ProPublica Illinois Earns 13 Nominations for Peter Lisagor Awards From the Chicago Headline Club

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by ProPublica

The Chicago Headline Club, the nation’s largest chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, named ProPublica Illinois a finalist for 13 Peter Lisagor Awards. The Lisagor Awards honor the best journalism produced throughout Illinois and Northwest Indiana.

ProPublica Illinois received five nominations in the All Media categories, which span all news mediums and platform sizes, and eight nominations in the Online Media categories — including General Excellence in Online Journalism. These projects reflect the depth and range of the newsroom’s collective efforts, from features, original video and illustrations, to blog posts and investigative reporting. Winners will be announced on May 10.

The finalists are:

Best All Media

• Driven Into Debt, for best investigative reporting and best data journalism. The series, initiated by ProPublica Illinois and continued in partnership with WBEZ Chicago, outlines how the city of Chicago drives its residents into bankruptcy through ticketing practices that disproportionately affect black neighborhoods and motorists who can least afford the fines and fees.

• Hidden in Plain Sight, for best investigative reporting and best illustration. At the outset of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, four stories quickly uncovered the secretive network of Illinois shelters that serve as detention facilities for immigrant children.

• “We Will Keep on Fighting for Him,” for best feature story. As part of the $3 Million Research Breakdown investigative series, the feature details the heartbreak and struggle of a family caught up in a child psychiatry study gone awry — and blends deep original reporting with a mother’s journal entries and present-day reflections by her and her son.

Online Media

• ProPublica Illinois for general excellence in online journalism.

• Stuck Kids, for best non-deadline reporting series. The series showed how the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services fails to find appropriate homes for young people with mental illness, holding some children and teens in psychiatric hospitals even after they’ve been cleared for release, with serious consequences for their health and well-being.

• Politic-IL Insider, for best continuing blog and best individual blog post. The online investigative column from Mick Dumke provides a close look at political issues such as government transparency, civil liberties and criminal justice.

• “Going Bankrupt Over Ticket Debt in Chicago,” for best use of features video. The three-minute video profiled one woman’s descent into bankruptcy and illustrated inequities in Chicago’s vehicle ticketing system.

• Driven Into Debt, for best investigative/public service reporting. In addition to the series, an online news application, The Ticket Trap, shows how Chicago’s reliance on ticketing for revenue affects motorists across the city. The interactive database allows users to search more than 54 million tickets issued since 1996.

• “We Will Keep on Fighting for Him,” for best multimedia feature presentation and best feature story or series. Part of a series of stories that revealed misconduct in a research trial at the University of Illinois at Chicago for children with bipolar disorder, this interactive story highlighted a mother’s journal entries alongside present-day annotations, and used family photos, video and audio clips to intimately reveal the challenges of raising a child with mental illness.

In addition, reporting fellow Lakeidra Chavis was named a Radio Broadcast finalist in Best Health or Science Reporting for “Chicago’s Black Communities Hit Hardest In Opioid Overdoses,” a project that aired during her prior stint with WBEZ Chicago.

ProPublica Illinois, founded in 2017, is the first regional publishing operation of ProPublica, dedicated to stories about big issues that affect people living and working in the state. For the full list of Peter Lisagor Awards nominees, visit the Chicago Headline Club’s website.

The European Media’s Deep Bias Against Conservatives

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

I was fired last week. It happened when I received an email from the editor-in-chief of an outlet I’d contributed to for the last eight months, saying that he’d found a social media post of mine to be unacceptable. This is said post:

For context: Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist who sparked international (though most notable in Europe) school walkouts to demand “climate action” from governments. Thunberg hasn’t done anything but moralize about how we need to reverse capitalism to save the earth. For that, she got to speak at the World Economic Forum, and has since been nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (though Barack Obama also got one, so the relevance has certainly diminished). The protests received a lot of favorable coverage, with children appearing on TV uncommented on and unquestioned.

I don’t consider that professional journalism. Even though reporting is something I myself only do on occasion, I still get to have opinions on it, particularly since I write columns and analysis pieces. My post was there to illustrate how the reporting would have been much different had the children held less popular beliefs. I don’t mind if The Guardian or The Independent has a lack of consistency, because those are both far-left broadsheets. But this bias has become obvious at supposedly “objective” outlets too.

