In June, I wrote that Republicans need to embrace the culture war and loudly oppose critical race theory. I said we need to “lean” into the subject and show the organic movement of parents who are concerned about their kids’ education that “we have your back.” I said Republicans need to make clear that America should be a colorblind society where individuals are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
Glenn Youngkin clearly heeded that advice. And it’s part of what earned him a historic victory in Virginia three weeks ago and why he’s governor-elect.
Democrats wholly embraced critical race theory. Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, campaigned with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, who penned a threatening op-ed for CNN warning parents that “you can’t stop” teachers from using concepts borrowed from critical race theory.
It’s vital to ask why they did that. Why would Democrats embrace such a divisive ideology that instructs its adherents to judge individuals based on the color of their skin?
The answer is simple: Democrats cynically believe they can create a coalition of minority voters by telling them they’re victims and “oppressed.” First, they tell minorities that America is a racist and evil country, and that in the current system, minorities are destined to be losers. Second, Democrats lure minorities to vote for their party with the promise they’ll invert the pyramid and make them winners.
That strategy isn’t panning out because racial essentialism is unpopular. No one wants his fortunes tied to the color of his skin. In fact, we had this debate last century. For decades it appeared Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a post-racial nation, unified by an American identity, had decisively won. Now, Democrats and critical race theorists are attempting to throw away the MLK consensus.
So, Democrats face a choice. Will they continue to promote this backward, poisonous theory? Or will they fold to democratic pressure?
House Democrats answered that question on Friday when they passed Biden’s spending plan. The Build Back Better Act’s 2,500 pages of text are laced with critical race theory. It’s so pervasive, really, that we can say that the Build Back Better Plan is really just a plan to implement critical race theory in our federal government.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Page 718 of the bill text includes $25 million for funding CRT training in medicine and nursing schools for the purpose of promoting “health equity.” Do we really wantcritical race theory in our hospitals? What should the color of an individual’s skin matter when we’re providing healthcare to people? Remember, “equity” in this context means equality of outcomes. Will this mean that some patients could be turned away from care because that month’s healthcare metrics are too favorable toward one race?
Why isn’t anyone asking these questions? There are line items like this sprinkled throughout the Build Back Better plan in areas like Medicaid, business grants, public schooling, and infrastructure development.
Senate Democrats should have to answer for the bills’ critical race provisions before they vote on the bill.
How long will these restrictions go on? As people are finding out in California, New York, and all across Europe, the intention is that they should go on forever.
Ride an escalator in New York’s Penn Station, and a voice will coach you all the way up: “Face front at all times. Always hold the handrail . . .” In the subway, another voice warns you not to stand close to the edge of the platform, especially when a train is coming. A poster on the wall asks you to wear a mask, even if you’re vaccinated. A voice on the train reminds you that “courtesy is contagious, and it begins with you.” Another government poster offers, for no obvious reason, that “Ambition is Ageless: #CombatAgeism.”
If one were to judge a group of people solely based on what their government thinks of them, one could be forgiven for concluding that New York is populated exclusively by subnormal morons who can barely be trusted to walk upright. It is no wonder, then, that COVID-19 is such an enduring problem in the city, while down in Florida they seem to have forgotten it exists.
Want to go to a museum in New York? Show proof of vaccination at the door, and then wear a mask the whole time you’re there. Want to eat indoors? Proof of vaccination. Go to the gym? Proof of vaccination. And a mask: You must wear a mask while you run on the treadmill, for your own safety.
Are you a child, or an idiot? The government seems to think both.
In Florida, meanwhile, I went to a NASCAR race at Daytona this summer with about 100,000 other people and not a mask among us. The only papers we needed were our tickets. The race began, as it always does, with a benediction invoking God’s protection (it would seem successfully) followed by a stirring rendition of the National Anthem and a smattering of fireworks. There were no symptoms of the national panic the government feels is appropriate to our times.
The popular press recently has been reduced to running pieces on why Florida’s low COVID rates are “misleading.” The press wants you to know that things are worse than they look in Florida, and better than they look in the parts of the country that are governed according to their own ideas.
