The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.
So they finally figured that out, eh? Well done, but we already knew about those there permanent physical advantages of being born male. We knew and we said, over and over.
Will we see any apologies from the media outlets that got this so horribly wrong? Some of the ugliest things said to me on Twitter were from journalists who worked for liberal media outlets while the male boxer scandal was unfolding at the Paris Olympics.
And when they weren’t sending me nasty tweets and DMs, they published articles in which the most brainless claims were made and rabidly defended. I wrote a piece about the media’s meltdown at the time. At the bottom are screenshots of a dozen major left or centre-left media outlets that made staggeringly false claims about men in women’s sports, including the CBC, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, PBS, Mother Jones, Buzzfeed, The New Republic, the Associated Press…
Will there be firings? Resignations? Public corrections of the record? Any word at all from the liberal media, acknowledging its role in perpetuating outright lies to the detriment of women athletes?
There bloody well should be. And of course, it’s very doubtful we’ll see anything of the kind.
Meanwhile, Harper’s, the 175-year-old bastion of liberal-minded letters, has published a great big “forum-style” piece called Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media? Anatomy of a credibility crisis, with four bylines — all liberals, all of whom blame the collapse of trust in the media on the right, on conspiracy theories, on Covid… no introspection whatsoever.
Jack Shafer, former editor at Slate and SF Weekly, whose area of expertise is supposedly “what he sees as a lack of precision and rigor in reporting by the mainstream media” (per Wikipedia), goes so far as to say that the problem is the papers are just too good at their jobs:
I actually think that the decline of trust has to do with newspapers’ becoming more responsible, more accurate [than they were 50 years ago].
Like their British counterparts at the Beeb, they’ve all fallen into their own echo chamber.
@Artymorty, sorry to hear about your experience. You mentioned “all liberals, all of whom blame the collapse of trust in the media on the right, on conspiracy theories.” I am reading NYTimes, WashPost, The Guardian and other UK newspapers etc. talk about what is going on with BBC, It is fascinating how they are utterly leaving out one of the key points of the Prescott’s memo about what BBC deliberately got wrong: an entire section of the memo is about “Biological sex and gender” and about “gender identity.” The liberal press is mentioning only in passing without any of these specific examples. So of course it is NOT only right wing criticizing BBC biased/censored coverage, Helen Joyce and others have been criticizing it.
Michael Prescott’s 19 page memo https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating-internal-bbc-memo-in-full/
archived at https://t.co/dkb0fZFzEo
biological sex and gender section https://archive.ph/pBmPv#biological-sex-and-genderundefined
Here are just a few examples [sorry i forgot how to make italicized quotes]
…The story that each person told me was what sounded like effective censorship by the specialist LGBTQ desk within News.
As virtually all shows had lost their own reporters, programme editors had to make requests to News if they wanted a correspondent to cover a story. I was told that time and time again the LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans-debate.
The allegation made to me was stark: that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off-air. Individual programmes had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight.
..
The report couldn’t find a single example in the review period that reflected the experience of de-transitioners
…It also noted a surprisingly high number of stories about drag queens considering it is such a niche group of people
Stories that raised concerns about the quality or safety of care given to gender questioning children and adults received “little or no coverage”
In March 2024, there was widespread media coverage of leaked documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health which raised concerns about the quality of care given to gender-distressed children. It was picked up by the Mail, Economist, Observer, Washington Post, the Times and others but not the BBC…
…There was also scant coverage of biological women campaigning to exclude biological men from sensitive spaces
The BBC failed to cover the story of Darlington nurses who took their employer to court for allowing their changing room to be used by biological males. This story was covered extensively by other news outlets including Sky News and GB News
Similarly, there was no coverage of claims biological male police and prison officers were being allowed to conduct strip searches on women and girls
..The report noted concerns with how the debate about the Cass Review was framed on Newsnight – the views of a doctor critical of the Tavistock Clinic were “balanced” with those of a trans woman, who said she had received excellent care. The report pointed out that if Newsnight was covering concerns about a maternity unit it would not seek to provide balance by interviewing a mother who was happy with her care
and many many more SPECIFIC instances.
Like their British counterparts at the Beeb, they’ve all fallen into their own echo chamber.
Mobs of sheep have been known to do the same.
I actually think that the decline of trust has to do with newspapers’ becoming more responsible, more accurate [than they were 50 years ago].
This sounds like Jack Shafer had a job interview and was asked what his greatest fault was and he said sometimes he’s just too much of an overachiever.
But meanwhile half his resume is fake.
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