Katie Couric is still terrible
Former Today host Katie Couric claimed in a new memoir that she selectively edited a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to hide the late Supreme Court justice’s harsh critique of professional athletes who kneel during the national anthem.
Anthem protesters show “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life,” Ginsburg told Couric.
“Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from,” she continued. “As they became older, they realize that this was youthful folly. And that’s why education is important.”
These remarks were excluded entirely from Couric’s subsequent reporting. She explained she doctored the interview with Ginsburg for two reasons: to “protect” Ginsburg’s legacy because Couric believed the then-83-year-old justice was too feeble to understand what she was saying and because the head of public affairs for the Supreme Court personally asked for the remarks to be stricken from the record.
This is not journalism. This is public relations.
Just so we’re all on the same page: Couric, who was once one of the biggest names in journalism, has admitted to covering up a liberal Supreme Court justice’s criticism of what is now a core left-wing agenda item. And not just any liberal Supreme Court justice, mind you, but the very embodiment of the activist judiciary Left.
As a particular former vice president once said, “This is a big f***ing deal.”
Yet, amazingly, Couric will likely suffer no professional consequences for her admitted malfeasance regarding the Ginsburg interview. Of course, she suffered none when she was caught in 2016 deceptively editing interviews of gun rights activists, so why start now?
The beatings will continue until morale improves
The New York Times has joined the effort to pressure Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona into supporting the White House’s multitrillion-dollar social spending plan.
The only difference between the New York Times and the activists who followed Sinema into the bathroom to berate her about her opposition to President Joe Biden’s spending bills is that the paper of record is subtler with its attacks.
“As Budget Bill Hangs in Limbo, Kyrsten Sinema Heads to Europe,” read the headline to an Oct. 13 New York Times report.
Its subhead read, “With the Senate out of session, Ms. Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona, has been in Europe on a fundraising trip.”
Left-wing activists wasted no time sharing the report’s toplines, blasting the senator for selfishly abandoning her party in its time of need. The opening paragraphs of the New York Times report certainly suggest as much.
However, in the story’s third paragraph, the reader eventually learns that Sinema is in Europe to raise funds for her party, specifically the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
And it’s not until the story’s ninth paragraph that the reader hears from the senator’s office, which claimed she has “held several calls — including with President Biden, the White House team, Senator Schumer’s team, and other Senate and House colleagues — to continue discussions on the proposed budget reconciliation package.”
Where does this leave us? It leaves us with a relatively mundane story about a Democratic senator who is still in talks with the White House regarding its domestic agenda, even as she fundraises overseas for her party while Congress is in recess. Yet the report is presented anyway, through buried ledes and insinuation, as one in which an out-of-touch lawmaker, an obstructionist even, has skipped the country for a self-serving European vacation.
Just vote for the stupid bills, Sinema! We wouldn’t have to publish stories like this if you’d just fall into line!
Univision and fake news
In explaining the labor shortage crisis in the United States, the Spanish-language network Univision promoted actual, honest-to-God fake news this week.
“Our number of the day is 4,300,000,” anchor Elyangelica Gonzalez said. “That’s the record number of Americans that quit their jobs, which is the highest since December of 2000 and which is equivalent to 3% of the workforce,”
She added, “According to the Department of Labor, this is happening due to a combination of increased opportunities with better pay elsewhere, in addition to fear over the delta variant.”
The problem here is the Labor Department said no such thing.
What it did say is that “quits are generally voluntary separations initiated by the employee. Therefore, the quits rate can serve as a measure of workers’ willingness or ability to leave jobs. Layoffs and discharges are involuntary separations initiated by the employer. Other separations includes separations due to retirement, death, disability, and transfers to other locations of the same firm.”
It was a reasonable effort by Univision, though! Anything to avoid blaming policies promoted and enforced by the Democratic-controlled House, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the Democratic-controlled White House.
