NEVER MIND IF IT’S TRUE
Blame first
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services fraud investigators recently visited a New York City public school to see if parents of a particular student qualified for benefits. But the student wasn’t enrolled, and the officials left.
Before long, it was being reported that Immigration and Naturalization Services officials had come to the school to pick up the fourth-grader in question but were valiantly turned away by the school.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s press secretary took to Twitter to heap shame on the incident, followed by New York City’s Twitter account, which said “all students, regardless of status, are welcome … Fed imm[igration] enforcement is not. …”
That set off a Twitter storm by outraged liberals, blaming President Donald Trump. One even said, “I am finding it harder & harder to be proud to be an American …”
However, even the far left New York Times called out the mayor’s staff, saying, “City Hall Spread ICE Fears First, Gets Facts Later.”
When the mayor’s office was confronted with the facts, de Blasio’s press secretary oddly blamed Immigration and Naturalization officials, saying any time they show up, for any reason, is “alarming.”
Tunnel vision
What’s a day like in the life of CNN?
Well, recently, it’s all Donald Trump, all the time. But it’s hardly balanced.
A Media Research Center examination analyzed a day of coverage (the 4 a.m. show through the 11 p.m. show) on Friday, May 12, and found the network had 96 anti-Trump guests/panelists (78 percent), seven pro-Trump guests/panelists (6 percent), 13 who were neutral and seven who offered a mixed assessment of the administration.
Excluding commercials, teases and promos, CNN featured 13 hours, 27 minutes of news coverage. Of that, 12 hours, 19 minutes were devoted to Trump, and 68 minutes — about three minutes per hour — were devoted to all the rest of the news stories of the day.
The most salient Trump news was the president’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, but that story was three days old. But, instead, to the network, more analysis, more editorializing by anchors/hosts was needed.
Along the way, if one listened for all 13-plus hours, one would have heard the president should be given “a pacifier and a rattle and [be put] in the crib,” “the story of the first 100 days was dishonesty,” clips of White House officials trying to explain the firing of Comey were “filled with lies” and an initial account of the firing was “a heap of falsehoods.”
Quite the litany for a network that once considered itself “the most trusted name in news.”
You’ve done nothing for me
Minority enrollment at the University of California at Los Angeles has risen nearly 13 percent since 2012, but the Afrikan Student Union (ASU) has decided that’s not nearly enough and has issued an eight-point ultimatum to university officials.
What it wants is a bit more than a pittance, but the organization says the school has done “nothing” for minorities in recent years.
Among its requests are “a physical location” to house ASU projects and be staffed by a director and office manager responsible for distributing funds; a $40 million endowment for black students, faculty and staff (as well as financial aid to “dismissed black students”); “an anti-discrimination policy [that] assuages discriminatory and offensive behavior” and mandates “cultural awareness training” for all incoming students, faculty, staff members and police officers; a black student financial aid officer and access to data that would allow the performance of black students to be evaluated independently from that of other students; a “special admissions” program to admit “a limited number of students fitting certain alternative admissions criteria”; five fully funded student positions starting at $15 per hour and lasting for 30 weeks a year (though what jobs they would do was not spelled out); and “guaranteed housing” for black students for four years, including on- and off-campus housing.
UCLA administrators didn’t say whether they would get right on that.
Overreacting-R-Us
Colgate University campus safety officials apparently took the exact steps they were supposed to recently when they received a report of a person “potentially armed,” according to Campus Reform. They called local law enforcement, which, in time, traced the report to a black student carrying a black glue gun for an art project.
Immediately, the university’s president called the incident an example of “profiling,” accused campus safety personnel of “implicit racial bias” and said the department’s director must take administrative leave while the matter was reviewed.
Meanwhile, students in the wake of the incident conducted Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
The review of the situation stated the safety officials “followed standard university protocols,” noted the officials called 911 before the race of the glue gun carrier became known and revealed that erroneous messages were sent out about an “active shooter” situation due to a user error of the emergency notification system.
Nevertheless, pulling out a catch-all response, the review suggested university officials undergo bias training.
As ever, no good deed goes unpunished.