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White House correspondents behaving badly
Getting President Biden to answer to the press is hard enough. His handlers in the administration make it even tougher. And now it seems journalists are linking arms with them to help the aging president out.
Tamara Keith, current head of the White House Correspondents’ Association and its apparent hall monitor, chastised her colleagues in an email a tipster passed to Cockburn about “decorum.” (Cockburn, you will be shocked to hear, is not a WHCA member and so is at liberty)
Keith took umbrage when “at least three journalists continued loudly shouting” over a reporter, “making it impossible for the president to hear and answer the question. It didn’t reflect well on our profession.”
“It is anti-collegial and completely unacceptable to shout down a fellow reporter’s question when the president has called on someone, even in the competitive environment in which we work,” the NPR White House correspondent continued. “The behavior of several in our press corps deprived the public of a Q and A session with the president on a big news day. It is completely counter-productive for everyone to shout at the same time. It means no one, including the president, can hear any of the questions clearly.” (Her emphasis, not Cockburn’s.)
“Once someone else has been called on, continuing to shout and interrupt prevents another reporter from asking a question,” Keith concludes. “It crosses a line and violates the collegiality called for in the WHCA’s bylaws.”
It seems to Cockburn as if the head of the WHCA shouldn’t have to work so hard to carefully maintain the very specific set of circumstances in which the president of the United States is prepared to face the Fourth Estate. Keith’s job, and that of her WHCA comrades, would be much easier if Joe Biden had the “decorum” to answer to the American people more often.
Afghanistan sadly lacking in #BlackGirlMagic
The question on everyone’s lips this week: why is there no #BlackGirlMagic in Afghanistan?
Karen B. Decker, the chargé d’affaires of the US Mission to Afghanistan and possibly the whitest State Department employee ever, was mercilessly mocked for her tweets trying to link Black History Month to the struggles of Afghans in the newly Taliban-run state.
“Are Afghans familiar with #BlackGirlMagic and the movement it inspired?” She tweeted Wednesday. “Do Afghan girls need a similar movement? What about Afghan Women? Teach me, ready to learn. @Beyonce @lizzo @ReginaKing.”
Cockburn thinks Beyoncé is a bit too busy cashing in in Dubai to liberate the women of Kabul. Lizzo could do some damage, though.
In addition to relentless criticism from Republicans, Decker’s State Department colleague Ned Price referred to her comments as “rather inappropriate and ineffective.”
The #BlackGirlMagic post was just the latest in a series from Decker where she reflects on how to deploy black American history to help the people of Afghanistan. Take this one from February 1: “In 1960, four Black students ordered coffee at a diner in Greensboro, NC. They were refused service but they would not leave. They came back the next day & a ‘sit-in’ movement was born. Has nonviolent protest ever been successful in Afghanistan? Why or why not? #BlackHistoryMonth” Cockburn is surprised that a diplomat as experienced as Decker wouldn’t know the answer to that one — perhaps there are some mujahideen she could check with?
“As I reflected on his legacy this week, it occurs to me to ask — who is Afghanistan’s MLK?” she tweeted on January 18. “What Afghan person, driven by their faith, and a desire for peace, can lead the Afghan people ‘to the mountaintop?’”
Cockburn is sure that the Georgetown-educated Decker had the best of intentions. Presumably she had more luck spreading #BlackGirlMagic in her previous diplomatic postings… in Estonia, Greece and Bosnia.
Do Dominion’s lawyers have selective amnesia?
Mainstream media outlets have been feasting on the revelations from Dominion Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The likes of the Washington Post and CNN slaver over text conversations between the #1 network’s primetime hosts expressing fear of losing viewers if they accepted the 2020 election result, and reporters being chastised for fact-checking crazy and unsubstantiated claims about the Dominion voting machines.
But for the defamation case to succeed, Dominion’s lawyers will need to prove that Fox News knowingly misled their audience about Dominion and prove actual malice. This could prove difficult — particularly if you take a more complete view of how Fox News and Fox Business chose to cover the madcap allegations from Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lyn Wood et al.
For example, Cockburn recalls Tucker Carlson’s monologue on November 19, 2020, in which he directly challenged Sidney Powell for failing to provide any evidence supporting her allegations about the Dominion voting machines.
We invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention.
But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed at the press conference.
Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she’s right, but she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.
Don Lemon’s day off
Thursday, Cockburn, “Does Don Lemon want CNN to fire him?”: “Perhaps Lemon’s outbursts are a symptom of growing pains as he struggles to overcome the end of his prime… time show. Cockburn wonders if he thinks he’d be more comfortable on Licht’s trash heap, alongside allies such as Davos “disinformation” expert Brian Stelter and nascent postal worker Chris Cuomo.”
Friday, CNN This Morning’s Kaitlan Collins: “Audie Cornish is here with us, Don has the day off…”
The Times, they are a-changing?
An unruly band of self-identifying “New York Times contributors” caused a stir this week when, thanks to the stewardship of GLAAD, they wrote an open letter to Times leadership alleging “editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people.”
“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” the letter-writers assert.
One accusation concerns a Katie Baker feature, “When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know.” Per the letter, “The piece fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups. These groups have identified trans people as an “existential threat to society” and seek to replace the American public education system with Christian homeschooling, key context Baker did not provide to Times readers.”
Cockburn wonders if every co-signer read the piece in question, which includes the following “key context-providing” passage:
Three parents, all self-described liberals, told the Times that support groups had connected them with a legal group affiliated with the Alliance, called the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, which was founded in 2019 with the mission of defending children and parents against “gender identity ideology,” according to its nonprofit disclosure forms. Its president has spoken at conferences about the “existential threat to our culture” posed by the “transgender movement.”
The letter is signed by an ensemble cast of ex-Gawker writers, many of whom are not gainfully employed at present — and, more amusingly, food writer Alison Roman. Times leadership were surprisingly brave in their response, describing their trans coverage as “important, deeply reported and sensitively written.” Then, rather brutally: “We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation of Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
The letter-writers described themselves as “disappointed” with the NYT response. The Times, meanwhile, published a column headlined “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.” Cockburn is impressed by the Gray Lady’s newly rediscovered testicular fortitude. He might even re-subscribe…
