Stunning reports, flawed news media, flawed messaging and a very informative interview
I have about a week to prepare for vacation that requires extra organization and training of backup for my all day job, plus the vacation that follows. I’ll still be writing throughout, though some shortcuts will be employed.
I regularly skim through hundreds of articles, posts, tweets and memes each week, trying to separate wheat from chaff, make determinations of what I believe are the most important to further filter and refine to give you fresh ideas and old history, mixed with some mirth and hope, entertainment and comfort.
For much of November I’ll just have to scale back on the refining. Instead of long explanations and quotes, I’ll filter to the most important readings or videos that I find and give you the links to read, watch and listen. It’ll be more like a recommended reading/viewing list, leaving you to make time to click on the links and form your own opinions about the topical events.
Election seasons are times of excessive redundance and a tendency towards increased social polarity that typically continues post-election till the beginning of the 5 week year-end holiday season.
Every social or political problem before us has a solution. Despair and surrender are not good options to reach that goal. (The following meme was created in 2016 around the time of the party conventions.)
Jon Stewart had a long interview with Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey, about 81 minutes long. I rarely sit longer than 5 or 10 minutes to listen or view something so you’ll rarely see me recommend something this long. It’s titled ‘Dismantling Racism Is Patriotic’ and was first broadcast 7 months ago.
Cory Booker:
There are a whole bunch of good people of all different backgrounds who recognize that our criminal justice system is not just. Or as Bryan Stevenson says “You have a criminal justice system that clearly treats you a lot better if you’re rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”
Okay, that’s not news to anybody. But they don’t know how to fix it and they are often overwhelmed or they surrender to cynicism… that I can’t make change, that the system can’t be changed. That’s a whole bunch of folk that could be a part of concrete solutions that we can get something done.
While Stewart bears down on the intractability of racism and social inequity, Booker - who doesn’t shrink from the truth - redirects the conversation to his pursuit of the pragmatic’s path, highlighting what’s special about this country, emphasizing that we have to engage and discuss things with people we disagree with and that we can.
He highlights our core needs as the expansion of moral imagination and the courage to deploy more empathy.
If you don’t have 81 minutes to spare, watch it in 20 minute segments. I was pretty impressed by Booker. And since he quoted Bryan Stevenson, here’s another 5 minute read about that guy and his remarkable achievements.
Major conventional news sources have to do their job of informing way WAY better than NBC News did here.
In the competition to get news out quickly, it’s not uncommon for the media to get a few details wrong. Responsible media maintains its integrity by issuing corrections and retractions about such errors.
But NBC News also got the retraction wrong.
Much of Almaguer’s account was inaccurate, based on flawed information provided by a source who was unnamed in the report, according to people at the network. Those people said Almaguer was incorrect when he reported that the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave police no indication he was in danger when he answered the door. In fact, San Francisco police have said that Pelosi was struggling with the intruder, David DePape, when they first saw him.
But before NBC News’ hasty removal of the video from its website — accompanied by a vague note that the story “did not meet NBC News reporting standards” — it spawned a sinister new narrative.
It provided fodder for fresh right wing conspiracy theories with the flawed information and even more conspiracy theories when they deleted the online video. Not only did the reporter use a poor source of information but an editor erred in determining the source credible, too. Correcting two errors should never delete the video of the bad reporting as that inevitably provokes claims that the truth is being censored or hidden.
The hit to NBC’s credibility is pretty big here especially in its impact on a very polarized public.
A lot of times we bore witness to news events where it’s perfectly clear that the federal response launched by the strange ex-president were more than overkill, involving some pretty shady and possibly illegal actions.
Utilizing a made-up law enforcement force composed of personnel from multiple agencies to deal with protesters - many of them charged with no crimes - was wrong. Abducting random protesters off the streets without providing their identities or their authority was likely illegal.
So it’s not a big surprise when more than two years later, proof emerges of the ex-president’s effort to create his own special police force who created a terror threat that didn’t exist caused by an organization that didn’t exist either.
Any president utilizing multiple government agencies for pure propaganda and election-boosting services is wielding excessive power that needs to be curtailed by Congress.
The proof is startling but not unexpected: antifa was always a made up threat, a useful political bogeyman that the strange ex president utilizes still. The surprise is how his private quasi-police force spied on and investigated peaceful protesters never charged with any crime at all.
The longterm impact of exercising presidential power in unethical and illegal ways is it creates the mistaken belief that all presidents do the same things. Not only did this strange president act improperly but he’ll claim that Biden does it too, with zero evidence to back that claim. Projecting his ethical breaches onto his political opponents is one thing the strange ex-president is good at. Be sure to read the article to grasp how he politicized agencies while hurting their credibility too.
Finally, speaking of projection, there are two areas where most in the Republican party have gone repeatedly while the Democrats have done a terrible job of fighting back. They keep claiming that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis amplified it by charging 20 Black ex-felons with the crime of voting illegally, even though it appears that most or all did so unwittingly without any intent to break the law.
Meanwhile multiple reports by news agencies in multiple states have turned up several dozen examples of people deliberately casting illegal ballots including some using the names of dead spouses. In almost every case, the voters doing that have been Republicans. Democrats should compile all those reports to fight back and make it clear that most of the fraudulent voting was done by Republicans.
The other charge made by Republicans that are widely distributed by conspiracy theorists like QAnonsense pushers is that Democrats are all a bunch of pedophiles who drink children’s blood and practice cannibalism on the kids. On the surface it sounds so ludicrous that no reasonable adult would believe these claims, yet quite a few do.
And like the other false narrative numerous reports of pedophilia, child pornography, etc by lawmakers or campaign staff have emerged over the past 6 years. And again, most of the perps by far have been Republicans.
Meidas Touch, much more effective messagers, compiled this brief video after accumulating and aggregating those reports. Assembled like this, the impact is devastating to the guilty. It’s a brief but must-see video.
So one long interview, a short video, and 3 more links to read. All, I think are essential.
Keep on moving forward and making America a good example again.