BBC Reporter: Antics Like Acosta’s Help Trump

When the Press Fights the President, the President Wins

The East Room of the White House — with its vaulted ceilings, ornate chandeliers and gold curtains — is the closest thing to a throne room the United States has.

When set up for a presidential news conference, as it was on Wednesday morning, it is magisterial. The president is announced, and the doors to a long hallway swing open. He steps onto the podium, towering over reporters squeezed tightly into the wooden chairs before him.

It feels a bit like an audience with a king. And on Wednesday, the king was angry.

Donald Trump held this formal news conference, only the second of his presidency, to respond to the results of the midterm elections. It was, he said, “very close” to a “complete victory” for Republicans, despite the fact that his party lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.

After spending weeks of battering and belittling his political opponents, the president opened by changing his tone and speaking of bipartisanship. When it came time to interact with the gathered journalists, however, the olive branch was replaced by a mailed fist — as it always seems to be.

The president accused one reporter, who is African-American, of asking a “racist” question. He said he’s not “a big fan” of another. And he repeatedly barked at persistent questioners to sit down.

The real fireworks came when CNN’s Jim Acosta tried to ask a series of questions, culminating with the president accusing him of being a “terrible person,” mocking his network’s ratings and reiterating his own contention that outlets that promote what he considers “fake news” are enemies of the people.

As a reporter for BBC News, I was seated a few rows behind and to the left of Acosta as he questioned the president, who at one point huffily stepped away from the lectern while the reporter continued to talk. The White House would later accuse Acosta of “placing his hands” on an intern trying to take his microphone away — and suspend his press credentials.

From my vantage point, I thought there may have been nonhostile contact between the two — in stark contrast to the obvious verbal hostility between reporter and president. A review of video from the incident corroborates this.

Acosta has a reputation as a dogged reporter, but his time at the White House during the Trump administration illustrates the perils of covering a president who uses dust-ups with journalists as a political tactic.

When the news cycle turns against him, one of the presidents first instincts is to criticize those who report the news. And journalists often take the bait. They’ve spent their whole professional careers dedicated to their craft, after all, and it’s human nature to take such slights and derogations personally — and to talk about them in private and then in print and then on-air for days.

That’s exactly what the president wants. An us-vs.-them debate between Trump and media personalities is friendly terrain for the White House. It feeds into the perception held by conservatives across the country that journalists, who are predisposed to questioning authority, are out to get this president. It diminishes the impact of the stories reporters spend so much time covering.

And as a further complication — and temptation — it also can benefit outlets such as CNN and reporters such as Acosta, who see followings grow, ratings soar and advertising dollars pour in with every new Trump-related controversy.

There’s a mirror to this perception on the left, casting “the media” as some sort of cohesive whole that can stand up to the president — as opposed to a chaotic mass of individuals and outlets, each vying for a small slice of the story.

When people ask me why reporters don’t just walk out when a news conference turns ugly as it did Wednesday, I chuckle. Telling journalists to walk away from a story is like asking them to stop breathing.

Sitting next to me in the East Room was a Korean reporter, perched on the edge of her seat. Her hand shot up every time the president appeared poised for a new question.

“Mr. President, sir! North Korea! North Korea!” she said pleadingly.

Try asking her to give up a chance to get a choice line from the leader of the United States about an issue that is of the utmost importance to her audience.

I like to tell friends and colleagues that covering Donald Trump can feel like falling into quicksand. The more you struggle, the more you fight, the quicker you sink.

Instead, the best strategy — the only way to survive — is to take a deep breath. Find solid footing. And move deliberately. That’s what the story and the audience deserve.

---

Anthony Zurcher is senior North America reporter for BBC News based in Washington, D.C.
COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM

Getting to Be Way Too Routine

Trump and Russia: Chasing Your Tail

Media: Then and Now

Insane

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Not News

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Hypocrisy: Is it OK to Want the President to Fail?

From MRC NewsBusters:

The Democratic Left is trying to pretend that Donald Trump wasn’t really elected President last year, with an unprecedented 67 U.S. Representatives boycotting Trump’s Inauguration after Congressman John Lewis told NBC that Trump was not “a legitimate President.”

But instead of scolding this divisive and unhelpful repudiation of a new President, the news media are enabling the sore-loser Left.

After Lewis announced his rejection of Trump, NBC’s Chuck Todd prodded him for more extreme action: “You believe this President is not legitimate. What would you tell young folks, young activists to do?”

And even though Trump hadn’t yet been inaugurated, Todd also pressed Lewis about impeachment: “Are you one of those that believe the impeachment process should begin?”

