There are unethical people in every profession. Journalism is no exception.
But unethical journalism isn’t only about phone hacking, going through bins or taking bribes.
At its core, it’s about knowingly misrepresenting reality.
Yesterday’s case involved one of the worst mass shootings in Canada’s history – the kind of event where the stakes for getting the facts right could not be higher.
You cannot claim to uphold journalistic standards while describing a crime committed by a man as having been committed by a woman.
Nor can you sidestep it by using the word “person” when sex is materially relevant.
Yet several major outlets did exactly that yesterday – including Sky and the BBC.
This isn’t about politics.
It’s about truth.
Because if we cannot rely on the media to report observable facts clearly and honestly, then what exactly can we rely on them for?
SEEN in Journalism makes the point I just made in a comment: that calling the perp a woman in the lede and not telling the truth until many paragraphs down is a grossly obvious violation of journalistic standards.
‘Canadian police have identified the suspect as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems’
This is a very serious lie about a shattering event. It’s not a point-scoring exercise to say so: it’s not stigmatising to notice and explain the lie.
‘Canadian police have identified the suspect as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems’ This is a very serious lie about a shattering event. It’s not a point-scoring exercise to say so: it’s not stigmatising to notice and explain the lie. Journalist convention is to explain the bones of the story in the first four paragraphs. This developed from the understanding that people don’t always read down: they may click, but they don’t scroll. Engagement tapers.
In short: DON’T BURY THE LEDE.
The Guardian did it on purpose, knowing perfectly well it’s a violation of that journalistic convention. That’s why they did it: because they know most people won’t read that far. It’s a conscious, deliberate cheat, in aid of manipulating people into believing women are every bit as violence-prone as men.
Not only that, at this point, the facts that the killer was a man (contra earlier reports) who ‘identified’ as trans (previously dismissed as speculation) are the newest lines, a fresh top.
The @guardian defies all natural editorial instincts to bury in the tenth paragraph the newest line and the explanation that its first sentence is untrue. It will know by its own data that a percentage of readers will just bounce off after reading the lie, and increasing numbers drop off by a third or half of the way down. Certainly before reaching the truth. Which turns out to be not so sacred after all.
The madness of this slavish, unquestioning devotion to the lie is puzzling and very worrying. There’s a defiance with which the paper sacrifices itself to the service of identity affirmation.
Which is also, unavoidably, the service of harming women.
Attorney General Pam Bondi at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday seemed to have a printout of Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s history of searches of the Department of Justice’s database of documents related to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos of a black binder that Bondi had at the hearing showed the words “Jayapal Pramila Search History” and a list of documents whose numbers coincide with the number of Epstein files.
That’s my Rep – not mine personally, but ours in Seattle. Seattle, of course, is not Trump Territory.
Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, and other members of Congress have visited the DOJ in recent days to view documents related to Epstein that are not available to the public.
Jayapal blasted Bondi in a post on X on Wednesday evening.
“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files,” Jayapal wrote. “Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched,” the congresswoman said. “That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members.”
Six people were found dead at a high school in the town of Tumbler Ridge
The suspected shooter, a woman, was among the dead at the school
Two more were found dead elsewhere and another died en route to hospital
Item 4 in that list is a lie. The shooter was not a woman.
It’s nearing midnight in Tumbler Ridge, the town in British Columbia where six people were found dead – including the suspected female shooter – at a high school.
We’re winding down our live coverage for now, but here’s what we know and don’t know so far about one of Canada’s worst mass shootings in decades:
Overall, 10 people died in the small town of Tumbler Ridge, a remote municipality with a population of around 2,400 people.
Six bodies were found at the local high school, which has a student population of 160 students.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney cancelled a trip abroad in response to the deaths.
Authorities haven’t identified the woman who was the suspected shooter, nor any motive.
There was no woman who was the suspected shooter. There was only a man.
Are all these reporters and their editors just hugging themselves with glee at being able to pretend that women are the perpetrators of mass shootings by men? Is it totally the best fun they’ve ever had?
