26 October 2008 @ 6:48PM >>
A local TV reporter in central Florida made television history the other day by questioning Saint Barack’s running mate in a manner usually reserved for Republican candidates.
And, of course, disciples of The One aren’t happy about it.
So the TV station has been cut off from all access to the Obama campaign for the duration of the election.
WFTV-Channel 9’s Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday. A friend says it’s some of the best entertainment he’s seen recently. [...]
West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama’s comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn’t being a Marxist with the “spreading the wealth” comment.
“Are you joking?” said Biden, who is Obama’s running mate. “No,” West said.
West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America’s days as the world’s leading power were over.
“I don’t know who’s writing your questions,” Biden shot back.
Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.
“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign.
McGinnis said the Biden cancellation was “a result of her husband’s experience yesterday during the satellite interview with Barbara West.”
[...]
WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, “When you get a shot to ask these candidates, you want to make the most of it. They usually give you five minutes.”
Jordan said political campaigns in general pick and choose the stations they like. And stations often pose softball questions during the satellite interviews.
“Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”
Voters overwhelmingly believe that the media wants Barack Obama to win the presidential election. By a margin of 70%-9%, Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win on Nov. 4. Another 8% say journalists don’t favor either candidate, and 13% say they don’t know which candidate most reporters support.
[...]
In recent presidential campaigns, voters repeatedly have said they thought journalists favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican. But this year’s margin is particularly wide. At this stage of the 2004 campaign, 50% of voters said most journalists wanted to see John Kerry win the election, while 22% said most journalists favored George Bush. In October 2000, 47% of voters said journalists wanted to see Al Gore win and 23% said most journalists wanted Bush to win. In 1996, 59% said journalists were pulling for Bill Clinton.
In the current campaign, Republicans, Democrats and independents all feel that the media wants to see Obama win the election. Republicans are almost unanimous in their opinion: 90% of GOP voters say most journalists are pulling for Obama. More than six-in-ten Democratic and independent voters (62% each) say the same.
For an industry that by all measures is in severe financial trouble, you’d think that reporters and editors would be a little more worried about the public’s perception of their output. But the media’s short-term desire to elect Barack Obama is apparently more important than their long-term credibility. That’s an exceedingly poor business decision.
24 October 2008 >>
I’m excited to announce that the Documentary Channel will be showing my film Indoctrinate U several times next week as part of its “Controversy in America” series. Airtimes are:
Monday, October 27th: 09:00 PM - 10:30 PM
Tuesday, October 28th: Midnight - 01:30 AM (After midnight Monday)
Saturday, November 1st: 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Sunday, November 2nd: 02:00 AM - 03:30 AM
Tuesday, November 4th: 03:00 AM - 04:30 AM
(All times Eastern U.S.)
The Documentary Channel is available on satellite and many cable systems nationwide. Check your provider for channel information.
These times are subject to change. Visit the Documentary Channel’s website for an up-to-date schedule.
21 October 2008 >>
The current market turmoil is not due to an insufficient amount of government meddling; quite the opposite, as the Washington Post notes in an editorial today:
[T]he problem with the U.S. economy, more than lack of regulation, has been government’s failure to control systemic risks that government itself helped to create. We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets.
[...]
We’ll never know how this newly liberated financial sector might have performed on a playing field designed by Adam Smith. That’s because government interventions of all kinds, from the defense budget to farm supports, shaped the business environment. No subsidy would prove more fateful than the massive federal commitment to residential real estate — from the mortgage interest tax deduction to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates under Mr. Greenspan. Unregulated derivatives known as credit-default swaps did accentuate the boom in mortgage-based investments, by allowing investors to transfer risk rather than setting aside cash reserves. But government helped make mortgages a purportedly sure thing in the first place. Home prices seemed to stand on a solid floor built by Washington.
Since no government regulator can know in advance how new man-made economic rules will affect the financial choices people make, no regulator is ever capable of understanding the full set of potential pitfalls those regulations could create. Any wholesale changes to the functioning of our markets is therefore extremely risky.
In a political environment like this, new regulations are an easy sell. People will support any bill that puts a stop to Demonized Financial Activity X—as long as they think it’ll only cost other people. But when deciding whether to support a particular regulatory solution, remember that you’ll never get to hear a full accounting of its possible downsides. That’s because there’s no human or computer on the planet capable of accurately modeling the quintillions of variables that will also change as those regulatory changes ripple through the world’s economic oceans.
New regulations may seem obvious, but the damage they can cause rarely is, sometimes even in retrospect.
