"Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri was acquitted Wednesday in a trial stemming from her arrest while covering the George Floyd protests in May 2020."

"Sahouri was charged with failure to disperse and interference with official acts, both simple misdemeanors. Police claimed she remained in the area of the May 31 Des Moines protest despite orders to leave, and tried to pull away when a Des Moines police officer pepper-sprayed her and tried to arrest her.... The three day trial did not broadly discuss the First Amendment issues but Sahouri, a colleague who was with her and Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter all testified that Sahouri's presence in the protest area was the very core of what journalists do.... Before the trial, prosecutors had offered to drop the interference charge if Sahouri pleaded guilty to failure to disperse. She said it was important instead to take the case to trial and win a full acquittal."

The Des Moines Register reports.

“As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever.”

 A new piece from Glenn Greenwald.

ADDED: I wrote this post on my iPad and let it sit for nearly 12 hours before noticing I'd written "Greenwood" for "Greenwald." I'm really sorry! I was done blogging for the day but wanted to get this last thing up, and I have a harder time seeing on the iPad, and then there's the autocorrection. In any event, "wald" means "woods," so it almost seems like a translation, like calling me "Oldhouse." Again, I'm sorry! I thought it was a good article, and I appreciate what Glenn has been doing lately, which is insisting on honesty from the press. Excerpt:

The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: [it's not that] they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.

Note the word "riot." It was a riot — not a coup or an insurrection.

Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.” This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra...

"It’s been quite baffling and painful for me to have people assume I’m a racist and believe that I said the ridiculous things I’m accused of saying..."

"... that 'racism is over,' that 'white supremacy doesn’t exist,' or 'white privilege doesn’t exist,' or that I defended the use of blackface or said horrible things about black teenagers in general. I’m surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a Times alumni Facebook page. Someone to whom I don’t think I’ve spoken since 1994 said 'calling him only a racist is being nice.' An editor I happily worked side by side with in 1989 and have had brief but cordial chats with maybe once every ten years when we bump into each other on the street said I seemed 'dismissive of people of color and their views' back then. Someone I thought I’d been very nice to when she left the paper attacked me for using the expression 'third world' in a story that was, as always, approved by several Times editors.... My girlfriend thinks I have a high-functioning Asperger aspect to my personality — I’m empathic about suffering but I also very much misread audiences.... [W]hat’s happened to me has been called a 'witch hunt.' It isn’t. It’s a series of misunderstandings and blunders. I may be the only living Times reporter who has actually covered a witch hunt — in Zimbabwe in 1997. They inevitably end worse for the accused. I’m at least getting my say."

From "NYTimes Peru N-Word, Part One: Introduction" by Donald McNeil (Medium). Interesting how he chooses to play the disability card with that "high-functioning Asperger aspect to my personality." I wonder how much of what the wokesters call "whiteness" (and maleness) could be repackaged as "high-functioning Aspergers" and received with some empathy as part of the rainbow of diversity. 

Here's the piece McNeil considers a story about a real witch hunt — "Zimbabwean Tribal Elders Air a Chief Complaint": 

Chief Mabhena is the first woman to be a chief of the Ndebele tribe, and her nomination by her village caused a furor... ''A chief is a leader in war,'' said George Moyo, president of the Ndeb ele Cultural Society, ''and there are secrets of warriors, like tactics and intelezi, that a woman is not allowed to know.'' Intelezi is war medicine sprinkled on soldiers. Mr. Moyo, who lives in Bulawayo township 60 miles north of Nswazi, is a sangoma, or herbal doctor, and brewing intelezi is something he knows about.... Chief Mabhena says Mr. Moyo needs to realize that culture is dynamic and that the army, not chiefs, makes war nowadays....

"At the 66-acre site, groups of beige trailers encircle a giant white dining tent, a soccer field and a basketball court."

