The 60 Minutes piece on Ron DeSantis and Florida's vaccine rollout is wildly, embarrassingly flawed. Journalistic malpractice. reason.com/2021/04/05/60-…
CBS claims Publix got the vaccine contract because of a "pay for play" scheme, i.e. donating to DeSantis's campaign. DeSantis calmly debunked this entire notion, but 60 Minutes cut the clip to make it look like he dodged.
DeSantis gave CBS this extremely plausible explanation—Publix was NOT first, they have 800 stores, etc.—and CBS just didn't use it. They clipped it so that DeSantis looks irate and combative.
Additionally, 60 Minutes weirdly makes it sound bad that DeSantis wanted to vaccinate the elderly first. But that's the right strategy! It's bonkers to pretend it isn't.
Then there's some nonsense about Florida essentially "privatizing" the vaccine rollout. Corporations! Profits! Scary! But... DC did this too (CVS is vaccinating). It's not like some weird pro-business Republican thing.
All that stuff is merely bad; the "pay for play" allegation is wildly irresponsible given they could not substantiate it and DeSantis explained why it was wrong. Heads should roll.
Here's Florida's emergency management director (a Democrat).
The mainstream media had a massive investment in the idea that DeSantis/Florida was incompetent and Cuomo/NY approach was good. But this notion has not survived scrutiny, and it's weird to watch journalists try even harder to sell it. reason.com/2021/04/05/60-…
The 60 Minutes DeSantis/Publix story is the biggest journalism screwup in quite a while. But with one exception, no media watchdogs at mainstream outlets are covering it. Why? reason.com/2021/04/07/60-…
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post have covered this. Nothing from CJR or Poynter. The PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter dial hasn't budged!
Worst of all, Axios framed the story as DeSantis trying to "milk" his mistreatment, calling it "a juicy chance to ingratiate himself with the GOP base by bashing the media." Uh, the media bashing is well deserved here. DeSantis didn't start this, CBS did.
As I am primarily known for criticizing cancel culture, Will Wilkinson—who once suggested I branch out to "slightly more important stories"—may be the closest thing I have to an ideological foe. In that spirit, I oppose his firing. reason.com/2021/01/22/nis…
Staggering number of hypocrisies here, frankly. Will's tweet was very bad, but more obviously a joke than what the president of the organization, Jerry Taylor, tweeted earlier this year.
Taylor's tweet "can be interpreted as condoning violence" to a much greater degree than Wilkinson's. And Taylor is the boss, so one could reasonably infer that sort of thing is okay if he does it.
I don't think Trump's speech on Wednesday meets the legal definition of incitement to riot—i.e., I don't think he could be prosecuted. But it inarguably contributed to the riot. He should resign, and if he doesn't, he should be impeached, removed, and barred from seeking office.
For the Founders "high crimes and misdemeanors" did not literally mean criminal behavior, it meant abusively abhorrent public misbehavior. Having egged on a crowd that ransacked the Capitol, resulting in 5 deaths, I think it's hard to argue that standard was not met.
If your rebuttal is “but Democrats” or “but media unfairness,” then you are not actually responding to the charge that what Trump did and said was horrible. Enough excuses.
Like most people with a vaguely functioning moral compass, I was horrified by The New York Time's story, "A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, a Reckoning." But I don't blame the teen who publicized the video. I blame the NYT editors who lionized him for it. reason.com/2020/12/28/new…
I refer to Jimmy Galligan as cancel culture's Count of Monte Cristo for his unusually elaborate revenge scheme. But really, there's nothing unusual about teenagers being extremely cruel to each other. Maybe you don't remember high school? I sure do!
Young people say and do awful things to each other. The point of school is to socialize them out of this, to teach better behavior, to allow them to fail, to learn, to grow. That's why it's wrong to expect perfect behavior from a 15-year-old. No one can pass this standard.
It's a huge problem that many in the mainstream media and pundit class (i.e. the people attacking Maggie Haberman for daring to share NY Post's Hunter Biden scoop) now think its their job to suppress information they don't want the public to read. reason.com/2020/10/14/hun…
Would social media sites reduce distribution of the mainstream press's articles, which are often thinly or anonymously sourced? Would the BuzzFeed report on Steele Dossier need to pass a fact-checker's muster before you could share it? What are the rules here?
In defending publication of the Steele Dossier, @benyt wrote: "We trust you to reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality." Try squaring that statement with all the mainstream media and social media moderators now asserting it's wrong to even note the Hunter Biden story.
Yes, I am aware that "orientation" has existed for some time as an alternative, and some people have—dare I say it—a *preference* for it. I really don't think the former is typically malicious, though.
This is really being made into a thing, I guess? "Orientation" can also be used in a way that implies a choice, though: i.e. people say "political orientation" all the time. slate.com/news-and-polit…