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| Damian Harris starting 64 yard TD run |
A few weeks ago, Jackspotpourri made the point that in football, the offensive line is the best determinant of the ultimate winner. Last night, amidst 50 mph wind gusts, making passing almost impossible, the New England Patriots defeated the Buffalo Bills by a score of 14 to 10. Since the game was a struggle of ground games, rare in the NFL, the Patriots won because they had the better offensive line. In the first quarter, it opened the way for Damian Harris’ 64 yard touchdown run and that was the game. Buffalo’s late attempts at catching up failed because their offensive line wasn’t good enough to hold off New England’s blitzing defense.
JL
* * *
Why Do Lies Get Equal Treatment?
When one side of a story is filled with documented lies, why should it receive equal coverage to stories whose content can be documented as truths? When a politician or civic leader has lied repeatedly, why should he be given “equal time.”
Challenging such lies in the media only
serves to give them an even larger share of space in print and electronic
media, covering their rebuttals, which of course also are lies. I haven’t seen too many articles lately
rebutting the beliefs that the moon is made of green cheese and that the earth
is flat. Why are political issues any
different?
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| Milbank |
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has had a lot to say about this. Read his column of December 3 which is reproduced below.
(You
might want to make a copy of it and put it in a box with other similar columns
expounding the truth about what is going on in the United States right now and
hide it under some floorboards in your attic to be found by a future grandchild or
great-grandchild living in a country in which democracy might not any longer exist.)
From the Washington Post - Dec. 3, 2021 - by Dana Milbank
"A sampling of headlines atop the influential Politico Playbook newsletter over the past month:
“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”
“Dems start to face the hard
questions.”
“Does the WH owe Larry Summers an
apology?”
“The other big intra-Democratic
fight.”
“No BIF bump for Biden.”
“White House braces for a bad CBO
score.”
“ … Biden dithers …”
“Biden tries to calm nerves about
2024.”
“The case for why Biden is screwed.”
Even the extraordinary news that
jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a
qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers]
to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”
It isn’t just Politico. My impression
of other outlets’ coverage of President Biden had been much the same:
unrelentingly negative. Was it my imagination?
No, it wasn’t.
Artificial intelligence can now
measure the negativity with precision. At my request, Forge.ai,
a data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote, combed through
more than 200,000 articles — tens of millions of words — from 65 news websites
(newspapers, network and cable news, political publications, news wires and
more) to do a “sentiment analysis” of coverage. Using algorithms that give
weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story, it rated
the coverage Biden received in the first 11 months of 2021 and the coverage President
Donald Trump got in the first 11 months of 2020.
The findings, painstakingly assembled by
FiscalNote vice president Bill Frischling, confirmed my fear: My colleagues in
the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.
After a honeymoon of slightly
positive coverage in the first three months of the year, Biden’s press for the
past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage
Trump received for the same four months of 2020.
Think about that. In 2020, Trump
presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of
thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House
and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a
racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to
discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair
election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions
to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as
favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today. Sure, Biden has had his
troubles, with the delta variant, Afghanistan and inflation. But the economy is
rebounding impressively, he has signed major legislation, and he has restored
some measure of decency, calm and respect for democratic institutions.
We need a skeptical, independent
press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an
existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative.
And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more
favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.
Sentiment analysis ranks coverage
from entirely negative (-1.0) to entirely positive (1.0), and most outlets are
in a relatively tight band between -0.1 and 0.1. Overall, Biden was slightly
positive or neutral for seven months, ranging from 0.02 to -0.01. That
plummeted to -0.07 in August — a lower number than Trump hit in all of 2020 (or
2019) — and has been between -0.04 and -0.03 ever since. Trump never left a
narrow range of -0.03 to -0.04. (The data set doesn’t go far enough back to
make a comparison to Trump’s first year in office.)
Also noteworthy: Trump got roughly
twice as much coverage in 2020 as Biden has received in 2021. And the coverage
of Biden is noticeably more negative than the tone of news coverage overall.
Predictably, Breitbart and the New York Post are among the most negative
outlets, but even liberal ones such as HuffPost and Salon have been negative. (The
Post was the closest to neutral, at 0.0006.)
How to explain why Biden would be
treated more harshly than a president who actively subverted democracy? Perhaps
journalists, pressured by Trump’s complaints about the press, pulled punches.
Perhaps media outlets, after losing the readership and viewership Trump
brought, think tough coverage will generate interest.
I suspect my peers across the media
have fallen victim to our asymmetric politics. Biden governs under traditional
norms, while Republicans run a shocking campaign to delegitimize him with one
fabricated charge after another. This week, Republicans threatened a government
shutdown to block Biden’s vaccine mandates, after a year of efforts to
discourage vaccination. Yet, incredibly, they’re simultaneously blaming Biden
for coronavirus deaths — deaths occurring almost entirely among the
unvaccinated.
“More people have died of covid under
President Biden than did in all of 2020,” proclaimed Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), GOP
conference chairman.
As Biden might say: C’mon, man.
Too many journalists are caught in a
mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and
fiction. It’s time to take a stand."
I agree with Milbank's column.
* * *
Playing Hardball on the Steps of the SCOTUS
Both those in favor of Roe vs. Wade and those
wanting it reversed demonstrated in front of the Supreme Court building last
week. The former were polite,
determined, and had clever slogans. The
latter, who were more numerous, were vicious, impolite and personally insulting
to those in favor of continuing access to legal abortions.
The pro-lifers were playing hardball. The pro-choice people were playing
ping-pong. And so it goes with issue
after issue. The Democrats must learn to
play hardball on all controversial issues.
The next time the pro-choice people have a demonstration, they should
bring wire coat hangers, to counter the images of
murdered fetuses the pro-lifers always flaunt.
JL
* * *
In the United States, at least up until now,
the election process has been sacrosanct.
There were winners and there were losers and both sides respected the
result. No longer is that the case.
The Republican Party won’t play by the rules
and is actively taking steps in States where they control the legislatures to
change the rules governing the electoral process so that the loser might end
up the winner. (The outdated electoral college already makes that possible in
presidential elections.)
Republican efforts now hinge on calling any
election they lose as ‘stolen’ from them and have no hesitancy to try to
reverse the result by any means possible, including violence. This is the philosophy of Donald Trump and
those who follow him, including most Republican officials, afraid of losing the
votes of his followers. There is only one way to describe it. It is ‘criminal.’ It is a way of breaking the rules which is
tantamount to breaking the law.
The Democratic Party is the party which
respects law and order. Their behavior of the Republican Party, however, marks it
as the party of criminals, some of whom even endorse the violent January 6 attack on
the Capitol, an effort to break election laws.
The Republicans who know better but are afraid to speak out, as Liz
Chaney had the guts to do, are no less criminal that the rest of them, led by the former president.
Without an honest election process, democracy
is dead, which is the way the financial supporters of the Republican Party want
it to be. Their aim is to discredit and replace it with an autocratic,
undemocratic system of choosing our government. They loudly claim
otherwise, wrapping themselves in the American flag and alluding to the trappings of
religion and try to convince Americans that the support of gullible voters,
misguided and misinformed by Republican criminals, is a substitute for
democracy. It isn't.
As of this moment, the election process in this
country is on life support. Without it,
democracy dies. What happens next is up to you.
JL
* * *
If as I hope, enough women and persons of color (whose votes are crucial to Democratic victories) manage to vote in 2022 to drive many Republican officeholders out of their jobs, they will not have any difficulty finding new employment. Their work for the G.O.P. has well qualified them to work as automobile salespeople, especially in the used car market.
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| "Would I lie to you?" |
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