This is strangely reminiscent of my seventh grade American history textbook, which asserted that during the Carter years, bad circumstances (what Barack Obama would call “headwinds”) overwhelmed Jimmy’s good policies, whereas during the Reagan years, good luck prevented Ronnie’s bad ideas from ruining everything.
In most of Florida, and most of the south, COVID-19 is a thing of the past, remembered more for the deleterious actions of government than for the damage wrought by the disease itself. Almost the only place COVID still exists in Florida is in facilities run by Washington, D.C.: Drive an hour south from Daytona to the NASA-operated Kennedy Space Center, and masks are compulsory indoors, where it’s 2020 forever. (Though vaccinated people are permitted to remove their masks—for the outdoor exhibits.)
These tiny government islands of COVID, surrounded on all sides by total normality, are reminiscent of the 2013 shutdown where Obama directed fences to be put up around all the open-air monuments in Washington, just to show people they were “closed.” This is an organized-crime-style, protection-racket government: They don’t make life better when you do what they say; they make life worse when you don’t.
In New York, I don’t follow the rules, and I pay the price: I don’t carry proof of vaccination because it’s nobody’s business whether I’m vaccinated or not. As a result, the only part of the city I can currently enjoy is Central Park, where cigarettes are banned but the authorities take a more lenient view of drug use, public indecency, and the occaisional murder.
How long will these restrictions go on? As people are finding out in California and New York and all across Europe, the intention is that they should go on forever. They should go on until walking in public with your face exposed is as unacceptable in our culture as it is for women under strict Islamic law. Until any restaurant is entitled (and required) to check your medical history at the door. Until we’ve accepted that the only safe social interactions are those that happen in a digital metaverse where “bad” conversations can simply be switched off, after being reported to the FBI.
Life in New York today is what the Left dreams of as a model for every town in America, coming soon to a police state near you.
But New York isn’t dead, as James Altucher claimed last year in a column for the New York Post. It just has a lot more government than it needs. The best, happiest life you can enjoy in America is as far away from the government as you can get. Until the blue states figure out that I don’t need their medical advice any more than I need to be told how to ride an escalator, you’ll find me down in the red states, enjoying what you might call unassisted adult living.
I was hoping I would never have to write about the Wuhan flu, aka COVID-19, again. I overdosed on it in days of yore. During the Great Panic of 2020, I wrote about it many times for American Greatness (here, for example, and here, here, here, and here) and elsewhere (here, for example, and here, here, and here). I really have nothing much new to add.
Now, as then, I have been astonished that a disease that poses a serious threat to a tiny sliver of the population—some of the elderly, and those with underlying (new vocabulary word!) “co-morbidities” like obesity—should have caused such widespread panic, not to mention such an acrid authoritarian response from so many governments. I was also astonished, and correspondingly disheartened, by the alacrity with which people the world over turned themselves into sheep, allowing their elected representatives (where such existed) to herd them like cattle: docile, bovine, will-less. But that’s how it was.
Now of course, everything has changed. We have a smorgasbord of vaccines with (we are told) something like a 95 percent success rate. We have a wide range of effective therapeutics, including the once-scorned (because Trump-endorsed) ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, not to mention monoclonal antibody treatment. Right around the corner, I am told, Pfizer and other members of the Big Pharma brotherhood will be offering a pill that (according to some) will cut hospitalizations and death from COVID by almost 90 percent. So the world is once again free, maskless, social.
Just kidding.
But why, you might ask, are we still masking up, locking down, and otherwise acting like savages who forgot yesterday’s human sacrifice and now are worried about what the angry, unpropitiated gods might do?
I like to point out that the great, but under-remarked upon, thing about COVID is that it has all but abolished death from old age. Readers will remember that Florida motorcycle driver who was in a dreadful accident, poor thing, and was spread like raspberry jam across the highway. Nevertheless, assiduous EMTs, or maybe it was some junior assistant of Anthony Fauci, collected enough goo to perform the requisite test and, bingo, he, or it, “tested positive” and was put down at first as a death from COVID.
