The New York Times laments digging through old tweets, Joe Biden collapses in the polls, and New York proves education is about leveling and not achievement, Ben Shapiro says on The Ben Shapiro Show. The reason that all of this becomes important is because the media seem to be at wit's end about what to do about the fact that they are bleeding credibility nationally and in terms of money regionally, and that has resulted in a lack of trust in the media. And that is the twin narrative for today because on the one hand, you have the national newspapers who are complaining that they're now being targeted as political activists, and on the other, regional papers complaining that there just isn't enough money to run them. It's a crisis that could only be cured by a systemic shift in how the news is funded, on the 1 hand, and by a change in orientation toward objective journalism, if you hope to maintain brand credibility at places like the NY Times and other media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post. Ben Shapiro's full show is available wherever books are sold, including Audible, Audible and iTunes. Subscribe to the show and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast! The opinions expressed in this podcast are our own and may not necessarily reflect those of our parent companies' policies and practices. We do not endorse the views expressed in the books we publish. We are not affiliated with any of the products or services we mention in the show. If you're looking for a book recommendation, please contact us directly or indirectly through a third-party reseller. . We are a proud supporter of the show, we do not own the rights to any of our products, we are not doing so. Thank you for your comments, reviews, recommendations or review or review of our work, or we're looking out for our own books, and we are looking out to find out what you're reading or listening to us out there. Thanks for your support is appreciated and reviewing our work is appreciated. -Ben Shapiro's bio on this podcast is linked in the comments section. -- Thank you! -- The opinions stated in this episode is that you'd like us to send us your thoughts and review our work and review it on the next week's podcast is also appreciated, and the words you've sent us out on the podcast is
00:00:00.000The New York Times laments digging through old tweets, Joe Biden collapses in the polling, and New York proves education is about leveling and not achievement.
00:00:16.000Well, a lot of folks in the media seem to believe that their industry is in serious trouble.
00:00:21.000And I think that the reason that the industry is in serious trouble is because journalism has lost its credibility with the American people.
00:00:28.000I mean, all too often, you look at the New York Times and you realize this is an activist newspaper.
00:00:32.000You look at CNN, you realize this is an activist newspaper.
00:00:34.000People blame that on President Trump in the media.
00:00:42.000Guys, a lot of us didn't trust you before, and we don't trust you now, specifically now that the mask is off with regard to President Trump.
00:00:49.000I mean, it is very obvious that the New York Times and major newspapers across the country have been engaging in political activism, not journalism, for all these years, and they've really thinly veiled it.
00:00:58.000And this hasn't just been true for the last few years.
00:01:00.000This has been true for literally decades, going all the way back to Walter Cronkite, who was a committed leftist, going all the way back to Edward R. Murrow, who was a committed member of the political left.
00:01:10.000I'm going all the way back to the Vietnam War when Cronkite was going on TV suggesting that the Vietnam War was lost after the Tet Offensive, which it absolutely was not.
00:01:17.000And the fact is, the media in the United States have been monolithically left since the 1960s, and it's gotten worse, and more activist, and more open, and the American people are on to the game.
00:01:26.000Well, that has resulted in a lack of trust.
00:01:28.000Now, that does not mean that all of these institutions are losing money.
00:01:31.000There were some institutional shifts that happened in the mainstream media over the last 10 years that meant that a lot of the newspapers around the country saw significant losses.
00:01:40.000That includes places like the LA Times, particularly regional papers, saw significant losses because the only people who were subscribing were people who expected a physical copy of their newspaper on their doorstep the next morning.
00:01:51.000Well, if it turns out that nobody wants that physical copy of the pulp newspaper on their doorstep the next morning and then get all their news for free online, then why exactly would you subscribe to the Los Angeles Times?
00:02:01.000Los Angeles Times has been bleeding for years.
00:02:03.000But the New York Times has found a way to make that up.
00:02:06.000That's because they're a national newspaper with a wire service and because they have extraordinary brand credibility, despite the fact that the trust levels in the media generally are down.
00:02:14.000And so they have a lot of subscribers.
00:02:16.000The Wall Street Journal was the first to jump into the space.
00:02:19.000So in other words, big national newspapers are doing fine.
00:02:21.000Local, regional papers, those are the ones that are getting hit the hardest.
00:02:25.000Now, the reason that all of this becomes important is...
00:02:28.000Is because the media seem to be at wit's end about what to do about the fact that they are sort of bleeding out in terms of both credibility nationally and in terms of money regionally.
00:02:38.000And that is the twin narrative for today.
00:02:41.000Because on the one hand, you've got the national newspapers who are complaining that they are now being targeted as political activists.
00:02:47.000And you've got the regional newspapers complaining that they're being put out of business because there just isn't the money to run them.
00:02:52.000The journalistic industry is in a severe crisis.
00:02:54.000It's a crisis that really could only be cured by a systemic shift in how the news is funded, on the one hand, and by a change in orientation on the other, moving away from activism journalism and toward objective journalism if you hope to maintain brand credibility at places like the New York Times.
00:03:08.000Now, the reason this comes up is because yesterday we saw the most bizarre, strange response by the New York Times to a story that I've seen in a very long time.
