Media watch: VOA Sides With Hamas
US government outlet Voice of America’s “managers and editors” have been trying “to whitewash Hamas’s war crimes against Israeli civilians, presenting terrorists as freedom fighters” and backing “Hamas’s propaganda,” fumes Ted Lipien at The Hill. The outfit uses “the term ‘incursion’ to describe Hamas’s unconscionable massacre” and made clear that “Hamas members must not be called ‘terrorists’ in VOA programs.” “How sad that the Voice of America’s management is so timorous about offending Hamas.” VOA wants “?‘neutrality’ in news reporting about terrorists murdering women and children. And they want you to keep paying for it.” “It makes me fear for the future of Western journalism and democracy.” Time for a “bipartisan effort” to bring VOA back to “values based on uncompromising respect for human rights.”
Conservative: Dems Sparked the War in Schools
“The fearmongering over Republicans focusing on winning school board victories is a direct result of the utterly bizarre insistence by Democrats that parents should be cut out of the lives of their children at school,” points out the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria. In California, “local school boards began adopting the policy” of notifying “parents if their children tried to change identities at school,” a shift The New York Times painted as Republicans being “Bible-thumping culture warriors who are distracting from actual learning in schools and harassing transgender children.” In short, the Times and Democrats “think parents should be cut out of their children’s lives because they think parents will abuse their children if they are struggling with their identity.”
From the right: Guns or Butter, Mr. President?
President Lyndon Johnson’s bid to “finance a war along with a new Great Society” ended in “inflation and retreat in Vietnam,” recall The Wall Street Journal’s editors. Yet President Biden now wants Congress to help allies win two wars, deter a third over Taiwan and continue spending “as if nothing in the world has changed. He won’t be able to do both.” Biden’s $106 billion ask of lawmakers includes money for Ukraine, Israel, the border and the Pacific theater, but also $56 billion in “?‘emergency’ domestic spending” — requests such as “$6 billion to extend pandemic broadband subsidies” that “aren’t remotely emergencies.” “There are two wars going on, Mr. President. Do you want . . . to sacrifice Ukraine and U.S. defenses for broadband subsidies?”
From the left: Don’t Demonize the Speaker
“You can just picture Democratic consultants savoring every time a new detail emerges about” new House Speaker Mike “Johnson’s long history of inflammatory statements on social issues,” notes Walter Shapiro at Roll Call, but “Democrats run a major risk in going out of their way to demonize Johnson. It is daunting to turn a political figure with low name identification into a symbol of menace.” He’s not “going to dominate the news over the next year, no matter what the House Republicans do.” For years, GOP “consultants tried to make every House election a referendum on Nancy Pelosi,” but “the strategy kept backfiring because voters in swing districts had more immediate concerns.”
Baseball beat: A Demented Playoff System
After making rule changes to speed up the game, “Major League Baseball managed the unthinkable: It made the sacred regular season far less 颈尘辫辞谤迟补苍迟,” grouses Paul Bledsoe at The Baltimore Sun. This year’s playoff scheme prevented “teams with the best records from playing any games for a week straight at the start of the playoffs.” As a result, “the three teams (Braves, Dodgers, Orioles) who this year won 100 or more regular season games — the classic benchmark of a great team” — got quickly eliminated, “collectively losing nine out of 10 playoff games.” MLB can’t have a playoff system “that undermines its most definitive characteristic — the long daily regular season — and then penalizes its best teams for winning during that season.” “After all, they are not called the Men of October. They are called the Boys of Summer.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board