Of course, “testing positive” for COVID is about as significant as “testing positive” from those other coronaviruses, those that cause the common cold. That is to say, it is utterly insignificant because the viruses are ubiquitous. About the only person I can think of who “tested positive” and died but was not accorded the honor of “dying from COVID” was St. George Floyd. My opinion is that Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose, but the jury said that Derek Chauvin was to blame and threw the proverbial book at him.
In any event, in addition to being ubiquitous, viruses are also ever-shifting. The one thing that viruses are really good at is mutating. It’s what they do; it’s their nature. Back in early 2020, we were presumably dealing with the classic original Fauci-weaponized Chinese bat-virus. But new versions started appearing more quickly than the latest fashion accessory. At the moment, we’re told, 99 percent of the cases involve the scary sounding “delta variant.”
But I surmise that the authorities decided that the populace was becoming complacent and insufficiently biddable, since just a few days ago the latest “out of Africa” miracle was announced: a newer, even scarier-sounding version dubbed the “omicron variant.”
Unless you live in South Africa (and even if you do), there is no need to panic. Zero cases have been reported in the United States. Various companies are lining up with novel vaccines and new treatments. But if you are bored, then by all means, panic. The market did, falling by more than 900 points Friday.
Of course, the market was long overdue for a correction, and Friday’s 2.3 percent retreat doesn’t even count as a correction. Still, it has some people spooked, and it will be interesting to see what next week brings.
One thing it has already brought is an executive order by Kathy Hochul, the suffect governor of New York, who just forbade elective hospital surgeries in New York, just as bad boy Cuomo did when he was busy packing the nursing homes with COVID patients, and consequently then the morgues, with your grandparents.
Are we really going to do this again? Somehow, I doubt it. But we’ll see. The hankering of the people in charge to interfere with your freedom is almost as reliable as the avidity with which many people are determined to relinquish their freedom in order to bathe in the warm bath of dependency. This is where we cue the quotation from H. L. Mencken about no one going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
And it’s not just Americans, of course, as Austrians, Australians, Canadians, and others also show.
But let’s go back to Juliet’s famous question: what’s in a name? Is it true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? How about a virus? A week or so back, we were faced with the “Mu” variant. Now, suddenly, we’re clobbered with the “omicron” nodule. If we’re traipsing through the Greek alphabet, what about “Ξ”? According to the AP, the World Health Organization skipped N—“nu”—“for clarity”—so as not to confuse it with “new.” It skipped Ξ “to avoid causing offense generally.”
There’s the rub. For “Ξ” is transliterated “Xi,” and the World Health Organization, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party, is not about to start naming diseases after the Great Pooh Bear of Beijing, Xi Jinping.
All of which is to say—and it displeases me to make the observation—that we are not yet done with the COVID follies, not by a long shot.
Over Thanksgiving, Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert was back in her home district. While talking to a group of constituents, she made a joke at the expense of Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.
This is what Boebert had to say:
The other night on the House floor I had my first “Jihad Squad” moment.
I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers. He and I are leaving the Capitol and going back to my office and we get in an elevator. And I see a Capitol Police officer running, running to the elevator. I see sweat all over his face. He’s reaching…the door’s shutting, I can’t open it. What’s happening? I look to my left, and there she is, Ilhan Omar. And I say well, she doesn’t’ have a backpack, we should be fine.
The joke is mildly funny, and as Ilhan Omar is perhaps uniquely vile among House Democrats, that makes the joke much funnier than it probably is. Omar has minimized the 9/11 attack (“some people did something”) and has succeeded in making anti-Semitism protected speech in the Democrat caucus.
That’s just her public policy side. Her personal life is a felonious trainwreck. She married her brother to effect immigration fraud, banged one of her campaign consultants (this seems to be a common thread), steered a few hundred thousand dollars of campaign funds to his company. Then they both abandoned their families to live together in adulterous bliss. Somehow, the FBI has managed to avert its eyes from this sh**storm because it is too busy pursuing trespassers and using “friendly” interviews to indict GOP Congressmen.