Since those with an ample supply of pessimism are already comparing our economy to that of the Great Depression—I’m not denying there’s the potential for pain in our future, but call me once the economy has contracted by 33% or when unemployment hits 25%—perhaps it’s useful to recall what happened in the 1930s when government bureaucrats in their infinitesimal wisdom decided that they knew better than markets:
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
[...]
“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”
Sadly, our country once again seems to be blindly groping its way towards socialism.
18 August 2008 @ 8:07AM >>
Chandler Tuttle, who did some great editing work on Indoctrinate U, is coming out with a film of his own.
2081 is his soon-to-be-released short film adapted from the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron. The film is set in a future society where everyone is finally equal. People who excel in any area are deliberately handicapped by the government in order to enforce equality. People with above-average strength are shackled to weights to prevent their strength from being an unfair advantage. Those deemed too intelligent must wear earpieces that emit loud crackles and noises to stifle coherent thinking.
In other words, the world has finally become the egalitarian “utopia” that today’s social engineers desire.
You can see the trailer for 2081 at the film’s website, finallyequal.com.
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.
Norman Thomas
14 June 2008 @ 1:52PM >>
A reader and viewer of Indoctrinate U recently wrote to me asking about a t-shirt I wore in the film: “I caught a glimpse of one of the t-shirts you were wearing, but didn’t really get the whole thing. It looked like it had a Republican elephant on it with a circle and a line through it. What was it really?”
I wrote back:
You correctly identified the t-shirt. It had the Republican Party logo with a circle-slash through it, and below that the text: “I Hate Republicans.”
For a while during the shooting, I wore a series of shirts deliberately intended to help me blend in to the environment, similar to the way that some species camouflage themselves.
The shirts (two more of which are shown in the attached photos: a CCCP shirt with the Soviet hammer and sickle, and a Joseph Stalin t-shirt) were originally part of an experiment that was intended to be a scene in the film. I wore different politically-themed t-shirts around campus and tried to capture various reactions. We did get a number of under-the-breath comments disparaging my “Viva la Reagan Revolucion!” t-shirt done in the iconic Che style and my “Proud Republican” t-shirt, but unfortunately, we had trouble finding the right mic setup to reliably capture such comments. So we pretty quickly scrapped the idea.
But after I realized that certain t-shirts granted me better access to the campus, I kept wearing those ones around.
Speaking of t-shirts, we’ve now got a few available over at the Indoctrinate U store, where we’ve just added a bunch of Indoctrinate U gear.
However, I should warn you in advance that these shirts probably won’t grant you better access on campus. Quite the opposite, possibly.
13 May 2008 @ 9:01AM >>
For years, universities have worked to increase diversity of appearance. Now, it seems like the one form of diversity most important in a marketplace of ideas—diversity of thought—is finally getting some attention. At least at one school:
How liberal is the University of Colorado at Boulder?
The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners. A recent pro-marijuana rally drew a crowd of 10,000, roughly a third the size of the student body. And according to one professor’s analysis of voter registration, the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans.
Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. “We should also talk about intellectual diversity,” he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation’s first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.
Mr. Peterson’s quest has been greeted with protests from some faculty and students, who say the move is too — well, radical. “Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?” asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. “I’d rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective.”
Even some conservatives who have long pushed for balance in academia voice qualms. Among them is David Horowitz, a conservative agitator whose book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” includes two Boulder faculty members: an associate professor of ethnic studies who writes about the intersection of Chicano and lesbian issues, and a philosophy professor focused on feminist politics and “global gender justice.”
While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like “an animal in the zoo.” We “fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus,” replies Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
[...]
“That’s what a good university does — look for an area where they don’t have depth or diversity and start investing,” Mr. Gleeson says.
19 April 2008 @ 10:45AM >>
In the New York Sun, John McWhorter, the former Berkeley professor and current Manhattan Institute Scholar who appears in Indoctrinate U, has some thoughts on the type of groupthink documented in the film:
I’ve just attended a showing of Evan Coyne Maloney’s fine documentary about political correctness on college campuses, “Indoctrinate U.” Finally what we usually only read about: University of California Regent Ward Connerly shouted down by a near-violent audience, or an English professor whose department tried to blackball her when they found out she was a Republican.
The film got me thinking about how I was treated when I was teaching at Berkeley and wrote a book against racial preferences. The truth is that if someone made a movie about my life and had students throwing bricks through my office window and a cabal of professors signing a petition calling for my tenure to be revoked, it’d be good drama but sloppy history.