00:03:19.000There's a fellow named Arthur Schwartz.
00:03:21.000Arthur Schwartz is good friends with Donald Trump Jr.
00:03:23.000He is close with the Trump administration.
00:03:25.000And he and some of his minions online, some of his friends online, started to go through all of the old tweets of various journalists at institutions like the New York Times, at institutions like CNN, dig those up, archive them, and use them for the possibility of deploying against these institutions.
00:03:43.000And the New York Times is really hot and bothered about this.
00:03:45.000So there's an article by Kenneth Vogel and Jeremy Peters that came out yesterday.
00:03:49.000Call Trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to White House.
00:03:54.000And the New York Times is very upset about this.
00:03:56.000Resurfacing old tweets from journalists, that's verboten.
00:04:00.000It's one thing for the New York Times to go dig up private information on citizens and then distribute it widely.
00:04:05.000It's one thing for the New York Times to go after people who are sort of fringe characters in politics and try and destroy their life with old tweets.
00:04:12.000It's one thing for the entire media to go after Kevin Hart and try and knock him off the Oscars and succeed by quoting tweets from 2009.
00:04:18.000It's another thing if somebody digs up a tweet from a New York Times editor's college days.
00:04:24.000That's the opinion of the New York Times.
00:04:25.000So in this article, Ken Vogel and Jeremy Peters write a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
00:05:06.000He's this guy who just lived in Toledo, Ohio and Barack Obama was walking around his neighborhood and he stopped Obama during a visit to complain about taxes.
00:05:16.000Well, the New York Times then went and dug up everything they could on this guy and basically ruined his life.
00:05:21.000And made him into sort of a temporary celebrity, his lines when he was speaking to Obama.
00:05:26.000But they turned him into a national level celebrity and they tried to discredit him as a human being.
00:05:30.000They ran an entire story that was all about Joe the Plumber.
00:05:33.000It's a real deal on Joe the Plumber reveals new slant.
00:05:36.000As though the question that he asked Obama was illegitimate because Joe the Plumber was not actually named Joe the Plumber.
00:05:43.000The New York Times says, as it turns out, Joe the Plumber, as he became nationally known when Senator John McCain made him a theme at Wednesday's final presidential debate, may work in the plumbing business.
00:05:56.000For my younger listeners, this is a thing that happened in real life 11 years ago.
00:05:59.000The New York Times went and dug up every piece of information they could on a dude who asked Barack Obama a question.
00:06:05.000They said Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics based in Toledo, said Thursday that Mr. Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber's license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding municipalities.
00:06:18.000His full name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher.
00:06:20.000He owes back taxes, too, public records show.
00:06:24.000The premise of his complaint to Mr. Obama about taxes may also be flawed, according to tax analysts.
00:06:29.000Contrary to what Mr. Wurzelbacher asserted, neither his personal taxes nor those of his business where he works are likely to rise if Mr. Obama's tax plan were to go into effect.
00:06:37.000So they went and they dug up all this information on Joe the Plumber to talk about his own personal tax records because he had the temerity to ask Barack Obama a question.
00:06:49.000Just a couple of years ago, Jared Yates Sexton, a, quote, writer, academic, and journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, and elsewhere, went and dug up information about a figure online named Han Bleephole Solo.
00:07:19.000How could President Trump do such a terrible thing?
00:07:22.000And of course, it wasn't very presidential, but the guy who created the GIF was just some dude online.
00:07:26.000And this dude online, it turns out, we had to go through all of his tweets to find out that he was a vicious racist so that we could then tie President Trump to vicious racism.
00:07:35.000So they dug up all this guy's old tweets, and then they suggested that because Trump had retweeted the silly GIF of himself tackling a person with a CNN logo for a face, then this guy's life should basically be ruined.
00:07:50.000And that it is definitely necessary to dig up every old thing that the guy ever said.
00:07:55.000And then this reporter, Jared Yates, texted and he started whining about it in Politico.
00:08:00.000He said, before the hour was up, I was receiving messages from the usual customers, anonymous accounts with Pepe avatars and bios declaring themselves ethno-nationalists and white identitarians.
00:08:08.000Yes, I'm sure that there are lots of jerks out there.
00:08:13.000It's one of the reasons why I have full-time security.
00:08:14.000But does that mean that it is a great idea for the media to start uncovering every bit of information about people they disagree with politically?
00:08:22.000And it was the New York Times who's jumping on the Kyle Cashew shouldn't be able to go to Harvard University bandwagon because some of his old friends had resurfaced crap that he said in a private chat two and a half years ago before the Parkland shooting.
00:08:35.000So the media are all in on the, we can uncover nasty information about people we don't like, or we can resurface old tweets that are 10 years old in order to ruin people's careers.
00:08:43.000But when it comes around for the New York Times, then they're very sad about it.
00:08:53.000First, You know, I had braces when I was a kid, straightened out my teeth, but as you get older, if you're not wearing your retainers, you remember you leave the orthodontist office, like, wear your retainers the rest of your life.
00:09:03.000And you're like, come on, I'm not a child anymore.
