90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, April 18, 2022

Blogs With Rule 5 Links

The Other McCain has: Rule 5 Sunday: All Sydney, All The Time!

Proof Positive has: Best Of Web Link Around

The Woodsterman has: Rule 5 Woodsterman Style

EBL has: Rule 5 And FMJRA

The Right Way has: Rule 5 Saturday LinkORama

The Pirate's Cove has: Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup

Visage à trois #188

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #361

CIA has known Trump-Russia collusion data not ‘technically plausible’ since 2017, Durham says

An agency believed to be the CIA concluded the data underpinning certain Trump-Russia collusion allegations was not “technically plausible” by early 2017, casting further doubt on claims pushed by the Clinton campaign before the 2016 election.

Democratic cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann was indicted last September for allegedly concealing his clients — Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and “Tech Executive-1,” known to be former Neustar executive Rodney Joffe — from FBI general counsel James Baker in September 2016 when he pushed since-debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank.

The September 2021 indictment alleged Sussmann lied when he said he was not providing the domain name system data allegations to the FBI on behalf of any client when he was, in fact, doing so on behalf of Joffe and the Clinton campaign.

Durham is also scrutinizing claims Sussmann made to the CIA in February 2017 about Russian phones, called YotaPhones, which the Democratic cybersecurity lawyer had claimed linked former President Donald Trump to these phones near the White House.

Durham revealed Friday that while the FBI “did not reach an ultimate conclusion regarding the data’s accuracy or whether it might have been in whole or in part genuine, spoofed, altered, or fabricated” as it was being pushed to government agencies, the CIA “concluded in early 2017 that the Russian Bank-1 data and Russian Phone Provider-1 data” — the Alfa Bank and YotaPhone information — was not “technically plausible,” did not “withstand technical scrutiny,” was “user created and not machine/tool generated," “contained gaps,” and “conflicted with [itself].” The special counsel said his office “has not reached a definitive conclusion in this regard.”

Durham said his prosecutors expect to cite evidence at trial reflecting that “the FBI and Agency-2 concluded that the Russian Bank-1 allegations were untrue and unsupported."

The special counsel said earlier this year that Sussmann told the CIA about the dubious Russian bank connection during the 2017 meeting in which he again allegedly misled about who his client was. Sussmann “provided data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these entities of internet protocol addresses affiliated with a...

Visage à trois #188

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #359

Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers—If They’re Not White

Analysis shows how homicide coverage downplays the race of minority offenders

Frank James, the man arrested for Tuesday's New York City subway shooting, is a black nationalist and outspoken racist who railed against whites, Jews, and Hispanics. A careful reader of the New York Times could be forgiven for overlooking that. In a nearly 2,000-word article on the attack, James's race is not mentioned. The same is true for the coverage offered up by Reuters; the Washington Post only mentioned James's race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for "low-income Black youths."

Media critics on the right say that the conspicuous omission of James's race from these news reports illustrates a trend among prestige papers, which deemphasize or omit the race of non-white criminals while playing up the race of white offenders. But is it a real pattern?

Yes. A Washington Free Beacon review of hundreds of articles published by major papers over a span of two years finds that papers downplay the race of non-white offenders, mentioning their race much later in articles than they do for white offenders. These papers are also three to four times more likely to mention an offender's race at all if he is white, a disparity that grew in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020 and the protests that followed.

The Free Beacon collected data on nearly 1,100 articles about homicides from six major papers, all written between 2019 and 2021. Those papers included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis's Star-Tribune—representatives of each paper did not return requests for comment for this article. For each article, we collected the offender's and victim's name and race, and noted where in the article the offender's race was mentioned, if at all.

The data suggest an alarming editorial trend in which major papers routinely omit information from news reports, presenting readers with a skewed picture of who does and doesn't commit crime. These editorial choices are part and parcel with the "racial reckoning" that swept newsrooms in the wake of Floyd's murder, which saw journalists dramatically overhauling crime coverage to emphasize the view that the criminal justice system is racist at the root—perhaps at the expense of honesty about individual offenders' crimes.

The chart above indicates that papers are far quicker to mention the race of white murderers than black. (Those two races account for 92 percent of mentions in the data, so others are not shown.) Half of articles about a white offender mention his race within the first 15 percent of the article. In articles about black offenders, by contrast, mentions come overwhelmingly toward the end of the piece. Half of the articles that mention a black offender's race do not do so until at least 60 percent of the way through, and more than 20 percent save it until the last fifth of the article.

Of course, journalists choose not only where in a piece to mention an offender's race, but also whether to mention it at all, and omissions can skew a reader's perspective.

To measure these choices, we identified the race of the offender in roughly 900 stories where his name, but not his race, was mentioned, first by looking at the race of people with the same name in Census data, and then hand-confirming race based on mug shots or...