Most people, including professors, are not especially political, and I should say that the Berkeley administration was nothing but supportive of me, seeming to value that my new press presence kept Berkeley in the news more than anything else.
Sure, I got some catcalls, and God knows what sorts of things were being said behind my back. And there was, in fact, one “Indoctrinate U”-type episode. A black education professor invited a black-ish star sociology professor to come to campus and “debate” me, and the event turned out to be an occasion for audience members loudly booing me and hurling extended tirades.
To me, it was all in a day’s work: you don’t do what I do expecting not to be hated. What has never left me, however, is a chat I had with the education professor a few days later. He actually thought the event — a know-nothing burning in effigy in which my opponent had clearly not even read my book — had been a useful debate. To him, that public spanking was a productive and appropriate response to my opinions — at a university no less. I will never forget his sober expression, his sad, earnest eyes: he actually was sincere.
This is the ideology “Indoctrinate U” is about, and it is mistaken to treat these people as bullies, willfully precluding debate by hurling epithets like “racist” and “sexist.” This analysis implies an insecurity of these people which they do not feel. They thrill as much to the idea of open dialogue as anyone — but they think that a radical leftist perspective is truth, not opinion. To them, dialogue about a conservative perspective’s correctness is no more legitimate than dialogue about heliocentrism.
15 April 2008 >>
The only thing that can be more gratifying to a filmmaker than having a packed house is having the house packed with a lively audience that responds enthusiastically.
It was truly a special night, and it makes me all the more certain that the only thing standing in the way of massive success for Indoctrinate U is making sure that enough people get a chance to hear about the film.
14 April 2008 @ 9:11AM >>
Reminder: The New York City premiere of Indoctrinate U is this evening at 6:30PM. For more information, visit the Indoctrinate U website.
Also, I’m scheduled to discuss the film and the premiere on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning at 7:40AM (Eastern time).
How is it that when Christian parents complain about such books, they are at best politely dismissed and at worst attacked as intolerant bigots, but when Muslim parents complain, schools can’t bend over backwards fast enough to accommodate them? Is it because people fear violent reprisals from Muslims more than from Christians? Or is it just a matter of the “secular” schools actually being against Christianity specifically instead of all religions in general?
It all goes back to the Multicultural Hierarchy, which dictates that actions can’t be judged without knowing on whose behalf those actions are taken.
Therefore, an action (such as removing books that offend some religious sensibility) can be considered fascistic when done at the request of Christians, but the exact same action, when done in the name of Islam, is considered a sign of tolerance and understanding.
That’s because Christians rate higher on the Guilty Oppressor scale and lower on the Victim scale than gays, who apparently don’t rate as high in the Multicultural Hierarchy as Muslims do.
Of course, the hidden story here is that gay rights activists have been silent. Is the gay community content with suddenly playing second fiddle to a constituency that places higher in the Multicultural Hierarchy? Or, as Jason suggests, are they just afraid of inciting a community with an outsized proportion of members who’ve shown a propensity to commit murder over far more trivial matters?
25 March 2008 >>
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is undergoing an assault in an all-out wikifight.
Recently, FIRE’s Wikipedia page and that of the organization’s president, Greg Lukianoff, have been repeatedly modified to insert bogus claims trying to paint the organization as some sort of right-wing front group.
It’s ironic that FIRE finds itself the subject of a partisan smear campaign. FIRE as a group is quite principled in its non-partisan nature, and its staffers are more intellectually diverse than many colleges seem to be. Over the years, they’ve provided consistent and unwavering support for liberals and conservatives alike—and to folks of just about any other school of thought represented on college campuses.
All of the proof for this is quite easy to find, as FIRE’s record is well-documented and readily available online.
Earlier today, Lukianoff singled out Simon DeDeo, one of the Wikipedia editors, for his “many errors.” To his enormous credit, when presented with the facts, Mr. DeDeo retracted his “remarks on [FIRE], some of which were in error and others of which were I think overly harsh and rhetorical.”
Unfortunately for FIRE, the rest of the group’s wikicritics may not be as intellectually honest as Mr. DeDeo.
The second video shows what happens when a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice comes to give a speech on campus. In Welcome Wagon NYC, students at NYU Law School object quite strongly to the presence of Antonin Scalia, giving him a reception worse than the President of Iran received at that other large Manhattan institution, Columbia University.
At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”
I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.
All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.
A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”
[...]
Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.
There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book “Whose Welfare?,” the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn’t working — yet many sociology professors even now deny that ’70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City’s 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.
