End of media; to delete this media…
KTVA reporters were caught planning attacks against the Miller campaign when Nick McDermott accidentally left his phone on after calling the Miller campaign and getting voicemail. One of the attacks was to make up a story about child molesters showing up for rallies or campaign events of some kind.
“…at least one of them will be a registered sex offender”. Note, that reporter didn’t say “child molester”; that was the attack plan, but they planned to get that attack by finding the more generic “registered sex offender”. Registered sex offender can mean a woman who at 13 had sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend. In some states it might even mean a woman who at 15 sent a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend.
It’s not that hard to find such a person, and the female reporter knew this: “Out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender”. And the male reporter replied with “you just have to find that one person”. Depending on the event, they were probably right; they’d be just as right for a Murkowski event (assuming people show up for those) or an Obama event or any other event. Because they include consensual sex among teens, these lists are huge.
What if McDermott hadn’t made that critical mistake? What if we had never heard them making these plans, and they successfully manufactured a “child molester crisis” to attack the Miller campaign with? Think about your reaction to this news if it had come out as the reporters planned it: on Sunday or Monday, “Sex offenders support Joe Miller”. Only on Wednesday or Thursday—after the election is over—do we discover it was (a) someone not connected to the Miller campaign except for showing up for something, and/or (b) not a child molester.
I know many conservative blogs, especially Republican ones, who would have reacted by throwing Miller to the media dogs.
The media cannot be trusted. We should have learned that in the 2008 campaign; we have definitely learned it this year. But we need to internalize. When something appears in a newspaper or on a news show, it isn’t real until it’s been proved by a trusted source. When I wrote The coming crisis this is what I meant: that members of the media would invent crises to throw at conservative candidates they don’t like, and that we need to be careful not to believe them without real proof, verifiable relevant details, and unbiased named sources. Anonymous sources and the media themselves don’t count.
In response to The coming crisis: We know it. We just don’t know what it is yet.
KTVA
- Alaska Station’s Alleged ‘Context’ Doesn’t Match Content of Miller Recording: Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism
- “Mr. Bever and his apologists on the left think the American people are too stupid to scrutinize their embarrassingly lame explanation.”
- Anchorage CBS Affiliate Caught on Voicemail Conspiring Against Alaska’s GOP Senate Candidate: Publius at Big Government
- “The voices are believed to be those of the news director for CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA, along with assignment editor Nick McDermott, and other reporters, openly discussing creating, if not fabricating, two stories about Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Joe Miller.”
- KTVA smear caught on voicemail at Caught On Tape: Reporters Overheard Plotting Smear Against Joe Miller
- “And the one thing we can do is… we won’t know… we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’”
sex offenders
- Anatomy of a Child Pornographer: Nancy Rommelmann at Reason Magazine
- “Sexting cases are piling up in courtrooms across the United States. Three Pennsylvania girls, ages 14 and 15, who took semi-nude pictures of themselves with their phones and sent them to their boyfriends are awaiting trial on charges of distributing child porn.”
- The Littlest Sex Offender: Kerry Howley at Reason Magazine
- “Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act—in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.”
- Sex-Registry Flaws Stand Out: Ryan Knutson and Justin Scheck
- “The growing sex-offender list can dilute the amount of attention on the most dangerous offenders, said Nora Demleitner, the dean of Hofstra University Law School who studies sentencing.”
- Too many registered sex offenders make dangerous sex offenders difficult to track: William Pfeifer, Jr.
- “A teenage boy who gets convicted of having sex with his underage teenage girlfriend is labeled a rapist on the sex offender registry the same as Phillip Garrido. An underage teenage girl who texts a nude photo of herself to her boyfriend is now registered for distributing child pornography the same as Gary Kendall, the Ohio minister convicted of distributing pornographic images of prepubescent minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
More Election 2010
- Don’t mess with the deck chairs, fix the boat!
- Advice for the incoming House. Make them deny it! And don’t try to fool us by changing the deck chairs.
- San Diego’s proposition D: tax first, reform afterward
- San Diego’s proposition D is an attempt to raise taxes and then reform—which is, of course, an attempt to raise taxes and not reform anything at all.
- Nick Popaditch debates Bob Filner in CA-51
- Popaditch comes off as far more responsive to the needs of the community in this debate.
- There will be lies
- The media takes a blunder by Coons on the first amendment—and outright changes what both candidates said to make it look like a blunder by O’Donnell.
- Help Good Candidates Ride the Big Red Wave
- Looking for a candidate to spend time and/or money on? Someone who is fighting and for whom your support can make a big difference? I round up blogosphere profiles of underdog candidates and candidates in close races. Be the wave!
- 10 more pages with the topic Election 2010, and other related pages
More Joe Miller
- No room for reason in Alaska
- Jesus Christ, what the hell are the Republicans doing up in Alaska?
- My philosophy: stop, look, and listen
- When an election is close, just wait until the results are in. It’s not that hard.
- Tea Party vs. the news
- What a difference between the traditional news media (Google News) and what people are actually talking about (Memeorandum)!
More media bias
- The ruling class’s unexpectedly old clothes
- I recently ran across early use of “unexpectedly” for a conservative’s strong economy, referring to the early 1981 market recovery under President Reagan.
- COVID Lessons: Journalistic Delusions and the Madness of Politicians
- COVID-19 was real. The crisis surrounding it was entirely manufactured. Everything we did took a manageable disease and turned it into a killer. And the very worst was believing a media we knew was lying.
- How many fingers, America?
- The Orwellianization of the left continues.
- Has Trump forced the media into a Kobayashi Maru?
- The Kobayashi Maru is that the media wants to be able to continue lying and be believed. People don’t distrust them because of Trump. People distrust them because they keep lying. It is a self-caused problem.
- The institutional forgetfulness of the press
- We no longer have to rely on the press as our institutional memory. The Internet has made it harder for the left to pretend the past doesn’t exist, or to say one thing here and another there.
- 34 more pages with the topic media bias, and other related pages