INVENTING THE OTHER: Salon invents Kurtz!

TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 2013

Part 2—Seitz-Wald toys with his readers: Halfway across the globe, “Buddhist lynch mobs” run in the streets, the New York Times has reported.

Last week, here at home, things weren’t entirely different. At the devolving, highly tribal Salon, a set of pseudo-liberal writers staged a series of interventions on behalf of pure tribal belief, waging war against Serena Williams and Paula Deen, among others.

Williams and Deen were hunted down for imperfections of utterance concerning sexual assault and race. Beyond that, they don’t know how to apologize correctly!

We’ll get to those cases before the week ends. For today, let’s consider the clownish way Salon instructed its readers with regard to the behavior of Howard Kurtz, who became especially vulnerable when he accepted employment at Fox.

For the past fifteen years, Kurtz has hosted Reliable Sources, one of the oddest programs in the history of cable news. As of this coming Sunday, that era will come to an end.

Kurtz is leaving CNN for the Fox News Channel, where he will host Fox News Watch, another of the oddest programs in cable news history.

For quite a few years, Fox News Watch was one of the smartest programs on cable news. It was perhaps the only program on Fox which was actually “fair and balanced.” If anything, it tilted a bit to the left, due to the fact that Jeff Cohen, a very bright, genuine progressive, tended to dominate discussion as a weekly panelist.

Week after week, year after year, Cohen would beat the tar out of Jim Pinkerton, the lumbering fellow Fox employed as Cohen’s conservative foil. Eventually, Cal Thomas was brought on board to help Pinkerton out. But even with two conservatives battling Cohen, Cohen tended to win the day in the program’s discussions.

Later, Fox News Watch featured Neal Gabler, another smart liberal—and the program’s capable host, Eric Burns, was plainly not a movement conservative.

Finally, Fox put an end to this nonsense, dispensing with Gabler and replacing Burns with a reliable hack for a host. But for many years, this was one of the most progressive-tinged programs on cable.

Now, Kurtz will host Fox News Watch. At Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald was brought in to kill the pig.

In one way, you can’t really blame Seitz-Wald. As a 2008 Brown graduate, he may be innocent of much of Kurtz’s history, which has sometimes been good. But Seitz-Wald wrote a truly clownish account of the new Fox host—a clownish account designed to please the Buddhist lynch mobs which currently run at Salon.

Seitz-Wald invented Kurtz as The Other, misleading and flatly misinforming us liberal rubes as he did.

“Howard Kurtz & Fox News: A true love story,” the headline atop his profile reads. “The purported media critic has long treated the ‘fair and balanced’ network with awe and romance.”

Those headlines are striking—but are they accurate? Without question, Kurtz has never done enough to address the lunacy of Fox. But that can be said of many people and many sites, including the hapless Salon.

That said, has Kurtz really staged a “true love story” with respect to Fox? Has he treated the disgraceful channel “with awe and romance?”

Hungrily, we fell on the evidence. Implausibly, Seitz-Wald offered this, larding his prose with the links you can find in his original text:

SEITZ-WALD (6/22/13): Kurtz took Sean Hannity’s side in his battle with Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison after the Fox host called the congressman an Islamic “radical” comparable to the Ku Klux Klan; he defended the network after the Shirley Sherrod scandal; downplayed News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association; favorably profiled anchors Bill Hemmer, Shepard Smith, and Megyn Kelly, along with chieftain Roger Ailes; seemed to take the network’s side in its dispute with former host Glenn Beck; and declared that Karl Rove is “generally fair-minded in his commentary.”

In the early days of the Tea Party rallies in 2009, Kurtz equated “whatever role Fox played in pumping them up” with mainstream reporters who were “late in recognizing the significance of the protests.” Journalists at CNN and MSNBC who “also performed badly on April 15th,” he wrote in a Washington Post Q&A with readers by being a few days on their importance. When another reader questioned the bleeding of opinion programming into Fox’s straight news block, Kurtz pointed to the quality work of Major Garrett, a good reporter who later left his job as Fox’s White House correspondent because he said wanted to “think more.” Garrett’s work is solid, but he’s a single anchor and reading the Q&A, it feels like Kurtz is going a bit out of his way to defend the network. He played the same Major Garrett card in an interview with former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn during the height of the White House’ war on Fox News.

In his original text, Seitz-Wald includes eleven links to help establish his claims. Unfortunately, four of the links go to Highbeam.com, a site which only presents the first few paragraphs of the pieces in question. (Unless you “try us out for 7 days, FREE!”)

We don’t know why Seitz-Wald linked to Highbeam rather than to the actual reports by Kurtz, which are available in their entirety. For example, here is Kurtz’s full report on the Sherrod firing, in which he made a blindingly obvious point about Fox’s limited role in the matter.

Whatever! We don’t know why Seitz-Wald linked to Highbeam. But we will guess that few of Salon’s tribal readers ever bother clicking such links. In its modern incarnation, Salon exists to give tribal succor and to invent tribal belief, not to offer serious analysis or real information.

Who needs real links, Seitz-Wald seems to say. We’ll paraphrase: Who needs facts?

Has Kurtz been a hack for Fox in the way Salon suggests? We decided to check Seitz-Wald’s examples—though on the surface, we couldn’t help noting their rather limited nature. The second paragraph we have posted largely turns on a single on-line Q-and-A session, not on anything Kurtz ever wrote. And good lord!

When we checked, we discovered that the Q-and-A which follows was the offending passage. Tell the truth: Does this sound like the stuff of a major love story?

MEDIA BACKTALK, WASHINGTON POST (4/20/09):
Question from New York City: In your chat last week, you included Neil Cavuto as one of the "commentators who are paid for their opinions." Really? According to his Fox bio, "Neil Cavuto was named anchor and managing editor of business news for the Fox News Channel in July 1996. He is now the senior vice president of Business News and host of 'Your World With Neil Cavuto.'" Senior VP of Business News is an opinion position? It sounds like straight news to me.

Howard Kurtz: Well, Cavuto wears two hats. He is a Fox News executive, yes, but he is also a daily host and I don't think he would deny for a second that he dishes out plenty of his own opinions on the air.

It's important to make these distinctions. At the tea party tax protests last week, the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity served as cheerleaders and star attractions, whipping up the crowd with anti-tax, anti-spending and in some cases anti-Obama rhetoric. Cody Willard, a Fox Business Network anchor, delivered a brief rant: "Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country?"

On the other hand, I erred during last week's chat in saying that Greta Van Susteren was among those leading the charge. She covered one of the tax protests but was not endorsing them or taking an ideological stance. I've never seen her as having a particular agenda, unlike some of her Fox colleagues.

There were particular journalists at CNN and MSNBC who also performed badly on April 15th. And the mainstream media, including the WP, were late in recognizing the significance of the protests, whatever role Fox played in pumping them up. So I think it's important to be as specific as possible in these critiques and not paint with an overly broad brush.

Is that the stuff of a love story? Speaking about his beloved Fox, Kurtz derides the way two Fox stars “whipped up the crowd” at those tea party rallies “with anti-tax, anti-spending and in some cases anti-Obama rhetoric.” He then describes another Fox anchor engaging in “a brief rant” about the fascism that seems to be sweeping the country.

Kurtz then retracted an earlier error in which he had wrongly criticized his beloved! And yet, this one on-line Q-and-A plays an extremely large role in Seitz-Wald’s invention of Kurtz as The Other—an indictment which led Salon’s headline writer to portray a “true love story” in which Kurtz has treated Fox “with awe and romance.”

Those Buddhist lynch mobs were misled when they read Seitz-Wald’s account of that lonely Q-and-A—as they were when Seitz-Wald criticized Kurtz for his comments about Sherrod. And by the way: With whom was Kurtz supposed to side in the fight between Beck and Fox?

Much of this was pure clowning. Meanwhile, has Kurtz written “favorable profiles” of Fox personnel?

You be the judge! With headline included, this is the way Kurtz’s profile of Smith began. Remember, this profile is supposed to be part of Kurtz's love affair with Fox:

KURTZ (11/16/09): Shepard Smith, leaning against prevailing winds on Fox News

Shepard Smith had barely started his program when a Fox News producer told him that their reporter had snagged an interview with Chris Christie, the challenger locked in a tight race with New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

"Here I am, the face of the network, it's a week before the election, and our station is about to put a Republican on live and have nothing from the Democrat," Smith recalls now. He reacted viscerally at the time, telling viewers: "Wow. . . . My apologies for the lack of balance. If I had control, it wouldn't have happened."

Seated in his Sixth Avenue office with an erect posture that matches his caffeinated style, Smith says he was unaware that correspondent Shannon Bream had grabbed Christie on the fly. "I came off looking condescending," he says. "I handled it poorly."

But the on-air rebuke underscored Smith's status as an outspoken newsman at the network defined by high-decibel conservatives, a stance that has earned him respect even from some Fox-hating liberals.

Oops! In his profile, Kurtz praised Smith because he isn’t like the partisan crackpots at Fox! As Kurtz correctly noted, even some Fox-hating liberals had made this obvious observation by this time.

(For ourselves, we were impressed by Smith’s passionate on-scene reporting during Katrina. We were grateful for his performance and remain so today.)

Seitz-Wald’s pseudo-profile of Kurtz represents terrible journalism. In fact, it isn’t “journalism” at all; it represents the latest attempt to pleasure the tribal mobs which now comprise the base for the floundering, low-IQ Salon as it apes the horrible conduct pioneered by Fox.