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00:10:35.000Okay, so as I say, The media have long gone after people that they find to be politically unpalatable by resurfacing old stuff, and it's usually at the apex of their career, right?
00:10:44.000It's about that time when somebody reaches a level of prominence, and then the media jump in.
00:10:50.000People at the New York Times, they're reporters, they resurface, quote-unquote resurface, old tweets.
00:10:54.000Resurfacing old tweets means you just search somebody's back catalog, you find something, you either take it out of context or you pump it out there.
00:11:01.000And then, you suggest that this is indicative of their current thinking and try to ruin their career over it, or demand an apology.
00:11:06.000And if they apologize, then you say you're only apologizing because you used to think this, so you're still a racist, so your career is ruined.
00:11:13.000This is why nobody should ever cave to the outrage mob.
00:11:16.000Now, the New York Times could be on the right side of this.
00:11:19.000The New York Times and the mainstream media could be on the right side of this.
00:11:22.000Instead of bothering to resurface old tweets, they could just go ask people what they think in the here and now.
00:11:27.000Or they could hold the consistent standard.
00:11:29.000Instead, their standard is, if they're people we disagree with, we can resurface old tweets and dig up old material about them and harm them.
00:11:35.000And if they're people who work for us, it's very bad if you do this.
00:11:38.000If you do this to Sarah Zhang, very bad.
00:11:39.000If you do this to one of our other editors, very bad.
00:11:42.000So, as I say, the New York Times is very upset about this.
00:11:44.000They say this is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.
00:11:54.000So you're telling me that Trump and his allies are trying to target your journalists, but your journalists are sacrosanct, so they shouldn't be held to the same standard that you hold everybody else to?
00:12:04.000That seems like a double standard to me.
00:12:06.000They say four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people.
00:12:16.000who work at some of the country's most prominent news organizations.
00:12:18.000The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump in response to reporting or commentary that the White House's allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.
00:12:33.000So again, this is very bad because they're members of Team Trump.
00:12:36.000Releasing information about journalists if you're members of Team Trump, Very, very bad.
00:12:42.000Operatives have closely examined more than a decade's worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said.
00:12:49.000Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up.
00:12:55.000The researchers said to extend to members of journalist families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.
00:13:25.000Okay, so, the New York Times tries to distinguish between its own coverage and the coverage that is now being applied to them.
00:13:34.000They say it is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled.
00:13:42.000The material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.
00:13:52.000They say the information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and reelection campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News.
00:14:05.000And then they say, The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump's long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an enemy of the people.
00:14:14.000The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.
00:14:23.000I mean, you literally just had a leaked transcript in which Dean Baquet, your executive editor over at the New York Times, admitted that they built their entire newsroom about the Trump-Russia narrative, and then that failed, and now they're building it around the Trump-racism narrative.
00:14:37.000So yes, you guys are exactly what you what you purport not to be.
00:14:43.000Here's the best paragraph in this piece by Jeremy Peters.
00:14:46.000He says, using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for or as a warning not to pursue coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.
00:15:01.000Oh, oh, so just to get this straight, if you're a journalist for the most powerful newspaper on planet Earth, then you're not in a position of power.
00:15:08.000And so us asking questions about all of your old tweets is bad.
00:15:11.000However, if you are a fringe member of the Trump administration, if you're an intern in the West Wing and they dig up an old racist tweet of yours and blast it out on the front page of The New York Times, that's speaking truth to power.
00:15:24.000Or alternatively, you guys are unbelievably full of crap, and you have decided that the best way to ruin people is to go after everything they said 15, 20, 30 years ago.
00:15:33.000It's to go around digging up what Mitt Romney said back in 1960 while he was giving a kid a haircut, and then use that to destroy his life.
00:15:41.000But if we ask about tweets that your executive editors were sending five years ago, then that's extraordinarily bad.
00:15:46.000Now the real solution to all of this is everybody just goes, okay fine, people said bad stuff, They either agree with it or disagree with it.
00:15:52.000They either apologize for it or don't.
00:16:05.000Good for the people on the right who are doing this.
00:16:07.000Not because I approve of this sort of activity generally, but because if the left, if the members of the news media are going to play this game, then the rules should be applied to them too.
00:16:15.000There must be mutually assured destruction here.
00:16:18.000If all of politics is going to be an exercise in digging up tweets out of context from 2009 and then using it against your political opponents, then you guys ought to live by that standard too.
00:16:29.000And then we can all decide together, is this a standard that we think is capable of being upheld?
00:16:34.000Or, perhaps, should we be a little bit more forgiving?
00:16:36.000Should we be a little bit more understanding of human nature?
00:16:39.000Should it be that people say dumb stuff sometimes and that is not indicative of their deeper character all the time?
00:16:45.000Should it be that maybe people progress over the course of their lives?
00:16:48.000See, the standard that the media have set up here is that if you ever tweeted anything bad, and now you are a Republican, then you must be ruined for all time.
00:16:55.000However, if you're a Democrat, you can treat like Sarah Jean all day and be totally cool.
00:16:58.000And you can treat overtly racist crap all day and it's totally cool.
