America's largest newspaper chain Gannett orders USA Today and other publications to roll back op-eds after 'repelling readers' with biased articles
The worm is beginning to turn
America's largest newspaper chain Gannett has instructed its newsrooms to scale back opinion pieces which are 'repelling readers' who do not want to be told what to do.
The newspaper chain owns the USA Today network which takes in hundreds of local newspapers in almost every state across the country.
At a recent editors committee meeting in April, editors said in a presentation: 'Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.
'They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. 'They perceive us as having a biased agenda,' according to The Washington Post.
Now, the company will do-away with opinion pieces almost entirely and they will also not allow any endorsement of politicians aside from in local races. They will no longer endorse presidential candidates, or candidates in House and Senate races. The only elections they will now cover will be local.
'Today’s contemporary audiences frequently are unable to distinguish between objective news reporting and Opinion content.
'In the old days, content appearing on print pages that were clearly labeled helped alleviate those concerns, along with a society that possessed a higher news literacy.
'But in today’s digital/social environment, we as an industry have been challenged to make these differences clear,' the editors said in an earlier advisory from 2018.
The editors said they had been losing reader subscriptions as a result of their perceived bias.
Readers this week reacted to the news by telling the media company to hire 'writers that aren't left-wing activists.'
Americans' faith in the media has nose-dived in recent years thanks largely to the widely left-wing bias of many national publications and news networks.
The lowest point on record was in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected. Many felt the media was biased against Trump from the beginning.
In 2021, faith in the media dipped to the second lowest point, with only 36 percent of people saying they had a fair amount of trust in journalists.
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It's So Bad Even Californians Have Had It: LA DA Loses Appeal After Not Enforcing Law
The signs continue to grow that Californians have had enough of “progressive” district attorneys’ soft-on-crime policies as the futures of the district attorneys of Los Angeles and San Francisco look very uncertain.
On Thursday, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Los Angeles DA George Gascon cannot refuse to charge criminals under the state’s three-strikes law, Fox News reported.
After Gascon took office in December 2020, he implemented a series of what he characterized as reforms designed to end “mass incarceration.”
“The measures included barring deputy DAs from prosecuting strikes, special circumstances and sentencing enhancements,” according to Fox.
The Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County responded by suing Gascon that same month to stop him from forcing them to break the law.
“While an elected District Attorney has wide discretion in determining what charges to pursue in an individual case, that discretion does not authorize him or her to violate the law or to direct attorneys representing the district attorney’s office to violate the law,” Michele Hanisee, president of the ADDA, said in a December 2020 news release announcing the suit.
Fox reported, “California’s Three Strike Law was enacted in 1994 after voters approved Proposition 184 by an overwhelming majority.”
The law mandated at least a 25 years in prison to a life sentence for those convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, referred to as “strikes.”
A California appeals court sided with the ADDA on Thursday.
“On the merits, we conclude the voters and the Legislature created a duty, enforceable in mandamus, that requires prosecutors to plead prior serious or violent felony convictions to ensure the alternative sentencing scheme created by the three strikes law applies to repeat offenders,” the ruling said.
“The district attorney overstates his authority. He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion,” the judges added.
Eric Siddall, vice president of the ADDA, celebrated the ruling, tweeting: “Today, the judiciary affirmed the rule of law. Gascón’s authority is not absolute. He must follow the rules.
“While we are heartened by the Court’s ruling, we continue to be disappointed that LA’s chief prosecutor forced us to take him to court to stop him from breaking the law.”
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San Francisco too: Voters oust DA Chesa Boudin over soft-on-crime policies
Fed-up San Francisco voters ousted their progressive district attorney on Tuesday in a recall election that rejected his soft-on-crime policies following surges in shameless shoplifting, car break-ins and rampant, open-air drug dealing.
The recall effort against Chesa Boudin, a former public defender and the son of convicted Weather Underground terrorists, was supported by 61% of voters in early returns, according to NBC.
Tuesday’s recall election, Proposition H on the ballot, could prove a bellwether of voter sentiment across the US, including in New York City, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced widespread criticism since enacting a slew of progressive policies after taking office in January.
“Around the country, we have seen the rise of the so-called progressive DAs,” Richie Greenberg, a former Republican mayoral candidate and spokesman for the recall effort, told The Post before Tuesday’s vote.
“We here in San Francisco have lived it and we don’t want to see the great city of New York fall in the way that San Francisco has.”
New York does not have recall elections but its governor is empowered to remove district attorneys who fail to do their jobs.