Day after day, readers are handed this crap at Salon, a site which featured high quality journalism when it began in the 1990s. Last week in particular, Salon’s misued readers were handed this crap all week long.

With some exceptions, Salon no longer attempts to provide real journalism. Like other publications, it has followed the tribal imperative, handing utterly stupid shit to its misled, irate tribal readers.

On a budget basis, this may be the way to survive in the current tribal environment. But it’s clearly the way to create stupid gangs of furious, misinformed citizens—to create Buddhist lynch mobs.

Seitz-Wald’s piece is pure imitation—an imitation of journalism, an imitation of life. Whatever the truth about Kurtz may be, it certainly can’t be found here.

Presumably, Seitz-Wald was better than this when he emerged from the groves at Brown. But life at Salon has dumbed him down. His profile of Kurtz is invention.

Might we note one other fact about Seitz-Wald’s hapless piece? We refer now to his opening complaint, the one involving Sean Hannity.

Hannity is one of the most destructive forces in modern pseudo-journalism. Salon has been too dumb and too feckless to report on his horrible conduct, or on the way his deceptions are permitted by the major upper-end news orgs to which Salon writers defer.

That said, the fact remains—Hannity is a beast. Leave it to Seitz-Wald to locate an instance where he was basically right! In short:

Did Howard Kurtz really “[take] Hannity’s side in his battle with Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison after the Fox host called the congressman an Islamic ‘radical’ comparable to the Ku Klux Klan?”

We’re tribally sorry, but no—he did not. Seitz-Wald is either mistaken or he is lying. Either path works at Salon.

In this case, you can actually click the Seitz-Wald link and see Kurtz taking Hannity’s side. In his on-line commentary, Kurtz is discussing Ellison’s appearance on the February 26, 2013 Hannity program.

We hate to tell you, but Ellison actually was quite buffoonish on Hannity’s program that evening. Seitz-Wald links to the on-line assessment Kurtz made on the following day, February 27. In that assessment, we’d have to say that Kurtz was basically right.

But uh-oh! Seitz-Wald gooses readers by saying that Kurtz defended Hannity even after he called Ellison “an Islamic ‘radical’ comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.”

Sorry! Hannity made that unpleasant remark on his February 28 program, one day after Kurtz's on-line assessment. And when he did, Kurtz responded on Reliable Sources. We join his commentary in progress:

KURTZ (3/3/13): I have a record of calling out Sean Hannity when I think he is wrong, but in this case [on February 26], he wasn't wrong. Ellison told me in a statement, “I stood up to Sean Hannity because of what the sequester will mean for millions of Americans who have already been forced to work harder while they get by with less. The president is not being an alarmist-in-chief or president panic when he talks about these cuts, he is leading.”

If you're not a Fox fan, check out the video and make up your own mind. But I do have to deduct points over what Hannity did later in the week [on February 28].

He attacked Ellison, who is Muslim, over having written two papers supporting Louis Farrakhan as a law student and suggesting that Ellison might be the, quote, "equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan." Even Hannity had to allude to the fact that the congressman apologized a half dozen years ago for once having supported Farrakhan and with that, Hannity surrendered the high ground.

Seitz-Wald linked Salon readers to a commentary Kurtz made before Hannity made the statement in question. He forgot to tell readers that Kurtz criticized Hannity for this remark after it was made.

But then, Salon has become a reliable junk heap, a tribute to tribal pseudo-journalism. Last week, Salon worked hard at its dual tasks, inventing The Other and running us rubes.

Salon’s readers are being treated like fools as this process continues. They're being turned into a tribal mob, the kind of mob hacks have inflamed all through the annals of time.

Tomorrow: Can Serena Williams say that?

At CNN, Howard Kurtz will call it a day!

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013

One of the strangest shows ever: Next Sunday, Howard Kurtz will end a 15-year run as host of the weekly CNN program, Reliable Sources.

Kurtz will be going over to Fox, where he will start hosting the weekly program, Fox News Watch.

Kurtz is smarter than most major journalists. Over the years, he has sometimes done good work—and he has hosted one of the strangest programs in cable news history.

The strangeness of Reliable Sources has rarely been mentioned within the guild which is known as the “mainstream press corps.” All your favorite fiery “liberals” have also agreed to stare into air as this program proceeded.

What made this long-running program so odd? Just this:

On Reliable Sources, Kurtz claimed, week after week, to be conducting a show “which trains a critical lens on the media.” But here’s how CNN did that:

First, they hired Kurtz, a member of the upper-end press corps, to host the weekly program. And then, each week, they would assemble a panel of three or four other press corps members to help him conduct his discussions.

Could any other industry even dream of presenting a program like this? Can you imagine a weekly show about health care in which a hospital executive served as host, with three or four other hospital executives serving as his panel?

In any other industry, a show like that would be known as an infomercial. For the past fifteen years, CNN has called its show “a critical look at the media.”

We first posted this obvious point in 1999. Have you ever seen even one of your favorite liberals second this obvious point?

Your favorite stars want to get on TV. Toward that end, they may not tell you the obvious things they are thinking.

It’s your role not to notice these things. After all, they’re on your side!

The very concept of trivia doesn’t exist!

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013

Major pundits couldn’t hear Snowden’s complaint: Whatever one thinks of Edward Snowden, he has made a good observation about the way his actions have been covered.

This weekend, on Fox News Watch, outgoing host Jon Scott quoted what Snowden has said. First, though, he played tape of Dick Cheney calling Snowden a traitor:

SCOTT (6/22/13): Former Vice President Dick Cheney there on Fox News Sunday, calling NSA leaker Edward Snowden a traitor for his actions. Snowden went public again this week reacting to Cheney`s comments and criticizing the media coverage. Part of what he said, "Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history."

Judy, what do you think of his remarks?

Might we paraphrase? In the statement Scott quoted, Snowden said the coverage of his actions has tended quite heavily toward the trivial. He said the mainstream press corps was more interested in his smokin’ hot girlfriend than in the substance of the program on which he released information.

Snowden said the press has tended toward the trivial. Scott asked a panel of pundits what they thought about this remark.

The first to opine was Judith Miller. This is what she said:

MILLER (continuing directly): Well, Edward Snowden, welcome to Celebrityhood! For better or ill.

Look, he has become a genuine folk hero to a lot of people under 30. If you look at the 17-point drop in the president’s popularity among that group, Edward Snowden is responsible for that. And I’m sorry, but he is not going to like a lot of what is written about him.

Did Miller understand Snowden's remark? He didn’t say that he “didn’t like” what has been written about him. Paraphrasing, Snowden said a great deal of the coverage has tended toward the trivial.

Miller didn’t seem to understand what Snowden had said. But as he continued, neither did Scott—and neither did Big Jim Pinkerton, to whom Scott turned next for comment:

SCOTT (continuing directly): Yes, and he thought there was what, going to be universal adulation in the media?

PINKERTON: Right. I think Snowden, as a naive narcissist, has the emerging narrative following up. Look, he is on his way to being Philip Agee, who was the notorious CIA agent who ratted on the agency and got Americans killed in the process, and ended up living out his life in Cuba, where he died under Castro.

Like Miller, Scott acted as if Snowden had complained that the commentary wasn’t favorable. Pinkerton also skipped past Snowden’s point, although parts of the Nexis transcript don’t make much sense. (Fox didn’t post tape of the segment.)

Watching this program, we were struck by a long-standing point of interest. The very concept of trivial coverage is virtually non-existent within the upper-end press corps.

They understand the claim of bias. They understand the claim that they got some factual point wrong. But the notion that they’re wasting their time on trivia?

Our journalists tend to twist their heads when they hear this claim, like the RCA Victor dog.

Miller, Scott and Pinkerton all seemed to miss Snowden’s point. Now, though, Scott raised a new question—and Kirsten Powers, who is pro-Snowden, backtracked to his original critique:

SCOTT (continuing directly): Kirsten, for you, the former vice president’s comments got this reaction from Snowden. He said, "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American." You took that on this week.

POWERS: Well, I just—I think his complaint is completely valid. It’s that people are focusing on things that, whether he was a high school dropout or his girlfriend, or these things that really have nothing to do with the issue, in an attempt to smear him. And even this “narcissistic” thing, you know, it is like—I guess he should have gone into TV or something. You know what I mean? It is not—

I mean, seriously. We work in the most narcissistic industry in history, sitting around pointing fingers at this guy, who basically gave up everything, you know, and had to flee the country because he thought it was so important to expose this information, which has not caused any damage to the United States. That’s the other thing that we keep hearing about, all this alleged damage that has been done. And a lot of good has already been done.

Like the other pundits before her, Powers skipped the question she had been asked—the question about Cheney’s accusation of treason. But at least she showed that she understood the concept of trivial coverage.

Dating back at least to the Clinton-Gore years, our political discourse has tended to drown in a sea of trivia. Why was Gore wearing those three-button suits? A long string of very major flyweights very much wanted to know!

But our “journalists” rarely show any sign of understanding the concept of trivial coverage. There is no shiny object so pointless that it can’t distract our mainstream reporters—or our emerging liberal world, if one wants to be honest.

Why are they wasting their time on trivia? Major journalists rarely seem to understand the concept, even when the critique is directly stated and they’re asked to comment on it.

So it goes as a gang of players strut and fret in Studio A, pretending to conduct a discussion. That said, major kudos to Powers.

“We work in the most narcissistic industry in history,” the spot-on analyst said.

Background report: Inventing The Other!

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013

Buddhist lynch mobs and the factions around Anne Frank: Unless we consult the better angels of our nature, we humans will split into two warring tribes in every way that is possible.