00:17:29.000And Pavel will start saying how many minutes it is past the time we were supposed to launch with all the authority of the Soviet Commissar.
00:17:41.000But if ever Pavel were to announce the time incorrectly, we would have to find a replacement for Pavel, presumably with a similarly intimidating accent.
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00:19:09.000Only you guys in the media are, are able to go through and make Justine Sacco into a national celebrity for tweeting a dumb joke about flying to Africa and then ruin her life.
00:19:18.000Only you guys should be able to do that.
00:19:19.000You should never be subjected to those rules, ever, ever.
00:19:22.000Pinched Soulsburger writes this, this silly, this silly, See, because it's in retaliation, that means it's bad.
00:19:28.000Well, have we ever exam- Like, this does not hold.
00:19:30.000campaign by President Trump's allies to attack hundreds of journalists in retaliation for coverage of the administration.
00:19:35.000See, because it's in retaliation, that means it's bad.
00:19:39.000Well, have we ever, like, this does not hold.
00:19:42.00090% of the members of the media are Democrats.
00:19:46.000I'm pretty sure they have some political motivations in their coverage.
00:19:50.000In fact, I know they do because they openly admit it when they're asked about it on undercover tape or when transcripts leak.
00:19:56.000It is very obvious how you guys are covering the news.
00:19:58.000So you guys don't get to question the motivations of people who are uncovering material about your reporters when you guys have your own motivations for doing your journalistic work.
00:20:05.000I remember I visited the headquarters of ABC News in New York one time, and there was a big slogan on the wall about, quote-unquote, doing good.
00:20:12.000And I thought, that's really not your job.
00:20:15.000Your definition of doing good may run directly counter to my definition of doing good.
00:20:19.000I mean, for God's sake, George Stephanopoulos was in the Clinton administration as your lead news anchor.
00:20:24.000So I have a pretty good idea that you have some different priorities than many of us on the other side of the aisle.
00:20:29.000In any case, the New York Times says, this unprecedented campaign Unprecedented campaign is literally a bunch of trolls digging up your old tweets, guys.
00:20:37.000That's why you're locking your accounts and cleansing them now.
00:20:41.000This unprecedented campaign appears designed to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with independent news organizations that have asked tough questions and brought uncomfortable truths to light.
00:20:54.000The New York Times, which has distinguished itself with fearless and fair coverage of the president, Fearless and fair cover... I love it when journalists call themselves fearless in covering President Trump.
00:21:44.000Nothing says fair like the New York Times.
00:21:47.000They say the New York Times is one of the main targets of this assault.
00:21:50.000Unable to challenge the accuracy of our reporting, political operatives have been scouring social media and other sources to find any possibly embarrassing information on anyone associated with the Times, no matter their rank, role, or actual influence on our journalism.
00:22:02.000Their goal is to silence critics and undermine the public's faith in independent journalism, as opposed to when you guys target, you know, like low-level staffers in the White House comms department, and then try and destroy their lives so that you can humiliate the Trump administration and suggest that they're employing unemployables.
00:22:18.000This represents an escalation of the ongoing campaign against the free press.
00:22:36.000Campaign against the free press would be like Barack Obama arresting an AP reporter.
00:22:39.000That would be a campaign against the free press.
00:22:41.000Arthur Schwartz Archive in your tweets, not a campaign against the free press.
00:22:47.000Not a campaign against, not in any serious way.
00:22:49.000And if it is, I have a very easy solution.
00:22:51.000The New York Times should just say, no matter what old stuff is uncovered, nobody's getting fired.
00:22:56.000Also, we are not going to investigate old tweets and then take them out of context to harm people because this is an unlivable standard.
00:23:02.000Then we could all go back to our business, right?
00:23:04.000We would stop trying to ruin the lives of people like Brendan Eich and suggesting that it is deeply important that Brendan Eich contributed, the former head of Mozilla Firefox, that he contributed to a Prop 8 effort.
00:23:15.000These are the same reporters who five minutes ago were suggesting that Joaquin Castro was doing the Lord's work in revealing the names of people who had donated to Donald Trump in his district.
00:23:43.000He'll get to more of Pinch Sulzberger's ridiculous statement in just a moment.
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00:25:06.000So as I say, we're going through Pinch Solsberger's statement from the New York Times.
00:25:09.000Very, very upset at people on the interwebs who are targeting their reporters by digging up old stuff.
00:25:16.000And again, they've been doing this on an ongoing basis nearly daily.
00:25:21.000It was a front page New York Times story when Media Matters started digging up old clips from Tucker Carlson on Bubba the Love Sponge, and this was considered national news.
00:25:29.000So if you guys are doing this to go after Tucker Carlson's advertisers, well then I think that it's perfectly fair to go after you and go after your advertisers.
00:25:38.000This is all dumb, but this is the religion of leftism.
00:25:41.000The religion of leftism suggests that That there is no such thing as sin.
00:25:47.000Sinners are people who don't believe in the religion of the left.
00:25:50.000So the difference between a sin and a sinner, from the normal sort of traditional religious perspective, is that everybody sins, and we are all sinners, and therefore you have a lot of tolerance for sinners, but little tolerance for sin.