Omar was not amused. On Twitter, she whined, “Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout. Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny & shouldn’t be normalized. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”
Later she sniveled, “Saying I am a suicide bomber is no laughing matter. @GOPLeader and @SpeakerPelosi need to take appropriate action, normalizing this bigotry not only endangers my life but the lives of all Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in Congress.”
By mid-afternoon yesterday, Boebert surrendered. In a pathetic tweet, she apologized to Muslims who may have been offended (ISIS and al-Qaeda did not respond to requests for comment) and said she was “reaching out” to Omar’s office, presumably to apologize.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, and Boebert came up with this boneheaded idea all on her own, but it isn’t hard to see Kevin McCarthy’s hand at work in something so ill-thought-out. Everyone knows Omar is a bully who was instrumental in getting Marjorie Taylor Greene booted from her committee assignments.
As I opined in my original post, a blind man could see that Omar would push for Boebert to be “censured” and stripped of committee assignments. McCarthy lacks the huevos to duke it out with the Democrats, and, at the same time, he is trying to give the illusion of being the scrappy fighter because he sees himself as Speaker in 2023. My theory is that McCarthy threw Boebert under the bus, directing her to undertake an apology tour to try to stop the Democrats from treating her like they treated Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
If anyone thought that was going to work, they still believe in leprechauns.
It didn’t take long for the left to start screaming about bigotry and islamophobia because, you know, carrying a suicide bomb is something that every Muslim does, and blowing yourself up to kill innocent people is deeply ingrained in Islamic culture. For the idiots at MMfA and Mediaite, that’s a joke, Scooter.
One of the leaders of the mob was none other than the guy alleged conservatives have a man-crush on — because he DMs them and RTs their stuff and makes them feel like something other than abject losers, Jake Tapper.
About the time Tapper was winding up the “we’re better than that” conservatives and the online left, Omar’s fellow socialists were pitching in.
The House Democrat leaders also issued a statement on l’affaire Boebert.
“Racism and bigotry of any form, including Islamophobia, must always be called out, confronted and condemned in any place it is found. This is particularly true in the halls of Congress, which are the very heart of our democracy.
“Congresswoman Boebert’s repeated, ongoing and targeted Islamophobic comments and actions against another Member of Congress, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are both deeply offensive and concerning. This language and behavior are far beneath the standard of integrity, dignity and decency with which the Constitution and our constituents require that we act in the House. We call upon Congresswoman Boebert to fully retract these comments and refrain from making similar ones going forward.
“Leader McCarthy and the entire House Republican Leadership’s repeated failure to condemn inflammatory and bigoted rhetoric from members of their conference is outrageous. We call on the Republican Leadership to address this priority with the Congresswoman and to finally take real action to confront racism.”
I have no problem with Boebert’s joke. It’s too bad that President Trump isn’t holding a rally and borrowing it so that it gets a wider audience. Omar needs to be mocked and ridiculed at every opportunity. The fact that we don’t isn’t a sign that we are morally superior, but rather it is a sign that we are led by a bunch of happy losers who would prefer to pick up the crumbs from under the Democrat table than win.
That said, if you make a joke like Boebert did about a nasty piece of work like Omar, you have to do so deliberately and anticipate the consequences. When Omar made her first tweet about Boebert’s fear of looking at her, Boebert should have directly challenged her. What you can’t do is go after one of the most powerful Democrats in the House in a way that accentuates her well-documented support for Islamic terrorism and imagine a) that word of the joke will not leak out and b) deceive yourself that you are not in a dogfight.
If, as I suspect, McCarthy was the guiding hand behind Boebert’s apology, it underscores his lack of fitness for any leadership position. He should have used this to lay down a marker with the Democrats that if they persist in this nonsense that when he becomes Speaker, he will strip several Democrats of their committee assignments for every Republican that has been treated that way so far. (Read my previous post on this subject: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, 2022, and the Chicago Way.) Instead, he seems to have deluded himself into thinking that the Democrats would leave Boebert alone and not officially retaliate if she apologized rather than them using her apology for wrongdoing and McCarthy’s failure to discipline her as a campaign fundraising pitch.