For one example, you might consider Thomas Fuller’s front-page report in Friday’s New York Times. Fuller describes a surprising new case in which a well-known group has been hunting and killing The Other:

FULLER (6/21/13): The world has grown accustomed to a gentle image of Buddhism defined by the self-effacing words of the Dalai Lama, the global popularity of Buddhist-inspired meditation and postcard-perfect scenes from Southeast Asia and beyond of crimson-robed, barefoot monks receiving alms from villagers at dawn.

But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar—and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

“Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims.” There is no way to invent, then loathe, The Other that we humans won’t devise.

For a second example of this impulse, consider Scott Sayare’s report about the two warring factions which now surround Anne Frank.

There have been no lynchings here. But a lawsuit has now been filed between the two organizations Otto Frank created to oversee the memory of his brilliant daughter.

Otto Frank created the Anne Frank House, which operates a very famous museum in Amsterdam. And he created the Anne Frank Fonds, which was “founded in 1963 to manage the copyrights to the Anne Frank diary.”

Now, these organizations are in a cold war about the way Anne Frank’s legacy should be explained to the world. Undoubtedly, each group has valid points to make. We recommend that you read Sayare’s report about their long-running dispute.

But when we humans invent The Other, we wipe away all favorable thoughts about the point of view of that group, which we long to loathe. As Sayare described the genesis of the lawsuit, we were most struck by the highlighted passage:

SAYARE (6/17/13): There are few images of the Holocaust [at the Anne Frank House], or of concentration camps or Nazi propaganda, a choice the Fonds has criticized.

The museum is “missing context,” said Yves Kugelmann, a Fonds board member and spokesman. Anne’s smiling face is “overpresent,” Mr. Kugelmann said, and the House has become a “pilgrimage place” where the girl is used “for everything and nothing.”

“They have a, let’s say, wrong perception of the truth and history,” he said, in an echo of decades of debate over Anne’s portrayal in popular culture.

There could never be just one correct way to tell Anne Frank’s astonishing story. That said, one official at the Anne Frank Fonds seems sure that his counterparts at the Anne Frank Museum “have a wrong perception of the truth and history.”

What happens when we invent The Other? Just a bit later, Sayare reports that Kugelmann recently compared an action by the Anne Frank House “to the seizure by ‘the Germans and their accomplices’ of the Frank family’s possessions.” This is where things tend to go when we practice to loathe.

Anne Frank didn’t conjure the world this way, and she was brilliant and deeply mature, a point we’ll extend tomorrow. That said, we liberals are training ourselves these days in the best ways to loathe The Other.

As we will explain all week, we think it’s a bad idea. Before you know it, those Buddhist lynch mobs can be out in the streets.

INVENTING THE OTHER: Liberally loathing!

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013

Part 1—What David Carr and Paula Deen said: Early this morning, in an undisclosed location, we were struck by the very first thing we read.

Each Monday, David Carr presents his Media Equation column in the New York Times. This morning, he started like this:

CARR (6/24/13): On Thursday night, the host of “The Daily Show” riffed on Paula Deen’s liberal use of both butter and racial slurs, chatted about journalism with Tom Brokaw and parodied the gangster code of honor that has been in the news in the Whitey Bulger trial. Along the way, he did a honey-dripped Southern accent and dropped into a Cagney-esque wiseguy voice.

We were struck by that highlighted passage. Here’s why:

We’ll admit it! At this time last week, we had never heard of Paula Deen.

We have never watched the Food Network, although we assume the channel is on our cable system. Last October, we were surprised when Ruth Marcus cited something called “Cupcake Wars,” which she identified as a Food Network series.

Incomparably, we were saddened. Why would a journalist be aware of something like that?

(Programming note: We single men will start watching The Food Network when it starts inventing new ways to pour milk over cereal.)

Whatever! This Wednesday or Thursday, we finally became aware of Paula Deen. We were so apprised when Salon began its latest effort to invent, then loathe, The Other.

This morning, that general loathing issued in that highlighted passage from Carr. Here’s why we were struck by Carr’s reference to Deen’s “liberal use of racial slurs:”

Heaven help us! Inspired by Salon’s desire to loathe, we actually read the May 17 deposition which has inspired the current wave of attacks on the loathsome Deen.

We not only read it—we read it twice! And we’ll make another admission: Having performed this civic duty, we don’t know what Carr means when he refers to Deen’s “liberal use of racial slurs.”

By all accounts, Deen has never employed racial slurs in her three million public appearances. In her deposition, she describes using the most famous of all racial slurs once, apparently in the year 1986, in a conversation with her husband after she was held up at gunpoint.

In our view, the world would be a better place if she hadn’t done that in 1986. In her deposition, Deen also says that she may have repeated the N-word at some other point or points in recounting arguments between black employees.

In her deposition, she specifically says that she hasn’t used the N-word in racial jokes because she doesn’t tell racial jokes. Although she wearily says at one point, “Every man I’ve ever come in contact with has one.” Click here, scroll to page 22.

For the record, Deen seems to live in a world which is somewhat different from ours. We were born in the same year as Deen. But we can’t say that we’ve ever heard a man (or a woman) tell a racial joke, excluding public performances by comedians, who are often hilarious artists. In our personal life, we can’t say that we’ve ever heard a white person use the N-word in a derogatory or dismissive way.

“Every man I’ve ever come in contact with has” a racial joke, Deen wearily says. At another point, she rolls her eyes at the way the men she knows share sexual material with each other over the Internet.

That world is somewhat different from ours. Still, because we’ve read her deposition, we don’t know what Carr has in mind when he breezily refers to Deen’s “liberal use of racial slurs.”

In her deposition, Deen refers to using a racial slur once, apparently in 1986. And because we've read a few southern newspapers which have included more facts about this case than the New York Times has been willing to share, we have learned that the (white) woman who is suing Deen and her brother made the statements you see below in her own deposition.

We can't judge this woman's case, in which she is seeking $1.2 million, but her name is Lisa Jackson. This is part of the news report from yesterday's Augusta Chronicle:

SKUTCH (6/23/13): Deens’ attorney, Franklin, asked Jackson: “You have never heard Paula make a racist remark, have you?”

“Not heard it,” Jackson replied.

“You have never known Paula to discriminate against a person based on gender, have you?”

“I’m not aware.”

“And you have never known Paula to sexually harass anyone, have you?”

“Not me.”

We can’t judge the merits of Jackson’s suit. But if you read a few southern newspapers, you will be allowed to know that Jackson said she’s never heard Deen make a racist remark.

Here's the bad news:

If you read Salon or the New York Times, you will be exposed to a much more limited set of facts. This morning, you will see Carr open his column with a puzzling remark.

What exactly did Carr have in mind when he referred to Deen’s “liberal use of racial slurs?” We don’t know, but he may have been reading too many Yankee papers over the past several days.

And he may have been reading Salon! In the past week, Salon went on a merry old chase in which the newly low-IQ pseudo-liberal journal kept itself extremely busy inventing The Other and training its readers in the best ways to loathe.

Liberal readers were fed highly selective strings of facts about a wide array of matters. In the case of Deen, the New York Times has basically played along.

We awoke this morning to find Carr making a puzzling statement. What is David Carr talking about? And in what essential way does he differ today from the same-name pseudo-conservative hit man, Boston’s own Howie Carr?

All week long, we will examine the various ways Salon kept inventing The Other last week, while training its liberal readers in the best ways to loathe. In the past, these impulses haven’t worked out especially well for progressive causes or for the American interest. But lord, it can feel so good!

Increasingly, Salon has been working out of a low-IQ trash can. But will our liberal lizard brains permit us to process this fact?

Tomorrow: Lazy, bogus, selective claims in a wide range of cases

Maddow makes fools of her viewers, part 2!

SATURDAY, JUNE 22, 2013

A report which was baldly dishonest: Is the state of Virginia still being forced to pay for Bob McDonnell’s body wash?

Having read Laura Vozzella’s report in the Washington Post, we have no idea. Vozzella made no attempt to raise her concerns about body wash and nasal spray with Dennis Johnson, the state official in charge of this matter. And that was strange, because late in her article, she quoted Johnson giving McDonnell a clean bill of health:

VOZZELLA (6/17/13): Like all new governors and their families, the McDonnells were told the expense rules at the outset of the administration but needed some time for them to sink in, Johnson said in an interview. Energy drinks aside, Johnson said that ever since he gave the McDonnells their refresher on what the state will and won't pay for, their spending has been in line with state policy.

“Typically when an administration comes in, we do discuss things," he said. "There are growing pains, and early on in the administration, there will be some things we have to review and discuss."

Despite that statement by Johnson, Vozzella claims that McDonnell still seems to be getting free body wash. Weirdly, there is no sign that she ever asked Johnson to comment on this allegation.

According to Virginia procedures, McDonnell is supposed to get his mouthwash for free. Vozzella is concerned about his body wash and his nasal spray, but she doesn’t seem to have run these specific concerns past Johnson.

Because we aren’t completely nuts, we can’t say we care a great deal about these pissant concerns. This is especially true when Vozzella presents her claims in such a bungled fashion.

But on Monday night, Rachel Maddow took Vozzella’s peculiar report and journeyed around the moon. You see, Maddow doesn’t approve of McDonnell—and her standards of accuracy are remarkably low when she pretends to report on such pols.

On Monday evening, Maddow staged a 17-minute hoedown for her opening segment. She showed old tape of Richard Nixon and staged a pair of nervous breakdowns about the governor’s use of a digestive system detox cleanse—about his troubling colonics.