• Key hearing: Attorney General Pam Bondi is testifying at a heated House Judiciary Committee amid ongoing controversies related to the Jeffrey Epstein files release, investigation into President Donald Trump’s political foes and the handling of the fatal shootings of two US citizens in Minnesota by immigration enforcement officers.
• Clashes with lawmakers: Bondi called Rep. Jamie Raskin – a former constitutional law professor and the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee – a “washed up loser lawyer,” as the clash between her and committee Democrats escalated over her approach to their questions.
Huh. Pam Bondi is going to stop people telling the truth about Trump. That seems a tad authoritarian.
Bondi: "You all should be apologizing. You sit here, and you attack the president, and I am not going to have it. I'm not going to put up with it." pic.twitter.com/ucmrjhhFuq
Trump: "So I put on a 30% tariff, which is very low. I got an emergency call from I believe the prime minister of Switzerland. She was very aggressive … I didn't really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39%." pic.twitter.com/covIESz4u2
The National Prayer Breakfast was founded in 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower accepted an invitation to join members of Congress to break bread together. Every president since has participated, regardless of party or religious persuasion. It offers an opportunity, according to its organizers, for political leaders to gather and pray collectively for our nation “in the spirit of love and reconciliation as Jesus of Nazareth taught 2,000 years ago.”
And that’s a bad thing, because it’s a gross violation of religious freedom, aka the separation of church and state. It’s not really an “opportunity” for “political leaders” aka the government to gather and pray collectively, is it, it’s a conspicuous push to do so. Government needs to be secular. The “National Prayer Breakfast” is wildly anti-secular, aka theocratic. Theocracy=there’s no way to vote the god in question out.
It is testimony to the marketing genius of Donald Trump that he never sold himself to Christians as one of them—pious, devoted, merciful, forgiving, irenic, biblically literate, a faithful husband and father, a man of high moral standards.
Is that marketing genius? Or is it just the familiar fact that Trump is a foul human being who loves to shove his foulness in our faces all day every day?
The National Governors Association (NGA) has canceled its annual White House meeting after President Trump only invited Republican governors to the gathering.
The yearly meeting is traditionally bipartisan and offers a chance for state leaders to convene with one another and the president.
Sigh. It’s a meeting of governors, not a meeting of Republican governors. It’s not for him to change that.
“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) wrote in a Monday letter announcing plans to forgo the meeting, according to The Associated Press.
Stitt said the Trump administration’s decision to exclude Democratic governors would not divide the association.
Political affiliation is not all there is to people. It’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple. There’s a lot of life that has nothing to do with political affiliation, so it’s not always necessary to sort people into BigEnders at this end and LittleEnders at the other end. Furthermore, it’s healthy for people with different political views to talk, because they can learn from each other.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s move to not invite Democratic governors to the meeting during Tuesday’s briefing.
“I just spoke with the president about this,” Leavitt told reporters. “It is a dinner at the White House. It’s the ‘People’s House.’ It’s also the president’s home, and he can invite whomever he wants to dinners and events here at the White House.”
No it isn’t. When he’s playing host at official events he’s not in his “home”; he’s at work, in a house that belongs to the government, or the country as a whole if you prefer. Part of the White House is his temporary “home” but the rest of it is his and other people’s workplace, and a government building that belongs to all of us. No he cannot invite whomever he wants, not morally or legally.
A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare
For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare. And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.
Those of us in or close to the trans community have been to the funerals of those we love. And we have wept together for those we have been unable to save on Trans Day of Remembrance. We know the truth – we see it with our own eyes. And, to us, the decision by Wes Streeting to commission a review into suicides which downplayed the scale of these tragedies was unforgivable. His report denied the reality of trans deaths, as Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers denied the reality of trans lives.
He doesn’t actually say the ban on puberty blockers caused the purported rise in suicides, but he implies it as heavily as he possibly can. Very lawyerly of him, I suppose.
To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness.
And it’s not an act of grave moral wickedness to act on a new and peculiar idea of what human sexes are by helping teenagers harm their own bodies?