00:26:01.000The perspective of the left is you have a lot of tolerance for sin, because there's no such thing as a sin, but there's no tolerance for sinners, meaning people who disagree with the left.
00:27:11.000They're using insinuation and exaggeration to manipulate the facts for political gain.
00:27:17.000I'm fairly certain that just described the entire New York Times editorial board.
00:27:21.000You guys literally just ran a 1619 project suggesting that America was born in 1619 with the advent of slavery, not in 1607 with Jamestown, not in 1775, in 1619.
00:27:33.000And then you ran pieces that were purportedly journalism about how American capitalism has its roots in slave plantations.
00:27:40.000I'm pretty sure that that is a description of what you do for a living, using insinuation and exaggeration to manipulate the facts for political gain.
00:27:47.000In fact, the New York Times editorial bent is a disgrace to many of its own reporters, many of whom are terrific reporters.
00:27:53.000The New York Times actually does have a bunch of really good reporters, but the editorial bent of the New York Times makes their reporting less valuable, not more valuable.
00:28:01.000I mean, it's the New York Times that has had, they ran a full-scale anti-Semitic cartoon in their international edition like four months ago.
00:28:08.000The New York Times admitted back in the late part of 2018 that they had not reported on hate crimes in New York City because it didn't fit a political narrative.
00:28:15.000Insinuating and exaggerating to manipulate the facts for political gain is basically your stock and trade, guys.
00:28:21.000Sulzberger says, I want to thank the journalists at the Times and elsewhere who brave this type of pressure daily to bring essential information to the public.
00:28:31.000This is the scene in the movie where we get the slow clap, we get the backlit, pinched Sulzberger speaking to his journalist, and then they stand slowly, and the slow clap builds into a wild round of applause.
00:28:41.000Yeah, you know, you need to stretch your arm out there like Mrs. Incredible in order to pat yourself on the back there, Pinch.
00:28:47.000He says, under intense scrutiny and routine harassment, they remain undeterred.
00:28:51.000When our reporters learned of this campaign to attack journalists, they did what our colleagues around the globe always do.
00:28:56.000They went to work and started reporting.
00:28:58.000Well, I mean, they sort of had to do that because if they didn't, then you would fire them because they presumably would not be doing their jobs.
00:29:18.000If anyone, even those acting in bad faith, brings legitimate problems to our attention, we'll look into them and respond appropriately.
00:29:23.000See, this is where they want to uphold the double standard, right?
00:29:27.000I mean, he can't just say, maybe this has all been a mistake.
00:29:31.000They can't just say, maybe our pseudo-journalism, where we dig up people's old garbage in Twitter, and then pretend that that is representative of their worldview, and their worldview today, They can't just say that's a bad idea.
00:29:44.000Instead, it's, if you bring it to our attention, maybe we'll consider it and maybe we won't.
00:29:47.000But if it's you, we'll go after you with hammer and tongs.
00:29:51.000He says it is imperative that all of us remain thoughtful about how our words and actions reflect on the times, particularly during this period of sustained pressure and scrutiny.
00:29:59.000We all play a part in upholding our commitment to give the news impartially without fear or favor.
00:30:04.000What's the proper response to a campaign like this?
00:30:06.000Even in periods of pressure and change, the New York Times has the benefit of the long view, writes Pinched Soulsburger.
00:30:11.000We have served the public for 168 years now.
00:30:41.000Well, even other folks in the media left are looking at the New York Times going, guys, you're ridiculous.
00:30:46.000Eric Wemple, who is certainly not on the right, has a piece over at the Washington Post today talking about how dumb the New York Times response to all of this is.
00:31:09.000He's done a lot of really good things.
00:31:10.000And he's running that re-election campaign in part on that record.
00:31:13.000There's still one promise that he made that he's trying to pursue, and that is bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
00:31:18.000But many in the left and the press, even some big government Republicans, are making it hard for that actually to happen.
00:31:25.000The result is that, amazingly enough, some in the Trump administration, in the name of claiming victory, would like to push some form of price controls from the top down.
00:31:32.000Price controls rarely achieve their policy goals.
00:31:35.000They generally result in lack of innovation, lack of investment, in particularly the area where you have imposed a price control.
00:31:41.000Well, what area do you need innovation and investment more than in prescription drugs?
00:31:45.000That is the area where you need new cures and new treatments.
00:31:48.000Price controls are not going to be the solution.
00:31:50.000Putting price controls on America's medicine makers could lead to less R&D, which leads to less medical innovation.
00:31:55.000There's a reason that half of all medical innovation on planet Earth happens in the United States.
00:31:59.000That's why I'm asking you to go to DontCapMyCare right now and help FreedomWorks stop the Senate from capping your care by signing their petition right now.
00:33:30.000Help protect us against the nastiness of the left that has a double standard for sure when it comes to coverage in the media and when it comes to the right versus the left.
00:33:39.000We're the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:33:42.000So Eric Wemple over at the Washington Post, the media critic over there, even he who's on the left is ripping into the New York Times for their response to this news that people are going through old tweets of journalists.