The sheer stupidity of this conduct was the focus of Thursday’s post. Today, we thought you might want to see the way Maddow conned her viewers concerning some very basic facts.

In a word, her conduct was egregious. It may be that her work was just careless. But this is the sort of thing ought to get journalists fired.

To watch the whole segment, click here.

Can we talk? Maddow just isn’t obsessively honest, as we have told you for years. Her standards really tend to slip when she’s misleading us liberal rubes about pols like McDonnell.

The work which follows may remind you of an unfortunate fact—you have to be extremely careful about Maddow’s factual claims. In a more general sense, it may help you see the way the public can be misled when journalists withhold basic facts.

Make no mistake—Maddow advanced some inaccurate or unfounded claims in her endless report. Most strikingly, she said we “now know” that McDonnell has continued to make the state pay for his personal items, although Vozzella’s report plainly doesn’t establish that claim.

Beyond that, Maddow advanced several claims against McDonnell which Vozzella didn’t even allege. For example, is the state of Virginia still paying for McDonnell’s detox cleanse?

Vozzella never alleges that. But so what? Obsessed with this topic, Maddow rather plainly seems to state that as an established fact.

Maddow did advance some invented facts in her clownish report. More disgraceful was the range of facts she choose to withhold.

A skilled dissembler can greatly deceive you just by withholding certain facts. On Monday night, these are some of the basic facts Maddow withheld:

Johnson, the relevant state official, said McDonnell has observed state policy for the past three years. Maddow forgot to report that.

In Vozzella’s report, a McDonnell aide explains that the state is paying for McDonnell’s energy drinks because they constitute his breakfast and, as such, should be paid for under state rules. Maddow railed about the energy drinks, withheld the explanation.

Other explanations were withheld from Maddow’s report. But for a textbook case of deception by withholding, you have to consider what Maddow said about the Virginia state mansion chef.

At this point, you may want the children to step from the room. You may not want them to learn too much about the world when they’re still this young.

As part of her rant, Maddow went on at some length about accusations made by the mansion chef—the person employed by the state of Virginia to prepare its governor’s meals. Pretty much everything Maddow said was accurate. But good lord, the things she withheld!

You’re about to read work so slippery and so deceptive that it is truly qualifies as egregious:

MADDOW (6/17/13): Both of those probes follow accusations from the executive chef at the governor’s mansion. Accusations that the governor’s grown children were hauling off from the governor’s mansion kitchen with bottled water and cups and Gatorade and protein powder, flats of eggs, liquor for a private party taken out of the liquor cabinet at the governor’s mansion, also pots and pan, kitchen equipment, allegedly taken out of the governor’s mansion kitchen by the first lady and given to other people, given away.

“Take it! It’s yours! By which I mean it’s public, and therefore mine, and therefore–”

Those allegations from the chef are just allegations. They’re asserted by the executive chef in legal proceedings. They have not been proven in court.

But the chef has asked for records related to that alleged petty theft by the governor and his family, which if nothing else is a good reminder—if you are elected governor of Virginia, you do get your own personal chef. I mean, you get to be governor, which is cool enough, should be a good job, right? You also get a free mansion with free food, you get a free personal chef to cook it. You get free maids. You get one of the nation’s few state-funded butlers to serve you.

But free Ferrari rides and dog vitamin, those aren’t part of the deal, too?

Bob McDonnell sought to make those part of the deal. After he got the initial letter six months into his administration telling him that the state was not going to pay for the dog vitamins and the breath freshening strips and the body wash and all that stuff, the governor’s chief of staff fought back and demanded that the governor was going to get those free energy drinks.

So they paid up on the dog vitamins but the energy drinks, they fought that one. They’re keeping those. They fought to make sure that the taxpayers kept paying for the governor`s energy drinks.

In that passage, you see Maddow emoting about the energy drinks while withholding the (perfectly sensible) explanation why they’re paid for. But what she says about the mansion chef is a journalistic disgrace.

In fact, the accusations Maddow lists are not being made by the mansion chef. They are being made by Todd Schneider, the former mansion chef.

Here’s why that distinction matters:

Schneider, the former mansion chef, left his job in February 2012 “amid an unspecified police inquiry,” as the Washington Post explained in real time. In 2000, Schneider had been “charged with felony embezzlement and found guilty of petty larceny embezzlement,” the Post also reported.

In March of this year, the glaze hit the fan. Schneider was indicted on four counts of felony embezzlement in connection with his work as mansion chef.

The “legal proceedings” to which Maddow so slickly referred is Schneider's impending trial on these felony charges.

It’s astonishing that Maddow pimped Schneider’s charges with so much high drama without explaining these facts. (Have we ever mentioned the fact that Maddow just isn’t real honest?) And Maddow understood these facts. This Monday, the following passage appeared near the top of Vozzella’s report:

VOZZELLA (6/17/13): Emerging as the former mansion chef faces charges of stealing food from the kitchen, the McDonnells' expense records provide some insight into how the executive home has been managed. The chef has alleged that the McDonnells—already entitled to a free mansion, food, personal chef, maids and one of nation's few state-funded butlers—have engaged in petty pilfering.

In court filings submitted as part of his defense, chef Todd Schneider has said that the McDonnells' five children raided the mansion kitchen and liquor cabinet, taking large quantities of food and alcohol to their own homes or college dorm rooms. He also said that Maureen McDonnell had given away mansion pots and pans to her three daughters. McDonnell has declined to respond to those accusations, noting the ongoing criminal case against the chef.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing if Schneider’s charges are true. That said:

In our view, Vozzella underplayed the fact that these claims against the McDonnell family are being made as part of a defense in a criminal proceeding. But in an astounding act of deception, Maddow simply withheld that fact, working rather skillfully to do so.

(It’s a very talented staff.)

Maddow let you picture a bold whistle-blower blowing the whistle on the governor. She never even told her viewers that this was in fact the former chef, the one who has been indicted.

Maddow just isn’t real honest. We’ve told you this again and again—but we rubes just keep asking for more.

One last thought before we go. Did you hear about how dumb that stupid Miss Utah is? We certainly hope that she’ll start taking advice from Alex Wagner.

Skills straight outta Pravda: If you learned how to read by reading Pravda, you might have gleaned a few tiny glimmers from the brief interview which closed Maddow’s 17-minute segment.

She threw two questions at Mark Seagraves, a local reporter who is familiar with the McDonnell story. In his second statement, Seagraves offered this:

MADDOW: Bob McDonnell’s brand, I think the appeal of him, the idea of him as a national figure, really depended on this idea of him being so efficient, being about sound fiscal stewardship, being that kind of a conservative. Now we see him charging taxpayers for dog vitamins, insisting that taxpayers should pay for his energy drinks. What does that do to the Bob McDonnell brand long term?

SEAGRAVES: You’re right. Governor McDonnell has been seen as that squeaky clean politician. That you may disagree with him about policies and about issues and whatnot, but people never really question his integrity.

And I think you even see in the recent polling data, while his approval rating is slipping to a two-year low, when you look at the numbers just about his ethics and his moral charter, he still gets high marks in Virginia for that. You know, his staff has been busy trying to explain that the energy drinks actually qualify as his breakfast and the governor and first lady are entitled to their breakfast and many of these receipts that the Washington Post got go back to 2011 and the gentleman who you spoke of who does actually all the bookkeeping acknowledged to the Post that he has this problem with every new governor when they come in.

But the timing of this is just all wrong. For not just Bob McDonnell for Ken Cuccinelli and the Republican ticket as they head into November.

MADDOW: Mark Seagraves, reporter for the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. Mark, thank you very much for helping us understand this tonight.

“Thank you for helping us understand this tonight!” Was that really the goal?

Murkily, right at the end, Seagraves explained the energy drinks. He alluded to Johnson’s statement that every governor has some confusion with these rules when they first come in.

Seagraves didn’t explain that the chef is actually the former chef, and that he has been indicted for stealing from the mansion. He didn’t note that Johnson has given McDonnell a clean bill of health.

None of that was Seagraves’ fault. The fault here lied with Maddow, who was histrionically upset about high colonics and who just isn’t real honest.

Is this how we liberals want to be played? Can such conduct end well?

Chris Hayes says he is seething with anger!

FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 2013

The suits may be getting involved: We don’t know Chris Hayes. Personally, we weren’t thrilled with his book, but it was well-received elsewhere.

That said, Hayes made his name on cable by conducting long, discursive, intelligent discussions during a two-hour program on weekend mornings.

A lot of people liked him, and the suits moved him to weekday nights. In that spot, his ratings have been very poor.

Presumably, that explains the way he opened last night’s program. As he started, Chris Hayes said he was seething with anger:

HAYES (6/20/13): Good evening from New York. I’m Chris Hayes. Thank you for joining us.

Tonight on All In:

If you still possess the ability to be shocked by the rank corruption that crashed our economy, then you’re going to be shocked by the report Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has for us tonight. That is coming up.

Also, a shocking turn of events on the House floor as the House speaker brings crucial legislation to the floor and watches it go down in flames. I`ll tell you why what`s bad for John Boehner is good for the country.

Plus, taxpayer funded bailouts of struggling casinos? Now there is something that sounds totally ridiculous. But, yes, it is also something that is totally happening.

We begin tonight with a truly rare bit of genuine progress from Congress. Excellent news, in other words—excellent news that nonetheless has me seething with anger.

Here’s what’s happening that’s great news and infuriating.

Hayes promised that we would be shocked by Taibbi’s shocking report. Then he teased a shocking turn of events in the House.

Then, he teased a story about an action that is totally ridiculous. But he was going to start with a story which had him seething with anger.

