Recently in Journalism Category

There just is no moral bottom for those who strive to suppress Politically Incorrect opinions.

The family-run Twitter account of a young girl who went viral for posing in photos mocking New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been pulled. The family claims to have received death threats for using their daughter to parody photos of a visit Ocasio-Cortez made to a migrant detention camp last year.

Earlier this week, the account had tweeted out several photos of "Mini AOC," an 8-year-old girl named Ava ... widely known for her impersonations of Ocasio-Cortez, standing outside a fenced-off park in an all-white outfit and red lipstick, looking visibly upset.

Today, April 18, 2019, American journalism brims over with awareness that a prosecutor's decision not to pursue criminal charges does not necessarily mean that the person in question is actually innocent. It is not "exoneration" as that term is widely understood.

Mark the date on the calendar and count the days until the next report that refers to the Death Penalty Information Center's so-called "innocence list" of supposedly "exonerated" former death row inmates as if the people on it actually are innocent. I predict it won't be long. Memory is short, and confirmation bias is powerful.

Kennedy and Trump/WH had been in negotiations for months over Kennedy's replacement.  Once Kennedy received assurances that it would be Kavanaugh, his former law clerk, Kennedy felt comfortable retiring, according to a source who was told of the discussions.

Luke Nichter has an op-ed in the WSJ titled A Vietnam Myth That Refuses to Die. It illustrates how an allegation can be widely repeated and come to be accepted as fact if it fits in with the preconceptions that most journalists share, even if the evidence to support it is flimsy.  We see this on crime issues regularly.

This is why the journalism profession would be greatly improved by greater diversity of viewpoint.  Everyone has confirmation bias.  It's only human.  But if a group of people has a diversity of viewpoints, then any assertion will have a substantial number of people willing to challenge it.

Is a lawyer who has ever defended a person accused of serious misconduct per se "unfit to be a judge"?  If so, everyone who has ever been a criminal defense lawyer is disqualified.  If I wrote an op-ed saying that a nominee was unfit because he once represented a murderer and sent it to the New York Times, what is the chance it would be printed?  Absolute zippo.

Yet today the NYT has an op-ed hit piece attacking Fifth Circuit nominee Kyle Duncan on the ground that he once represented Harry Connick, the former District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, in a case arising from a Brady violation committed by attorneys in Mr. Connick's office, not Mr. Connick personally.

Newspaper editorials are statements of opinion, but those opinions are often supported by assertions of fact.  As the saying goes, everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.

On this blog we have often called out the New York Times editorial page for its particularly loose association with the truth.  See, e.g., this post from 2013.  NYT editorials regularly make factual assertions that seem to be pulled out of advocates' talking points.  If they do any fact-checking at all on their editorials before they print them, they are doing it exceptionally poorly.

Now Derek Hawkins reports in the WaPo that Sarah Palin has sued the NYT over false assertions of fact in an editorial.

Far too often, people run to the courts claiming that some action of the executive or legislative branch is unconstitutional when their basis is really nothing more than strong disagreement with the merits of the decision.  It is refreshing to see a recognition of the important difference in this editorial in the WaPo.

Much as we find Mr. Trump's travel ban offensive, imprudent and unwise; much as we believe it inflicts real harm not just on America's foreign policy objectives but also on families, communities and institutions in the United States, it's fair to wonder whether it really amounts to an attack on Islam and an affront to the Constitution.

That's a step in the right direction, but understated.  There is no need to wonder.  The order is well within the President's legal and constitutional authority, as I have explained previously on this blog.  Of course the Post is entitled to its opinion on the wisdom of the policy, which I won't get into here.  We should give credit where it is due for seeing the difference between "offensive" and "unconstitutional," a difference too seldom recognized.

