to bring something to read while waiting – and waiting. . .
Another career comes to an untimely end. In Cherokee County, S.C., a 29-year-old man broke into a home around 2:30 a.m. and attacked the homeowner, sending him to the hospital. Before seeking medical attention, however, the homeowner greeted the intruder with a single gunshot to the chest. The intruder fled to a hospital, where he expired. – from a story at WSPA-TV.
Election fraud update
J. Christian Adams is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. In a piece at The Federalist, he says his organization has government records showing that foreigners are voting in Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and most recently, North Carolina.
“It isn't just in the sanctuary city of New York, where 800,000 foreigners just got the power to vote in municipal elections,” he writes.
While most Americans would likely agree that voting by an ineligible person, especially a foreign national, is an act of sabotage and the most serious non-violent offense against the country, Adams says many of these illegal voters may not even realize they have committed a deportable offense. He blames automatic registration policies promoted by state agencies such as motor vehicle departments.
These unaware aliens, Adams says, are “sometimes victims of third-party registration drives that jeopardize their immigration status. These voter registration drives sign anyone up without regard to eligibility.”
Pennsylvania – the state emerging with the strongest evidence of fraudulently throwing its electoral votes to Biden – has allowed aliens to vote “for more than two decades on a broken department of motor vehicles registration process,” Adams claims.
Although New York City votes reliably Democrat and adding 800,000 foreign voters will make no difference in its election outcomes, it will be revealing to track – this is inevitable – the progression of illegal voting. We can be confident that it won't be long before aliens are voting in state and national elections. What would stop them? Certainly not New York's attorney general, and certainly not the Biden Administration's highly-partisan Justice Department.
Quote for today
“The Biden Administration has turned the Border Patrol officers into travel agents.” – Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell, on the Border Patrol's new mission to relocate illegal aliens into the U.S. Interior.