Soaring and cratering

As you might have imagined, the Fair 'n' Balanced Network lost no time making sure we know who won the confrontation in the Persian Gulf -- and, of course, who got us there. (Hint: OBAMA!!!!1!11!1!!11!1!!!) But it's worth spending some time to tease out the different sorts of lies that Fox employs; more specifically, the proportion of lies to bullshit needed to achieve a properly balanced Fox page.

In the lead position, even though the president is (in the words of one critic) "lying relentlessly," the transitive property of journalism means Fox is telling the truth: it's passing along an authoritative figure says. Fox's job then is to show that it's done its due diligence in assessing the claim:

It’s unclear exactly how the missiles used in the attacks were funded. But other Republicans have connected the Iran settlement money to the attacks, with GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz saying on Fox News' "Hannity" on Tuesday night, “In a very real sense, the missiles that we saw fired at U.S. servicemen and women tonight were paid for by the billions that the Obama administration flooded the Ayatollah with."

 Well, that settles that. 
 
The second story also appears to be a reasonably faithful reproduction of what was said, though it runs into hat pesky maxim of relevance: Is this assertion relevant to the discourse in the way its positioning suggests? You make the call:

After President Trump declared that Iran “appears to be standing down” in the wake of Tuesday's missile strikes on Iraqi airbases, Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane said that Trump had executed a diplomatic strategy that could enable the U.S. to negotiate with Iran without further military action.

The story is as much Trump as Keane, but it least it allows for promoting another Fox personality without having to support his assertions:

“It changed from the strategy of appeasement under the Obama administration to confrontation using economic pressure to do that,” Keane told “The Daily Briefing” Wednesday.

But the pick of the litter is the No. 3 story, "Oil craters." If you're a sportsball fan,

you're probably comfortable with the idea that whether a 2-point difference means the winning team "squeaks" or "breezes" past its foe is largely a matter of Zip code. So it is here (timelines from CNN). Light crude seems to have cratered back to about a dollar below where it was at the beginning of the month and Trump's bumbling foray into global strategery, and over the past year, it's up more than 20 percent.


It's been a pretty busy few days at Fox, having to pivot from the Impeachment Hoax to the #RegimeOfTerror while still keeping an eye on the socialist menace and those pesky Democrats. Indeed, for a network that's basically been ignoring substate political violence since Trump vanquished ISIL in single combat, it must have taken some effort to dust off all the terror tropes. Good to see that the starting lineup is back in the game here.

'Caught up in the moment'

It would have been nice to get through the summer without a polling rant, but -- OK, here's Nate Silver, stating the obvious:

We’ve documented for years how polls tend to rise and fall — in what are often fairly predictable patterns — after events like debates and conventions. In general, what suddenly goes up in polls tends to gradually come back down after a matter of a few weeks. Conventions typically produce polling swings of 4 to 6 percentage points toward the party that just nominated its candidate, for instance — but the polls usually revert back to about where they were before after a few weeks.

True, though surveywise it's not nearly as interesting as the "rally 'round the flag" effect. But stay tuned; conventional wisdom usually travels in flocks:

It looks as though something like this is happening again following the first Democratic debate last month. If you look at the RealClearPolitics average:

• Biden has rebounded to 28.4 percentage points from a low of 26.0 percentage points just after the debate. He was at 32.1 percent before the debate, so he’s regained about two-fifths of what he lost.
•  Harris has fallen to 12.2 percentage points from a peak of 15.2 percentage points. She was at 7.0 percent before the debate, so she’s lost about a third of what she’d gained.

Harris is still in better shape than she was before the debates, but she’s currently 16 points behind Biden instead of looking like she’s on the verge of overtaking him.

Which is the setup for this:

I’ll be honest … as predictable as this pattern is, it’s easy even for professionals like me to get caught up in the moment, especially in the early stages of a race before we’re using any sort of model to smooth the data out.

