The Washington Post – When The Abuser Goes To Work…

Bad Business At The Washington Post

Ben Roethlisberger is a great football player but, as a human being, not so much.

As the SFGate recently pointed out, he’s been accused but not prosecuted for (among other things) raping two different women on separate occasions.

For whatever reason, Lori Montgomery, the business editor of the Washington Post, responded in a tweet that claims the retiring NFL great was a rapist are “easily disproven” and “completely FoS.”

Montgomery was given a verbal warning for the tweet by Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee after a WP reporter asked whether employees at the newspaper would feel safe reporting harassment to editors who make similar comments.

Evidence

In truth, there is considerable evidence of sexual misconduct by Roethlisberger.

In 2010, a 20-year-old college student accused him of raping her inside the woman’s restroom of the Capital City nightclub in Milledgeville, GA, after plying her with liquor. According to news reports, friends of the woman tried to intervene but said they were blocked by Roethlisberger’s bodyguards. The alleged victim was later treated at an emergency room for head lacerations and genital bleeding. Roethlisberger said she slipped and fell in the restroom. Authorities declined to prosecute.

That same year, SFGate reports that another woman came forward and told Sports Illustrated that Roethlisberger raped her after he called her up to his Lake Tahoe hotel room to have her fix his television. When she reported the assault to her boss, her boss threatened to fire her. Again, Roethlisberger wasn’t prosecuted, though he settled a lawsuit filed by the alleged victim in 2011.

The Historian Who Won’t Be Bullied

Americans should applaud Dr. Gordon S. Wood, perhaps the leading scholar of the founding of America.

Dr. Wood is one of a few historians who had the courage in 2019 to stand up and object when the NYT’s 1619 Project hijacked American history by claiming “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.”

Dr. Wood recently received the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education from The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of academic excellence, academic freedom and accountability at America’s colleges and universities.

Dr. Wood argues that slavery was not a cause of the American Revolution, which was fought to advance principles like liberty, equality and the well-being of ordinary people. These principles, he adds, are “really the only things that hold us Americans together and make us a single people.”

ACTA lauded Dr. Wood’s six decades of scholarship on America’s founding that is “renowned for its meticulous accuracy and groundbreaking insight.”

Historically Inaccurate

In remarks accepting the ACTA award, Dr. Wood rejects the 1619 Project’s premise that colonists fought the American Revolution because Britain was threatening to abolish slavery.

Why America’s Free Press Is Circling The Drain

After 45 years in the news business, Marty Baron had no answers for how to address the flailing state of the U.S. media.

Baron, who retired as executive editor of The Washington Post (WP) on Feb. 28, was interviewed Sunday by CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl.

He criticized former GOP President Donald J. Trump for declaring that papers like the WP report “fake news” and for calling reporters the “enemy of the people.” Baron declared that democracy will not die in darkness because of the WP.

Of course, Baron knows that Trump is not the real problem with the media today.

The real problem is that Congress has allowed six corporations to control about 90% of media outlets in United States, and most owners are multi-national corporations that have little or no commitment to the First Amendment or the traditional values of America’s free press.

Baron’s assessment is emblematic of the shocking and extreme dearth of intellectual scholarship about the current and future state of the media. Instead, news anchors and journalism professors are teaching students to capitulate to corporate ownership by losing any semblance of objectivity.

Baron had nothing but praise for Jeff Bezos, the owner of the WP and the owner of Amazon, which many consider to be a monopoly in flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws. Baron said Bezos came to the Post in 2013 with a visionary plan to expand its coverage from a regional newspaper to a national digital publication. (Of course, The New York Times had already launched a digital platform in 1996 and a subscription-based internet paper in 2011.)

Will Bullying Corporations Discourage States From Passing Voter Integrity Bills?

photo of person dropping a vote — Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

If you can’t get the state legislature to do what you want, bully corporations that are critical to the state’s economy into advocating your position.

A group of 72 black executives, including some Fortune 500 business leaders, appear to be using this strategy to either force Georgia to repeal Georgia SB 202, an election integrity law, or to scare other states into not passing similar measures.

In a letter this week, they called the Georgia bill an effort to suppress minority voting and urged corporations to oppose the measure. And they are.

Ed Bastian, president of Delta Air Lines, a Georgia-based company and the state’s largest employer, said Wednesday “the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”

The bill, signed into law by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp last month, requires all voters to provide a driver’s license or a free state ID card number to request and submit an absentee ballot. Every voter already must present some form of photo ID to vote in person.

The bill also makes it a misdemeanor for individuals to give gifts or “food and drink” to voters who are waiting in line to vote. (Poll workers can still provide water.) And it restricts the number and placement of ballot drop-off boxes to insure ballot security.

Poll: Most Blacks Support Voter ID

The issue is anything but clear cut.

For one thing, a recent poll shows that most Americans – including most black Americans – support voter identification.

Federal Judge Calls One-Sided Media ‘Dangerous’

Senior Judge Laurence Silverman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday launched a full-frontal attack on the state of the American media today, calling it “dangerous.”

Judge Silverman bemoaned the “economic” and “ideological” consolidation of traditional and social media into a megaphone for the Democratic Party.

Judge Silverman warned the power of the press is “dangerous” today because America is “very close” to one-party control of the media.

He observed the first step taken by a potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to control communications, particularly delivery of news. “It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy,” he said.

His comments were made in a dissent in a defamation case, wherein he expressed doubt the U.S. Supreme Court today would approve the landmark 1964 decision that protects the press from lawsuits by public figures. He said the case, New York Times v. Sullivan, effectively “allows the press to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.”

Democratic Party Broadsheets

Judge Silverman, who was nominated to the bench by late GOP President Ronald Reagan, referred to the notorious McCarthy era, when Congress engaged in a vicious hunt for Communists in government and Hollywood. “As one who lived through the McCarthy era, it is hard to fathom how honorable men and women can support such actions,” he said.

He called the repression of conservative political speech today by large institutions with market power is “fundamentally un-American.”