Contrast that with the news media’s hysterical reaction eight years ago when Rush Limbaugh said of incoming President Barack Obama and his ardently liberal agenda: “I hope he fails.”

It was a sentiment Limbaugh repeated a month later when he spoke at the annual CPAC conference: “What is so strange about being honest and saying, ‘I want Barack Obama to fail,’ if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?”

Liberal reporters freaked out. CNN political analyst Bill Schneider said Limbaugh’s CPAC speech had “sinister” tones and had “crossed a line.” During a CNBC interview, host Mark Haines lectured Limbaugh that it was a “stupid and mean spirited thing to say,” an exchange that so tickled MSNBC host Keith Olbermann that he re-played it that night on his Countdown program.

Republican politicians were pressed to denounce Limbaugh. ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked John McCain to say he was “offended” by the remark (McCain demurred), while then-MSNBC anchor Norah O’Donnell scolded then-Indiana Representative Mike Pence: “Why don’t you feel like you could denounce something like that?”

On MSNBC in 2009, the failure to appreciate Obama was seen as treasonous, as Hardball host Chris Matthews asked viewers: “Does Rush Limbaugh hate this country?”

But last week, before Trump was sworn in, Matthews pressed Democratic Representative Maxine Waters if she would consider impeaching the not-yet-President. During Friday’s inauguration coverage, Matthews described Trump’s speech as “Hitlerian” and suggested Trump could use “Mussolini” tactics if he wanted to jettison his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a White House advisor.

And over the next few days, ABC, CBS and NBC all provided heavy and positive coverage of an anti-Trump protest march that included speakers like Madonna seeming to suggest assassination: “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

The news media are obviously not demanding a consistent respect for the office of the U.S. Presidency. The most obvious explanation is that eight years ago most in the so-called “news” media wanted Barack Obama’s left-wing policies to succeed and were appalled by dissent.

Now, the media see themselves as part of the opposition to President Trump and his agenda to roll back Obama’s policies — and they hope he fails.

Of course, the two most common elements in Washington (and this includes the Washington press corps) are hydrogen and hypocrisy. So none of this is a surprise.

As we write this, the media are in a frenzy about Trump’s criticism of a Washington state judge who put a hold on his immigration pause. But attacking conservative Supreme Court judges over Citizens United or Heller or Hobby Lobby is just fine.

It’s not that only liberals are hypocritical, but in any subculture that is overwhelmingly dominated by liberals it is liberal hypocrisy that is going to run riot. And the people in that subculture, being so entirely surrounded by people who think the same way, can’t see it.

It’s much like academia, where one of our colleagues in Marquette’s Political Science Department told us he did not know what “political correctness” means.

Fish don’t know they are wet.

Media Flashback: Trump Candidacy is a Joke

Dunce

The Fake Attack on “Fake News”

From Frontpage Mag:

Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”

By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.

The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.

Why Facebook?

Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.

But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.

Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.

The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.

The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.

Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic, has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.

Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.

But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.

USA Today and the Los Angeles Times promoted a list of “fake news” sites that included a variety of mainstream conservative sites including RedState, IJR and the Blaze. BuzzFeed targeted RightWingNews.

Fake news, like fact checking, has very obviously become a euphemism for attacking the politics that the left disagrees with by dressing up partisan agendas in fake concerns about journalism and civic virtue.

This goes far beyond namecalling. The goal is to ban conservative sites from social media. Or at least to penalize them in ways that will make it difficult for them to compete with the mainstream media.

There are obvious ideological and financial motives behind this war on “fake news.” The financial motives are grossly blatant. The loudest media voices in this war, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and Vox, depend heavily on social media traffic for their own hyperpartisan factually challenged clickbait.

Read the entire article.

The Washington Examiner gave some examples of what the Buzzfeed “study” considered the top “real news” stories:

Here’s the top “Real News” stories: “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” As the headline suggests, this is a liberal opinion piece, complaining that the media doesn’t report enough on Trump’s scandals.

No. 2 is “Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.” This is a rambling screed claiming that people only dislike Clinton because she is a woman.

The No. 3 “Real News” story is “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos From Racy Shoot Revealed,” published at the New York Post.

To be clear, the journalists gnashing their teeth about “Fake Election News” winning would have been less concerned if “Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos” had received more clicks.

If this study shows something it’s that the biggest fake news stories get a ton of Facebook engagement — maybe more than the biggest real election stories. (I say “maybe,” because maybe there were stories with more engagement at places like AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, Yahoo News, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Houston Chronicle, or any of the thousand other news sources not included in the BuzzFeed study.)