With (ahem) appropriate respect -- no, it isn't. That's one of the things that separate professionals from pundits. Medical professionals don't seem to have any trouble telling female patients not to waste time steaming their ladyparts with eucalyptus leaves, because part of the professional's job is distinguishing quackery from evidence. If you can't avoid getting "caught up in the moment," that's an argument against your claim to professionalism.

If a candidate rapidly goes from 7 to 15 in the polls, our unconscious, System 1 reflex is to assume the trend will continue, and that the candidate will continue gaining ground — to 20 points, 25 points and beyond. More often than not, though, the candidate loses ground after a sharp rise.

Unless we're claiming to be a professional psychologist or something, also no. We have no idea what "our" "unconscious" reflexive response to a perceived short-term rise in poorly aggregated survey data would be, because all we know about short-term responses to poorly aggregated survey data is what hucksters tell us. If professionals did their jobs, we wouldn't obsess about how people responded to headlines like zOMG RCP AVERAGE FALLS 3 POINTS ELECTION OVER!!11!11!1!1!!11!!!!, because they wouldn't occur in grownup publications. Yes, we'd still have to worry about the clueless and the openly fake, but that's why we have professionals: to spread the word as often as possible when bullshit needs to be countered.

This is a polling rant, but I'd like to think the point goes farther. The top-of-the-hour lead (most closely following a traffic report; make of that what you will) was about whether the "conventional wisdom" about Robert Mueller's congressional appearances this week had been borne out. Ladles and jellyspoons, those who want the conventional wisdom can find it anywhere; if you want to add some market value, could I suggest you start by providing unexcited news with frequent reminders that the null hypothesis can't be rejected based on the day's developments. 

Journalistic expertise is a fraught thing. Sad to say, one of the things we're best at is making data converge into story lines -- like the "game frame" that assumes, as above, that opening a lead in the first half points to opening a bigger lead in the second. That has the advantage of making stuff comprehensible (for many) and accessible (for many), and it's delivered a lot of actionable information about political, economic and cultural matters through the years. It also means we're traditionally not very good at telling stories that aren't interesting (like most survey results), even if they're likely to be more informative. We still have some time to work on that, and the week's events suggest that it would be nice to start sooner rather than later.

I didn't know you were on Moscow's payroll!

It's got to be a rough day at the Fair 'n' Balanced office when you draw the short straw and your story is headed for the No. 2 position on the homepage anyway:

Donald Trump denied calling Meghan Markle "nasty."

Um, stop the press!

Last week, it was reported that Duchess Meghan, 37, would skip out on events with President Trump during his state visit to the U.K., citing maternity leave following the birth of her and Prince Harry's son Archie Mountbatten-Windsor.

An interview she'd done previously while promoting "Suits" resurfaced at the time, in which she'd called Trump "misogynistic ... and so vocal about it," adding, “I’m voting for Hillary Clinton, not because she is a woman, but because Trump has made it easy to see that you don’t really want that kind of world that he’s painting.”

... In an interview with The Sun on Saturday, Trump reportedly said he was "shocked" by Duchess Meghan's remarks.

“I didn’t know that. What can I say? I didn’t know that she was nasty," Trump reportedly told the outlet. When confronted with the fact that she wouldn't be seeing him during his state visit, he replied, “I didn’t know that. I hope she is OK.”

The interview was published Saturday, and given the (ahem) ownership structures of Fox News and The Sun, it does seem a bit odd that Fox took until Sunday to get  on board. Much of Trump World was busy with the story on Saturday, including @TrumpWarRoom ("Warning: This account punches back 10 times harder"):

And by Sunday, the Dear Leader himself had caught up:

On Sunday morning, however, the POTUS changed his tune.

"I never called Meghan Markle 'nasty,' he tweeted. "Made up by the Fake News Media, and they caught cold! Will @CNN, @nytimes and others apologize? Doubt it!"

Well -- not so fast, but let's let our Fox writer finish:

Despite his denial, there is an audio recording circulating of President Trump saying the exact quote about Duchess Meghan that had been reported.