"There is a bright blue hospital tent with white bunk beds inside. A legal services trailer has the Spanish word 'Bienvenidos,' or welcome, on a banner on its roof. There are trailers for classrooms, a barber shop, a hair salon. The facility has its own ambulances and firetrucks, as well as its own water supply.... he most colorful trailer is at the entryway, where flowers, butterflies and handmade posters still hang on its walls...." 

From "First migrant facility for children opens under Biden" (WaPo). 

I wonder how those sentences would have been written if this "facility" had opened under Trump. 

I'll just list some words in the order that they would be most likely to be deleted/replaced if Trump were President when this place opened: butterflies, encircle, bienvenidos, flowers, handmade, colorful, welcome, bright, salon, basketball, soccer,  blue, beige, firetrucks, facility, classrooms, barber shop, white, banner....   

My favorite of those words is "encircle." They're talking about beige trailers. C'mon, beige trailers, let's form a big happy circle around the giant white dining tent!

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd accepts the challenge to rewrite the passage as it would have been written if Trump were President:

Crowded into less than 70 acres, dusty trailers huddle around a military style mess tent, a few basketball hoops and what we were told is a soccer field. There is an ominous, blue medical tent crammed with narrow, sterile bunk beds of the type one associates with mental wards of the last century. A legal services trailer with a banner on its roof reads 'Bienvenidos,' or welcome, an irony that could hardly be lost on those kept here away from family, friends and the promise of America. In a half-hearted gesture towards the basic needs of its young inmates, trailers never designed for the job have been pressed into service as makeshift classrooms, a barber shop and a hair salon. A grim-looking ambulance and firetrucks stand ready in recognition of the inevitable. The camp's water trickles reluctantly from hurriedly drilled, shallow wells. Standing out in this largely beige world, one trailer near the entryway has been ham-handedly decorated with cheap posters featuring butterflies and flowers, their once bright colors fading rapidly under the glaring sun.

"'Now there’s an IQ test,' said another prominent Hamptons media figure. 'I’d have to be insane to let you quote me.'"

From "Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses/Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media" (NYT).

Were media leaders in the right place to cover the horror of the early days of the outbreak, when they weren’t being kept awake by sirens? And did they overplay the violent fringes of protests, when they’ve been overwhelmingly peaceful and the city’s broader mood has been a kind of revolutionary good cheer? Walking with a television executive past boutiques on Newtown Lane in East Hampton last week, I tried to convince him that his teenage children would be fine walking around their native Upper East Side unaccompanied. During the protests, the city could look terrifying on television, and reporters on the scene faced violence, mostly from police; but the mood away from the police billy clubs was not exactly the Reign of Terror. (Though stay tuned: When The New York Times forced out the opinion editor James Bennet over a controversial column a week ago, two employees reacted in Slack with a slackmoji of the word “guillotine,” prompting internal complaints, a Times reporter said. “We encourage constructive, honest dialogue among our colleagues but there are lines that can be crossed, and this was one of them,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in response.)

"There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration."

"In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole. The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them.... In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. 'White Silence = Violence' is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae.... If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of 'white fragility.' If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones...."

From "Is There Still Room for Debate?" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics."

"White protesters in Floyd’s Houston hometown kneeling and praying to black residents for 'forgiveness… for years and years of racism' are one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling while dressed in 'African kente cloth scarves'? There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.... The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence 'whistleblowers,' all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc. It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous."

From "The American Press Is Destroying Itself/A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press" by Matt Taibbi (at his own website). Much more at the link.

"On 'Morning Joe,' they are talking about coronavirus all the time again."

I said, after listening to the show on the car radio in 2 4-minute stretches on the way out and back from the sunrise run.

"What does that tell you?" Meade asks.

"It says the ratings came in."

"Days after Bon Appétit's editor in chief, Adam Rapoport, wrote in a May 31 newsletter that 'food is inherently political'..."