Three conclusions can be drawn from all this. First, liberals are seeking a rationalization for why their candidate lost. They cannot admit that Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate. They cannot admit that their snobbish elitism was recognized, and rejected, by voters. If this evil fake news could have been controlled, the obviously correct candidate would have won, they believe.

Second, the Mainstream Media, and liberals generally, long for the bygone days when a few gatekeepers decided what was news, and what was true, and how events should be understood. They hate having to complete with alternative conservative sources over these issues, and hate that ordinary citizens on social media can entirely undermine the mainstream narrative.

Finally, this is an example of the ugly authoritarianism of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it is significant that liberals will not call themselves “liberals,” since they have abandoned, in huge numbers, the central doctrine of classical liberalism. As propounded by Jefferson: “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Liberals increasing insist they need not tolerate error.  And they believe themselves authorized to decide what is in error.

Media Arrogance and the Trump Victory

From, of all places, CBS News, a biting critique of the elitist liberal attitudes of the media.

The writer notes that a lot of Americans, and Trump voters, hate the media. He then asks:

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong. [emphasis in original]

The media (and liberals generally) have been going through the motions of taking stock and rethinking and reassessing some of their attitudes and practices.

But the toxic cultural prejudices that afflict the media (and liberals generally) are deeply ingrained, and part of a very insular and parochial culture. The odds favor only the most superficial self-examination, after which they will go back to their smug elitism.

Oops!

Klan Chief Endorsed Trump? Communist Party Chief Endorsed Hillary

From NewsBusters:

The media just loves the Ku Klux Klan. Here’s a small sampling of headlines:

The New York Daily News: Donald Trump supported by former KKK leader David Duke: ‘I hope he does everything we hope he will do’

The Daily News gasped:

Donald Trump’s been knighted by racist David Duke.

The former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan told his bigoted followers that not voting for Trump would be “treason to your heritage” and implored them to volunteer for the billionaire candidate because they would find like-minded haters in the campaign.

Then there was USA Today: Former Ku Klux Klan leader declares support for Donald Trump.

The paper then wrote in breathless style:

Donald Trump once said he’s “the least racist person there is.”

Even so, multiple white nationalists have found appeal in Trump’s message and have aligned their support with the presidential candidate.

The latest is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who called for listeners of his radio show to support Trump and volunteer for his campaign.

‘Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have,’ Duke said Wednesday on the David Duke Radio Program, as first reported by Buzzfeed.

Duke reasoned that ‘voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.’

And so it went in the mainstream media universe, Trump’s rejection of Duke irrelevant to their stories.

Did Trump stumble in that now-famous CNN Jake Tapper interview when asked about Duke? Yes. But he not only corrected the next day, as documented here by McClatchy he was well on record speaking out against Duke not only before the Tapper interview but as long ago as the early 1990’s. Wrote McClatchy’s reporter, with bold print for emphasis supplied by me:

Trump eagerly denounced Duke on more than one occasion decades ago, according to Factcheck.org.

In 2000, Trump told NBC’s “Today” that he wouldn’t seek the Reform Party nomination because he said the party was “self-destructing.”

Matt LAUER: “When you say the party is self-destructing, what do you see as the biggest problem with the Reform Party right now?”

Trump: “Well, you’ve got David Duke just joined – a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.”

The New York Times also reported at the time that Trump issued a news release referring to Duke as “a Klansman” and not the “company I wish to keep.”

Trump also spoke out against Duke in 1991 – three days after Duke lost a race for governor in Louisiana.

CNN’s Larry KING: “Did the David Duke thing bother you? Fifty-five percent of the whites in Louisiana voted for him.”

Trump: “I hate seeing what it represents, but I guess it just shows there’s a lot of hostility in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of hostility in the United States.”

So with all this attention to Trump on David Duke, surely you read the news about John Bachtell, right? He endorsed Hillary and the headlines were everywhere. Oh, wait, sorry. Mr. Bachtell’s Hillary endorsement was apparently not newsy enough to make the mainstream media headlines. Curious, yes? If the endorsement of Trump by the ex-head of the Ku Klux Klan is big news, one would expect a Hillary endorsement by the head of the Communist Party USA would be a big deal as well.

That’s right. Hillary-supporter Bachtell is, as seen here, the very proud “national chair of the Communist Party USA.” That’s right, Mr. Bachtell is a literal card-carrying Communist. You recall the Communists, yes? The folks who produced Stalin and Mao? The advocates of a political philosophy that is described in The Black Book of Communism as being responsible for “between 85 million and 100 million” deaths in “the most colossal case of political carnage in history.” Ring a bell? The Soviet Union? The Cold War? The Iron Curtain? Korea? Vietnam? The Khmer Rouge? Come on, you remember.