We are all aware of the special alignments of particular academic disciplines. In “Gender Studies” departments, for example, the listed requirements for majoring in the subject never include any Biology coursework; this is because scholars in this subject do not believe that “gender” has anything to do with Biology. Similarly, none of the various “This or That Studies” departments require any education in Statistics, because scholars of these disciplines typically define “knowledges” (plural, and including indigenous folk-traditions) in a sense that is independent of what elsewhere is called “data”.
Departments are free to define their own subject matter, but I submit that US universities committed a category error when they assigned these departments to the Faculties (or Schools) of Arts and Sciences. The Sciences, of course, all concentrate on knowledge of the physical world. And the Arts are no less deeply connected with the physical world: visual Art through the physical materials it uses in painting, sculpture, ceramics, and so on; musical Art through the instruments it uses, and in the physics of sound. But how, then, can disciplines which assert their complete separation from analysis of the physical world be part of an A & S Faculty?
The solution is obvious. Academies should define a separate School or Faculty of Rhetoric, to include the department of Communications, all the “Studies” departments, and some other units. Rhetoric has a venerable academic history, going back to ancient Athens at its height, and much later becoming part of the classic medieval Trivium of university studies.
Once “Studies” departments are placed in the Faculty of Rhetoric, their majors will of course receive undergrad degrees of BR rather than BS or BA, better informing putative employers about the nature of their training. The names of advanced degrees in these disciplines will also be modified to provide such improved information. Finally, inclusion of these departments in the Faculty of Rhetoric will provide the departments with an intellectual environment appropriate for them.
In short, this simple reform of the Faculty assignment of departments will cure 40 years of of ambiguity and confusion in and downstream of the groves of academe.
The author was formerly a professor at the University of Washington, first in the A & S Faculty, then in the School of Medicine. He is currently experiencing an advanced case of emeritis.
An explanatory photo of the male Scottish Green candidate would have helped too. I mean, this is how all professional women dress for work. pic.twitter.com/1mK50mAIki
Wait, what? Trans toilet ban? You mean Holyrood has banned trans people from all the toilets?
I bet that’s not what they mean.
A Scottish Greens for the Holyrood election has pledged to work to persuade the Scottish Parliament to lift its ban on trans people using toilets in their lived gender in the building if she is elected in May.
Ah, there it is. After the obfuscatory bilge has misled the reader. Nobody is banning trans people from toilets; the ban is on using toilets for the other sex. No men in women’s toilets, capeesh?
Iris Duane, who is the party’s candidate for the Glasgow Kelvin and Maryhill constituency, in the poll in May, made the call in an interview with The Herald.
Ms Duane, 23, who spoke last week to The Herald’s Unspun podcast, would be the first openly trans woman to become an MSP if she is elected in May.
But would he be the first man to become an MSP? Er, no.
Some firsts, and purported firsts, are not significant. Being the first person to become an MSP while having a tattoo of a stoat on the left buttock is not significant. Pretending to be the opposite sex is equally irrelevant, and vastly more obnoxious, especially when the stolen sex is female.
The rest of the article is a torrent of rehashed bilge, all in the cause of promoting men who pretend to be women. Where are the adults?
President Donald Trump says he will not allow the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor to open unless Canada makes significant concessions to the U.S.
Trump said in a Feb. 9 post on Truth Social that the U.S. will open negotiations with Canada, which has footed the entire bill for the $5.7-billion bridge construction project, but believes the U.S. should probably take ownership of at least half of it.
In fact, the bridge is jointly owned by Canada and the U.S., with Canada intending to recoup its upfront construction costs over time, through bridge tolls.
While the US enjoys a free ride, but Trump is pissed off anyway.
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the U.S. with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.
“With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset.”
We should learn, perhaps, how to use commas like a literate grownup.
Anyway, Canada paid for the construction and Trump still thinks it owes us? How does that work?
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the U.S. with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.
That’s an F for the semester. “importantly” is not a synonym for “what’s important is”. In fact “importantly” is not anything; it’s not an idiomatic way of saying anything.
“While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.”
And replacing women from these positions is not social engineering? All and only men is a neutral, apolitical, unprejudiced position? And each of these women has more experience, talent, and skill than a hundred thousand Hegseths and Trumps.
