From the left: How the Media Earn Distrust
With polls showing trust in traditional media sinking ever-lower, Matt Taibbi at his TK News blog is astounded that the insiders “still think the issue is a mathematical question of ‘sides,’ with widespread audience revulsion a kind of reward for their unflinching correctitude.” The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan mentioned one part of the real issue in passing when she referred to “ ‘our values,’ which she described as being like the world as represented in ‘West Wing’: celebrating ‘multiculturalism, a belief in the principles of liberal democracy and a kind of wonky idealism.’ ” Huh? “ ‘West Wing’ was ‘General Hospital’ for rich white liberals, a seven-season love letter to the enlightened attitudes of the Bobo-in-Paradise demographic. If that’s the self-image of the national press, it’s no wonder they make people want to vomit.”
Conservative: Biden’s Inaugural Purge
President Biden’s “firing of Peter Robb belies all the happy talk about unifying the country,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. Minutes after Biden’s inauguration, the White House sent the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel “an ultimatum: resign by 5 p.m. or be fired.” The position “is a Senate-confirmed four-year appointment at an independent agency,” and Robb “had 10 months left,” as he noted in declining to resign. Biden “canned him,” making Robb the first NLRB general counsel to be fired. This “illustrates the falsehood” of claims that Biden will “restore norms to Washington.” Even President Donald Trump didn’t fire President Barack Obama’s NLRB counsel. But “Democrats rely on unions to get elected, and unions are therefore first in line to get rewarded.”
Cop: Left’s Riot Double Standard
After Democrats “excused, ignored or euphemized” months of riots, “the left has finally found a riot it can condemn, with all its MAGA hats and American flags and, of course worst of all, white people,” snarks pseudonymous Officer Jack Dunphy at PJ Media. The Capitol riot met “universal disapproval,” but if the situation were reversed, with crowds protesting on behalf of President Biden and a black woman shot by police, it would be a different story. This is “a previously unimaginable elasticity of principle” in those “who were aghast at the sight of federal officers defending against the nightly siege of the federal courthouse in Portland, but who welcomed” the hypersecurity at Biden’s inauguration. Bet that when lefty lawlessness returns, they will revert to “excusing, ignoring and euphemizing all of it.”
Pandemic journal: Teachers Shouldn’t Cut Line
The editors of the New Hampshire Union Leader cheer Gov. Chris Sununu’s slap at teachers’ unions for politicizing the pandemic. He’s right: The “great majority of New Hampshire’s public schools can be and ought to be open for in-classroom learning,” as kids “are the least vulnerable” to COVID. Unions “don’t like to be told” they can’t “cut the vaccination line” ahead of “more vulnerable populations,” including those 65 or older. “The unions don’t like to hear” key statistics — the average Granite State teacher is 46, and 95 percent are under 65 — but it’s not “good for young and healthy teachers to be seen as competing with granny and grandpa for a place in the vaccine line.”
Education beat: Progressives Fall Out in Jersey
In New York magazine, Andrew Rice reports on the battle over reopening schools in New Jersey suburbs, focusing on the progressive stronghold of the Maplewood-South Orange district. When the schools stayed “closed to in-person education, even as many neighboring districts — not to mention private schools, colleges, universities, bars, restaurants, churches, nail salons, gyms, shopping malls, yoga studios and hockey rinks — managed to reopen,” some committed lefties organized to get their kids back to school, only to find themselves at odds with old allies in the teachers’ unions and black activists. The “openers” finally won last week — in that district, but not in nearby Montclair, where a union work stoppage prevented the scheduled reopening.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board