Category Archives: Journalism

On Satire

Satire—caricatures included—is a highly civilized and refined way of exposing ‘folly, vice, or stupidity,’ to follow the dictionary. The dictionary defines satire as ‘a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.’ Writers, this one included, have instantiated in writing the questions the cartoons of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo posed in pictures.

With a cartoon, a subset of satire, ‘the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect,’ so as to bring to the fore the illustrator’s perspective. The Charlie Hebdo satirical spoofing, like the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons before it, did not in the least exaggerate the connection between the example the prophet set, his teachings, including the exhortation to Jihad, and the violence that convulses a critical mass of Muslims.

Beavis (Obama) & Butthead (Steve Inskeep) Do National Public Radio (NPR)

Barack Obama, Critique, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio “interviewed” President Obama in the Oval Office. Inskeep’s interview is really a non-probing, lighthearted quiz that can be paraphrased as follows:

* So glad you were able to pass two major executive actions. Did the fact that elections had just passed liberate you to perform so liberating a service?

* I hope you continue to do the things you want to do, Mr. president. I’m with you, Bro.

* Pretend the following is a question, when in fact it is but a way for me to “cleverly” show you the degree to which I’m down with you. Here goes: Bloody Congress! How do you, Great Leader, intend to get those rube-hicks on board with your enlightened executive orders?

* Republicans are nativists. I’m so smart. We both are. (The two laugh like Beavis and Butthead.)

* Finally, and before I suggest my own flattering explanation of how wickedly smart your foreign policy is—outwitting enemies with empathy—I’m going to get really tough and give you a chance to convince me America has not been further divided racially by yourself.

* Have I told you how awesome you are for bringing the price of oil down? Consider it said.

Each and every question posed by Steve Inskeep suggests its own, most-flattering reply.

Repulsive.

Read with vomit bag handy.

The Fourth Estate (Media) Moving Country Into Third Dimension

Hollywood, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, Technology

Being part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”

It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It

details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.

MORE.

How Frat Feminists ‘Report’ On Rape

Feminism, Journalism, Propaganda, Socialism

In reporting on an alleged rape at the University of Virginia, Rolling Stone Magazine’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely made a pledge not to the facts of the case and the principles of investigative journalism; but to her sorority of feminists. In so doing, this frat feminist followed the propagandizing principles of radical leftist ideology, which is to pursue consciousness-raising on issues they deem important.

Now, an earlier apology over the failure to fact-check the story has been retracted. Instead, editor Will Dana is prepared only to apologize for failing to do her journalistic due diligence. She concedes she was “mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request [the alleged victim] to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account.”

Her equivocating, disgraceful words:

Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school investigates sexual assault allegations.
Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely reported the story, Jackie said or did nothing that made her, or Rolling Stone’s editors and fact-checkers, question her credibility. Jackie’s friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported her account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of Phi Psi, the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn’t confirm or deny her story but that they had questions about the evidence.
In the face of new information reported by the Washington Post and other news outlets, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account. The fraternity has issued a formal statement denying the assault and asserting that there was no “date function or formal event” on the night in question. Jackie herself is now unsure if the man she says lured her into the room where the rape occurred, identified in the story, as “Drew,” was a Phi Psi brother. According to the Washington Post, “Drew” actually belongs to a different fraternity and when contacted by the paper, he denied knowing Jackie. Jackie told Rolling Stone that after she was assaulted, she ran into “Drew” at a UVA pool where they both worked as lifeguards. In its statement, the Phi Psi says none of its members worked at the pool in the fall of 2012. A friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone) told the Washington Post that he found Jackie that night a mile from the school’s fraternities. She did not appear to be “physically injured at the time” but was shaken. She told him that that she had been forced to have oral sex with a group of men at a fraternity party, but he does not remember her identifying a specific house. Other friends of Jackie’s told the Washington Post that they now have doubts about her narrative, but Jackie told the Washington Post that she firmly stands by the account she gave to Erdely.
We published the article with the firm belief that it was accurate. Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie. We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening.

Will Dana
Managing Editor

Most journalists these days are activist reporters-cum-celebrities. Prime examples are Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon and Brooke Baldwin, not one of whom deserves to be called a journalist. They do not report on the central events of the day, as journalists of old were obliged to do by definition. Rather, they decide which story should matter to YOU. The activist-journo-celebrity proceeds from the working premise that you don’t care about the right things, and that You, the hick-rube viewer, needs some good old Marxist consciousness-raising.