Our Republic is in crisis. We are on the cusp of clawing back enough power to stop the progressive onslaught. We have a lot of tough fighters in the House and Senate. But, unfortunately, without the leadership, who and how many people we elect doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. The fact that the GOP has not risen to Boebert’s defense against the dishonest accusations of “islamophobia” and whatever shows just how far we have to go to deserve to be a ruling party.
As the architects of the Build Back Better society assist you in creating easier ways to show your vaccinated and compliant status, perhaps it is prudent to pause and think about the discussions that take place behind the opaque glass doors.
Right now, as you are reading this, under the guise of enhancing your safety, the U.S. federal government is in discussions with multinational corporations and employers of citizens to create a more efficient process for you to register your vaccine compliance.
You may know their conversation under the terminology of a COVID passport. The current goal is to make a system for you to show your authorized work status; which, as you know, is based on your obedience to a mandated vaccine.
Beta tests are being conducted in various nations, each with different perspectives and constitutional limitations based on pesky archaic rules and laws that govern freedom. For the western, or for lack of a better word ‘democratic‘ outlook, Australia is leading the way with their technological system of vaccination check points and registered state/national vaccination status tied to your registration identification.
The checkpoints are essentially gateways where QR codes are being scanned from the cell phones of the compliant vaccinated citizen. Yes comrades, there’s an App for that.
Currently the vaccine status scans are registered by happy compliance workers, greeters at the entry to the business or venue. Indeed, the WalMart greeter has a new gadget to scan your phone prior to allowing you custody of a shopping cart.
In restaurants, the host or hostess has a similar compliance scanner to check you in prior to seating or reservation confirmation.
It’s simple and fun. You pull up your QR code on your cell phone (aka portable transponder and registration device), using the registration App, and your phone is scanned delivering a green check response to confirm your correct vaccination status and authorized entry.
The Australian government, at both a federal and state level, is working closely with Big Tech companies (thirsting for the national contract) to evaluate the best universal process that can be deployed nationwide.
As noted by all six Premiers in the states down under, hardware (scanners) and software (registration) systems are all being tested to find the most comprehensive/convenient portable units to settle upon. Meanwhile in the U.S., cities like Los Angeles and New York await the beta test conclusion before deploying their own version of the same process.
In Europe, they are also testing their vaccine checkpoint and registration processes known as the EU “Green Pass.”
The “Green Pass” is a similar technological system that gives a vaccinated and registered citizen access to all the venues and locations previously locked down while the COVID-19 virus was being mitigated. What would have been called a “vast right-wing conspiracy theory” 24 months ago, is now a COVID passport process well underway.
As with all things in our rapid technological era, you do not have to squint to see the horizon and accept that eventually this process will automate, and there will be a gadget or scanning gateway automatically granting you access without a person needing to stand there and scan each cell phone QR code individually.
The automated process just makes sense. You are well aware your cell phone already transmits an electronic beacon enabling your Uber or Lyft driver access to your location at the push of a touchscreen button, another convenient App on your phone. So, why wouldn’t the gateways just accept this same recognizable transmission as registration of your vaccine compliant arrival at the coffee shop?
The automated version is far easier and way more cool than having to reach into your pocket or purse and pulling up that pesky QR code on the screen. Smiles everyone, the partnership between Big Tech and Big Government is always there to make your transit more streamline and seamless. Heck, you won’t even notice the electronic receiver mounted at the entry. Give it a few weeks and you won’t remember the reason you were laughing at Alex Jones any more than you remember why you are taking off your shoes at the airport.
However, as this process is created, it is worth considering that you are being quietly changed from an individual person to a product. Some are starting to worry in the beta test:
[…] “you must become an object with attributes sitting in a database. Instead of roaming around anonymously making all sorts of transactions without the government’s knowledge, Australians find themselves passing through ‘gates’. …
All product-based systems have these gates to control the flow of stock and weed out errors. It is how computers see things. The more gates, the more clarity.
You are updating the government like a parcel pings Australia Post on its way to a customer. If a fault is found, automatic alerts are issued and you are stopped from proceeding. In New South Wales, this comes in the form of a big red ‘X’ on the myGov vaccine passport app (if you managed to link your Medicare account without smashing the phone to bits).
