Journalists are hounding the movie depiction of their earlier hounding of an innocent man.

Fascinating. From The Freakout Over Trump’s Executive Order on Jews Was Wrong by Ted Frank.

Sometime in the past 12 hours I became aware of yet another crisis. The Trump administration issued some draft wording for an executive order to address rising anti-semtism, especially on university campuses where the BDS movement has been vocal and powerful in the past few years at deplatforming and shutting down Jewish or pro-Israel events.

It is of course an exceptionally fine line between defending free speech and precluding speech. We want the BDS people to be able to spew their anti-semitic and hateful venom on the grounds that freedom of speech is near absolute. On the other hand we need to ensure the BDS free speech is not used to in turn suppress Jewish free speech as they have so frequently demonstrated is their goal. It is a very narrow needle to thread.

Translating a good intent (protect free speech for everyone) into clear law is challenging. That is what the draft wording is about.

But the NYT and their cousin NPR quickly flamed this into either emerging white nationalism on the part of the Trump administration a la some form of legislative Kristallnacht. I caught a snippet on NPR yesterday afternoon that was so garbled, incoherent and nonsensical that I knew there must be more to the story.

And of course there is. Frank has the background to the legislation which is multi-decadal in nature and bipartisan in support across multiple administrations. The Trump administration is merely continuing the work of the Obama administration in this area.

Early Tuesday evening, the New York Times Politics Twitter account tweeted out that “President Trump will sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality,” and Twitter immediately went into overdrive. Was Trump classifying Jews as un-American and promoting the dual-loyalty smear? Were Nazi deportations and Nuremberg Laws around the corner? No. The sky isn’t falling. The Trump executive order simply enshrines as policy decades of existing anti-discrimination laws meant to protect Jews.

The issue is this: a number of anti-discrimination laws are phrased as protecting people from discrimination based on “race or nationality” — but not religion. Do these laws reach discrimination against Jews?
The consensus has long been yes. In a 1987 Supreme Court decision, Justice Byron White, a JFK appointee, held that Jews were a “race or nationality” protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The decision was unanimous, joined by liberal icons like Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan.

But it was unclear if the Supreme Court’s reasoning applied to the same “race or nationality” language in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protecting against discrimination in education. While congressmen in the 19th century thought of Jews as a race, that classification is offensive in modern times.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration Justice Department provided informal guidance that Title VI did apply to discrimination against Jews qua Jews (and Muslims and Sikhs), if the discrimination could be classified based on ethnic identity or national origin.

In recent years, there has been a bipartisan movement to provide legal protections to students and academics against the anti-Semitic BDS movement. Left-wing anti-Semitism has been a troubling trend on campus, with incidents such as a UCLA student government panel questioning whether a Jew could serve on its judicial board. The U.S. Senate has repeatedly taken up legislation to endorse the Obama administration view of Judaism-as-nationality for purposes of Title VI, most notably in the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016, passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, though it died in the House.
Twitter blue-checks did not cover themselves in glory in the first 24 hours after the Times tweet.

As the Times story (which was considerably less incendiary than the tweet) noted, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and his Jewish chief of staff, David Krone, had pushed this issue hard. Even after Reid retired, Krone reached out to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to lobby the administration on the issue. Other Jews within the administration supported the policy change, and an executive order modeled after the 2016 Senate bill was developed. The Times story correctly expressed no concern about the “nationality” implications, restricting its news hook to ACLU concerns about possible infringements on speech opposing Israel. (Proponents deny that there are any free-speech implications.)

But because it is an action undertaken by Trump, the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) of the NYT, NPR and the blue-check brigade of Twitter all kicked into action with their themes of Nazi, Racist, Speech suppresser, etc.

All nonsense. Presumably they didn't read the draft text, they did not know the legislative history, and are unaware of the threat from BDS (or are comfortable with its speech suppression). Ben Rhodes journalists in other words.