Yes, and one of the places the audio recording is "circulating" is The Sun -- the very Murdoch tabloid that published the interview.

The Fox reporter, perhaps aware that a first-class ticket on the unheated cattle train to Siberia awaits if the account misses but in the estimation of a hair, avoids taking a stand on whether Trump is lying or not in his denial. It's true that he "never called Meghan Markle 'nasty'" -- at least, within the "never" of the interview. But let's consider "I didn't know [ ] was [ ]" in some other circumstances:

I didn't know it was loaded -- It was loaded, and I deeply regret that I stuck it in my waistband while drunk.

Meghan! I didn't know you were here! -- You're here, and somebody else actually said it, OK?

Mr. Vice President! I didn't know you were on Moscow's payroll too! -- Wow, that one's tough.


So, no, he didn't technically, quote-unquote, say "Meghan Markle is nasty." But if you want to apply for that endowed chair in pragmatics at the Trump University Department of Linguistics, it's time to work on the CV.

A Fair 'n' Balanced history lesson

And what are the Enemies of the People doing to bring down the republic these days, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The Department of Justice reporter for NPR referred to the date of Attorney General Barr's summary of the Mueller report as "a date that will live ... in infamy," a phrase many associate with President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 speech following the Pearl Harbor attack.

Shock horror outrage! No wonder it's the No. 2 story on the Monday morning homepage!

NPR's Carrie Johnson made the comment during the NPR Politics podcast last Wednesday while discussing Barr's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which he answered questions about the summary he gave of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

Or not. Since it's only a 7-graf story, though, let's skip the background and get to the substance:

... "March 24th, a date that will live in my brain in infamy, a Sunday, remember, Barr sends this four-page letter to Congress," Johnson said during the podcast. Listeners soon drew connections to her phrase and the remarks made by President Roosevelt in 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, when he declared war on Japan.

There's no sneaking one by those "listeners," huh? 

... Although both days are undoubtedly significant in the fabric of American history, some have criticized the perceived comparison as an exaggeration, since more than 2,000 people were killed during Pearl Harbor.

Johnson did not return a request for comment.

Rather kind of her, considering she could have started by noting the firm grasp of history evidenced in the story slug:

www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-reporter-refers-to-barr-summary-mirroring-language-of-president-johnsons-announcement-of-pearl-harbor

But more broadly: The nerve of some people! Who would dare invoke the image of Pearl Harbor in connection with the travails of the Trump administration? Speaking of breaking news, let's start with Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch on Feb. 28:

Michael Cohen is a criminal and Michael Cohen is a political prop. Michael Cohen is the furthest thing from a victim.

At the hearing Wednesday we witnessed history. Unfortunately for the reputation of the House, it is the type of history that will live in infamy.

Not even an "in my brain" to soften the blow! How about it, former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Sept. 28, on the Kavanaugh hearings)?

If the majority of voters buys what the Democratic-media elite is selling, our nation will have suffered yet another day that “will live in infamy.” We will have abandoned any commonality in our institutions, our traditions, our mores and our ability to hold together as a nation. There will no longer be any "we" in "We the people.”

Enough of that. What about that pesky Iran nuclear deal?

A mere 21 percent of the American public supports the deal and a bipartisan majority of the Senate opposes it. Yet the filibuster rule blocked the Senate from defeating it, allowing Obama to hail the “historic step forward.”

His “victory” is a disconnect that will live in infamy.

You too, The Kelly File?

MEGYN KELLY, HOST: Breaking tonight, new fallout from what the president calls an historic agreement on Iranian nukes and the critics call a deal that would live in infamy for the dangerous it possess* to the world.
 
OK, we all knew Boehner was a RINO on immigration, but how about Lindsey Graham?

And as little banty roosters like Senator Lindsey Graham flap their arms and claim they have the votes to stop any Obama nuclear deal with Iran, it doesn’t matter, because Obama won’t follow the law anyway.  He already knows that Congress won’t stop him.