The editor told me he expects opinions to be backed up by facts. In essence: the hypothetical scenario I was drawing could only be drawn if it actually happened, which would make it not a hypothetical. …Right.

The same editor also wrote in his email: “Some of your columns have suffered from the same problem, and I have worked hard with you to give you a chance to improve. I now see a pattern here that I fear I am unable to change.”

Give that some thought. I am a contractor writing opinions for your news outlet, yet you’ve taken it upon yourself to change those opinions? Note that this is an outlet that pretends to have no political bias, that supposedly allows diversity of thought. Apparently not. Said outlet received €100,000 ($113,000) in government subsidies in 2018.

A bit more than a year ago, I was fired from a public radio broadcaster after I submitted a column criticizing the overblown and overpaid public sector in my home country. Echoing my more recent episode, an editor claimed my statement that the public sector is inefficient was “not factual.” Here as well, I was initially brought in to diversify the range of opinions. On the same taxpayer-funded broadcaster, you can listen to a wide range of left-wing pseudo-intellectuals day in and day out, lambasting global predatory capitalism and recommending the creation of new welfare programs.

Sometimes they do get caught.

German public broadcaster ADR was recently found to have commissioned a framing document by a linguistic expert, in order to find ways to demonize opponents of Germany’s media royalty, which taxes all citizens to fund public broadcasting. The linguist recommended that those who do not want to pay the fee shouldn’t be labeled simply as opponents, but as “questioning the authority of democratic decisions.” She also recommended that ARD portray those opponents as acting “contrary to democracy,” “untrustworthy,” and “disloyal.” Rejecting the media fee should be portrayed as “asking for less democracy.” She even suggested new slogans for ARD: “Others want profits, we want cultural profits,” “TV without censorship for profits,” “excellence instead of profits.” The idea was to demonize both opponents of the licensing fee and private media companies that could replace the functions of public broadcasting.

These outlets need to be asked: what have you become?

Does anyone remember when The Economist was a thorough magazine with classically liberal leanings? Today, you get stories about how Emmanuel Macron walks on water. “Electoral victory will make France’s president a potent force,” they say. Hah. I think in journalism school, that counts as “headlines that don’t age well.”

The British BBC has had so many controversies that Wikipedia has a six-subcategory list for them. Many news outlets in Europe suffer from the same problem: a consistent lack of objective reporting.

The French news show Quotidien reported on Elizabeth Warren claiming to be Native American and Donald Trump betting $1 million against it as Trump losing the bet since Warren’s DNA test revealed her to be “part” Native American. That the “part” was between 1/64th and 1/1,024th was not mentioned.

Or how about the German Spiegel journalist who got caught writing fake news about Fergus Falls, Minnesota? Claes Relotius pretended that this town of Trump voters had a sign at its entrance saying “Mexicans out” and embellished the portraits of the people he interviewed with completely fictitious stories. The fact that Relotius was awarded with two “Journalist of the Year” awards by CNN is just a bonus at this point.

The European press in general suffers from political bias that clearly goes in one direction. No wonder, what with all the journalists graduating from universities where Che Guevara T-shirts are common, and with a majority of news outlets either owned by the government or funded by it. There isn’t much room in such an environment to question the Etat-providence, the “providing state,” better known as the welfare state. Anyone questioning it must be demonized and laid off.

Bill Wirtz comments on European politics and policy in English, French, and German. His work has appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Examiner, CityAM, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Die Welt.

Good Grief. Ben Shapiro Is Not Alt-Right

On March 30, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Don’t know if you heard about it or not, but this week, The Economist magazine smeared the conservative writer Ben Shapiro by calling him a member of the alt-right, and a “radical conservative.” (The magazine apologized when it was called out.) It was a stunning move, given how much alt-right polemicists despise Shapiro, a religious Jew who has had to endure an immense amount of anti-Semitic abuse from them. It doesn’t require much googling to discover this. Shapiro is, in fact, a conventional conservative of the Anglo-American strain, and a gifted debater and writer. He is not remotely a figure of the alt-right, and not a “radical” in any way (except being radically good at getting his point across). It is really remarkable that a magazine of The Economist‘s caliber made that fundamental error. It brings to mind that crackpot 2017 analysis of religion and US conservative politics made by an Italian Jesuit and an Argentinian Calvinist, who beclowned themselves by the act.