At this point it is seems almost a Pavlovian response - Trump action of whatever nature leads instinctively to calls of Nazi, Racist, Incipient Dictator. The NYT is certainly free to lose its own money doing this but why on earth are we using nearly half a billion dollars of taxpayer money for journalism from excitable, neurotic, ignorant ninnies?

Twitter blue-checks did not cover themselves in glory in the first 24 hours after the Times tweet. CNN’s Bianna Golodryga called the executive order “Soviet.” The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg called it “the same kind of shit that Nazis did.” The Good Place creator Mike Schur sneered that Trump was doing the bidding of bigots. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, apparently unaware of his own lack of opposition to identical language in 2016, took to Twitter to complain, “My nationality is American.”

Law professors and journalists and celebrities bemoaned the appeal to white supremacy. A few voices on the Left, such as Media Matters’s Matthew Gertz and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, tried to stem the tide with accurate information, but they were barely heard over the noise. The refusal to apply Occam’s razor was astonishing. What was more likely: That someone without legal training was misunderstanding an executive order they hadn’t seen, or that a bipartisan coalition of Jewish policymakers persuaded Jared Kushner to convince Trump to issue the preliminary groundwork for a 21st century version of the Nuremberg Laws in America? You can guess which tack got the most retweets and likes.

The tragic irony is that while the Mandarin Class were cloaking themselves in ignorance and bigotry, real anti-semitism was on clear display in Jersey City where two members of the Black Hebrew Israelite hate-group targeted and murdered three innocent Jewish shoppers.

The response from some of the Jersey City residents? Video in this article.

NYT, NPR, the Mandarin Class on Twitter are all far more eager to score political points than they are to do factual reporting or address real problems.

With particular irony, the NPR piece on the new legislation to protect from anti-semitism was followed soon after by an interview with some mainstream media movie critic about the new Clint Eastwood movie Richard Jewell. Both the critic and the NPR interviewer were outraged by a character in the movie, Kathy Scruggs, who, in the movie, is intimated to have offered sex to an FBI agent for a scoop. Scruggs was a real reporter for the Atlanta Journal & Constitution.

The protectors of the guild of journalists tried to turn their criticism into a feminist critique. That Scruggs was being demeaned as a woman rather than as an unreliable reporter.

I was living in Atlanta at the time of the Centennial Park bombing and it was horrifying to see, in real time, the mob power of the press to shape an investigation and to target to the point of destruction an innocent and heroic individual. At the time it appeared that they chose to target Jewell because he was a lower class, not especially articulate, intermittently employed white guy. Their pursuit of him was charged with racism, classism, credentialism. It was appalling.

And of course it was wrong. Wrong in approach and wrong in that their mob pursuit of the wrong suspect diverted attention from the real perpetrator.

As I say, all this was visible as it was occurring. Seemingly though, the mainstream media couldn't help themselves. Despite all the red flags going up, their prejudices, self-regard, and privilege drove them onwards. Onwards and over the credibility cliff.

And Scruggs, with her hometown advantage, was at the front of the howling pack, seeking to take down a living embodiment of all they hated. Who happened to be innocent.

Did the offer of sex for sources as depicted in the movie occur? It seems that that element is in there for dramatic effect. As far as I can tell, no, it did not occur. But as I was digging around trying to find out, it does appear that Scruggs had a number of relationships over the years, not infrequently with individuals in the police force. My sense is that she was a journalist covering crime and dealt with police a lot and that was the natural pool for relationships. I did not come across anything as tawdry as explicit sex for sources but it also does not appear that the movie script is far outside the bounds of reality.

The mainstream media movie critic and his NPR interviewer came across as precious defenders of their profession's reputation. They cast it in terms of not sullying a person's name who died many years ago. They cast it in virtuous terms of feminism. But it came across completely as "Journalists are good people and you shouldn't say bad things about them."

They were defending their privileges.

A pretty unsustainable position as reported in Why is everyone pretending reporters never sleep with sources? by Stephen L. Miller.