Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Quick Hits: Volume CCII

- So a college newspaper engaging in its sole purpose of journalism can now be "triggering?" Wut?!?!

Editors at the Northwestern University student paper The Daily Northwestern on Sunday issued an apology for what it called "mistakes" in its coverage of a campus event last week featuring former Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sessions, who served a tumultuous term as attorney general under President Trump from 2017 to 2018, announced a bid to win back his Alabama Senate seat last week. He spoke at Northwestern on Nov. 5 amid heavy protests.

The editors at the paper from the well-known journalism school specifically noted the photos taken at the event in their apology, noting that some students had found them to be “retraumatizing and invasive” and adding that those photos had been taken down.

"The Daily sent a reporter to cover that talk and another to cover the students protesting his invitation to campus, along with a photographer. We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night — along with how we plan to move forward," reads part of the apology.

"One area of our reporting that harmed many students was our photo coverage of the event. Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down," it adds.

Townhall Political Editor (and Northwestern alum) Guy Benson, as you can imagine, was none too pleased with this action.

(I)f elite institutions abandon support for the First Amendment (here's another recent example from Harvard), dark times lie ahead. And the notion that this sort of madness is merely confined to the academy is obviously not true anymore. Woke, stifling political correctness, in subordination of the truth, is infecting increasing swaths of society writ large, with real and distressing consequences. That the Daily Northwestern actively elected to undermine the credibility of its work with this egregious sop to the outrage mob is a tragedy. Its current leadership might as well have taken out a full-page advertisement announcing that their newspaper is no longer in the news business, and cannot be counted upon to relay accurate, factual information without fear or favor.


Constitutional rights die in wokeness.



- So an octogenarian Canadian hockey commentator opines that immigrants to the country aren't appreciative of soldiers who perished in fighting for Canada. Said commentator is unceremoniously dumped.

Meanwhile, the young, progressive boy Prime Minister of Canada donned blackface on multiple occasions as a young adult, yet is reelected.

Huh. Maybe our neighbors to north have decided to glom on to some modern day American values after all.


- I've been an admirer of the late John McCain for his honor and courage while serving America in the Vietnam War. However, a good number of his policy stances as a U.S. Senator and his indignant attitude over being a "maverick," one not afraid to thumb his nose at his own party, were traits of his which I didn't much care for.

As such, I'm really not concerned what McCain would think of today's Republican party. Honestly, how often is the news media going to recycle the same narrative where his widow Cindy proclaims her husband would be ashamed of what the party has become?

What's really disgusting is many of the same people who besmirched McCain because he had the audacity to oppose Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race are the ones consistently giving his family a platform to do their dirty work. Conservative commentator Steve Deace noticed this, too.

I’m not saying virtually everything in politics is fake...but watching a bunch of folks who smeared John McCain as the 2008 GOP nominee now claim him as their perpetual posthumous weapon to wield against those who actually voted for him....okay, I am.

Say, how many networks gave more than even a cursory mention of Democrat Zell Miller upon his passing 20 months ago? Certainly his family could've conveyed how disgusted Mr. Miller likely was with his party making a quantum leap leftward. Yeah, intellectual consistency is hard.

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