“Here’s what`s happening that’s great news and infuriating,” he said.

To us, that didn’t sound like Hayes. It sounded like a new approach, designed by the suits to generate added excitement.

Those are speculations, of course. But as Hayes continued, we thought we saw the new game planning continue. It didn’t take long before he seemed to be showing off his new-seeming Maddow-style chops:

HAYES (continuing from above): Here’s what’s happening that’s great news and infuriating.

The bipartisan group of senators committed to making sure 11 million undocumented immigrants are given a road out of limbo and fear and toward citizenship is trying to pass a comprehensive bill by a huge margin in the Senate. That group of senators are called, annoyingly, the "Gang of Eight" and the reason they think they need the huge margin victory is to put pressure on House Speaker John Boehner to bring the legislation to the house floor even though it will almost certainly not have the support of a majority of House Republicans.

So that’s the game plan, right? The goal is get 70 votes in the Senate, a goal that has seemed, well, further away by the day lately. I mean, when one of the bill’s architects, Marco Rubio—I see you, Marco Rubio!—started openly flirting with killing it.

“I see you, Marco Rubio?” We’re going to call that a Maddow hook. But then, we think we’ve seen more and more Maddow hooks in Hayes’ delivery in the past week or so.

And not only that! Hayes was even annoyed this night by the name, “Gang of Eight!” To watch this whole segment, click here. Do you think he’s seething with anger?

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with trying to build ratings. Sometimes, though, this process can cause you to lose the essence of what you liked in the first place. When Hayes explained what had him seething, he didn’t really seem to be seething. Beyond that, we were even struck by the dumbness of his presentation.

In the beginning, people liked Hayes because he wasn’t dumb.

What has Chris Hayes seething with anger? The massive spending on border security that is being proposed to lure House Republicans into support of reform. As Hayes explained why this is infuriating, he made a presentation which struck us as very dumb:

HAYES: The price tag? Well, it’s all for a cool $30 billion, or more.

[...]

Now when you were evaluating—you right now watching this, the American voter, the American citizen, the American taxpayer—you’re thinking: Is this a smart way to spend money?

I would like you to keep in mind these two important things. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, found that in 2012 we spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement agencies, a 43 percent increase from 2006.

Here’s the kicker. That $18 billion, that’s more than we spent on all other law enforcement agencies combined by 24 percent.

And do you happen to know what the net migration between Mexico and the United States currently is? It is zero. Zero!

The most recent numbers show that from 2005 to 2010, the net migration is zero. A huge change from 1995 to 2000, the net migration from Mexico to the U.S. was more than 2 million people. But from 2005 to 2010, the number of people coming here from Mexico was about the same as the number of people going to Mexico from the U.S.

So we’re already spending almost $18 billion a year on a problem that does not exist. And Republicans in the Senate are poised to add $30 billion to that all over a handshake deal to win votes.

It will cost $30 billion over how many years? Hayes didn’t say.

But the part of that passage which struck us as dumb was the final highlighted claim—the claim that we are already spending $18 billion per year “on a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Please. Has the problem of unauthorized inflow actually ceased to exist? Any Republican would instantly say that the situation has improved because of that increased spending on enforcement—and they wouldn’t obviously be wrong. Meanwhile, the graphic behind Hayes as he spoke showed that illegal inflow is still quite high. The balance has improved because of the very large outflow of unauthorized residents from 2005 through 2010, presumably in reaction to the economic slowdown.

Hayes’ graphic still showed a lot of unauthorized inflow. Would anyone really buy the idea that the problem in question, at this time, “does not exist?”

Was Chris Hayes really seething with anger over that large spending proposal? Watching the tape, he didn’t seem to be seething with anger. And it seems to us that people like Hayes because he doesn't seethe.

The suits may have said that he has to seethe. If so, is that why people decided they liked Chris Hayes in the first place?

SILLY SEASON: Who gets attacked!

FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 2013

Part 4—Miss Utah yes, Maddow no: First, they came for Miss South Carolina Teen. That was 2007.

Two years later, they came for Miss California. On the One True Liberal Channel, Keith Olbermann and his smutty pal mauled the offending pageant contestant in ways which were plainly misogynistic.

Everybody knew not to say so. At least, not to say so out loud!

In these ways, a new type of seasonal shark attack was born—and this week, they came for Miss Utah. At one point, they begged Miss Utah to take their advice, and to take the advice of NeNe Leakes, a person who is now a bit better known for having been somewhat well known:

CARMON (6/17/13): There is definitely legislation that could help with the wage gap. I mean, not only those numbers that you show. Even like for like, when women have the same education as men, when they graduate with the same qualifications, from the year they graduate there is still a five percent gap and it widens. It widens when they get married, and then it widens when they have children yet again. Even when you factor out career interruptions, the wage gap is there.

So yes, women are seeking more education. They’re filling the ranks of the educated people. It’s not actually making a difference for the wage gap. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which has gone in and out of Congress, has been blocked by Republicans. Sometimes women who are making less money don’t even know.

So wage transparency, you know, there’s a lot of measures we could do to help when it comes to this.

WAGNER: That is how to turn a negative into a positive, which is what our, what NeNe Leakes suggested Marissa Powell do. We hope she takes our advice and NeNe’s advice.

Irin Carmon, a new member of the MSNBC family, welcome! We are so happy to have you. Congratulations and thank you for your time tonight.

In an excess of caution, we watched the tape of this exchange. Was Wagner perhaps being ironic, mocking herself, in the highlighted statement?

Alas! Quite plainly, she was not. With the certainty of the failed and the worthless, she begged the gods to help Miss Utah learn to take her and Carmon’s advice—and the advice of NeNe Leakes, who had asked the jumbled question Miss Utah didn’t know how to answer.

Has there ever been a more pompous statement on a cable news channel? Right from the start of Monday night’s segment, Wagner seemed to raise a question, more in snark than in anger: Why can’t a woman in a pageant be more like one of us?

Her pomposity broke all records. This is the way this world-class buffoon began her sad discussion:

WAGNER: What if you were competing in a pageant on national television and you were asked this question?

LEAKES (videotape): A recent report shows that, in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?

WAGNER: What would your answer be? Might it include something about how our country still has a long way to go in terms of gender and pay equity? Would you invoke women leaders in business like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, or female politicians Hillary Clinton, who have continued to break glass ceilings?

Given a day to prepare with the help of a staff, Wagner knew what Miss Utah should have said in response to that jumbled question.

To watch the most pompous six minutes in history, go ahead—just click here.

Wagner was almost impossibly pompous as she chastised poor stupid Miss Utah. Wagner prayed that Miss Utah would take her advice—although we can’t exactly find Wagner or Carmon offering “advice” in that six-minute segment.

Whatever! But how strange! One year before, Wagner had kept her pompous trap shut when an older, much more significant person bungled this very same topic, then pretended that she hadn’t made a mistake.

Plainly, this person had made a mistake, as we humans sometimes do. But since the person in question was Rachel Maddow, Wagner kept her big trap shut, just as everyone knew not to speak when Olbermann slimed Miss California in ways they described, when speaking in private, as misogynistic.

This is the way our heroes behave, our corporate-fueled pseudo-progressives.

People do make mistakes! And on April 29 of last year, Maddow made a mistake on Meet the Press. Again and again, she said that “women in this country still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make”—and she implied, again and again, that women face this wage gap “for doing the same work,” for “doing equal work.”

That isn’t what the statistics say, as Alex Castellanos kept trying to tell Maddow that day. But you don’t have to listen to Castellanos. You can consider what Carmon said this Monday night:

CARMON: Even like for like, when women have the same education as men, when they graduate with the same qualifications, from the year they graduate, there’s still a five percent gap and it widens. It widens when they get married, and then it widens when they have children yet again. Even when you factor out career interruptions, the wage gap is there.

Carmon seems to be better informed on this topic than Maddow was last year. When she appeared on Meet the Press, Maddow kept saying the wage gap “for equal work” (“for the same work”) stood at 23 percent.

Carmon seems to know that isn’t the case. She seems to know that this wage gap seems to be in the mid-single digits.

“Like for like,” Carmon put the gap at five percent when people emerge from college. “Even when you factor out career interruptions,” there is still a wage gap, she said, suggesting that she understands this topic in a way Maddow did not.

(Women interrupt their careers more often than men. This affects their future earning.)

On Meet the Press, it was different. Maddow cited a statistic we liberals love to cite but tend to misdescribe. If we are recalling correctly, that figure represents the income gap between men and women who are employed full-time. But that isn’t the figure for men and women who are “doing the same (or equal) work.”

If memory serves, the experts find a gap of about seven percent between men and women who are doing the same work—and it may not all represent discrimination. On Monday night, Carmon seemed to be aware of this general state of affairs. Last year, Maddow was not.

Everybody makes mistakes! Also, everybody has topics they aren’t prepared to discuss; this is especially true the younger a person may be. Last April, Maddow, who was 38, made a mistake about the size and nature of the wage gap. This Sunday, Miss Utah, who was 21, was flummoxed by a somewhat jumbled question about this same general topic.

Everybody can make a mistake, or get stumped by a topic. To some extent, the difference lies in the way the person responds to this state of affairs. This week, Miss Utah went on several TV shows and laughed at herself for Sunday night’s admitted mess. She then issued a well-prepared statement about the need for “equal pay for equal work.”

(Is that what Leakes was talking about? her question does not make this clear.)