[...]
All this is bad for society because academics’ ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges. Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.
[...]
Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It’s the only way universities will earn back society’s respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.
6 December 2007 @ 8:36AM >>
Did you know that the radical left-wing group ACORN has its own taxpayer-financed public high school in New York City? I didn’t, until it was reported today that some parents are unhappy with the principal.
Going unasked in all the coverage, of course, is why the City of New York would hand the reins of a public school over to a political organization?
9 November 2007 @ 2:24PM >>
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announces another victory:
[A] federal judge has ordered San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the California State University System (CSU) to stop enforcing several unconstitutional speech codes. The codes were challenged in a lawsuit filed by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) in cooperation with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
“This decision is a vital step in the fight against unconstitutional campus speech codes,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The court’s decision frees hundreds of thousands of students throughout the CSU System from unlawful restrictions on their expression.”
The lawsuit—brought by the SFSU College Republicans and two of the group’s members—came after the SFSU College Republicans were put on trial by a campus tribunal for stepping on makeshift Hamas and Hezbollah flags as part of an anti-terrorism rally they held in October 2006. Despite having the power to dismiss the charges at any time, SFSU dragged the plaintiffs through a five-month investigation and hearing before ultimately clearing the group of baseless “harassment” charges. The plaintiffs’ lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asks the court to hold SFSU accountable for unlawfully mistreating the plaintiffs on the basis of their constitutionally protected expression and to strike down several unconstitutional speech codes at SFSU and in the CSU System.
Burning the American flag is protected First Amendment speech, on the grounds that actions intended to convey a political message should be treated no differently than actual speech. The Supreme Court made that decision in the 1980s. So it’s good to know that, decades later, stepping on the flags of two terrorist organizations is also protected speech.
But it’s troubling that administrators at a taxpayer-funded university—an entity legally prohibited from punishing students for protected political expression—are so ignorant of the basic parameters of their students’ rights that the school needed to be brought to court in the first place.
You shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer in order to exercise rights enumerated in the Constitution.
The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.
“The University of Delaware’s residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”
The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”
According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”
At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as “treatments.”
The taxpayers of Delaware should demand that the folks running the state’s university get put into a treatment program of their own.
Update: The University of Delaware has agreed to dismantle this very troubling program. But these things have a way of resurfacing under new guises, so I hope the students and RAs at the University of Delaware will be vigilant about watching the school’s future actions, especially now that it appears RAs who spoke out against the program are being threatened with retribution.
25 October 2007 @ 9:07AM >>
Last night, David Horowitz came to speak at Emory University as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, an event created to highlight the human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam around the world. Horowitz started off by showing a picture of a woman being shot in the head for “sexual improprieties.” In some Muslim cultures, sexual impropriety includes being a victim of rape, something for which countless women have been killed in an attempt to restore the “honor” of the rape victim’s family.
It used to be that leftists would be outraged by such a thing. After all, they claim to sympathize with the oppressed. But these days, when women are killed for being the victims of rape, or when gays are executed for being who they are, leftists first must look into who is doing the killing. If it’s a Muslim doing the killing, then for some reason, it is excusable.
That’s because there is a hierarchy of political correctness, where one group’s rights can be superceded by another group’s rights depending on which group is viewed as more oppressed by Westerners. This leads to some rather strange double-standards: if a Christian opposes gay marriage on religious grounds, he’d be branded a bigot and would be blacklisted from campus. But if a Muslim leads a country that routinely executes gays, he would be welcomed with open arms.
This is the environment into which David Horowitz stepped when he tried to demonstrate the very real crimes against humanity that are committed in the name of Islam. So, naturally, the leftists at Emory University had to make sure that Horowitz’s speech got shut down: in today’s politically correct world, the “rights” of radical Muslims to murder women who run afoul of Sharia law apparently trumps the right of David Horowitz to criticize those murders. So, naturally, Horowitz needed to be silenced.
The Emory University College Republicans, which sponsored Horowitz’s speech, issued a press release describing what happened:
On Wednesday evening, the Emory University Chapter of the College Republicans hosted acclaimed author and activist David Horowitz for a lecture on radical Islam as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. From the beginning of Horowitz’s speech, rowdy protesters continually interrupted him and less than half an hour into the event, the crowd became so disruptive that police were called in and Horowitz had to be escorted off stage.
