"Riffed from the Headlines" is Townhall's daily VIP feature with coverage on the deeply flawed aspects of journalism in the nation. We'll look to bring accountability to the mishaps, malaprops, misdeeds, manipulations, malpractice, and manufactured narratives in mainstream media. (For a VIP discount, drop SLAGER in the signup form.)
11.16.21
Artisanal-Crafted Narratives – MSNBC
- Joy Reid offers some low-caliber wisdom on guns.
It has been a joy to watch the media unravel over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Somehow with every member of the case being white, it is being spun as a racist issue, the judge has been called a supremacist, and we have even learned there is such a thing as a Trumpian ringtone for your phone.
Joy Reid, all the while, has been her usual unhinged self regarding the courtroom drama, starting with her mewling over the fact that the jury had a lone POC member. Her days hence have been spent barking about racism, a tough sell in the case of Mayonnaise vs. Miracle Whip. Now, she decided to address the appearance of the prosecutor, Thomas Binger, raising a gun in the courtroom and aiming it at the jury with his finger on the trigger.
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So according to right wing Twitter, it's OUTRAGEOUS for a prosecutor to point an unloaded AR-15 toward the jury to demonstrate how scary that firearm is, but totally cool for a teenager to point a loaded one at people and shoot them and also libruls are DUMB DUMB to fear AR-15s. pic.twitter.com/zmdi8hl2e7
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ?? (@JoyAnnReid) November 15, 2021
Gilded Reframe – MSNBC
- Joe Scarborough's gun illiteracy is significant enough to make it into court records.
This is a hilarious evolution. So, on "Morning Joe," the titular host said something rather insipid about the night of Kyle Rittenhouse's shooting.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough says Kyle Rittenhouse was a "self-appointed militia member" who drove across state lines and ended up "unloading 60 rounds, kills two people, wounds a third person." pic.twitter.com/kCAjU4TGhd
— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) November 14, 2021
This was so egregious that the defense actually cited this comment by Joe Scarborough in their closing arguments. Joe, in response, declared that he should not be the party embarrassed by his statement, but the lawyers, because they did not listen to the entire three hours of "Morning Joe," as they were preparing their case for closing arguments, you understand.
I’m embarrassed for him. He brought up a single question I asked in a 3 hour cable show in a closing argument? AND I corrected my question this morning, saying he fired his rounds in 60 seconds. I offered a second correction this morning on TV 10 hours before he put up the tweet. https://t.co/Z6H7uUikOf
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) November 15, 2021
Then Joe makes the best argument possible. Anyone who heard his statement and thought that it was accurate is really the one at fault.
This is obviously wrong to anyone following the case for more than a minute. I meant to say he unloaded his rounds in about 60 seconds. Thanks for pointing this out. https://t.co/opGKvw6VEL
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) November 15, 2021
This is a fantastic new statement regarding the news outlets. The audience is fully responsible for ferreting out the accuracy of any statement on the air. Those who speak inaccurately, even as they announce their expertise on the very topic, are in no way responsible for the words they have spoken.
Body Checking The Fact-Checkers – POLITIFACT
Flailing as they have been doing, the prosecutors of Kyle Rittenhouse, realizing they had botched their case, attempted to go with a lesser weapons charge on the youth in an effort to save face and get some type of conviction. That attempt, however, was dashed when the judge looked over the charge and the law, then promptly tossed the charge out of court.
For many, this move brought to mind an entry from over a year ago by PolitiFact, declaring definitively that Rittenhouse had no legal right to possess that gun the fateful night in Kenosha.
A Facebook post says, “At 17 years old Kyle (Rittenhouse) was perfectly legal to be able to possess that rifle without parental supervision.” That's False. https://t.co/Rxtw5rkFZb
— PolitiFact Wisconsin (@PolitiFactWisc) August 28, 2020
It turns out there was a legal aspect for Kyle, as the law for his age was stipulated on the type of gun barrel in regards to the gun in possession of someone his age. Seems that PolitiFact missed out on one of the key tools employed by the fact-checkers – nuance.
Reporting on the Mirror – THE BULWARK
It can get pedantic when covering the press coverage of other press outlets and how they are covering the press, but it would not be a feature from The Bulwark if it were not pedantic. Scribe J.V. Last penned a lengthy screed where he took Andrew Sullivan to task for daring to suggest the mainstream media was engaged in cancel culture. Last dutifully rose to the defense of the media, in white knight fashion, pointing out that Sullivan fell prey to labeling ALL of the press for what were, in fact, select examples, and then he countered with conflicting examples of his own.
Then, he fell prey to the very behavior he was criticizing. Last could not help invoking the conservative press – because this is The Bulwark, after all – and then he made a sweeping generalization of his own; "The conservative broadcast ecosystem...is so untethered from reality." So, it is wrong to label all media as a monolith, but it is perfectly acceptable to slam conservative media as thinking exactly the same.
Then, after scorching Sullivan for using cherry-picked examples, J.V. Last impugns The Federalist in his critique by citing an article from 2018 as his proof.
The narrative on MSM narratives is false. https://t.co/EsClYZS9nu
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) November 15, 2021
Body Checking Tye Fact Checkers – WASHINGTON POST
Over at the Washington Post, they are in a severe bout of rewriting. Currently, the newspaper is doing significant revisionist work on their Steele dossier coverage. Now, their resident fact-checker extraordinaire, Glenn Kessler, is joining in on the corrective fun.
Last week, Glenn leaped to the fore to defend the good honor of Secretary Pete, in reference to his laughable claim that bridges can be racist. Kessler had referenced a past biography that Pete Buttigieg had relied on for his stance, but now he has come around to thinking otherwise.
- "Well, our knee jerked. This was obviously a reference to one of the most famous anecdotes in Robert Caro's majestic biography of Robert Moses, 'The Power Broker.'"
It turns out Kessler found out about the book and decided this was sufficient to then ridicule those on the Right who were mocking Buttigieg's racist bridges stance. But then some historians weighed in and alerted Glenn that the biography resorted to some fabulist generalizations and is largely disregarded these days. This led to a rather polarizing view of the book by Glenn. First, he raved about the book.
"...found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses's beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island." There's much, much more. Easily one of the best nonfiction books ever written. https://t.co/vV0MWKxJRX
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 8, 2021
Then, as (ahem) the facts came to light, this blurb seemed to alter significantly.
ICYMI -> We were too quick to cite Caro's work as definitive. Experts increasingly doubt the story .... Robert Moses and the saga of the racist parkway bridges https://t.co/xJxshDUKXC
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 10, 2021
Pulitzer Prize Nomination – USA TODAY
- Those kids on TikTok are great at inventing items...which have existed for generations.
One of the flaws of millennials entering the publishing industry is the built-in truncated view of history. The assumption of contemporary events being novel and never experienced leads to skewed reporting. It is the kind of thinking that leads to saying the January 6 riot was "the worst attack on the Capitol in our nation's history" and other such stunted declarations.
In that spirit, USA Today giddily details for us how TikTok users have come up with a new task-management system, one they have dubbed "Time Blocking" in order to categorize essential activities to maximize efficiency and lead to a sharp rise in productivity and see an expansion in the fulfillment of goals and achievements. For those of you who are not on TikTok, I'll summarize this revolution for you in this way:
The kids discovered calendars.
You have so much to do but so little time, and even the simplest tasks, like going for a walk, can't fit into your busy schedule. Users on TikTok claim they've found a solution: time blocking.https://t.co/acWGoxjXBi
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 15, 2021