March 3, 2015, a day which will live in infamy.

Yes, but all those are commentary! Surely Fox would never invoke Pearl Harbor in a sports story!

May 25, 2016 is a day that will live in infamy for Darrell Horcher, although he can't remember that much about it.

It was that Wednesday evening when Horchers motorcycle collided with a 2006 Ford Escape while he was riding with a friend, and the UFC lightweight was thrown from his bike before skidding down the road.

OK, well -- pop music**! That has to be off limits, right?

The 53-year-old music icon is perhaps the most edgy Super Bowl performer since 2004, the halftime show that will live in infamy, as Justin Timberlake revealed Janet Jackson's bare breast during a "wardrobe malfunction."
 

Fox, on other words, is turning up the chaff machine again. Wonder what they could be so concerned about!
 

* (sic), if you insist.
** This appears to be a Fox creditline atop an AP story. Ahem.

Today in public opinion reporting

And how do we back up our authoritative claim about whom Those Blacks are lukewarm on, Reagan's Favorite Newspaper?

Democrats have the highest-powered and most diverse potential presidential field in history, including two candidates who are black — yet two black leaders say none of them stands out so far.

And if you had Feb. 13 in the office pool for "day on which the Washington Times neglects to run screaming in fear at the mention of Black Lives Matter," you can retire to your tropical island now:

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and former mayor of Newark, doesn’t have a great reputation with activists, said Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter in greater New York. Sen. Kamala D. Harris, a California Democrat whose parents were Indian and Jamaican, has a problematic background as a former prosecutor, he said.
...
Tanya Faison, a Black Lives Matter leader in Sacramento, California, is also dissatisfied with the two black senators. She said Mr. Booker is generally OK but could be doing more, whereas she doesn’t support Ms. Harris at all.

Certainly interesting points, but you can see why the WashTimes almost immediately thought better of its original hed:

OK, not much of an improvement, but you have to admit -- it is an improvement, right? OK, sorry. You don't. It isn't.

Random babbling about innocent numbers

What's entertaining about the CNN polling analysis on Sunday morning's home page isn't whether it slips on a statistical banana peel or two, but how much of it bears any resemblance to things that actually happen in the political ecosystem. Shall we?

Poll of the week: A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows 50% of voters prefer November's election to result in a Democratic-controlled Congress compared with 42% of voters who prefer a Republican-controlled Congress.

I don't love the syntax; I'd go with "prefer that November's election result in ..." if some editor insisted that you can't say "want November's election to produce," but  it's not completely out of bounds for "what is your preference for the outcome of this November's congressional election."*

This result is in-line with other polls from NBC News/Wall Street Journal and from other generic ballot polls more generally. 

True so far, despite the irrelevant hyphen in "in-line." Since December in this poll, the result for Democrats has ranged from 47% to 50%; for Republicans, from 39% to 43%. "More generally" is sort of what "other generic ballot polls" means, but that's copy-editing, not reality vs. unreality. Which gets us to the paragraph reproduced above, which needs to be gone through more carefully.

At the most basic level, the generic ballot can be seen as an estimation of the House popular vote. 

Technically ... yeah, that's what the question tries to estimate. Whether it produces as good an estimation as "If the election for Congress were held today, would you vote for [ROTATE] the Democratic candidate in your district or the Republican candidate in your district?"** is another matter, but the sentence is misleading for a different reason. There's no Electoral College for the House; the "popular vote" is the only kind we have.

Given where the generic ballot average is at this point (an 8-point Democratic advantage), there is roughly an 6 to 8 point margin of error in predicting the final vote.

