Media watch: Disinfo Jankowicz Won’t Combat
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour got her network to “ease up” on fact-checking, leading her to push a debunked “Hamas propaganda” about a “mass grave” in Khan Younis supposedly dug by Israelis, seethes Commentary’s Seth Mandel.
It was an “actual disinformation campaign” — and so perfect timing for the return of Nina Jankowicz, who briefly headed a Biden “disinformation” board even though she’d bought into such campaigns herself.
Jankowicz’s American Sunlight group is on a “new crusade” — not to “combat” the kind of Hamas disinfo Amanpour spread, but to probe how “Republican legislators have made it easier to be mean to women” on the Internet.
The entire Israel-Hamas war has been “infused with reporters’ startlingly unethical allegiance” to Hamas propaganda — yet it “gets a pass” from the “disinformationists.”
Data check: No, Crime Isn’t Dropping
Mainstream media argue that our cities are safer, yet overlooked data — and public perception — suggest the opposite, explains John R. Lott, Jr at The Wall Street Journal: “92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats” think crime is rising, and “Americans aren’t mistaken.
News reports fail to take into account that many victims aren’t reporting crimes to the police, especially since the pandemic.”
In 2022, “31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn’t report crime data to the FBI.”
Arrest rates are also plummeting, with only 20% of violent crimes yielding an arrest in large cities, vs. 44% pre-Covid.
Those who do believe crime is falling tend to be in a higher income bracket. “It isn’t surprising that affluent people can insulate themselves from spikes in crime — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”
From the right: Australia’s Push for Global Content Control
“The idea that every human being’s right to see an image of a suspected terror attack must be revoked in order to protect the feelings of some people in Australia is the definition of authoritarianism,” fumes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, yet Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is trying to force X to take down a clip of “the horrible assault on the Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel,” who “was stabbed in his church . . . allegedly by a teenage boy yelling ‘Allahu Akbar.’
“Elon Musk has ‘geoblocked’ tweets that show the stabbing, meaning people in Oz can’t see them . . . But that’s not good enough for Australia’s overlords of online safety,” who “say X must erase it everywhere, in every territory, for every population.”
Beware: “Giving local functionaries global power is a recipe for tyranny.”
Elex beat: Joe’s Working-Class Hispanic Problem
In 2020, Joe Biden’s Hispanic margin over Trump was 23 points — down from “Clinton’s 39-point margin” in 2016 — but today his “margin over Trump among Latinos is a slim 9 points,” notes The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira.
Central is “the role of Hispanic working-class (noncollege) voters in driving this trend.”
A YouGov poll shows “Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics” vs. 39 points among college-educated ones.
On inflation: “Two-thirds (67 percent) of working-class Hispanics see it as a “very serious problem” vs. “49 percent of college Hispanics.”
“Working-class Hispanics give Biden an overall approval rating of 42 percent, less than the 45 percent they give Trump.”
And “Hispanic eligible voters nationwide are 78 percent working class” and more “in critical states like Arizona (82 percent) and Nevada (85 percent).”
Libertarian: Greenpeace vs. Children
“Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups have logged a win in a crusade that could ultimately blind and kill thousands of children annually,” thunders Reason’s Ron Bailey, by getting a Philippines court to impose “a scientifically ignorant and morally hideous decision to ban the planting of vitamin A-enriched golden rice.”
That means “more children blinded and killed by vitamin A deficiency.”
Almost 17% of Filipino children under 5 are vitamin-A deficient, and “regulators across the globe . . . have found that the biotech-enhanced rice is as safe to eat as any other variety of rice.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board