Boudin’s loss followed February’s recalls of three San Francisco school members amid outrage over their decision to spend time renaming one-third of the city’s schools instead of re-opening classrooms closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mayor London Breed — who in December announced a crackdown in which cops would be “less tolerant of all the bulls–t that has destroyed our city” — will name Boudin’s replacement until a special election is held in November.
The selection process could be complicated, however, by another ballot measure, Proposition C, that, if passed, would bar Breed’s pick from running in the special election, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Boudin, 41, was narrowly elected in 2019 amid a nationwide wave of victories by progressive DA candidates who vowed to reform a criminal justice system they called historically racist and unfair.
But residents of ultra-liberal San Francisco, population 815,000, soon soured on Boudin’s vision of “radical change to how we envision justice,” which included prohibitions on seeking cash bail, prosecuting juveniles as adults and seeking tougher sentences under California’s anti-gang or “three strikes” laws.
Viral videos have revealed shoplifters running rampant during smash-and-grab thefts at high-end stores, with city police Lt. Tracy McCray lamenting to Fox News last year that “we can have a greatest hits compilation of people just walking in and cleaning out the store shelves.”
Offenses against Asian-Americans also proliferated amid the pandemic, with lifelong resident Henry Wong, 74, who worked for the late comedian Robing Williams saying that people “spit on me on elevators, on the streets” and calling Boudin “the worst district attorney the city has ever had.”
“These are crimes,” Wong told the Washington Post. “And he doesn’t care. It’s just so easy to break the law.”
The latest official police statistics show that overall crime in the city is up nearly 8 percent this year, with a 20 percent surge in larcenies, as well as spikes in homicides, rapes and assaults.
Most polls conducted in the run-up to Tuesday’s election indicated that voters were poised to get rid of Boudin by a wide margin, with a Friday survey published by the San Francisco Examiner showing 56% in favor of removing him.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/08/san-francisco-da-chesa-boudin-ousted-over-soft-on-crime-policies/
******************************************************The man taking on the anti-free-speech left
For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million.
Lukianoff is part of a generation of new Gen X leaders for the conservative movement in America, though he thinks of himself less as a conservative and more as a classical liberal. The arrival of this new broadened agenda is something long planned but now accelerated.
“People have been approaching and asking since day one, the whole time we faced pressure to expand beyond campus,” Lukianoff said in an exclusive interview with The Spectator. “We were thinking about expanding in 2024, but 2020 was such a bad year for freedom of speech, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”
This degradation of free speech in America, thanks to the pandemic and the increasing power of bureaucratic actors, led FIRE to adopt an approach that no longer pretends the anti-speech efforts of the college kangaroo court system are confined to the campus.
“There should be a thumb on the scale on not firing people over a political view or ruining their lives over a drunken tweet,” Lukianoff said, while admitting: “The good news is that we’ve been dealing with an extra-constitutional situation on campus for a long time, but taking on the administrative state is going to be a real challenge.”
The tension FIRE will need to navigate is that both the left and right seem inclined in recent years to deploy the power of government to effect their ends — including eradicating protections against the meddling of bureaucrats in order to achieve a government-mandated arrangement of balance.
“We don’t want the heavy hand of government coming in,” Lukianoff said. “What we’d like to do is encourage a culture where we get back to a point where firing someone for a political view is a drastic option. The state of free speech law is pretty good — B+ — but culturally, we are not where we need to be.”
FIRE’s efforts will be focused on communication and rebuilding the value of free speech as central and bipartisan. Lukianoff wants to address issues like qualified immunity and push back against the devaluation of free speech by online social media entities in creative ways: “To remind people of the old idioms, and good small-d democratic values.”
Yet much of this effort may be a last stand for pluralism at a moment when it seems cast aside by right and left. “If you’re deciding you’re going to fire people for saying heterodox or partisan things, you’re going to hurt yourself, and deny yourself people with skill,” Lukianoff said. Citing the situation with Georgetown professor Ilya Shapiro, he commented, “That was an insane case but it was not at all atypical… When everyone is their Twitter avatar 24 hours a day, it’s not good. We are all on stage all the time, when ‘The Purifiers’ will go after you.”
FIRE is looking for help within this space, not just in terms of donor support, but talent and staff from those who are dedicated to the cause of free speech, and plaintiffs who will help them make the case within court systems and battles worth fighting within HR departments and corporate America. Not every battle will be one in which they can engage, Lukianoff warns, but they will choose to weigh in as much as possible on the side of those fighting for their right to speak freely.
“Major parts of the left don’t understand that without free speech, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, would all be a bird without wings,” Lukianoff said. He intends to remind them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/the-man-taking-on-the-anti-free-speech-left/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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