161 Comments

As someone who has spent her career in newspapers, I am angry and heartbroken at the attacks on my struggling industry. Reporters go to extraordinary lengths to investigate and to check what they have been told, and editors enforce standards. Indeed, I believe one problem with this country is that there are many, many fewer reporters to investigate government, institutions, businesses and people. Studies have shown, for example, that in news deserts, government officials’ pay increases, presumably because there are no reporters to call taxpayers’ attention to it.

Contrary to what opponents of the legacy media say, we don’t lie to “get” them - which would be actual malice anyway.

Expand full comment

Tucked into all of this was a tidbit about families. And Mona Charen is right to say that families are key to a lot - especially how a child develops. But then what? Conservatives whine about families but regarding policy, the real issue is (according to many sources) that working class men don't do well enough for the marriage to benefit the woman. So the woman still needs to juggle several jobs (and kids) and the man's job or jobs are not enough to give him any status. So college educated kids marry and stay married and HS grads don't marry and don't stay together.

If there are any policy suggestions that should be to grant childcare benefits without restrictions - so save the kids.

Expand full comment
Feb 15, 2023·edited Feb 15, 2023

The United Kingdom seems to be able to maintain a balance between a vibrant free press and effective defamation law. Just as we should be able to have both a right to bear arms and common sense gun control, we ought to be able to have a free press without continuing to give media outlets and corporations a license to libel, effectively at will.

Expand full comment
founding

When TFG advocated loosening defamation laws I thought that the first plaintiff under the proposed new laws should be Ted Cruz’ father. Also, E. Jean Carroll might benefit from a loosening.

Expand full comment

You should remember the case between Gawker and Peter Thiel via Hulk Hogan. It is a wonder that left leaning groups have not run the same playbook against right wing sites that are clearly not based on fact. The only case that would be close is the case against Fox/Murdoch and Dominion Voting Machines. Calling any billionaire with time I would like to end Breitbart; I think that could be fun.

Expand full comment

Damon Linker’s description of DEI programming demonstrates his unfamiliarity with it. He references very unrepresentative and outdated examples.

Expand full comment

I am scratching my head over the purpose of Mona Charen’s column.

Neither she nor anyone else needs the Super Bowl to “teach” us that a loving, emotionally healthy home (usually) begets loving, emotional healthy children. Is she astounded that Black families are capable of this? Is she subtly assuring her mostly White readership that all would be well if only more Black families were like the Hurts and Mahomes? One thing is certain (based on her other writings): Whether a child is wanted or not is beside the point.

Anyway, that the home of Charen’s fantasies is a good thing may not be that complicated--as she writes--but providing it is hardly easy. It does make a difference when the children are wanted, when the marriage is strong, when the parents have a support system, and when they know when the family’s next meal is coming from. So, Mona, doesn’t a wealthy country have an interest in doing as much as possible to facilitate all of this?

Expand full comment
founding

The great Cathy Young gives us a much needed jolt in her piece from two of the most passionate and unforgiving proponents of liberal democracy. Sharansky and Levy have more on the ball than anyone in the 535 member US Congress and the entertainment wing of what passes for the Republican Party.

Expand full comment

To weld Originalism to historical practice as Alito did in Dobbs might founder in an attempt to annul Sullivan. The press in the early Republic was partisan, vicious and demonstrated little regard for truth. A passing familiarity with the press treatment of the Adams Jefferson Presidential contest leaves little justification that the Founders regarded slander as a cause to suppress the press. Then again, only the little people need be constrained by consistency.

Expand full comment

As usual, Sarah has reduced the case against Nikki Haley to the succinct yet insurmountable essentials: "No one is asking for what she’s selling."

Expand full comment

Did I misunderstand him, or was JVS actually considering supporting DeSantis in this past Thursday zoom meeting? I must have misunderstood.

Expand full comment

Charlie, I've long wondered how you have the stamina to write Morning Shots daily, produce podcasts and appear on TV. Now you are keeping it up even with COVID. Please take care of yourself and get well soon.

Expand full comment

Nikki Haley wouldn't have been a good candidate for 2015/2016 either because--and it seems a lot of people still haven't grasped this yet--2016 was an *anti-establishment* election. People hated how the country was doing on both sides of the aisle in terms of how the working and middle classes felt about the direction of the country. Nikki Haley is an establishment candidate, and she would have been thrown out with the rest of them like Jeb Bush, Huntsman, etc. The GOP won in 2016 because they nominated an anti-establishment candidate who didn't have a history in politics to fight against an establishment candidate (Clinton) whose name was toxic with a whole swath of the voting electorate going as far back as her endorsement of and vote for the Iraq War. Benghazi and years of right wing infotainment tarring and feathering her only worsened that. Her acting like a focus group proofed robot on the campaign trail also confirmed her status as an establishment candidate for anyone with a pulse who was watching. Nikki would have went nowhere in 2015.

Expand full comment

Americans should never be empowered to become even more litigious than they are already. Do we really want ambulance chasing lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits for Republicans claiming defamation?

Justice in America is already overwhelmed and screwed up, why make it worse? Hopefully judges would immediately dismiss these cases with extreme prejudice, since 99% would be meritless.

Expand full comment
Feb 14, 2023·edited Feb 14, 2023

My understanding she was a very harsh district attorney. And only 2 year senator. I voted for her for senator.

I dislike that in the primary she accused Biden of forcing little black girls like her girls to stand in the cold waiting to be bussed to a white school.

She plays that card but her father was from Jamaica and her mother is East Indian. Her father a professor at Stanford and her mother was a Biomedical scientist at Berkeley,

So she is far from a poor little

Black girl. She attended Berkeley school district and was part of a voluntary bussing program within the district. She went to a Gifted HS program in Quebec Canada.

So why pretend that she was poor little black waif forced to be bussed. She's half African Jamsican and East Indian and she married a white man who is Jewish.

Expand full comment
founding

To Mona, regarding families: I grew up an only child with two parents and no other relatives within a 6 hour drive. My husband grew up with two parents, six siblings, 4 grandparents, and multiple aunts, uncles, and cousins all within a half hour drive. My husband's family had, and has, some clear advantages over mine based on all that peer and intergenerational close contact. I'm not saying that siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins are as important as parents, and I'm not denying the existence of destructive families of any size, but I don't think anyone who has either had those relationships, or not had them but observed them up close, can say that they don't matter at all. And yet we hear lots of critiques of single parent families on the mainstream right, but very few of people who move away from their families of origin or have only one child. So all I'm asking is that those of you who write about families be fair. When you say that two parent families offer advantages, please remember always to add, "to a lesser extent, sibling-ed families and extended families living nearby offer advantages, too." (I suspect Charlie would agree.) Thank you, Mona.

Expand full comment