"... he again denied a pay raise for the only Black woman on the magazine's staff. Ryan Walker-Hartshorn... whose annual base salary is $35,300... had not received a pay increase in her tenure as Rapoport's assistant. Aside from her editorial duties, she said, she had cleaned Rapoport's golf clubs, fetched his son's passport, and taught his wife how to use Google Calendar. So, once again, the Stanford graduate asked for more money. 'I thought this conversation might be different this time,' Walker-Hartshorn said in a recent interview. After all, Condé Nast, the parent company of Bon Appétit, had just donated $1 million to racial-justice organizations amid global protests over the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.... Instead, Walker-Hartshorn says, Rapoport told her, 'Well, maybe you should consider that this is not the right job for you.' 'I am the only Black woman on his staff,' Walker-Hartshorn said. 'He treats me like the help.'"

From "Bon Appétit's editor in chief just resigned — but staffers of color say there's a 'toxic' culture of microaggressions and exclusion that runs far deeper than one man" (Business Insider).

"Appreciate the article but the sanitizing and glossing over of the serious crimes including assaulting a pregnant woman with a gun does a disservice to reporting reality."

"He need not be perfect for all of us to mourn and demand change but by manipulating the life story we lose the ability to educate many who don’t see the problem as they focus on the spin versus the real story - his murder."

The second-highest-rated comment at "George Floyd, From ‘I Want to Touch the World’ to ‘I Can’t Breathe’/Mr. Floyd had big plans for life nearly 30 years ago. His death in police custody is powering a movement against police brutality and racial injustice" (NYT).

Also highly rated: "I am confused. I believe the autopsy report said he was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine. This seems relevant to the full picture yet is not mentioned in the meticulously researched article."

I've read the NYT for more than 50 years, and I don't believe I have another option for reading a real newspaper here in America. I've always been looking out for the propaganda. In fact, I was taught to that by my high school history teacher, whose class included required daily reading of the NYT. After the ousting of James Bennet a few days ago, you would think the NYT would feel extra pressure to show that it will pursue high journalistic principles and not skew things to please the people who are demanding propaganda. I can't say I'm surprised to see this sanitized portrait of George Floyd, but I want to go on record saying that this is bad.

And it's bad not only as bad journalism, but it's bad on the subject of police brutality. It doesn't matter that the man who died had big dreams of the future or professional-level athletic ability. The police shouldn't be executing anybody.

"Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens [on the streets of Ferguson], and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters..."

"... most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms. And by 2014... Twitter...  offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism. Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.... The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.... Mr. Sulzberger... told me... 'We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.'"

Writes Ben Smith in "Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms/Staff members’ demands helped end the tenure of James Bennet as Opinion editor of The New York Times. And they are generating tension at The Washington Post. Part of the story starts in Ferguson, Mo." (NYT).

We’re not retreating from the principles of... objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective....

How many protesters does it take to "pack" Washington D.C.?

According to The Washington Post, the city is "packed" when there are "more than 10,000."



That's the WaPo headline as displayed at Memeorandum. The headline is no longer written like that. Now, it is "'Defund The Police' painted on D.C. street as tensions among protesters flare."

Now, my question is: How bad did it get for WaPo to write "tensions... flare"?

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation’s capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality.... The cause even led to flares of tension among Washington’s protesters, with some embracing a party atmosphere while others furiously spray-painted “Defund The Police” in giant yellow letters a block from the city’s “Black Lives Matter” display....

So there was some graffiti. What else? Turns out it was just a few protesters who were irked that others weren't acting angry:

Kenny Sway, a D.C. musician who had calmed thousands a few days before with his rendition of “Lean On Me,” pushed through the crowd, yelling at everyone he could see to stop dancing and start marching.

“This is not a festival!” he shouted into a microphone. “This is not a f---ing festival!”

The dancing demonstrators mostly ignored him, except for one woman who rolled her eyes and complained to a friend.

“Who made him God?” she asked. “You can’t police a protest.”

She took a puff of what appeared to be marijuana and again swung her hips to the music.