Wrong on multiple counts. By "generic ballot average," the writer may mean the RealClearPolitics average for generic ballot questions, which at this writing is given as 8.4 points. That "average," of course, is not a meaningful number; you could use a weighted mean to smooth out the eight different sample sizes it represents (RCP doesn't), but that doesn't cover the different populations sampled (registered voters vs. likely voters) or the different questions asked. "If the election were held today ..." and "what is your preference for ..." look like they're tapping the same sentiment, but still: You can't average the results of different questions. That's literally cheating.

The so-called "average" doesn't have a "margin of error," and RCP doesn't claim that it does, but if it did, the "margin" wouldn't be affected to that degree by the difference in proportions or by the time represented "at this point."*** Even if there was a meaningful "average," it wouldn't affect the "margin of error" as claimed. The difference in proportions is represented in the numerator of ((p)(1-p))/n, of which we take the square root to get a standard error of proportion. The 50% Democrat result in the NBC/WSJ sample produces a margin of error of 3.3 points at 95% confidence;**** the margin on the Republican result is 3.2. And the "margin of error" isn't related to the "final vote," which doesn't happen until 10 weeks after the survey concluded. We report sampling error because we can measure it, but we can't measure biases like nonreponse or social desirability. Fabricating a "margin" that apparently accounts for biases like those is just blowing smoke.

In other words, Democrats end up winning by double digits or roughly tied with Republicans. That's far from perfect, though is actually more predictive than an average for a Senate race would be at this point.  

If there was a "margin of error" involved here, that's just about exactly the opposite of how it would work. Assuming a 6-point lead and a 6-point margin, nonchance results could include either a double-digit win or a tie -- but those are the far ends of the distribution, and the bulk of findings from repeated samples would cluster around the actual population results and slope downward from there.

I don't know what is meant by "actually more predictive than an average for a Senate race," except that "at this point" has nothing to do with that, either. It may reflect a concern about the disproportion in how many people a Senate seat represents (say, between Montana and California), but individual statewide polls would be very good representations of Senate races -- to the extent that hypothetical questions are predictive. Why an "average" is relevant here ... SQUIRREL!

... The exact margin though is likely to be smaller than we thought it would be at the beginning of the cycle. It may be closer to 6 points than 8 points. And while 6 is still significantly greater than 0, it's much more doable than 8.

OK, I guess we're going to give up on the copyediting altogether.  But to the broader concern, CNN is more or less just making it up at this point. It's fun to make fun of Fox News, because Fox as a whole is so desperately a tool of the Trump wing of the Republican Party, but when it comes to straight-up reporting of survey results, Fox continues to err on the side of accurate and dispassionate. Why CNN thinks it needs to analyze public opinion by producing random, poorly punctuated babbling about innocent numbers is beyond me, but it does suggest that you should use CNN's polling analyses for entertainment value only.


* Yes, the noun modifier should be "Democrat-controlled," but the burnt hand dreads cold water.
** The phrasing is Fox's.
*** The timing could certainly affect the prospective "If the election were held today" question if it was after a primary, rather than before.
**** For convenience, it's common to use .25 as the numerator, because that produces the largest possible margin of error for any proportion from the sample. A 70-30 split on a question would produce a margin of error (95% confidence) of 3 points, rather than 3.3, with the same sample. And always report those confidence levels, kids!

'We' is not amused

Pronouns: How can you miss 'em if they won't go away? The vermin press shows how it's done:

President Trump placed the emphasis on “we” over “I” in his first State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

A review of the president’s prepared remarks by The Daily Caller reveals he used the word “we” more than four times as many times as he said the word “I.”

President Trump used the word “I” 29 times in his speech, while using “we” 129 times. Another communal word used often by the president: “our,” which he used 104 times.

“As long as we are proud of who we are, and what we are fighting for, there is nothing we cannot achieve,” Trump said near the end of his speech. “As long as we have confidence in our values, faith in our citizens, and trust in our God, we will not fail.” (RELATED: Obama Mentions Himself 45 Times During Memorial Speech For Dallas Police Officers)

“As long as we have confidence in our values, faith in our citizens, and trust in our God, we will not fail. Our families will thrive. Our people will prosper. And our Nation will forever be safe and strong and proud and mighty and free.” 