Last April, Maddow took a different route. Thirty-six hours after her error, she went on her eponymous TV show and insisted, at ridiculous length, that she hadn’t made a mistake. She kept repeating her bogus statistic, saying she had been trying all day to determine why Castellanos would have challenged her statement.

She even brought an “expert” on to help wish away her error! It’s very, very hard to believe that Maddow wasn’t lying that night, though everything is possible.

Here’s where this story gets good:

Wagner, the world’s most pompous human, kept her big trap shut last year when Maddow engaged in this conduct! This Monday night, Wagner snarkily rolled her eyes at the foolishness of poor stupid Miss Utah. She helped us see how great it would be if people like these could just learn to be a bit more like Wagner herself.

She prayed that Miss Utah would take her advice. And that of the genius Leakes!

But how strange! Last year, Wagner didn’t say a word when Maddow erred and then seemed to lie. When it was Maddow who bungled this topic, bungling was A-OK!

There is a teachable moment here. Another such teachable moment was lost this week, as usual.

For all of us, there is a teachable moment here about horrible people like Wagner. Just as our fiery progressives refused to challenge Olbermann’s misogyny (and that is precisely how they described it, so long as they were speaking in private), so too Wagner looked away from Maddow’s error last year.

This week, she landed on Miss Utah, thus providing entertainment to us gullible liberals. Sharks attack the weak and the young, not the rich/famous/powerful.

A second teachable moment was lost this week. This concerns the jumbled question which was posed to Miss Utah:

“A recent report shows that, in forty percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?”

That wasn’t the world’s sharpest question. That one statistic, forty percent, served as a bit of a distractor. However one may understand the problems posed by the fact that women “continue to earn less than men,” those problems would be the same if that percentage were somewhat different.

By the way: In more than a third of the families in question, women are the primary earners because they earn more than their husbands. What exactly did Leakes have in mind by building her jumbled question around that statistic?

The larger problem with the question involves the various forms of the income or wage gap. What did Leakes mean when she said that women “continue to earn less than men?”

Did she mean that women seem to earn somewhat less for doing the same or equal work? Or did she mean that women who are employed full-time earn substantially less than men, partly because they aren’t qualified, by education and/or length of time in the work force, to do “the same work?” (This is where those “career interruptions” come in.)

Each of these matters can be seen as a problem—but they aren’t the same problem. Which problem did Leakes have in mind?

As this week had proceeded, have you seen a single person use this as a teachable moment about the complexities of this matter? Last year, these complexities bollixed even Maddow! How many people have tried to clarify these matters this week? Or has this really, in the main, just been a shark attack?

Wagner and Carmon certainly didn’t clarify matters much. Although they did join in the attack, with Wagner even making a point of kissing Leakes right on the keister!

This week, we saw a shark attack, the latest iteration of a new summer entertainment. In some cases, horrible people staged this attack.

These players are eager to state their own greatness. As they serve their corporate agendas, they claim to be on your side.

A few things we think would be great: As Wagner launched the most pompous six minutes in human history, she listed a few of the things she thinks would be great.

Beyond that, she helped us see that the new Miss USA landed some swag Sunday night:

WAGNER: So Marissa Powell did not win the competition last night. Erin Brady from Connecticut won. And we were looking into the duties of a Miss USA. And as Miss USA, Erin Brady will get posh digs in New York City and an opportunity to travel the world while promoting the organization and acting as a spokeswoman for breast and ovarian cancer awareness.

Now, I think it’s really important and good to raise awareness about breast and ovarian cancer. But I also think if you’re going to raise questions like the ones that were raised last night about gender equity and pay equity it would be great if Miss USA and the contestants in the Miss USA pageant could talk about the issue of pay equity and gender equity and the way society treats men and women and perhaps talk about the Pew Research analysis from 2011 showing there is a massive income gap among breadwinner families, single moms, married moms, and a whole host of other issues pertain to women shattering the quote unquote "glass ceiling."

Just to be clear, that “Pew Research analysis” was released last week. It uses data from 2011.

Did the new analysis “show a massive income gap among breadwinner families, single moms, married moms?” Though Wagner had all day to prepare her remarks, this statement was basically incoherent, although it wasn’t false.

Whatever! Wagner listed various things she thinks would be great. For example, she thinks it would be great if people like Miss Utah “could talk about the issue of pay equity and gender equity and the way society treats men and women and perhaps talk about the Pew Research analysis from 2011 showing there is a massive income gap among breadwinner families, single moms, married moms, and a whole host of other issues pertain to women shattering the quote unquote ‘glass ceiling.’”

To Wagner, it would be great if dummies like Miss Utah could do these things on the spot. As she dreamed this impossible dream, she gave a rather jumbled account of what the Pew report—from 2013—actually said.

We also think some things would be great:

Since we are talking so much about “wage transparency,” it would be great if we were told how much Wagner is paid by MSNBC. How about Maddow? Why can’t we progressives enjoy this kind of transparency about our corporate stars?

(Will Miss USA “get posh digs in New York City?” What kind of digs does Wagner enjoy in Gotham? Why can't progressives be told?)

We think it would be great to know what Carmon is now being paid to be “a member of the MSNBC family.” Wagner congratulated Carmon on this score. So how much is Carmon paid?

(We think it would be great to know such facts for an obvious reason. People will cut a lot of corners to hang onto very large pay, with the chance to move on to more. How much money does it take to make someone like Wagner land on Miss Utah but look away when Maddow errs?)

Here’s one last thing we think would be great:

We think it would be great if script-reading hacks like Alex Wagner were escorted out of our TV studios and never allowed to return. If MSNBC was a news organization, its directors would cringe when they watched the tape of Monday night’s discussion.

They’d see a guild-hog kicking down hard. If they had a progressive bone in their bodies, they’d want her to leave, to go home.

MSNBC isn’t a news organization, of course, and its directors aren’t progressives. With Lawrence on vacation, Wagner’s servicing of us rubes has continued all week.

Maddow makes fools of her viewers, part 1!

THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2013

A truly ridiculous segment: In Monday morning’s Washington Post, Laura Vozzella penned a strange report about Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.

Has the state of Virginia been picking up the tab for some of McDonnell’s personal expenses? It’s impossible to tell from Vozzella’s report, which was journalistically peculiar. It’s also very hard to care, so piddling are the offenses the Post scribe tries to establish.

For a full review of Vozzella's report, see yesterday's post.

McDonnell seems to be in some serious doo-doo concerning a separate matter, in which he accepted a $15,000 gift from a private citizen with interests before the state. But Vozzella is worried about who pays for the governor’s body wash and whether an energy drink should count as the governor’s breakfast. Meanwhile, she didn’t run her current concerns past the state official in charge of this matter, the man who required McDonnell to reimburse the state in 2010, after his first six months in office.

The official in question is Dennis Johnson, Division Director of the Division of Selected Agency Support Services. Back in 2010, Johnson required McDonnell to reimburse the state to the tune of $317 and change, after McDonnell’s first six months in office.

But that was then, and this is now. In her report in the Post, Vozzella reported what Johnson told her about McDonnell’s conduct in the past three years:

VOZZELLA (6/17/13): Like all new governors and their families, the McDonnells were told the expense rules at the outset of the administration but needed some time for them to sink in, Johnson said in an interview. Energy drinks aside, Johnson said that ever since he gave the McDonnells their refresher on what the state will and won't pay for, their spending has been in line with state policy.

“Typically when an administration comes in, we do discuss things," he said. "There are growing pains, and early on in the administration, there will be some things we have to review and discuss."

As we noted yesterday, the state’s various rules in this area seem to be quite arcane. (Mouthwash yes, body wash no! Bar soap in, deodorant out!) Vozzella goes on to claim that McDonnell still seems to be billing the state for his body wash, and for some other verboten items. But there is no sign that she ever asked Johnson about these claims. Nor did she attempt to resolve several other aspects of puissant matter.

This was terrible journalism. But so what? On Monday night, Rachel Maddow took Vozzella’s report and proceeded to bay at the moon, treating her viewers like absolute fools and engaging in seventeen minutes of balls-out journalistic lunacy with a very large dose of deception.

In case you haven’t heard, Maddow doesn’t care for McDonnell much. Let that fact explain the misconduct in which she engaged that night.

Maddow’s sins took a wide range of forms. We’ll break them down as best we can, though we strongly suggest that you should watch the tape of her seventeen minutes.

To watch the full segment, click here.

Ludicrous overemphasis: In truth, Vozzella’s report was so blatantly flawed that it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from it.

Despite this fact, Maddow devoted the first 17 minutes of her program to this topic. The first six minutes were devoted to the attempt to compare McDonnell’s body-wash spending to Richard Nixon’s “corruption scandal” in 1952, which led to the famous “Checkers speech.”

We got to watch old tape of Nixon. Maddow then made the connection:

MADDOW (6/17/13): [The Checkers speech] was genius. And he did not get dropped from the ticket and they won and he became vice president. And now, two generations down the road, with the word "Nixon" a synonym for corruption, and us having mostly forgotten that he even ever was vice president— Now, I think maybe it is time for Checkers II, or it had better be. There needs to be some move of equally audacious political genius sometime soon in Virginia politics, for what is happening there right now is not going to end well. Even then, it might not end well.

On the basis of Vozzella’s report, Maddow spent six minutes on old Nixon tape. She went on to make a set of claims that even Vozzella hadn’t advanced.

She conned her viewers hard this night. The cable star tends to do this.

Coo-coo for colonics: Early in her report in the Post, Vozzella describes some of the expenses for which McDonnell reimbursed the state three years ago. In her second paragraph, she mentioned such items as body wash, sunscreen, dog vitamins “and a digestive system ‘detox cleanse.’”