00:33:59.000He says, Just what would the damaging information uncovered be?
00:34:19.000Among the central players in the network notes the Times is a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant to Arthur Schwartz, a man who makes no apologies for his work.
00:34:28.000As the article notes, the network has surfaced anti-Semitic and otherwise offensive posts from other reporters in the mainstream media.
00:34:35.000And Wimple says, Sulzberger has all but admitted that the information supplied by Schwartz and company can be relevant to the management of the New York Times.
00:34:42.000There's an incompatibility in the Times story and the Sulzberger's memo.
00:34:46.000On one hand, there's an attempt to tire the motivations of the loose network of conservative operatives.
00:34:50.000On the other, there's a stubborn admission that they have brought actionable information to public attention.
00:34:55.000For decades now, representatives of the mainstream media have answered conservative critiques by imploring, judge us by the work we produce, not by the fact that more than 90% of us are liberal democratic.
00:35:05.000Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways.
00:35:07.000Cut the idle and unverifiable talk about motivations.
00:35:09.000If the tweets presented by the loose network of conservative operatives are racist or anti-Semitic or otherwise problematic, take action.
00:35:58.000Because it used to be the only way that you could get the local sports, the only way you could get the local news, was for the newspaper to be delivered to your doorstep on a daily basis, and you'd have to pay for it.
00:36:07.000Well now, there are all sorts of local sites that are running the news for free, and so you don't have to pay for anything.
00:37:41.000Real journalism, in the words of Joseph Pulitzer, is the painstaking reporting that will fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, and always fight demagogues.
00:37:49.000In other words, real journalism is the kind of stuff that you like.
00:37:53.000Because I have a feeling that Bernie Sanders defines progress and reform very differently than I define progress and reform.
00:37:59.000That he defines injustice and corruption very differently than I do.
00:38:02.000And demagogues, I mean, he is a demagogue.
00:38:05.000So I don't think he means that people should report more stringently on his campaign.
00:38:09.000But Bernie Sanders says, we have to fight the advent of the new market in journalism.
00:38:14.000Real journalism requires significant resources, so we have to crack down on Facebook and Google, which is the way that a huge number of people get their news.
00:38:22.000Also, he wants to ban conglomerations and hedge funds from buying local newspapers.
00:38:28.000Which, by the way, is not going to stop these newspapers from going bankrupt.
00:38:31.000I mean, local newspapers are going bankrupt, whether or not a hedge fund comes in and saves the newspaper or not.
00:38:41.000So Bernie Sanders' standards for saving the media is that he would like to ban consolidation in the media.
00:38:49.000So you shouldn't be able to buy more than one newspaper, basically.
00:38:52.000He says that he wants to put in place policies that will reform the media industry and better protect independent journalism at both the local and national levels.
00:39:01.000Yes, I think a socialistic top-down government control guy should definitely help reform journalism.
00:39:08.000He says he's going to reverse the Trump administration's attempts to make corporate media mergers even more likely in the future.
00:39:13.000So he'll ban proposals to merge big companies.
00:39:18.000He said he he opposes media consolidation.
00:39:20.000He opposed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which has made.
00:39:25.000Enormous strides, by the way, in terms of speed of the internet and the ability for broadband networks to be built.
00:39:32.000He says, in the spirit of existing federal laws, we'll start requiring major media corporations to disclose whether or not their corporate transactions and merger proposals will involve significant journalism layoffs.
00:39:42.000So now he wants the federal government to start punishing media corporations for laying off journalists, which, by the way, does not add to profit incentive, does it?
00:39:50.000How exactly does it make businesses more profitable to find them?
00:39:54.000He says employees have to be given the opportunity to purchase media outlets through employee stock ownership plans.
00:40:02.000Who the hell's gonna start a new newspaper under these conditions?
00:40:05.000Who in the world isn't going to just take their newspaper into bankruptcy and sell off the assets immediately if all of this were going to take place?
00:40:12.000There are answers to the death of local journalism.
00:40:22.000They do not lie in government regulation from the top.
00:40:25.000And yet now you have Bernie Sanders using the death of local journalism as an excuse for the government to jump into the business of regulating journalism.
00:40:32.000Can't see how this is dangerous in any way, shape, or form.
00:40:36.000Yes, I definitely trust the same media that digs up people's old tweets, ruins their lives, and then complains about it when people do the same for their journalists.
00:40:43.000And I definitely trust the media that have built up Bernie Sanders, a man who wants to use taxpayer dollars and the power of the executive branch in order to quote-unquote protect the journalists that seek to cover him.
00:40:53.000Yes, I think this will all go beautifully.
00:40:55.000And meanwhile, let's take a look at this Democratic 2020 race.
00:40:59.000There's a new poll out that is just devastating for Joe Biden.
00:41:02.000Joe Biden's entire pitch is that he is going to win.
00:41:05.000Joe Biden's entire pitch for the presidency is not that he's a good candidate.
00:41:09.000It's that he is the guy who is leading in the polls versus Donald Trump, and he is going to win.
00:41:13.000Well, the problem is once that balloon is punctured, the air is out.
