Category: media and media people

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crime and punishment media and media people partisanship

So Low

Fareed, Trump

“I have to admit: none of this is playing out like I thought it would,” Fareed Zakaria told viewers of his CNN program last weekend.

“Trump is now leading in almost all the swing states,” Zakaria noted, adding that he is “someone worried about the prospects of a second Trump term.”

The host’s opening monologue on Fareed Zakaria: GPS went on, complaining that, “The trials against [Trump] keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base — who see him as a martyr and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe that his prosecutors are politically motivated.”

Leave it to the Democrats to turn Mr. Trump into a sympathetic figure . . . with Zakaria then agreeing that these prosecutions are politically motivated.

“This happens to be true, in my opinion. I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.”

And Fareed is not alone, even at CNN, where Elie Honig also acknowledged that, had the prosecution been brought in a less rabidly Democrat area than New York City, “there’s no chance of a conviction.”

No statement is more compelling in a court of law than what is known as a statement against interest, the admission of facts that do not serve the person so conceding or that person’s side. That’s what we now witness . . . as even CNN commentators recognize that the former president is being politically railroaded.

No one is above the law. That phrase loses some punch, however, when “the law” sinks so low.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pander, Please

Washington Post, ethics, Democratic Party

The newspaper of record in our nation’s capital urges its much-preferred political party to “trim your principles, Democrats, and pander away.”

This is a very different media watchdog role, where instead of calling out bad behavior, The Washington Post calls for it.

Sure, some of President Biden’s policies “clearly pander to core constituencies,” acknowledges the editorial board, adding: “The problem is that some of these policies are quite bad — even dangerous.”

For the record, the editors explain that they much prefer “the kind of pandering that is less obviously dangerous but still violates common sense and principle.”

Well, on a ranking basis . . . but isn’t this all too rank? 

Proselytizing for a lack of principle, the Post posits that these “means” of pandering to voters — i.e. buying their votes — are fully justified by “the end” of winning the election against former President Donald Trump.

“The only thing worse than” Democracy [Dying] in Darkness (per the paper’s masthead) is, the editorial board concludes, “losing.”

So, go ahead and delay again the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on menthol cigarettes, which, if implemented, would undoubtedly cost Mr. Biden the votes of many black men who make up the majority of that product’s customer base. Even though it is simply a trick of timing — for after the election, the Biden boys will be back to snuff out menthols. 

Come’on, man! Who needs honesty, accountability, or fair media coverage when there’s an election to win?

Surprisingly, The New York Times’ executive editor Joe Kahn argues the paper should not become an “instrument of the Biden campaign,” not “stop covering those things” such as immigration and inflation “because they’re favorable to Trump,” and not “turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”

He’s not wrong.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

The French King Flip Flap

Jerry Seinfeld, censorship, woke culture, wokeism

There’s this great Jerry Seinfeld bit about how we treat our “important” friends on our smartphones: “They don’t seem very important, not the way you scroll through their names on your contact list like a gay French king.” And Mr. Seinfeld flipped his wrist in a motion of dismissal. “Who pleases me today?”

Well, Seinfeld is not pleasing the woke. Not today. Not The Washington Post’s Brian Broome. 

“Wake up, Mr. Seinfeld. Mean-spirited humor isn’t cool anymore,” is Mr. Broome’s title. And his opinion is that times change, and meanie Mr. Seinfeld is a has-been for making fun of marginalized people. 

You may have judged Jerry Seinfeld as one of the lighter, cleaner comics, his act almost universal. Broome says you’re wrong. “I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny,” he explains. “Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.”

O, shall thy pearls be clutched!

Wasn’t the self-described “show about nothing” really a comedy of manners where the main characters, George Costanza, Elaine Benes, Cosmo Kramer, and Jerry himself served as the actual butts of the jokes? These four egoists fretted over their ultra-liberal concerns about good manners but always behaved badly. And we always knew it. And somehow still liked them — because Seinfeld was not mean-spirited!

Broome characteristically ends on a vindictive note: “So, yes, if you make ham-fisted jokes about women or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you.” Thus, the mob beheaded the king. And the priest. All with wrong opinions.

Would Broome think the point of the “gay French king” joke was to make fun of gays? But recall the actual target: ourselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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They Don’t Get It

Jerry Seinfeld, woke culture, humor, comedy, TV

Jerry Seinfeld seems so everyday-observant you get the idea that there can be nothing controversial about his comedy. But that just isn’t so. He’s had to avoid colleges for many years because the humorless young simply cannot take thoughts that lie even slightly outside their safe-space delimited comfort zones.

Right now he’s getting some viral shares for an interview he did, wherein he clarifies his position.

Comedy, he says, is something everyone needs. “They need it so badly, and they don’t get it. It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M.A.S.H. is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected, ‘there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.’

“Well, guess what. Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left, and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

In other words, wokeness kills comedy.

“When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, ‘Here’s our thoughts about this joke . . .’ well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

Yet, Seinfeld went on to explain how he works around all this. Avoiding colleges is only a part of it. 

In the end, it helps being good at what you do. Work around the nonsense, most of the time, but speak out against it, as he does now and then.

And it might help to continue laughing at the woke as well as laughing in spite of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling media and media people

Erroneous About the Eclipse

Whoopie Goldberg, The View, science

The View is not something to audit on a regular basis. It may decrease IQ. Nevertheless, we may have to defend Sunny Hostin for her silly ramblings on eclipses, cicadas, earthquakes, TDS and The Rapture. 

I’m not sure. She sure seemed to be saying that the recent eclipse and climate change were integrally related.

But the banter of the women was so light-hearted that maybe we shouldn’t hold her to high standards.

Besides, Whoopi was there to provide rational pedantry — no matter how inaccurate she was. (Contra Ms. Goldberg, there are thousands of cicada species, and you may respectably pronounce the word in a variety of ways). It could be that Sunny was merely trying to be funny about the Sun.

As the man said at the end of Chinatown, “Forget it, it’s The View.”

But how hopeless was Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s little lecture to the students at Booker T. Washington High School? She was instructing the students and taking credit for their “opportunity” to go outside and see the eclipse.

“A Full Moon is that complete, rounded circle which is made up mostly of gases,” she mis-explained, “and that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the Moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?”

Well, no, the Moon is not mostly composed of gases. It possesses the scantest of atmospheres, but does have water — or so I last read.

Even eclipsing The View, sending embarrassing, ultra-ignorant politicians to teach astronomy in the inner cities is — Lunacy!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eclipse

eclipse, propaganda, truth