This last item worked its will inside Maddow’s head.

In the passage below, Maddow misstated what we “know” from reading Vozzella’s report. Beyond that, she staged the first of two nervous breakdowns about the governor’s detox cleanse.

You really need to watch the tape to see how coo-coo this is:

MADDOW: The governor was asked to please pay back the state, specifically $317.27 for the breath strips and the dog vitamins and all the rest of it. That was six months into his time being governor.

But as of today, as of new reporting from the Washington Post today, we now know that the humiliation of this whole incident is not just shared between that poor state employee who had to write that letter about dog vitamins to the governor and ask for the money back. It’s not just between that employee and the governor, who presumably was a little embarrassed by having to receive that letter and pay the money back. No, now it’s not just between them.

Now we all get to share in the embarrassment because now we know that, even after being confronted with that, even with being confronted with that and having to pay the state back for his personal hygiene items and dog things that he charged to the taxpayers of Virginia, even after that confrontation and having to cut a check back to the state, Bob McDonnell kept doing it.

Vitamins for people, not just for dogs. Nasal spray. More body wash, even after they were specifically told, “The taxpayers will not pay for your body wash, Governor.”

Still, though, more body wash! And how about a digestive system detox cleanse? Charged to the taxpayers of the state of Virginia by Governor Bob McDonnell. You paid for that, for him.

Do you want to know what a digestive system detox cleanse is? It’s exactly what you think it is. Just take a second.

[Pause]

You paid for that, for Bob McDonnell, if you live in Virginia. And now we all have to know he does that. We all have to have this information about him and his family which everybody would prefer would be private, right?

In fact, we don’t know that McDonnell has continued to charge the state for his body wash, even if we’re dumb enough to care. Vozzella says the records indicate this, but she doesn't seem to have asked Johnson, the state official, about this concern.

Meanwhile, at no point does Vozzella claim or suggest that McDonnell has continued to charge the state for his detox cleanse. Maddow’s suggestion to the contrary is, in a word, made up.

Beyond that, Vozzella doesn’t claim that McDonnell has continued to charge the state for vitamins for his dog, although that seems to be implied by Maddow's remarks.

By now, Maddow was advancing claims that aren’t even made by Vozzella. More strikingly, she was having her first nervous breakdown about that “detox cleanse.”

Loudly, Maddow complained that “we all have to know he does that,” even as she went out of her way to shout this fact to the world.

Everybody would prefer that this be private, Maddow plaintively said, as she wasted everyone’s time blabbing it to a rapt world.

Maddow has done this before, of course. In 2009, she spent two weeks having Ana Marie Cox tell dick jokes about average people, even as Madddow complained each night that she found the whole thing deeply, deeply embarrassing.

Maddow isn’t especially honest, but she is a bit of a loon. And sure enough! A few minutes later, this led her to complain about the detox again:

MADDOW: So maybe the Republican governor of Virginia can pull himself out of this. Maybe, he saves himself with a speech that leverages the, frankly, ostentatious cuteness of the first dog to defuse the paying for the vitamins part of the scandal, right? Maybe he could pull a Nixon here.

But it does not feel like that. In part, because we all just know too much, right? We know about the Ferrari and the pushing the magic tobacco pill that coincidentally is made by the guy who lent you the Ferrari. We know about the detox cleanse and I will pray daily that we never learn the brand or any more specific information.

By all accounts, including Vozzella’s, “the paying for the vitamins part of the scandal” ended three years ago—and no, it wasn’t ever a scandal. But Maddow returned to the detox cleanse that had a tight grip on her mind.

“I will pray daily that we never learn the brand or any more specific information,” this full-blown nutcase now avowed. Do you ever wonder why such a nut is hosting a national news show?

It’s hard to get to all the lunacy, and all the deception, in this 17-minute report. For today, we’ll stop right here, suggesting that you take the time to watch the tape of this deeply ridiculous segment.

Vozzella’s report was very weak. Weirdly, the scribe advanced tiny, ten-cent claims while making no apparent attempt to run her claims by the state official who was in charge of the matter.

In response, Maddow treated herself to an evening of old Nixon tape and she staged a two-part nervous breakdown about the governor’s colonics. Tomorrow, we’ll show you the remarkable ways she conned her viewers, toying with them in exactly the way Sean Hannity toys with his.

Do liberals want to be played this way? If so, we all understand who provides the service.

Tomorrow: From ridiculous on to egregious

Niall Ferguson just keeps pouring it on!

THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2013

Concerning our miserable failure: When you’re creating a Standard Group Story, repetition is very important.

Tuesday night, Charlie Rose spent half an hour with Niall Ferguson, the gloomy and frequently misinformed world-famous Harvard professor.

Eventually, it had to happen. Ferguson shrieked about American performance on international tests, with Charlie cheering him on:

FERGUSON (6/18/13): Let’s just look at education. We are failing, miserably, at the level of secondary education—high school education.

ROSE: Right.

FERGUSON: If you look at the PISA study—

ROSE: And these are institutions of education.

FERGUSON: Yes, right. That’s the most—surely, the most important institutions are our educational institutions.

ROSE: Right.

FERGUSON: And that’s where I think we have a major problem and that’s why social mobility is declining.

As usual, Charlie interrupted before his guest could complete his thought about “the PISA study.” For that reason, we’re forced to work with what we have.

Set aside the question of social mobility. Is it true that results on the PISA show we are “failing, miserably” in secondary education?

This claim is part of a very familiar drumbeat. But is it actually true?

The PISA is one of three major international testing programs. Because it’s the one on which American students have scored least well, it’s the one which is routinely cited by the gloom machine.

So how about it? Did American students “fail miserably” on the most recent PISA tests, in 2009?

We’d have to say no, although math performance was poor. In reading, as we noted all last week, American students outperformed the average score of the 34 OECD nations. On a head to head basis, American students outperformed their counterparts in Germany, France, England, Italy and Spain.

In reading, American students outperformed the students in all the major European nations. Would anyone get any such impression from listening to people like Ferguson? But then, here’s what Hacker and Dreifus wrote in a recent high-profile piece in the New York Times, in which they specifically referenced the PISA:

“It is widely known that American students score well below their European and Asian peers in reading and math, an alarming shortfall in a competitive era.”

That gloomy claim is just baldly untrue. But so was this claim from a recent op-ed in the Washington Post:

“Is it surprising that Asian and Scandinavian countries, where teachers are well-compensated and treated with dignity, show higher levels of student achievement than the United States?”

With very few exceptions, American students outscore Norway, Sweden and Denmark (the Scandinavian countries) on international tests. The gloomy claim lodged in that passage was, in a word, untrue.

It’s amazing to see the way our basic understandings are created by repetition—especially by the repetition of claims which are false or misleading. Even more amazing is the way the liberal world simply accepts this process.

We simply don't care about public schools. No fact could be more clear.

SILLY SEASON: Greatest teen bimbos of the past!

THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2013

Part 3—CNN’s version of Miss Indiana remembers: It’s hard to get one’s arms around the emptiness of our modern “journalistic” “elites.”

Despite that, we’re willing to try! Consider the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed gang at CNN’s new morning program.

The adjectives come from the headline atop Alessandra Stanley’s profile. In Tuesday morning’s New York Times, she described the cheerful threesome who have become the face of CNN in morning drive-time.

At the start of her piece, Stanley captured the bushy-tailed trio at play as their program premiered:

STANLEY (6/18/13): Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed, With a Serious Streak, on CNN

There is already way too much happy talk on morning television. So it's a little worrisome that on the Monday premiere of CNN's revamped morning show, ''New Day,'' Chris Cuomo responded to a report on the Supreme Court by his co-anchor, Kate Bolduan, by saying: ''My mom says my tie is not on straight. How does it look? Look all right? Is it better now? All right, Mom, better?”

Despite this funnin’, Stanley judged that the new morning show was destined to be “an earnest, news-driven operation with more diligence than panache.”

The headline noted the “serious streak” Stanley had spotted among these players. She even suggested that the new program was trying to be “smarter” than other such shows.

Based upon her later descriptions, we’re not sure why Stanley said those things. In this passage, she captured the mood at the earnest new program:

STANLEY: The mood was much sunnier on CNN, where Ms. Bolduan, Mr. Cuomo and the news anchor, Michaela Pereira, gamely tried to seem like good friends—they even showed clips from a team-building weekend they spent together, grilling cheeseburgers and fishing. But the show was at its best when it stuck to the news, asking CNN's Christiane Amanpour to assess the Iranian elections or parsing a new poll that recorded a significant drop in the president's approval ratings after news broke of the Internal Revenue Service and National Security Agency scandals.

There was still a steady supply of silly features, including images of a Chinese man piloting a moving lounge chair and an older man who had an image of his young, bikini-clad wife tattooed on his bald spot.

Interesting! Despite their serious streak, they managed to include an image of a young, bikini-clad wife!

Whatever! Last Friday night we caught Pereira, the new news anchor, saying hello on Anderson Cooper. Right at the start, guest host John King hit her with a tough one:

KING (6/14/13) Michaela joins me now. Welcome to CNN. I'm down here in Washington. My first question for you: New Day, based in New York, you spent a decade on the west coast. What is it like, going from left coast to east coast?

PEREIRA: This really is a new day. It's such an adjustment, a lot of wide open space in the west.

KING: Your former colleagues, I watched the old clips when you said farewell on KTLA. You got a car for your birthday once. Do your new colleagues understand that, what they have to do?

