From the left: Don’t Trust Mainstream Media
“I mourn” for the news business, writes TKNews’ Matt Taibbi. “It’s destroyed itself.” After the internet arrived and flooded the market with new voices, some outlets found that, “instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and dominate it. How? That’s easy. You feed the audience news you know they will like.” Yet when you “decide in advance to forego half of your potential audience, to fulfill the aim of catering to the other half, you’re choosing in advance which facts to emphasize and which to downplay. You’re also choosing which stories to cover, and which ones to avoid, based on considerations other than truth or newsworthiness. This is not journalism.”
Culture critic: The Right’s Winning vs. Disney
“In recent years, the Walt Disney Co. has become embroiled in America’s culture war,” pushing critical race theory in its employee-training programs and radical gender ideology in its children’s programming, but last week it fired CEO Bob Chapek and reinstalled former CEO Bob Iger, cheers Christopher F. Rufo at his site. And in video of Iger’s first townhall meeting with employees, he “retreats from the company’s most controversial positions and moves toward neutrality.” He vows to adopt a different posture, to listen to Disney’s audience and work to quiet things down. “This is an important shift,” notes Rufo. Conservatives had sought to “damage Disney’s brand” and “make the company pay a political price” to force it to “declare neutrality. So far, it appears that the strategy is working.”
Housing expert: Bipartisan Path on Homeless
“If bipartisanship really were to take hold” in Congress, “action aimed at mitigating street homelessness would be a good place to start,” suggests Howard Husock at The Hill. Helping the street homeless must go “beyond housing, to include treatment of the sort that long-shuttered state psychiatric hospitals once offered” — and “treatment plus housing” are the goals of GOP legislation that “languished in the last Congress” but deserves Democratic consideration. “Underutilized post-pandemic big-city office buildings and hotels could be converted to supportive housing . . . Policing could be invoked to clear the streets and sidewalks. Political will, as well as funding, matters.” “Tent cities dot D.C. not far from the Capitol”; assisting their “unfortunate residents” would show politics can “make a positive difference.”
Crypto watch: SBF’s No Schlub, Just a Crook
“It is now clear,” thunders CoinDesk’s David Z. Morris, that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and Alameda Research involved “conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors.” Honcho Sam Bankman-Fried used “in-house asset[s] as collateral for loans between clandestinely related entities” and handed out a total of $4.1 billion in loans “including massive personal loans that were likely unsecured.” Since FTX’s collapse, he’s “attempted to portray himself as a well-intentioned but naïve kid who got in over his head.” No: “The scale and complexity of Bankman-Fried’s fraud and theft appear to rival those of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and Malaysian embezzler Jho Low,” and he “deserves to share their fate.”
Crime beat: Linking Crime to Immigration
“Violent crime is becoming common in Sweden,” as it is throughout the European Europe, report John R. Lott & James Varney at RealClearInvestigations. And an RCI analysis “strongly” links the surge with immigration: “Each one percentage point increase in immigrant population is associated with a 3.6 percent increase” in homicides. The results echo other studies in European countries that show immigrants commit crime at higher rates than the native-born population. A 2020 Swedish study found that from 2002 to 2017 immigrants were suspected in 73% of cases involving murder, attempted murder and manslaughter. In the US, data for such an analysis is “rarely” collected. But in Texas, which does track such stats, illegal immigrants are “convicted of homicide 32% more frequently than the rest of the Texas population.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