You don't even really need the link to get the point, do you? No pronoun was safe in the hands of the Kenyan usurper: "Someone is going to say, 'Am I the only one* who thinks that Obama likes the sound of his own voice?'" Fortunately, there's a new sheriff in town, and he are not amused.

The experts -- we could say "the coastal eee-lites," but that'd be piling on -- have traditionally spread the bizarre pseudo-sociolinguistic fictions about the meaning(s) of presidential pronoun frequency (Language Log's catalog can be found here). True to form, the impact has already been felt over at the National Review:

Trump’s publicly well-received speech (we hope the Obama first-person singular continues to give way to the Trump first-person plural) did not register with his enemies, mostly progressives but some Never Trumpers as well.

But what if Trump follows up on his speech by letting his successful policies speak for themselves, even as his critics are permanently stuck in the past obsessing on the shadows of Trump — oblivious to his record and brawling against a style and comportment that could be increasingly dissipating?

After watching the Democratic and celebrity boilerplate reaction to Trump’s speech, and the Kennedy response, a person from Mars might conclude that Trump was sober and judicious in reviewing a tangible record, while his critics were emotional and petulant while ignoring definable reality to focus on nebulous symbolism.

I've never been one to suggest that our first contact with the Martians -- "person" or otherwise -- should carry the assumption that they plan to wipe the galaxy with us, but doesn't it seem a little rude to think they'd all act like Daily Caller readers?

* No. You're not even the only white one, moron.

Truth in advertising

What could possibly go wrong when you turn a brite from the hinterlands over to the general assignment desk for some writering? Take it away, The Washington Post:

On late Saturday morning, a bird flew out of the cold Detroit sky, across an airfield and into the cockpit of a jetliner bound south for Atlanta.

Some believe it was a sparrow. Some, a hummingbird. A Delta Air Lines spokesman referred to it only as a “stowaway” — and, in any case, it would be a long delay before anyone on Flight 1943 could catch the thing to get a look at it.

The cold Romulus sky, maybe. The terminal Delta uses is a bit over 20 miles* from Charles Lindbergh's birthplace in midtown Detroit. Whether the bird flew "across an airfield and into the cockpit of a jetliner" is a matter of speculation, to put it politely. The days of the open cockpit are largely behind us, but wherever in Wayne County you were, it was at least pretty cold.

Which gets to the dueling belief systems, sparrow vs. hummingbird. If you were writing cutlines in the good old days of journalism and you didn't know whether the scary thing in the picture was a rifle or a shotgun, you would find someone in the building who knew the difference and ask. Everyone's short-staffed at holidays, but maybe the nice folks at the Cornell Lab could help improve the odds a bit. Having a birder in the next room, I took the old-fashioned route: Hey, those birds in the terminals at Metro -- what are they? (Answer: "Mostly sparrows.") The closest the story itself gets is that someone thinks the pilot might have said "hummingbird."

So, since "we were just outside Barstow, on the edge of the desert" is taken, maybe we could try "A stately, plump sparrow found its way to gate A4 at Detroit Metro Airport and down the jetway sometime Saturday morning." Or, if we insist on not making stuff up,** stick with the AP's "It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a bird on a plane." And, basically: Forget flood. Interview hummingbird in suburban Detroit at the end of December.

I'm kind of stuck on the not-making-stuff-up part, because this does seem rather a lot of time and effort to put into a story that's already been covered elsewhere. The hed promises a "how" story, but the only "how" part seems to be the fictionalized lede. Shouldn't we be off writing about hunger, world peace or the price of checked baggage instead?

OK, that's not entirely fair. Come to that, I ought to be writing about Fox's coverage of Iran, rather than complaining about long-range featurization.*** But this story is No. 4 on the "Post Most" morning newsletter, the top story being "Niagara Falls is coated in ice — and absolutely jaw-dropping."**** So I'm a little concerned about handing your news judgment over to the "most popular right now" algorithm, but I really don't want to think about what's going to happen if Iran is given to rewrite with instructions to pep it up a little.