Gate-keeping systems have been adapted from retail and transformed into human-based crowd solutions to micromanage millions of lives with the same ruthless efficiency as barcodes tracking stock. There is no nuance or humanity in this soulless digital age. Barcodes are binary. Good – bad. Citizen or dissident.
Even if you have all the required government attributes to pass through the gates – two vaccines, six boosters, and a lifelong subscription to Microsoft – something could go wrong. If your data fails the scan, you’ll slip into digital purgatory and become an error message. (read more)
It could be problematic if your status fails to register correctly, or if the system identifies some form of non-compliance that will block you from entry. Then again, that’s what beta tests are for, working out all these techno bugs and stuff. Not to worry…. move along….
Then again… “For those in the privileged class allowed to shop, take note of Covid signs which encourage cashless transactions under the guise of ‘health’. Messaging around cards being ‘safer’ will increase until the Treasury tries to remove cash entirely, almost certainly with public approval.”
Wait, now we are squinting at that familar image on the horizon because we know those who control things have been talking about a cashless society for quite a while.
We also know that data is considered a major commodity all by itself. Why do you think every system you encounter in the modern era requires your phone number even when you are not registering for anything. It, meaning you, us, are all getting linked into this modern registration system that is defining our status. We also know that system operators buy and sell our registered status amid various retail and technology systems.
Yeah, that opaque shadow is getting a little clearer now.
Perhaps you attempt to purchase dog food and get denied entry into Pet Smart because you didn’t renew the car registration. Or perhaps you are blocked from entry because you forgot to change the oil on the leased vehicle you drive and Toyota has this weird agreement with some retail consortium. You head to the oil change place that conveniently pops up in the citizen compliance App –it’s only two blocks away– they clear the alert after they do the oil and you are gateway compliant again.
Missed your booster shot? We’re sorry citizen, your bank account is frozen until your compliance is restored… please proceed to the nearest vaccination office as displayed conveniently on your cell phone screen to open access to all further gates (checkpoints)…. tap to continue…
STUDY: Actual News Is Hard to Find on Today’s Cable ‘News’
If you’re looking for actual news on any of the three major cable
“news” networks these days, you might be looking in the wrong place.
According to a new study by the Media Research Center, less than
one-fourth (22.3%) of what is aired on cable news could be classified as
old-fashioned hard news — just-the-facts reporting or live
as-it-happens coverage of an unfolding event. Instead, nearly 80 percent
of what’s on cable news these days consists of talk-show discussion and
opinionated commentary by the anchors.
Our analysis also shows that cable news has abandoned a varied news
agenda in favor of repetitive discussions of U.S. politics. “Politics”
now accounts for more than 60 percent of cable news airtime, while other
aspects of U.S. life (crime, health, business, sports, weather, etc.)
have been pushed to the margins.
For this report, Media Research Center analysts reviewed a sample of
108 hours of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel programming from February 1
through June 30. The sample consisted of two randomly selected hours of
weekday programming from each network for each hour beginning at 6am ET
and ending at midnight ET. (More details below.)
Our analysts classified each
segment by both type and topic. “Hard news” consisted of reports from a
correspondent in the field (11.4%), live coverage of a breaking news
event (9.3%), and short news items read by the host or anchor (1.6%).
Add it all up, and that’s just 22.3 percent of all cable news airtime
(after commercials and teases are excluded).
Put another way, the average hour of cable offers viewers
just nine minutes, 15 seconds of hard news, compared to an average of
about 18 minutes of commercials. That’s not a lot of hard news for
networks that put the word “news” in their name.
Instead of hard news, the largest
portion of cable “news” airtime (54.3%) consisted of discussion and
analysis among the hosts and/or with a gaggle of pundits:
correspondents, contributors or commentators. And that total doesn’t
include the 15.6 percent of coverage devoted to interviews with direct
participants in news events (such as U.S. government officials,
eyewitnesses, etc.). Add it up, and nearly 70 percent of cable news
airtime consists of hosts talking with guests — a talk show format.