Over 300 people - a cross-section of students, professors, and Atlanta community members - packed into White Hall where the event was held. The audience included a wide range of Leftists from Amnesty International, Veterans for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as Muslim groups such as the Muslim Student Association. In addition, members of “National Project to Defend Dissent & Critical Thinking in Academia,” an organization dedicated to opposing Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events throughout the country, participated in the protests dressed in orange attire as a reference to Guantanamo Bay. There was also a sizable group of men and women dressed in traditional Muslim garb as well as students wearing Kafiyehs, a symbol of Arab solidarity.
“I’ve spoken at Emory University several times and I’ve never seen it this bad,” said Horowitz responding to the crowd as they shouted and jeered. “This is exactly what the fascists did in Germany in the 1930s.” Protesters began their efforts as soon as Horowitz was introduced with boos and chants of “Heil Hitler.” Despite the people who stood with their backs to Horowitz and the shouting of obscenities and other remarks from audience members, Horowitz attempted to deliver his speech that covered academic freedom and radical Islam. The loud chants, sign-waving, and disruptive gestures continued to escalate from audience members until the atmosphere was so chaotic that even the police present were unable to subdue the crowd. Horowitz was led off stage and left the campus under tight security, and the event came to an abrupt end.
This is yet another example of how college campuses no longer have any tolerance for diversity of thought. Free speech is only welcome on campus if you say the right things.
5 October 2007 @ 9:12AM >>
If an extremist group such as the Ku Klux Klan sponsored rallies in Washington D.C. that drew hundreds of thousands of people, I suspect the media would report who was behind the protests.
But several years ago, when anti-war protesters started rallying under the banners of communist relics, the media kept silent. The fact that the media was ignoring the radical element of the groups organizing the anti-war rallies was the prime reason that I was motivated to shoot the first few videos for this site.
Now that the protest movement has fizzled, a little light is finally being shed on the shady groups that sponsor the rallies. Reuters reports:
Saturday’s protest, sponsored by the Troops Out Now Coalition, came two weeks after an antiwar event sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, which drew roughly 10,000 people. ANSWER also sponsored a rally in March.
The groups’ agendas are similar, opposing what they call “imperialist” U.S. policy not only in Iraq but toward countries like Cuba and Iran — which has alienated some supporters.
[...]
Both groups’ leaders were associated with the Workers World Party, which advocates a shift toward a Soviet-style planned economy. But a 2004 dispute prompted some members to form the splinter Party for Socialism and Liberation.
I wouldn’t exactly call this extensive reporting—only two sentences alluding to the extremism of the organizers—but these few words are still the most I’ve seen the establishment press write about the ideological underpinnings of the protest movement. And this is years after the fact, and only after the groups proved ineffective. Why are we just hearing about this now? Why hasn’t this been more extensively reported? Or even reported at all?
My suspicion is that reporters feared mentioning this sooner because it would have marginalized the protest movement. The protest leaders would be seen for the extremists that they are.
Perhaps I should be thankful for the media not doing its job. If this information had been reported several years ago when the story was still relevant, I might not have ended up with a career as a filmmaker.
27 September 2007 @ 7:13AM >>
When CBS dumped Dan Rather and replaced him with Katie Couric, the network changed the gender, the generation, and as Kenneth will tell you, even the frequency of its top newsreader.
Speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday evening, CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric pulled back the curtain on her personal views of both the war in Iraq and former “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather.
[...]
The former “Today” show anchor traced her discomfort with the administration’s march to war back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ’shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”
I don’t think disagreeing with the administration makes one unpatriotic, although I do have to wonder about someone who becomes uncomfortable when she sees people displaying American flags or referring to fellow Americans as “we.”
25 September 2007 @ 9:28AM >>
After days of denials, The New York Times has finally admitted that a controversial MoveOn.org ad referring to General Petreus as “General Betray Us” was not handled according to the paper’s usual advertising guidelines. Public Editor Clark Hoyt writes:
For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.
But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to.
On Monday, Sept. 10, the day that Gen. David H. Petraeus came before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of troops, The Times carried a full-page ad attacking his truthfulness.
Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”
“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.
The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like “despicable,” “disgrace” and “treason.”
[...]
Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?
The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.
The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.
By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”
For its part, MoveOn has decided to pay the Times an additional $77,083 for the ad, to make up the difference between what they paid and what they should have paid. This move shields the Times against accusations that it made an in-kind contribution to MoveOn, something that could be legally perilous for the paper.
But it strikes me that MoveOn giving more money to the Times after the paper gets caught doesn’t change the equation much. One high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement gives some cash to another high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement. Big deal.