00:41:16.000And once that balloon pops, it ain't a slow leak.
00:41:18.000The balloon is popped and you're done.
00:41:20.000For Joe Biden, if he is seen as vulnerable, he's toast.
00:41:24.000He can brag as much as he wants about the general election, but if he never makes it there, it ain't gonna matter.
00:41:29.000There's a new poll out from Monmouth today.
00:41:31.000It shows that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden are in a statistical tie, all three of them.
00:41:36.000Apparently, Sanders is at 20, Warren is at 20, Biden is at 19.
00:41:41.000Now, I would say this is an outlier poll, except for the fact that this is actually the second poll that we have seen in the last two weeks that suggests that Joe Biden has now receded all the way back to the field.
00:41:51.000There's an Economist YouGov poll that shows Biden at 22, Sanders at 19, Warren at 18.
00:41:57.000Now, the polls are really all over the place.
00:42:17.000Yesterday, for example, Joe Biden was in New Hampshire and he forgot which state he was in.
00:42:22.000That tends to happen when you don't actually visit Denny's for the early bird dinners and refill on the energy before you go out on the campaign trail.
00:43:08.000I just spoke at Dartmouth on healthcare, at the medical school, or not, I guess it wasn't actually on the campus, but the people from the medical school were at the, I want to be clear.
00:43:52.000She is an ideas person by which they mean she has a lot of bad ideas that do not mirror her ideas from earlier in her career when she was sort of moderate.
00:43:59.000Now she is a wild, wild eyed progressive.
00:44:02.000And she also has the cadences of an upper class An upper class elite from Massachusetts, which is where she's been teaching for the last 20, 30 years.
00:45:28.000Needless to say, rave reviews from the critics.
00:45:30.000Critic reviews the performances of the Democratic candidates.
00:45:33.000Needless to say, rave reviews from the critics.
00:45:36.000Peter Marks, he says, she enters in an ordinary blouse and slacks, not a toga.
00:45:42.000And yet, when Senator Elizabeth Warren takes the stage of a music hall in the sweltering Sunbelt City, it is with a command of the occasion that might have Julius Caesar's Mark Antony taking notes.
00:46:20.000Okay, I've been, like, I took a sample class with Elizabeth Warren when I visited Harvard Law School, this would have been back in, like, 2004, and she was fine.
00:46:29.000I mean, she's somewhat charismatic, but this is wildly overstated.
00:46:58.000They literally put this on the front page of their website.
00:47:01.000Friends, Romans, Countrymen, is not exactly where the talk goes in her 45-minute strut upon the Tempe stage on this August evening in the Marquis Theatre, capacity 2,500.
00:47:09.000It is so packed, some of the crowd must remain outside in the 100-degree heat.
00:47:14.000Still, the sense of drama Warren radiates replicates the momentum of an actor at the climactic point of a play.
00:47:21.000Her speech may not convey the compact, lyrical eloquence of Marc Antony, but the sights and sounds of her presentation deliver the centrifugal emotional force of a potent soliloquy.
00:47:32.000Just as Antony fashioned an address to provoke a passionate response in which every wound of Caesar should move the stones of Rome to rise in mutiny, Warren has a gift for infusing a call to action with raw, clarifying emotionality.
00:47:45.000Antony appeals to the crowd's desire to control its destiny.
00:48:36.000But according to the Washington Post, deployed their theater critic to write this.
00:48:41.000Warren's tempeh appearance was the first time in my travels as a theater critic on the 2020 campaign trail, in which I was moved by a politician's oratory, and I could feel I wasn't the only one.
00:48:51.000Warren's team seated about 120 people on the venue stage to cheer her on, and one exuberant young man in the first row was clapping so ferociously, I thought his hands would bleed.
00:49:01.000That kind of enthusiasm is difficult to manufacture.
00:49:25.000They say in this hall it came across as genuine in part because the speaker seemed to be seeking that kind of intensity.
00:49:30.000One of the most seductive attributes of great actors is that they create the impression they are giving you more of themselves and asking you as an audience to give them more in return.
00:49:38.000A worn performance is a polished act of seduction.
00:50:00.000As the candidate makes plain and even makes fun of herself for, she's got a plan for everything except maybe what you should have for dinner.
00:50:07.000But I'm drawn to something more elemental and just as vital for someone auditioning for the role of Communicator-in-Chief.
00:50:11.000How does a politician convince you she understands the way you think?
00:50:14.000How does she share enough of herself for you to not only imagine you know her, but also want to side with her?
00:50:19.000With Warren, this seems to be a holistic mission, one in which she skillfully integrates who she is with how she reveals to you who she is.
00:50:27.000She knows how to bring you into her spotlight, even when the focus remains entirely on her.
00:50:33.000At other times, Warren can summon a bit too fiercely her disapproving inner school marm.
00:50:37.000But unlike Vice President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Warren has a fully evolved performance style.
00:50:42.000In a gritty, poetic way, her spiel is akin to that of a folksy troubadour.
00:50:46.000She is the Springsteen of campaign 2020.