Another six percent of cable coverage consisted of direct commentary
by the host, usually highly-opinionated, most of which (83%) was found
during primetime. The remainder (1.9%) were soft feature packages,
pre-produced and not about the news of the day.
Most of the traditional hard news we found was during daytime
programming (between 6am and 7pm), but it was still a small minority of
what viewers saw. During the day, 73.1 percent of airtime was devoted to
discussion and commentary, vs. 26.9 percent for hard news. In primetime
(between 7pm and midnight), the amount of hard news was almost
nonexistent, dropping to a mere 9.3 percent, with more than 90 percent
of airtime devoted to guests and commentary.
The differences among the three cable networks were relatively
slight, but CNN had the greatest percentage of hard news (28.2%, vs.
71.8% discussion/commentary). MSNBC delivered 20.3 percent hard news vs.
79.7 percent discussion/commentary, while Fox News gave viewers 18.4
percent hard news vs. 81.6 percent discussion/commentary.
U.S. politics was at the top of all three networks’ agendas. On
MSNBC, 66.1 percent of their programming focused on politics, compared
with 62.0 percent on Fox News and 52.2 percent on CNN. This fixation on
politics crowded out other topics. Crime — including the much publicized
trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — amounted to
15 percent of airtime; health news, including COVID-19, garnered just
7.4 percent of cable news airtime. (Note: a discussion of the Biden
administration’s handling of COVID-19 would be considered a “political”
segment, while a segment talking to doctors about the pandemic would be
considered a “health” segment.)
Other former mainstays of traditional news are now almost entirely
absent from cable’s airwaves: Foreign news accounted for just 3.7
percent of the coverage; accidents a scant 2.4 percent of airtime;
economy and business stories just 1.7 percent; sports and weather just
1.3 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. Religion garnered just 0.14
percent of all airtime in our sample — a grand total of two segments,
both on Fox News.
Eight years ago,
the Pew Research Center studied cable news and found that “factual
reporting” amounted to a bare majority of CNN’s content (54%), vs. 45
percent of Fox News and a scant 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming, with
the rest consisting of “commentary and opinion.” Now, it seems, the
other networks have caught up to MSNBC in jettisoning their hard news
mission in favor of inundating their audiences with endless political
chattering.
Back in 2019, CNN’s media reporter Brian Stelter tried to defend
this trend as something that was needed in the age of Trump: “These
days, cable news is primarily a 24/7 talk show about politics and other
stories. I say politics first, because you know, especially in the past
three years, all things Trump has been the focus....Cable news has had
to evolve....There’s less of a need for headlines, and more of a need
for talk about the news, analysis of the news.”
Now in 2021, in the age of Joe Biden, what used to be “cable news” is
still a “24/7 talk show about politics and other stories.” The question
is, does anyone really “need” more talk about the news?
Detailed Methodology: For this study, MRC analysts
randomly selected two examples of each hour of programming from 6am ET
through midnight ET on each of the three main cable networks (CNN, MSNBC
and the Fox News Channel) between February 1 through June 30. Thus, we
looked at two examples of CNN’s 6am hour, two examples of CNN’s 7am
hour, etc. The hours we examined were chosen independently for each
network. The 6am hours of CNN, for example, were from March 1 and June
24; those from MSNBC were from February 23 and March 25; and those from
Fox News were from May 5 and May 12. When sampling was complete, our
analysts had the equivalent of two full days of coverage for each cable
network; weekends and holidays were excluded.
This sampling method ensured our
study would not be influenced by the news events of any given day, but
would broadly represent cable content over a five-month period. Analysts
then reviewed each selected hour, noting the time when each segment
began and ended, the length of each segment, and classified each segment
by type (news, live event, discussion, interview, commentary, etc.) and
topic (politics, health, foreign news, crime, etc.). Teases for
upcoming topics and commercials were not included in any of the totals.
The results were then sorted to determine the total airtime and
percentage of airtime devoted to each type of coverage.
In Europe, they are also testing their vaccine checkpoint and registration processes known as the EU “Green Pass.”
Then again… “F