18 July 2007 @ 12:44PM >>American Journalism Reviewcovers the professional fallout (or lack thereof) from the Duke non-rape case:
Michael B. Nifong—the district attorney who pursued Seligmann, Finnerty and teammate David Evans even as evidence of their innocence mounted and his case imploded—was held accountable for his actions. Hours after Seligmann testified, Nifong announced his intention to resign; the next day, he was disbarred.
The media incurred no such penalties. No loss of license, no disciplinary panels, no prolonged public humiliation for the reporters, columnists, cable TV pundits, editorial writers and editors who trumpeted the “Duke lacrosse rape case” and even the “gang-rape case” in front-page headlines, on the nightly news and on strident cable shoutfests.
Of course, Nifong had information and power the media did not. His failing in the case cannot be overstated, nor can it be equated to that of a throng of journalists and pundits, however odious some of their reporting and commentary. But the media deserve a public reckoning, too, a remonstrance for coverage that—albeit with admirable exceptions—all too eagerly embraced the inflammatory statements of a prosecutor in the midst of a tough election campaign. Fueled by Nifong, the media quickly latched onto a narrative too seductive to check: rich, wild, white jocks had brutalized a working class, black mother of two.
“It was too delicious a story,” says Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor, who is critical of the Times’ coverage and that of many other news organizations. “It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”
As with so many stories, lies that fit the media’s preconceptions were reported, while contradictory facts were ignored. It’s just another example of how a lack of intellectual diversity in the establishment press results in a shoddy product. It seems that too many media organizations don’t have anyone in the newsroom challenging the preconceptions that led to this journalistic fiasco.
In this case, the reputations of the accused were destroyed, and they will never be fully restored. The prosecutor’s malfeasance was amplified by reckless reporters who pushed an ideological storyline about race, class and gender. The prosecutor has been punished, but none of the reporters faced any consequences. They’re still employed, ready to distort the next story.
11 July 2007 @ 7:11AM >>
A new Zogby poll indicates that Americans are becoming aware of the problem of political bias in academia. Saying that “a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem,” the poll adds that a full 39% consider the problem to be “very serious.”
9 July 2007 @ 8:20AM >>
Librarians aren’t just librarians anymore. Now they’re political activists:
Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?
Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”
[...]
“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.
[...]
Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows. “Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when information is restricted.”
So, to the New York Times, left-wing social activism equals cool. That’s about what I would expect from the Times.
But I wonder if the reporter bothered posing a follow-up question to the liberal librarians: what book, exactly, did the Patriot Act ban? What information was restricted?
21 June 2007 @ 10:06AM >>
MSNBC took a detailed took at political contributions made by reporters and found some numbers that, to me anyway, aren’t terribly surprising:
[We] identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
[...]
The pattern of donations, with nearly nine out of 10 giving to Democratic candidates and causes, appears to confirm a leftward tilt in newsrooms — at least among the donors, who are a tiny fraction of the roughly 100,000 staffers in newsrooms across the nation.
The donors said they try to be fair in reporting and editing the news. One of the recurring themes in the responses is that it’s better for journalists to be transparent about their beliefs, and that editors who insist on manufacturing an appearance of impartiality are being deceptive to a public that already knows journalists aren’t without biases.
“Our writers are citizens, and they’re free to do what they want to do,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick, who has 10 political donors at his magazine. “If what they write is fair, and they respond to editing and counter-arguments with an open mind, that to me is the way we work.”
The openness didn’t extend, however, to telling the public about the donations. Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.
Several of the donating journalists said they had no regrets, whatever the ethical concerns.
“Probably there should be a rule against it,” said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine’s profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. “But there’s a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler — a journalist interviewing him had murdered him — the world would be a better place. As a citizen, I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don’t regret it.”
Ah yes, the fine reporter would have killed President Bush—who is just like Hitler—but darn it, that’s illegal. So instead he gave $250 to a left-wing group.
There’s a longstanding tradition that journalists don’t cheer in the press box. They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work. Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair, most mainstream news organizations discourage marching for causes, displaying political bumper stickers or giving cash to candidates.
Appearing to be fair is about as related to being fair as appearing to be pregnant is to actually being pregnant. A woman I know was once asked how far along her pregnancy was. She wasn’t pregnant. And she was not amused.
If Mark Singer had not contributed $250 to America Coming Together, he would appear to be more fair. But in the absense of that contribution, he would still be a journalist who implies that President Bush should be murdered because he’s morally equivalent to Hitler.
Sure, Singer might appear more fair, but would you trust him to actually be fair?