As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women “is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform….”
I wonder how this effects the morale of the armed forces as a whole? While I can imagine some Trumpistas among the military, there are going to be plenty who will resent the culling of female officers by a know-nothing dweeb like Hegseth, and I can’t help but think that Trump’s vendetta against diversity in all its forms is not going to help with unit cohesion amongst serving minority members, whose existence is to be ignored and hidden behind their Aryan White comrades in arms. Will they be that much less willing to follow illegal orders issued from Berlin Washington? If those tasked with defending the regime no longer feel they are part of the regime, they might be less inclined to fight for it, die for it, or kill for it. This could become very important.
As much as I dislike the wokeism that got our hostess bullied off FTB, I take issue with the frequently repeated trope about how it killed the atheist and skeptics movements. The Men’s Rights Activists who flooded Watson, McCreight, Ophelia, and so many others with personal attacks, cyberbullying, harassment, and threats had dealt these movements their mortal blow long before that. If anything, wokeism just put them out of their misery.
Since the #MeToo movement (remember that?) was briefly mentioned, I was positively surprised to see the #MeToo hashtag gain the traction it did after seeing so many comparable campaigns fizzle out. I was not surprised to see the backlash to #MeToo, which I take to include the “Karen” meme, the “white feminist” meme, the “TERF”/”SWERF” memes, the “sex negative” meme, and, more recently, the “AWFUL”* meme. Nor, for that matter, was I surprised (depressed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised) to see Donald “Grab Them By the Pussy” Trump elected president a few years later. These things are not “fringe”! I predict already now that we will see a similar backlash to the Epstein scandal. As Victoria Smith puts it in HAGS:
It is only when you have witnessed several such Great Reckonings that you start to get suspicious. There is a pattern: everyone chants the slogans and uses the hashtags; a few ritual sacrifices are made; certain voices start to worry things are going too far; in one or two very well publicised instances, things do indeed go too far; the ‘going too far’ incidents are considered far greater tragedies than all the instances in which women have never seen justice at all; people start to talk about things being ‘post-#MeToo’ or ‘after Rotherham’, as though we have witnessed an irreversible cultural shift; everyone will shake their heads at the fact that ‘no one’ ever noticed the problem before. In practice, very little changes.
Be prepared for the inevitable moment when the current focus on the the horrific abuses of women and girls by powerful men once again starts giving way to the “gone too far” narrative, the “hysteria” narrative, the “witch-hunt” narrative etc.
Oh dear Sparkles has been told by The Times that calling him a bloke is a biological fact. He didn't seem to bothered with the word lunatic pic.twitter.com/MsCtBhCk0A
A man who was convicted of a terrorist offence has defended standing in local elections this year, saying he understands “people’s speculation and concern”.
Shahid Butt was found guilty of a plot to blow up the British consulate in Yemen in 1999, but said the charges were fabricated and that he was tortured into making a confession. Both Labour and Conservative politicians raised concerns about his suitability when he announced his plan to stand as an independent candidate, in the Sparkhill ward on the Birmingham City Council.
…
Speaking to BBC Politics Midlands this week, Butt said: “I’ve always maintained from day one, that these were false, fabricated charges that were put against me, I was tortured into signing a confession.”
What’s he been up to lately? Good peaceful friendly things?
Butt has been a controversial figure more recently, when he encouraged Birmingham Muslims to protest against a football match in November between Aston Villa and the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv. He was accused of using language which might have encouraged physical confrontations.
Social media footage from the protest showed Butt saying: “Muslims are not pacifists… if somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out.”
Protesting the football match why? Because…Jews?
Not someone I would feel happy voting for, I must say.
Sureena Brackenridge, the Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, said: “I am stunned that someone who was found to be a terrorist, who planned to blow up a British consulate, is now putting himself in a position to represent people of Sparkhill.”
Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Yardley in Birmingham told ITV News: “The idea that people who have been convicted of terror offences underplaying that as having had a colourful past and standing to represent part of my family in that area, I find that absolutely appalling.”
