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Friday, December 13, 2019


 

Headlines for Dec. 13, 2019




Click here to listen to this week's segment on Loud & Clear Radio.  
Headlines with an * are the ones we managed to fit in in our allotted time slot.

 


Worst, Most Misleading & Funniest Headlines for Dec. 13, 2019

*General election 2019: Ads are 'indecent, dishonest and untruthful'
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50726500
1st paragraph: “The Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising says at least 31 campaigns from across the party spectrum have been indecent, dishonest or untruthful.”
16th paragraph: “88% (5,952) of the Tory party's most widely promoted ads either featured claims which had been flagged…as not correct or not entirely correct.”
Lib Dems criticized claiming ”it was the only party that could beat either Labour, the Conservatives or the SNP "in seats like yours"”
“for Labour, it said that it could not find any misleading claims in ads run over the period. However, it noted that the party's supporters were more likely to share unpaid-for electioneering posts than those of its rivals. It said one of these contained leader Jeremy Corbyn's disputed claim that a Tory-negotiated trade deal with the US could cost the NHS up to £500m a week by driving up the cost of medicines.”

*Socialist Jeremy Corbyn to step down as leader of Labour Party after defeat in U.K. election
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/socialist-jeremy-corbyn-steps-down-leader-labour-party-after-crushing-n1101166
All other references to Corbyn in NBC News headlines are like "Labour leader Corbyn", but now that he lost, and they want to tar socialism, it's "socialist Jeremy Corbyn".

Boris Johnson breaks tradition by dodging interview with BBC’s top Rottweiler, Andrew Neil
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/breaking-decades-of-tradition-boris-johnson-wants-to-dodge-a-notoriously-tough-interview-with-bbc-s-top-rottweiler-andrew-neil/2019/12/06/d73bd3da-1835-11ea-80d6-d0ca7007273f_story.html
I guess “hard-hitting interviewer” would highlight the inadequacies of American interviewers too much.

*The Doves Were Right. I Was Wrong.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/anti-war-protesters-were-right-about-afghanistan/603271/
(by Conor Friedersdorf)
Original headline, which was rather quickly changed, was much more accurate: "Anti-war Protesters Were Right About Afghanistan." The new one about "doves" is either misleading or downright wrong. Both "doves" and "hawks" supported the invasion of Afghanistan; only radicals and anti-imperialists opposed it.

The American Health Care Industry Is Killing People
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/opinion/healthcare-industry-medicare.html
The health care system does sometimes kill people (A lot of them in fact: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html “According to a recent study by Johns Hopkins, more than 250,000 people in the United States die every year because of medical mistakes, making it the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”), but that’s not what this mis-titled article is about. It’s about the health INSURANCE industry, which is a cancerous growth on top of the health care system. It needs to be cut out. The health insurance industry would like you to keep calling it the health care industry so it sounds like it’s a system that actually cares for people (in both senses of the word). Don’t make that mistake. They don’t care (again, in both senses of the word). They care for PROFIT.

Report on F.B.I. Russia Inquiry Finds Serious Errors but Debunks Anti-Trump Plot
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report-russia-investigation.html
FBI was justified in opening Trump campaign probe, but case plagued by ‘serious failures,’ inspector general finds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/inspector-general-report-trump-russia-investigation/2019/12/09/d5940d88-184c-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html
‪CNN in an article headlined “7 new things we learned from the Horowitz reporthttps://www.cnn.com/2019/12/09/politics/horowitz-reports-new-things/index.html says “The FBI badly bungling its application to surveil Carter Page”.‬

“A chart in the report listed dozens of significant inaccuracies, omissions or assertions that investigators failed to back up in supporting documents in the four applications. To make the case that Mr. Page was probably a foreign agent, they relied on historical information about his contacts with Russians before 2016 and claims about his 2016 interactions with Russians that came from the Steele dossier.

“Among the problems: The F.B.I. never told the Justice Department, which thus never told the court that granted permission for the wiretaps, that Mr. Page had for years been providing information to the C.I.A. about his prior contacts with Russian officials — including an encounter cited in the application as a reason to be suspicious of him. That might have made his history less suspicious.”

“Mr. Clinesmith altered the email so that it stated that Mr. Page was “not a source,” contributing to the Justice Department’s failure to discuss his relationship with the C.I.A. in a renewal application.”

The things that happened, along with an FBI lawyer fabricating evidence, do not constitute “mistakes” or “errors” as the NYT and WaPo headlines would have it. 
They are deliberate perversions of justice. Criminal conduct. The ends (trying to destroy the odious Trump) do not justify the means. All the more so because the motivation for trying to destroy Trump wasn’t his *actual* odious policies. No, it was one of his few reasonable policies—expressing a desire for good relations with Russia (something which his predecessors had also expressed a desire for). Imagine what the FBI could (and would!) do if an actual progressive was in sight of the Oval Office. There are indeed dangers to democracy. But they don’t originate in Russia, but right at home in Washington, DC.

*France’s worst strike in decades enters a second day
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/06/france-strikes-for-a-second-day-over-macron-pension-reform-plans.html
Why is the word “worst” in the headline? To bias the reader, of course. Why not “best”? Or just neutral words like “biggest” or “most significant”?

*Four died in a shootout with police after a UPS truck was hijacked. Could it have been avoided?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/07/four-died-shootout-with-police-after-ups-truck-was-hijacked-could-it-have-been-avoided/
Believe it or not, they are asking that question seriously.

*Why Warren’s Drop In the Polls Is Good News for Her
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/13/warren-harris-altitude-084150
Hard to explain the “logic” of this piece. Example: “she has an opportunity to show in vivid and visceral ways that she is the real deal rather than a passing novelty.”

*Biden warns that Boris Johnson's victory shows dangers of parties leaning too far left

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/13/biden-warns-democrats-about-results-of-uk-election-084359

The Labour loss was by all serious loss a Brexit loss, not a "too far left" loss. But the establishment (media and politicians) will use it as a club to beat the left; Biden is just the first to start swinging.

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