Higher Education

One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance. A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative…

Two recent items in the Washington Post support my contention that the establishment press is currently doing more than anyone besides Lena Dunham and "Jackie," both of whom have been irrefutably exposed as rape story fabulists, to cause victims of sexual assault to be reluctant to come forward (Note: That's not to say that the two women haven't been victims of sexual assault, "only" that the…

In the Rolling Stone-University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape saga, National Review's Jonah Goldberg's journalistic instincts expressed in his December 1 Los Angeles Times column ("Rolling Stone rape story sends shock waves -- and stretches credulity") obviously ran circles around Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Diana Crandall's. On December 3, shortly before the story imploded, Crandall…

The headline at Saturday's Assocated Press story at Yahoo News dealing with the implosion of Rolling Stone's November 19 story about an alleged — and, for all appearances, completely fictional — fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia focuses, as so many other establishment press stories have, on the supposedly "chilling effect" ... (it) could have on sexual-assault victims reporting…

The straw man argument is a fundamentally dishonest fallback tactic employed by someone whose side is losing a debate: Make up a position the other side has never taken, and then shoot it down. The leftist fever swamp known as Vox, perhaps reacting to the utter implosion of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story and the potential impact it might have on keeping…

When the now-retracted article by the Rolling Stone magazine was published on November 19 about a brutal gang rape of a first-year student at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, the major broadcast networks rushed to the story and devoted multiple segments to both the article and reaction on the school’s campus. In doing so, they failed (unlike other outlets) to…

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana issued a statement on Friday about their much-publicized "A Rape on Campus" story, which zeroed in on an allegation of gang rape at the University of Virginia by a woman named "Jackie." Dana acknowledged that "there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account," and continued that "we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced....…

Andrew Lohse is entitled to hacking out an embarrassingly poorly-argued, simplistic screed. But it is curious that editors at Time magazine chose to publish it. When you boil it down, Lohse essentially argues that fraternities are beyond the pale and must be abolished because of their genesis in the antebellum South.  

Mirabile dictu! Fully 28 profs and former profs from the Harvard Law School have taken a stand for freedom and for the rule of law. They are on the side of the Constitution and simple fairness. As Ivy Leaguers go, their stand took courage.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them." That evening on Fox News's Special…

On Tuesday's The Kelly File on Fox News Channel, Maureen Faulkner, the widow of murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, berated the graduating students at Goddard College in Vermont for honoring her husband's killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as their commencement speaker: "I am just absolutely outraged that they would have such a hate-filled murderer on as a commencement speaker...he…

CNN's Twitter account on Thursday boosted a Rolling Stone article that hyped the far-left Occupy Wall Street movement's latest efforts. The social media post touted, "Think #OccupyWallStreet is dead? Think again. This short-lived occupation is still fighting for five key issues," and linked to Rebecca Nathanson's Wednesday piece on the "five campaigns that OWS-inspired groups have continued to…

In a surprisingly favorable gun rights story on Thursday's NBC Today, correspondent and weekend Today host Erica Hill profiled Dartmouth college student Taylor Woolrich "in Washington D.C. speaking to a group that advocates for legal concealed guns on campus and about her desire to carry one." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Hill began the segment by declaring: "If…