Read that Economist interview with him and see if there’s anything remotely radical or alt-right in it. In fact, the hook for the interview was his new book,  The Right Side Of History: How Reason And Moral Purpose Made The West Great . In the first few paragraphs, Shapiro writes:

That’s all you had to read to know that this guy Shapiro, whatever he is, ain’t an alt-rightist or a “radical conservative.” But the Economist figured they knew better.

David Marcus says that The Economist, the flagship journal of globalist neoliberalism, got this basic fact about Ben Shapiro wrong because the Left simply does not understand conservatism to begin with.  This is because so many senior journalists live in a bubble where elementary distinctions among conservatives are invisible to them. Excerpt:

The best antidote to this problem is better literacy regarding the conservative movement in mainstream outlets. When Kevin Williamson can’t work at the Atlantic, when the very moderate conservatives at the New York Times are pilloried as extremists, and when the Washington Post pretends its ex-conservative columnists represent anything but a small cabal of die-hard NeverTrumpers, readers get a skewed and distorted vision of conservatives that blurs the very real and bright line between the right and the alt-right.

Favoring control of the border and more limited illegal immigration is not an alt-right position unless it is rooted in the belief that such immigration forebodes white genocide. Opposing affirmative action is not an alt-right position unless it is rooted in pseudo-scientific babbling about the racial superiority of white people. Opposing foreign wars is not an alt-right position unless it is rooted in the belief that Jews and Israel are pulling the purse strings that send American soldiers to their death.

Conflating these positions is a very dangerous thing. It creates an environment in which liberals and progressives feel it not only an option but also, often, a duty to not engage with very mainstream conservative ideas. Calling Ben Shapiro a sage of the alt-right is meant to do exactly what protesters who de-platform his speeches do: Keep people from hearing his ideas rather than simply disagreeing with them.

Read it all.

If the only thing you knew about right-of-center populist/nationalist movements in continental Europe was what you read in the US and UK media, you would think that fascists are on the march. There really are some fascists on the march in Europe — but you absolutely cannot trust our media to tell you who they are. For example, here’s a headline in the conservative (!) Telegraph right now:

The story is actually interesting, and tells us something about the Vox party. Excerpt:

Abroad such influence is likely to be seen as further evidence of public discontent manifesting itself in political extremism – from Golden Dawn in Greece to the Front National (FN) in France. But Mr Espinosa [the Vox leader] is keen to distinguish Vox from those parties, and says he would “never appear on a platform with them” or with a leader like France’s Marine Le Pen. The only thing Vox shares with the FN, he says, is its hard line on immigration. He wants Spain to be able to say “how many [immigrants] and which ones” are allowed in and demand those arriving “accept the basic rules that the Western world has developed to create the most advanced civilisation in world history.”

Vox is usually described in Spain’s left-dominated press, and in the Anglo-American media, as “far right.” Vox’s actual positions are pretty much where many in the US Republican Party is on key issues. It’s economically liberal (that is, pro-market), for immigration restriction, critical of multiculturalism, and pro-life. It opposes same-sex marriage, but favors civil unions for gay couples. Vox is somewhat skeptical of the EU, and believes in protecting Spanish sovereignty. Vox wants to repeal a “gender violence” law that it believes discriminates against males, replacing it with one that applies equally to males and females.

Here is an English-language story from El País, a major left-wing Spanish daily, giving more details about Vox’s platform. 

Of course, El País calls Vox “far-right” — as did The New York Times in January, adding “anti-immigrant” as well. It is certainly true that Vox is hostile to the immigration status quo in Spain, which took in more migrants in 2018 than any other European country — over 57,000, which represents about half the total that entered European territory. When I was in Sevilla earlier this year, one of the people who came to hear my talk told me that his relative there in Andalucia works for the Spanish coast guard, and is on the front lines of the migration surge. He was so fed up with what is happening with the lawlessness, and how nobody in Madrid seems to care, that he voted for Vox.

Does this make that man “far right”? I don’t know about you, but my idea of “far right” is, you know, fascism, not simply wanting one’s nation to control its borders.

You call people like Ben Shapiro alt-right, and you demonize ordinary right-of-center parties as “far right,” and convince yourself that they are that, you are actually helping the bad guys. You really are.