00:51:15.000So we talked yesterday about the deep and abiding problem with the Chinese government, the fact that they are a strong geopolitical foe, that they have a long term vision and that they are attempting to expand their reach.
00:51:27.000There's a good book on this by Bill Gertz.
00:51:28.000It's coming out very shortly called Deceiving the Sky Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy.
00:51:42.000Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy, he talks about the history of it, what exactly they're trying to do, everything from using Huawei to invade privacy, building 5G networks.
00:51:51.000Check out the book again, Deceiving the Sky.
00:52:03.000So, one of the beautiful things about the left's perspective on education is it's not about educating children, it's about leveling the playing field.
00:52:09.000By leveling the playing field, what they mean is that no one should actually perform well.
00:52:24.000So in order to achieve racial parity in the programs in New York, they want to eliminate the programs for the smartest kids, who are disproportionately Asian in the city of New York, by the way.
00:52:34.000For years, according to Eliza Shapiro, no relation, New York City has essentially maintained two parallel public school systems.
00:52:41.000A group of selective schools and programs geared to students labeled gifted and talented is mostly filled with white and Asian children.
00:52:47.000The rest of the system is open to all students and is predominantly black and Hispanic.
00:52:51.000Now, a high-level panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio is recommending that the city do away with most of these selective programs in an effort to desegregate the system, which has 1.1 million students and is by far the largest in the country.
00:53:05.000De Blasio, who has staked his mayoralty on reducing inequality, has the power to adopt some or all of these proposals without input from the state legislature or city council.
00:53:14.000If he does, the decision would fundamentally reshape a largely segregated school system and could reverberate in school districts across the country.
00:53:22.000So now, they're going to shut down the gifted programs in selective schools, specifically because not enough Hispanic and black kids are getting in.
00:53:31.000Asians are wildly overrepresented at these schools.
00:53:33.000This obviously is because New York is a deeply racist place.
00:53:36.000Or alternatively, it is because there are racial differentials in test performance that are reflected in who is getting into what school.
00:53:41.000So the solution is to get rid of the possibility of better schools and make sure that everybody goes to the worst schools.
00:53:52.000The proposals may also face opposition from some middle-class black and hispanic families that have called for more gifted programs in mostly minority neighborhoods.
00:54:00.000That would be a better plan, would it not?
00:54:03.000Still, the plan could resonate, says the New York Times, with black and Hispanic families who believe that these selective programs unfairly divert money and attention from neighborhood schools.
00:54:11.000The plan includes all elementary school gifted programs, screened middle schools, and some high schools, with the exception of Stuyvesant High School and the city's seven other elite high schools, whose admission is partially controlled by Albany.
00:54:23.000The panel says, quote, gifted programs and screened schools have become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together.
00:54:34.000Studies do not show that when you put gifted students in a room with non-gifted students, that the non-gifted students benefit.
00:54:39.000All they show is that the gifted students underperform.
00:54:41.000I'm aware of no study that shows that gifted students perform better when they are placed in a mediocre classroom, and that students who are not gifted perform better when they are placed in a class with gifted students.
00:54:54.000In my own personal experience, I've been in and out.
00:54:57.000When I was growing up, I was in public school, and then I was in private school, and then I was in public school again, and then I was in private school.
00:55:02.000We bounced around a lot, depending on my parents' financial fortunes at the time.
00:55:06.000Well, when I was in my original public school, I had to skip a grade because the classes couldn't keep up with where I was, so I skipped third grade.
00:55:13.000And then I went to a private school and the private school couldn't keep up with where I was on the secular side.
00:55:18.000So my parents put me in a highly gifted magnet here in Los Angeles area.
00:55:24.000And the highly gifted magnet classes were disproportionately Asian and they were separate from the other classes in the school.
00:55:32.000Now, do I think that I would have learned better if I had stayed at the private school, not even the public school, the private school where they didn't have the capacity to deal with me on an academic level?
00:55:40.000I probably lost a year in math because I was in a class where the teacher literally did not know how to deal with me.
00:55:46.000The teacher was teaching algebra, I was already past algebra, and the teacher literally just handed me a geometry book and said, learn it.
00:55:54.000I think I was nine or ten at the time.
00:55:56.000Needless to say, I did not learn geometry that year.
00:56:00.000Hey, do you think that you're doing these gifted students any favors?
00:56:02.000And do you think you're doing the non-gifted students any favors by basically pushing the gifted students down into a crappier system?
00:56:11.000This is insanity, and it demonstrates full scale that the left does not give a damn about achievement.
00:56:16.000The left only cares about equality of outcome, and that means that if they have to force gifted students into worse classes, they will do it.
00:56:21.000They're not about raising other students up.
00:56:24.000They're about pushing the great students down so that you can assure that parity is achieved.
00:56:28.000Even if that means mediocrity through parity.
00:57:07.000Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:57:10.000You know, people are saying that America has never been so divided, and they can say that all they want, but it's completely and utterly untrue.
00:57:17.000What is true is that there's never been a time, at least not in my memory, when the elite establishment has been rooting so hard against the country that it's given them everything they have.
00:57:27.000I'll show you what I mean on The Andrew Klavan Show.