Something new for me

No, not bashing the Seattle Times. I’ve been known to do that a from time to time. What was new for me was rolling out a coordinated Twitter rant, or thread if you will, on this incomprehensibly biased piece of reporting at the Seattle Times.

I was really surprised about how hard it was to prepare and how nervous I was about posting it. Have a look, leave a comment and retweet!

This is the most brazenly biased piece of so-called reporting I ever remember seeing in the @SeattleTimes. Stay with me.https://t.co/utQrF5loTZ

— It's Only Words (@itsonlywords) January 6, 2020

 

When does a real news story become fake news?

Last week, my favorite talk radio host had a call in segment about whether or not the U.S. left and right could ever again really come together as a country. Bear with me as I take a roundabout approach to share my thoughts.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

 

Keith Eldridge is a reporter/anchor for KOMO, the ABC affiliate in Seattle. Yesterday morning, he tweeted the series of photos on the right. They tell the sad tale of a Tacoma family whose husband/father, Armando Chavez Corona, was detained by ICE after having been rear-ended on the freeway.

His wife said she had no idea why that might have happened and blamed it on President Trump. His teen-aged daughter worried that she might never see her father again. That’s awful, right? I mean, the accident wasn’t even his fault!

Do you notice anything missing from the tweets? Say, the reason why ICE might have gotten involved? I wondered, too, so I tweeted Keith Eldridge to ask, but got no response. I had to wait, as it says in one of his tweets, for the story at 4:00 and 6:00 p.m.

As it turns out, Chavez Corona was arrested because he is a convicted felon who had been previously deported. This couple has been married for 16 years. How likely is it that Ms. Chavez didn’t know her husband had a felony drug conviction? Keith Eldridge surely knew before his morning tweets, but chose not to share that information.

Click through and you’ll see that Eldridge finally tweeted the rest of the story 8-1/2 hours later. The story posted on their website is also correct, but how many people didn’t or couldn’t get back to the story later in the day and were left with the wrong impression?

The obvious problem here is that for some people, the “facts” about this story are “Trump is a horrible person who wants to rip apart this lovely family,” while for others, the “facts” are “Thank God that Trump is deporting convicted felons.”

Granted, this isn’t a terribly important story on its own, but it’s part of a pattern that’s become increasingly obvious in the weeks since the election. The Federalist has compiled a list of 16 fake news stories, some of which are also not so important on their own but, taken as a whole, paint a very negative picture of the president and the GOP. These are national stories, but how many local stories like the one presented here have run?

So my questions are:

• Did Eldridge have a responsibility to paint a fuller picture of the story in his morning tweets?
• Was the lie of omission part of a calculated strategy to create a misleading impression? Or was it merely a marketing ploy?
• If it was a marketing decision, do a station’s marketing concerns outweigh their responsibility to accurately report the news?
• How do people stay informed if they can’t trust what they see and hear from news media?
• How much of a story can be omitted before becomes fake news? Or how much bias can be injected into a story before it becomes fake?
• How much responsibility does a news outlet bear to make news consumers aware that a story has been corrected or that they’ve published additional facts? (See what happened here.)

Our ability to come together as a unified people is directly tied to our ability to find common ground. When half the country is operating with one set of “facts” and the other half with another, that ability is profoundly hindered; we can’t find common ground if we don’t we share common facts.

There are plenty of things for which the President can legitimately be criticized, but people’s opinions of him should not be based on lies, partial truths and innuendo. Same with Congressional Republicans; God knows there have been many times I wanted to throttle the lot of them, but I want my criticisms to be based on fact, not fiction.

I don’t want to absolve the individual of the responsibility to stay informed, but I’m finding that it’s nearly a full-time job to sort out the real from the fake news. I’m retired so I have time for that, but what, for example, does a single mom do if she wants to stay informed? Cut out sleep altogether?

Conservatives have been trying to hold the news media accountable and demanding accurate reporting for years even if it means reporters and anchors have to do something completely crazy, like, you know, actually investigating rumors before tweeting them or repeating them on television.  That’s not surprising because, frankly they’re the ones who usually come out on the short end of this situation. Now it’s time for fair-minded liberals to demand it too.

How Stupid?

Here’s the question: How stupid does one have to be to disqualify one’s self from employment as an anchor at CNN? The answer, apparently, is “pretty damn stupid,” as demonstrated by Carol Costello this morning during coverage of the D.C. Navy Yard shooting.

On the off chance that the powers that be at CNN think this does disqualify Costello, my dog Shasta is available as a replacement. I think her IQ would match up favorably with Costello, and she looks great on camera.

Jay Carney Bitchslaps The White House Press Corps

 

Do you see my middle finger? That represents laziness. And my index finger represents sloth. Either that or I’m hexing you.

Jay Carney calls the White House press corps slothful and lazy. I generally loathe journalists and this makes even my blood boil. Really. I’m nearly speechless.

Note to the press corps: At this point, the Obama Administration is the boyfriend who treats you like crap in public because he knows you don’t have the gumption to leave. Try and have a little self-respect.