PEREIRA: I don't think they fully understand what I left in Los Angeles. I think they are starting to get a sense from the tweets and e-mails that I've been getting and I've been sharing with them. You spend a decade—John, you know this. You spend a decade in a market, fall in love with a place, you make connections, part of community. It was difficult to leave and they made it difficult with the series of send-offs.

Pereira seemed to be helping us see how much everyone loves her.

Whatever! Soon, Pereira helped King understand the way the new gang views the news. (“We care profoundly about the world around us and what is going on.”) Then, King sprang a surprise on the person who has been charged with creating “an earnest, news-driven operation.”

Enough with Pereira’s serious streak! “Let’s play word association,” the world-famous newsman said:

KING: News is and always will be our top priority here at CNN. You know this better than I do, you have to juggle. You have to talk about a range of issues. Let's play word association. Here is your morning TV test.

PEREIRA: Here we go.

KING: Justin Bieber.

PEREIRA: Canadian, ha, ha.

KING: Politics.

PEREIRA: D.C.

KING: Wolf Blitzer's beard.

PEREIRA: Foxy.

KING: The Kardashians.

PEREIRA: A lot.

KING: A lot. That's good!

As we’ve said, it’s hard to get one’s arms around the fatuity of our upper-end “press corps.” In fairness, this line of questioning wasn’t necessarily Pereira’s fault.

On Monday morning, the bushy-tailed trio kicked off their earnest new program. Three days before, the Washington Post had fawned about the manifest greatest of Kate Bolduan, the program’s 29-year-old co-host.

That said, this was Bolduan’s reaction to the fact that a 21-year-old pageant contestant had given a badly jumbled reply to a somewhat poorly-formed question:

BOLDUAN (6/17/13): A new Miss USA has been crowned. But it's not Miss Connecticut, the winner, everyone's talking about this morning. People are piling on for Miss Utah, Marisa Powell, after she fumbled her response to a pageant question on why women in the U.S. earn less than men. Listen:

POWELL (videotape): I think you can relate this back to education and how we are continuing to try to strive to figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem. And, I think, especially the men are seen as the leaders of this, and so, we need to try to figure out how to create education better.

BOLDUAN: Before you two—I'll get your reaction. This reminded us a lot of the similar flub that happened in the 2007 Miss USA pageant. Who could forget Miss South Carolina?

CAITLIN UPTON (videotape): Some people out there in our nation don't have that, and I believe that our education, like such as South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like such as. And—

BOLDUAN: So what do you think?

“Who could forget Miss South Carolina,” CNN’s version of Miss Indiana said into the screen. But how perfect! As she rolled her eyes at the lesser beings Upton and Powell, the deeply serious newswoman Bolduan misstated several facts:

Upton, then 17 years old, had actually been Miss South Carolina Teen. Back in 2007, she had actually been competing in the Miss Teen USA pageant.

Whatever! Bolduan, paid millions of dollars per year, blithely misstated these basic facts. But as she did, she kicked down expertly, even at a teen-ager.

As Bolduan misstated those basic facts, she identified our new biggest bimbo—and entertained us with a teen-aged bimbo from the past. In doing so, she revealed the ratty soul it takes to be one of our leading pseudo-journalists. And she helped us recall the evolution of a modern-day shark attack—the shark attacks these flyweights spring on some pageant contestant each year.

(Due to embarrassment incurred in 2001, the cable press corps no longer kills time with reports on actual shark attacks. Instead, they stage metaphorical attacks of their own, in which they kill the pig.)

Upton, who was 17, gave a horrible answer six years back. What makes Bolduan, who is 29, want to keep playing the tape?

Let us briefly play the shrink, as these flyweights so frequently do. Our psychiatric novel would go something like this:

People like Bolduan understand how fatuous they themselves are. For this reason, they are eager to find and ridicule someone, anyone, who may briefly seem even dumber.

They’re especially happy to land on young women, perennial targets who will “sell” within a casually misogynistic culture. This helps us recall some of the progressive world’s greatest recent embarrassments.

It helps us recall the openly misogynistic way Keith Olbermann attacked Miss California in 2009—for the sin of stating the same view about same-sex marriage that was held by President Obama.

It helps us recall the way well-known progressives spoke about Olbermann’s open misogyny—but only in their private conversations, which were later revealed! None of these fiery figures was willing to stand up in public and tell this big asshole to stop.

What a disgrace those conversations were! No one said so, of course.

It helps us recall the open misogyny displayed by Chris Matthews over a great number of years dating back into the 1990s. It helps us recall the way his ass was saved in 2008, when liberals finally began to complain about his relentless misconduct.

His ass was saved by Rachel Maddow, who praised his brilliance to the AP, then signed her first contract with Matthews’ channel the very next week!

It’s hard to get one’s arms around the rattiness of our cable stars—the depths to which these contestants will descend to pocket their millions of dollars. Tomorrow, we’ll review the somewhat incoherent question our new biggest bimbo was asked Sunday night.

And not only that! We’ll recall the way our most brilliant star seemed to lie—just last year!—about this very same topic. It’s amazing how ratty these people will be as they stage their glorious quests to become huge cable stars.

Tomorrow: The wages of fame

Kicking down, perhaps inclined to kiss up: Rather deftly, Bolduan kicked down. Is she perhaps a bit inclined to kiss up to major power?

FARHI (6/14/13): Bolduan recognizes that the success of the program depends on that X factor. Cuomo, Bolduan and the show’s newsreader, Michaela Pereira, a former anchor at a Los Angeles station, will be on the air for three hours, making them, rather than the shifting drifts of news, the primary reason to watch. In preparation, Bolduan and her husband, Michael Gershen­son, an executive with Washington’s Carlyle Group, have been hanging out with Cuomo and his wife, Cristina.

“There’s an intimate relationship you build with viewers, especially in the morning,” Bolduan says over lunch in the Time Warner Center. Ergo: “Viewers will see, and my family will say thank goodness, people will finally get to see the whole Kate. This is a format that lets Chris and I show a fuller part of our personalities. . . . There’s a little bit of exposing yourself that you have to be okay with. Welcome to morning TV.”

Bolduan's family will say thank goodness that we “finally get to see the whole Kate?” How this family must have suffered down through the wilderness years!

As we see “the whole Kate,” we see someone prepared to kick down and perhaps willing to marry Big Power. For a rundown on Carlyle, click here.

Who knows—we may be seeing it wrong! “Welcome to morning TV!”

Coates keeps offering original thoughts!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2013

And the Post’s Emma Brown gets it right: Can Ta-Nehisi Coates do that?

Over at the Atlantic, Coates keep presenting original subject matter! This practice virtually doesn’t exist within the guild of the modern professional “journalist.”

People, it just isn’t done! Except by a very few folk.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Coates offered posts about the so-called Moynihan Report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous, much maligned discussion of race from 1965. In the first of his posts, Coates presented this remarkable passage from Moynihan:

“That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. That the Negro community has not only survived, but in this political generation has entered national affairs as a moderate, humane, and constructive national force is the highest testament to the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people. But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.”

As Moynihan implies, the people in question are, on the whole, the greatest achievers in American history. It’s also true that this group has paid that “fearful price” for our brutal history, and continues to do so.

In our view, each part of that story was on display in Emma Brown’s painful, sensational report in Monday’s Washington Post. Brown described the struggles faced by valedictorians from Washington, DC high schools when they head off to competitive colleges.

Brown describes the terrible price these kids still pay in the backwash of our American history. But good God! She also does a beautiful job describing the other part of that story.

Say hello to Sache Collier, 2011 valedictorian at Ballou High, now a junior at Penn State:

BROWN (6/17/13): Collier, the 2011 valedictorian at Ballou Senior High in Southeast Washington, said the first thing she noticed when she arrived at Penn State University was how intently her fellow students paid attention during class.

“It was like, ‘Wow, everyone’s on the same page and everyone wants to learn,’ ” Collier said. “At Ballou, it wasn’t like that at all. I was always trying to get the students quiet.”

Collier had been a star at Ballou, where fewer than one-quarter of students are proficient in math and reading. But she said that her classes largely dealt with the basics: summarizing story plots, for example, and learning how to write complete and grammatically correct sentences.

Only in her senior year, in an advanced English course, did a teacher challenge her to think more deeply. “I feel like it was too late,” said Collier, who took two of the three AP classes she said were available to her at Ballou. “It just wasn’t enough to have that kind of teacher for one year.”

In her first semester at Penn State, Collier took seminars in which professors asked her to synthesize ideas, develop arguments and do original research. It was new to her.

“We had to go into the library all the time and research articles and really, really write,” Collier said. “It was difficult for me because I hadn’t done that in high school. I didn’t have to write a lot. I didn’t really research anything.”

The 2.1 grade-point average she earned that first semester devastated her. She visited writing tutors, talked to librarians and sought out professors during office hours. Now a rising junior, her GPA is 3.38.

“I’m not the type of person to give up,” Collier said.

We thought of both parts of Moynihan’s story when we read that portrait.

Meanwhile, three cheers for Emma Brown, who did great work in this series of profiles. When Collier compares life at Penn State to life at Ballou, what she says is very painful to hear. White “progressives” are generally embarrassed to talk about race, and, to be honest, they don’t really care. They walk away from descriptions like that.

Journalist Brown, and her editors, went right out and told it.

The situation in which Collier rose is the fault of no living person. It’s the fault of our brutal history, which we rarely want to describe and which Collier is rewriting and overcoming, not being the type to give up.

We think Brown’s piece was just sensational. Coates’ work is sensational too.

Are Coates and Brown allowed to do that? We’re just asking, of course.