One street over, at the corner of H and Vermont streets, Zamzam Elzain stood on her tiptoes, lofted a sign reading “Silence is betrayal” and yelled desperately at the people meandering by with strollers and cigarettes and, it seemed, little conviction....

“If this is a protest, we get an F!” she yelled at passersby. “This is not supposed to be a block party!”

A man looked up, briefly, then returned to the bag of chips in his hand.

It sounds like the tension was about the lack of sufficient tension!

Other confrontations unfolded as night fell.

So... other than the confrontation about the crowd not being confrontational enough... okay...

There's really only one more "tension" vignette: A white protester guy tells a black Secret Service agent that he ought to quit his job. The agent retorted: "What does your white privilege taste like?"

UPDATE: WaPo changed the headline again. Now, it's "Protesters throng D.C., vowing to be heard after George Floyd’s death." It still hasn't captured what's in the article! There are fascinating vignettes in the article, which I've tried to highlight. I'd like to compliment whoever wrote them. I see the article was written by "Samantha Schmidt, Jessica Contrera, Rebecca Tan, Hannah Natanson and John Woodrow Cox." But I'm going to assume that what I'm enjoying there was written by John Woodrow Cox — not because he's the only man on that vast committee — "vast" is satire — but because when I mouse over the names, his is the one that gets "Enterprise reporter with a focus on narrative journalism." I don't know what "Enterprise reporter" means, but I think what I'm enjoying is "narrative journalism."

ADDED: Wikipedia says: "Enterprise journalism is reporting that is not generated by news or a press release, but rather generated by a reporter or news organization based on developed sources. Tied to 'shoe-leather' reporting and 'beat reporting,' enterprise journalism gets the journalist out of the office and away from the traditional news makers."

And: "Narrative journalism, also referred to as literary journalism, is defined as creative nonfiction that contains accurate, well-researched information.... Mainstream newspaper publications are still wary of supporting narrative journalism too much due to time and space constraints, and will often print the occasional narrative in a Sunday features or supplemental magazine." The names Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe come up.

AND: Here's a piece written by John Woodrow Cox solo — in WaPo 3 days ago — "‘I’m black before I’m anything else’: A police officer’s passionate exchange with protesters."

“My heart walks with you guys because I’ve been this,” Watts told them, pinching his skin, “since the day I came out of my mama. … I’m proud of each and every one of you guys.”

“Keep marching,” he continued. “Do it for me. Do it because right now I’m here and I can’t do what you’re doing. But understand, my heart is over here with you guys.”

"Folks delaying seeking care or, taking the most extreme case, somebody drinking bleach as a result of structural factors just underlines the fact that we have not protected the public from disinformation."

A sentence fragment from a doctor quoted in the NBC News article "'What are we doing this for?': Doctors are fed up with conspiracies ravaging ERs/'I left work and I felt so deflated,' one doctor said about an effort to counter misinformation he saw on Facebook. 'I let it get to me.'"

What did he mean by "structural factors" — in "drinking bleach as a result of structural factors"? NBC attempts to inject coherence into the doctor's statement:

The structural factors in this case include Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which have struggled to contain the spread of misinformation, some of it coming from positions of authority.

I found this article frustrating, because it's written in this impressionistic style that begins in the middle of things with a fed-up doctor expressing his frustration as he encounters one guy on Facebook ("a man insisting to him that 'no one's dying' and that the coronavirus is 'fake news' drummed up by the news media").

Yes, bad info on Facebook and the blowhards who pass it on are a problem, but when I turn to mainstream media for the news, I want factual information, clearly stated. So if NBC wants to do an article about coronavirus conspiracy theories in social media, I expect it to be easy for me to look at the article and see what the conspiracy theories are and how prevalent they are in social media. Not just what one guy said that annoyed another guy!

Look at that headline. It says we're going to get you anxious and excited about people you're expected to care about who've got their emotions stirred up. Yes, that did get me emotional. The emotion was annoyance that the professional news media does not give me a straight factual story!

It's like they want to get in on the conspiracy theory action by puffing up theories about theories.