* Dulles is 27.5 miles from the Washington Post (per Google Maps), if you're scoring along at home.
** Meaning "I've had it up to here" probably wouldn't qualify, so don't.
*** I think the preposition is out of place, too. The modifier can replace the (optional) preposition, so "on Thursday" becomes "early Thursday," but if you keep the preposition, it's "late on Saturday morning," not "on late Saturday morning."
**** Which, given that you have a picture of Niagara Falls coated in ice, is why trainees are told to show, not tell.

Slave-scarf symbol of the steppes

Some days the right-wing press just drives you to the Liebling archive before the coffee is even made. Take it away, veteran National Post columnist Robert Fulford:

In a burst of bogus feminism and commercial ambition, Mattel Inc., the global doll-maker, has announced that in 2018 it will market a Barbie doll wearing a hijab. Barbie dolls rarely impinge on political and social issues but this one is so unsettling that it evokes a wide range of responses.

Tell us a little more about how rare it is for Barbie to reflect social issues!

... After all, Barbies aren’t just princesses and wonder women. You can buy Barbies wearing practical clothing for offices, “chic summer suits” and camel-hair coats. This is Mattel’s bow to feminists who believe little girls should be discouraged from dwelling on fantasies of the future: they should learn, as soon as possible, the truth about what they are likely to become.

For girls with higher aspirations, you can get Barbies clothed in a cocktail dress, a classic black dress, or an Oscar de la Renta ball gown. One Barbie has a Hudson’s Bay jacket and another displays an Andy Warhol painting on the front of her dress.

So much for the camel-hair coat vs. Hudson's Bay controversy, though you'd think the fencing uniform -- the new addition is modeled after the Olympic medalist  Ibtihaj Muhammad -- might suggest at least some aspiration. But back to the issue at hand: 

Attached to the news about the hijab Barbie is a line from Mattel about “Continuing to inspire girls to be anything.” Girls are to become whatever their desires and talents can make them.

... But Mattel doesn’t explain the crucial facts about places where hijab is required apparel.

See if you can guess what's coming next. Or return with us to the glory days of Chicago Tribune columnist Jimmy Savage's campaign against the other headscarf:

"We propose a citywide burning of the babushkas!" Savage wrote one morning, not too long ago. "These regimenting rags, which convert pretty, young Chicago faces into moon-round parodies of peasants, have made the teen scene resemble potato digging time on a Soviet collective. Watching those farm-fresh, 4-H club visitors to the livestock show, we noted that not one of them wore that sloppy substitute for headgear. ... Those youngsters were American farmers, too proud of their heritage to wear the slave-scarf symbol of European field hands. Are our Chicago kids less smart, less proud? To the torch, then, and the burning of the babushkas!"
Read more »

Agenda-setting and wishful thinking

If you've heard one thing about agenda-setting, it's the summary that McCombs and Shaw borrowed from Bernard Cohen's "The press and foreign policy": Media accounts aren't very effective at telling you what to think, but they're really good at telling you what to think about. Cohen's next line, though, is worth bearing in mind as well:

"It follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors and publishers of the papers they read."

Planet Fox might seem like a strange place from outside, then, with its eight methane-powered suns and its greisly fauna, but that's because you're not using the right map. To the natives, the day's most super-important top story makes perfect sense, particularly if you look at the inside headline or the html: melania-trump-cuts-bloated-first-lady-payroll-from-michelle-obama-days.html. Likewise, nothing too unusual about the redtop-style existential hed on the second story (also bigger on the inside: clinton-pitbull-media-attack-kelly-after-gold-star-general-defends-trump-condolence-call.html). 