Leave It To The Times

Regardless of the fact that a mob of 500 baseball bat and crowbar wielding longshoremen stormed the port in Longview, Washington, took and held hostages, cut brake lines and dumped grain, the Seattle Times has chosen to illustrate the story with photos and captions depicting law enforcement as the aggressors and the longshoremen as peaceful protesters. One photo, depicting a protester standing on the tracks in front of a locomotive, is clearly intended to evoke memories of Tianamen Square or maybe Washington State’s liberal darling, Rachel Corrie.

To be fair, the Times news article covering the disturbance reported the facts much as I’ve recounted them here, relying on their bevy of low-information readers to skip all the nasty words and head straight to the photos.

Keeping You Ignorant Since 2008

Just in case you haven’t thought about this lately, my friend, Jimmie, compiled a list of stories that the “journalists” of the Democrat-Media Complex couldn’t be bothered to report. It’s really rather shocking to see them all listed together, especially considering some of the stories they do cover as if they’re of some import. Today we find them breathlessly reporting that Sarah Palin’s staff watched Fox News during the 2008 election. Frankly, it frightens me that anyone would find this at all newsworthy. I mean, I wouldn’t be even a little shocked to find out that people in the Obama Administration watch MSNBC non-stop. Disheartened, maybe, or disgusted but not surprised.

What might the media be reporting on if Sarah Palin would just get out of their heads, you ask? Why, this.

Anthony Weiner, Christian Martyr?

It’s truly astonishing how far the press will go to spin the #weinergate story in their beloved Weiner’s favor. In this one, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post likens being a Christian to being a pervert and suffering the consequences of your own actions to being fed to lions because of your religion.

Barbara Walters Goes Off The Deep End

Barbara, you know I love you like a sister, but you're killing me here!

According to Barbara Walters, Sarah Palin’s bus tour of U.S. historic sites is as ethically questionable as Anthony Weiner’s digital indiscretions. You know it’s bad when Joy Behar feels compelled to defend Palin.

Oh, Barbara, how low you’ve fallen.

Calling Something Satire Doesn’t Magically Make It So

Do you like how I cleverly worked in a photo of Todd Palin? Oh, and look, there's li'l Trig up there, too!

Back in June of 2009 there was a dust up involving David Letterman and a questionable joke he made concerning Sarah Palin’s daughter, Willow. At the time, I thought I could be of help to Mr. Letterman by providing him with a few simple guidelines he could use to determine if his jokes were falling outside the bounds of propriety.

In light of Jack Stuef’s incredibly crass and callous Wonkette column* in “honor” of Trig Palin’s birthday, I considered updating the test for his benefit. Sadly, after careful thought, I decided that it probably wasn’t worth my time. Judging by this column, I’m guessing he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about what he says or does or what kind of person he is. He might care, though, about what people think of him as a writer.

This wasn’t the best piece of political satire I’ve ever read. <—Understatement.

In fact, when I read it the first time, I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be satire; it just seemed like a mean-spirited rambling attack-by-proxy on Sarah Palin. For me – and I think for most decent people – the piece was missing an important satirical element. You know…the humor. I feel safe saying that the vast majority of people don’t find it funny when a grown man verbally assaults a toddler…and a disabled toddler at that. And let me just say right here that if you found the piece humorous in any way, you should probably engage in some serious soul searching because there is something seriously wrong with your soul. Yes, Mr. Stuef, I’m talkin’ to you.

Something else was missing, too…a clearly elucidated point. I had to find out by reading elsewhere that the purpose of the column was to mock Palins “well-documented” use of li’l Trig as a political prop. Now I’ll grant that this prop angle was mentioned once in the column, but since none of the presumably supporting links and graphics actually supported that point, well, yeah. I missed it. Anyway, I’m not buying that Stuef really cares about Trig Palin at all, because what does this column do if not exploit Trig to make a political point?

(And since someone else brought it up, I’d love to have someone explain to me how Trig Palin is any more of a prop than Sasha and Malia Obama…say when their mother used them to promote her anti-obesity initiative?)

All in all, a poor outing for Mr. Stuef. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if this is the best he can do, I hope he has a Plan B.

*I didn’t intend to link the Wonkette piece here; hey, they don’t deserve the traffic but I hear now that it’s been removed. Not to worry! Warner Todd Huston, writing at Red County, has reproduced it in its entirety. Good luck, Mr. Stuef, if you ever want to apply for a job that requires good judgment or common decency.

Mere Coincidence Or Something More?

Dori Monson wonders if it’s merely a coincidence that the accident report from Bill Gates, Sr.’s, August hit and run accident wasn’t made public until the day after the election.

That got me thinking so…I headed over to the local news rag, the Seattle Times, to check out their coverage, which was notably – but not surprisingly – missing in action until the story was broken by another news outlet, KIRO-TV.

What makes this story so interesting is that Mr. Gates the Elder was the public face for I-1098, the latest attempt to establish an income tax beachhead in Washington State. One wonders whether the press would have been so forgiving if it had been Tim Eyman involved in a hit and run in the weeks leading up to the election.