Apparently the mainstream media does not remember what Mr. Bachtell’s Communist Party represents — or maybe it’s something else. Maybe, just maybe, the media doesn’t care about Hillary receiving the Communist Party chairman’s endorsement because, well, if you’re a lefty to begin with there’s nothing seen as out of the ordinary much less wrong with this.

Vandalizing of Anti-Abortion Display at Marquette in the News

It hasn’t been quite the fiasco the Assata Shakur mural was, but the vandalizing of an anti-abortion display (which has been approved by the university through normal channels) by leftist students (including members of the feminist campus group Empowerment) has gotten some attention.

• The Daily Caller. Notes that the College Democrats approved the defacing of the display.
• The Daily Caller. Notes that Empowerment, a recognized student group at Marquette, has applauded the vandalism, and said there is no need to tolerate anti-abortion opinions.
• Campus Reform. Also notes that the College Democrats approved the vandalism.
• Hypeline. Recounts basic facts of the case, and notes numerous other cases of vandalism and harassment directed at pro-life students at various universities.
• LifeNews.com. Also lists cases of vandalism by intolerant feminists at various campuses, and names one student who confessed on Facebook that she participated in the vandalism at Marquette.

More relevant, probably, because they have good penetration of the local market, are two reports on local TV news.

• WTMJ, Channel 4. Basic facts, and good interview with the vice president of Marquette for Life.
• WITI Channel 6. Says that “A group has taken responsibility for the defacement.” Not exactly true, but not exactly wrong either.

The issue now becomes: what will Marquette do in response? Will it discipline those responsible? Marquette’s incessant pandering to the campus left suggests the university will do nothing. But perhaps this case is so egregious that even the über-politically correct administration will have to come down on the side of free expression.

Finger in the Dike

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Race Riots, Journalists and Academics

From a syndicated column by Walter Williams:

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.

“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.

In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.

Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”

It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.

In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.”

Political Pied Piper

Firestorm: Marquette Mural Honoring Cop Killer Goes National (and Beyond)

The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center’s posting of a mural honoring cop killer Assata Shakur has garnered attention all across the nation, and even in the United Kingdom (the Daily Mail).

A Marquette in the News summary lists the following outlets as having covered the story:

Story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 19, 2015

Story aired on at least 11 news outlets, including: WNYW-TV (FOX 5, New York), WISN-TV (ABC 12), WTMJ-TV (NBC 4), WITI-TV (FOX 6), WLUK-TV (FOX 11, Green Bay), WTMJ-RADIO (620 AM), WISC-TV (CBS 3, Madison), KRGV-TV (ABC 5, Rio Grande Valley, Texas), WBOC-TV (CBS 16, Salisbury Md.), WSJV-TV (FOX 28, South Bend, Ind.) and WPVI-TV (ABC 6, Philadelphia), May 17-19, 2015

But that is merely the tip of the iceberg.

A Google News search, conducted earlier today, produced pages and pages of results.

Here are the first five pages of results.

And here are the second.

Is Marquette’s administration going to learn anything from this fiasco? We frankly doubt it. The most sensible thing to do would be to abolish the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Any legitimate issue surrounding gender and sexuality could be addressed through the Counseling Center, Campus Ministry, Student Affairs and so on.

But in an administration lacking vision, the incentives for pandering to politically correct lobbies on campus are too large.

[Update]

It’s an honor Marquette most certainly didn’t want: being featured on Drudge.

Monumental Local News Blunder

Supposedly, the NTSB released the names of the pilots on the Asiana Airlines flight 214, which crashed. Or so a San Francisco TV station thought.



Somebody has to be fired for this.

Until just a few minutes ago, the home page of the station’s website had a link to an article that was an apology for the report. When we checked it, the actual apology was missing. And now, the link is gone. See below (click on picture to enlarge.)

Terrorists Don’t Like Fox News / Like Mainstream Media

From David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Bin Laden and his aides hoped for big terrorist operations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. They also had elaborate media plans. Adam Gadahn, a U.S.-born media adviser, even discussed in a message to his boss what would be the best television outlets for a bin Laden anniversary video.

“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” Gadahn wrote. At another point, he said of the networks: “From a professional point of view, they are all on one level — except [Fox News] channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks objectivity, too.”

What an unintended boost for Fox, which can now boast that it is al-Qaeda’s least favorite network.