Новости за 13.08.2020

Public trust in the media has reached an all-time low, according to a poll of over 20,000 people released last week by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. “Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media, they believe news organizations actively support the partisan divide,” the report stated. Those who suspect that the media has had a hand in inflaming partisanship aren’t wrong. The ongoing collapse of local news outlets and mass layoffs at publications across the country... Читать дальше...

How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools? We can answer the question with some hard numbers. Public school students merit something like $266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding. Kids attending the right private schools are worth $5,000 each or possibly much more.

On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson tried to channel Edward R. Murrow. Discussing Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Carlson flew into a rage after being challenged by consultant Richard Goodstein. “So it begins! You’re not allowed to criticize her!” Carlson fumed. “I love the idea that she’s immune from criticism because on this show, no one is immune from criticism. Our political leaders must be held to account: That’s our job.”

The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising against police brutalization of Black people. The multiracial protests that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo—at least momentarily—against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in American policing. Fueled by the video-capture of the casual hand-in-the-pocket–style murder of George Floyd, this mass repudiation might be read as an expression of the humanitarian values that... Читать дальше...

Barry Gewen introduces his study of Henry Kissinger,  The Inevitability of Tragedy, with an anecdote that may be more telling than he intended. “A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with a friend,” he recounts, “when he leaned across the table and whispered to me, ‘Barry, Henry Kissinger is  evil.’” Throughout this book, Gewen defends Kissinger’s record as flawed but indispensably instructive for Americans now amid the country’s converging, collective tragedies. This is a familiar argument. Читать дальше...

Back in April, when New York City was the epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis, The New York Times’ Bret Stephens published a column entitled “New York Rules Can’t Apply to All.” The inset quote that Stephens’s editor had pulled out to summarize the column was, “A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.” Stephens argued that the only reason New York City was in such dire straits was that the New York metropolitan area is the most densely populated in the United States; absent that degree of congestion... Читать дальше...

After donning a flak jacket and working vainly for nearly four years on Mideast peace, the opioid crisis, the federal bureaucracy, the criminal justice system, the second Great Depression, the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the United States’s relations with leaders of China, Russia, and Apple, it has come to this: Jared Kushner has been put in charge of This Kanye Thing.