The anti-death-penalty crowd very earnestly desires a case of a demonstrably innocent person actually executed, and if they can't find a real one they will just invent one.  Employing the Lenin Principle, if they can simply repeat enough times that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent of burning to death his baby daughters, he will become innocent.  The original New Yorker article on the case was a shameless piece of propaganda, as demonstrated in this post.  After the first year, it seemed like we were making some progress on balanced coverage, as noted in this post, but as time went on the only people interested in the case were those with an anti-death-penalty agenda, and that has become the overwhelmingly dominant narrative.

In their quest, they went after the original prosecutor in the case for a claimed Brady disclosure violation.  Interestingly, in Texas you can take a bar discipline case to a local jury, so that is what former prosecutor (and now judge) John Jackson did.

Regrettably, the only coverage on the decision I can find is by the Marshall Project, an advocacy group masquerading as journalists.  So we have to take the story with a heaping tablespoon of salt.  The WaPo is printing this report instead of devoting actual journalism resources to it.  Update:  Michael Kormos has this article on the verdict in the Corsicana Daily Sun, the local paper for the venue.  Regrettably, the article has no information on the trial or the evidence presented that convinced the jury the charges were groundless.

Fox 16 News in Arkansas has this 12-minute video with its reporter Donna Terrell, a witness to last night's execution of Kenneth Williams.  Five minutes in, she says Williams' chest was going up and down, though her description is less dramatic than that of another media witness.  This lasted about four minutes, she says.  She does not say that anything she observed indicated pain.  She saw no grimacing or clenched fist, but what she saw was not the peaceful "going to sleep" that she expected.

I wonder how the witnesses are briefed on what to expect.  Movements do happen.  This article by Dr. Patty Khuly (DVM, presumably) on PetMD, regarding animal euthanasia, says:

Movement after death (such as an intake of breath) is not considered a sign of pain or incomplete euthanasia. It is common. In fact, some postmortem movement is typical. It happens because of electrical impulses remaining in the peripheral nerves of the body after brain waves have ceased.

The anti-DP crowd is wasting no time exploiting public misunderstanding, and I have no doubt they will be aided by the less objective, less professional elements of the press.  Some reporters are just in love with the term "botched execution."  Truly, deeply, passionately.  So they will jump at the chance to call any execution "botched" on the thinnest evidence.  Applying the Lenin Principle, if an execution is called "botched" often enough in the media, then it becomes "botched" in the public mind.  No factual basis required.

There are many ways to misuse numbers to intentionally create a false impression in the mind of the reader.  Such deception is morally no different than lying, in my view, even if one carefully avoids saying anything false.  Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has pointed out an exceptionally egregious example from the New York Times.

The headline of the Times article is "Amid 'Trump Effect' Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants."  The article states:

Nearly 40 percent of colleges are reporting overall declines in applications from international students, according to a survey of 250 college and universities, released this week by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

The actual finding of the survey is "39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers."  That is a complete nothingburger, but cherry-picking the first number creates a very wrong impression.

Cowen is too generous in the title of the post:  "This one is a real blooper and I cannot let it pass by."  The word "blooper" implies an innocent mistake or accident.  This looks like intentional deception to me, and that appearance is reinforced by the fact that the misleading story and atrocious headline are still on the NYT website three days after this has been all over the internet.  Additional commentary comes from James Freeman at the WSJ and Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy.

We see similar cherry-picking in arguments about criminal justice, but this is such a clear and obvious example of the deceptive tactic that I thought it worth noting here.

This story reminds me of an old REO Speedwagon song:

But I know the neighborhood
And talk is cheap when the story is good
And the tales grow taller on down the line

Ian Millhiser, the Justice Editor at ThinkProgress, informs us:

President Trump "is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border," according to the Associated Press.

But AP did not say that.  Notice the placement of the opening quotation mark.

Debra Saunders has long been the resident person of sense (singular) on the opinion pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.  I have called her the SF Chrontrarian, and we have quoted her columns many times on this blog.

Debra is moving to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and she is going to Washington as that paper's White House correspondent.  We at CJLF congratulate her and wish her well in the new gig, though we will miss her in California.