We're slipping a bit farther from strict reality, though, in that the only outrage mentioned in the 666*-word story is directed toward Rep. Wilson, not "the media,"** and it comes from the president and the ineffable Sheriff Clarke. But Fox does (if obliquely) acknowledge that Gen. Kelly outright lied about Rep. Wilson during his appearance.

The fun one, I think, is the Anything But Russia story in the No. 3 position.*** Here, the homepage hed with the "infamous Clinton tarmac meeting" is most at odds with the inside hed ("Lynch meets with House investigators on Russia, ignores questions on Clinton") and the html version ("lynch-meets-with-house-investigators-amid-questions-on-russia-clinton"). Not to mention, sad to say, the story itself:

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with members of the House Intelligence Committee on Friday as part of the probe looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Lynch is one of several former Obama officials who have been called to Congress for closed-door questioning over the Russia accusations.

But sources**** close to the investigation told Fox News that questions over her infamous tarmac meeting with President Bill Clinton also may have been on the agenda. That June 27, 2016 meeting with Clinton on an airport tarmac in Phoenix raised questions about whether Lynch – or the Justice Department – could be impartial in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Apparently we're not even sure that the questions were on the agenda, let alone in the grill itself. So whence the "amid questions"?

Lynch ignored three questions from Fox News’ Catherine Herridge Friday morning on Capitol Hill, in reference to those issues.

Got it!

Anyway, the cluttery format that foxnews.com introduced last month has made the agenda-setting part harder to track. But it certainly hasn't dampened the fun with the headlines.


* Stuff just writes itself sometimes, doesn't it? This is the count I get with MS Word.
** Assuming that the "former Clinton spokesman" quoted in the text is the "Clinton pitbull," that means "the media" are represented by one dude at MSNBC. Just in case you're scoring along at home.
*** Just wondering here -- do you suppose there's some, oh, unifying demographic characteristic of the targets of Fox's derision in the afternoon's top three stories?
**** Pesky sources! 

Today in lying

The afternoon's top story at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network certainly rips the mask off one of the chief miscreants of the 0blamer administration, dunnit? I mean, daring to play the race and gender card when Unmaskinggate is closing in:

Susan Rice, the Obama national security adviser under fire over her alleged involvement in the “unmasking” of Trump associates during the 2016 presidential election, suggested in a fresh interview that race and gender might be playing a role in the scrutiny she’s faced.

Sounds serious! I wonder if it's true.

In an interview with journalist Michael Tomasky for New York Magazine, Rice reportedly questioned the criticism she’s faced dating back to the Benghazi controversy.

Funny, lots of adults do that. What's the problem here?

“Why me? Why not Jay Carney, for example, who was then our press secretary, who stood up more?” she asked.

Tomasky noted in the piece that Carney “isn’t an African-American woman, of course” and apparently asked Rice whether that is the key factor. Rice, in response, left the door open:

“I don’t know… I do not leap to the simple explanation that it’s only about race and gender. I’m trying to keep my theories to myself until I’m ready to come out with them. It’s not because I don’t have any.”

In other words, Susan Rice "links" race and gender to "the 'unmasking' backlash" by ... declining the opportunity to link them to BENGHAZI!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can see why -- other than the marginally literate prose its staff produces -- Fox doesn't want you to read past the headline. It doesn't just lie about the evidence; it lies about what it's lying about.
Read more »

Hannity: Hero of the Soviet Union

Hey, kids! What do you suppose was the No. 2 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage this afternoon?

Deep-state Obama holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump. It's time for the Trump administration to purge these saboteurs.

Is it just me, or does Comrade Hannity sound like ... what's that, Soviet-era historian R.W. Davies?

The purge announced  at the XVI party conference in April 1929 ...  was directed towards the removal from office of bureaucratic and degenerate officials, and those who 'solidarised' with Nepmen or kulaks, as well as those who were outright saboteurs and wreckers. The purge was carried out by Rabkrin, with the support of activists both from the institutions being examined and from outside.

So when do we suppose Comrade Hannity will receive his Order of Lenin?