Every Friday morning I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on Talk1370 Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. Today is Dolly Parton Day, 9.25 (get it?), as love for the legendary artist continues to unite the country. Nashville is renaming their airport. Here’s who made this week’s list:
WINNER: Trump Bans CNN, MS NOW & Politico from White House Press Briefings
Trump is a winner for taking away the White House press passes of CNN, MS NOW and Politico last weekend even though the three news outlets took him to court and got their press passes restored for 14 days while the issue moves through the courts. I understand Trump will probably lose this fight. Everyone, even conservatives, thinks it’s unconstitutional for the president to throw some reporters out of the White House just because he doesn’t like what they report.
Maybe, but Trump is also right because what he is protesting in the left-wing news is not simply reports from a different perspective, it is the daily onslaught of lies, distortions and half-truths that fuel so many American beliefs in things that just aren’t true.
Just take one example from this week – a group of Jewish shareholders sued the New York Times for persistent lies in their coverage of Israel, which has bolstered a pro-Hamas narrative and anti-Jewish bias, likely contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism throughout the country.
Before they were forced to delete it last week, the New York Times inexplicably noted that “Israelis still view themselves largely as the victims of October 7.” Huh?
They also ran a horrifying photo of an emaciated child who they portrayed as starving in Gaza as a result of Israeli tactics, but after several days of pressure the paper was forced to admit that the unfortunate child actually suffered from muscle atrophy and several other diseases which accounted for his appearance. The fact that Israel has sent over 2 million metric tons of food into Gaza since October 7 is rarely reported.
All these stories were echoed by CNN, MS NOW and Politico. The conservative half of the country doesn’t pay attention to those outlets so we tend to think it doesn’t matter. But their phony presentation of what is going on in the world so heavily pollutes the news stream that everyone ends up hearing it.
We see the same thing in the Texas press which pushes false narratives on virtually every issue. One of last week’s losers was a story that university professors were leaving Texas because they didn’t like the new higher education reforms. Not true. Since the incredible new Bluebonnet Curriculum has been given the green light, there have been dozens of stories that Texas public schools do not teach about slavery and that they force students to embrace Christianity. Neither is true.
In Washington, every press outlet has rallied around the banned reporters waving the First Amendment flag. We are all big fans of the First Amendment, but it is important to remember that when Thomas Jefferson famously said he’d prefer to have “newspapers without a government rather than government without newspapers,” it was 1787. George Washington hadn’t been elected president yet and there actually wasn’t a government. After Jefferson became president, he said that Americans would be better informed if they read nothing at all – because newspapers were filled with “falsehoods and errors.”
What Jefferson said then is not all that different from what Trump is saying now. The President is not attacking Freedom of the Press, he is simply pointing out that nothing in the Constitution guarantees a daily briefing in the White House.
Of course, conservatives argue that if Trump throws out lefty media, the next time a Democrat is in the White House, he will ban Fox News and other conservative outlets, to which I say, “so what?”
Years ago, I was honored to work for the legendary H.L. “Sandy” Schwartz, who had reported the Watergate story for the Associated Press. I was covering New Jersey politics and one of the most important things Schwartz taught me was to never waste my time going to press conferences. “There is never any news made at a press conference,” he said, and he was right.
White House daily briefings are livestreamed. Anybody can watch them. The reporters who have been kicked out of the White House press room should go and search out some real news stories – maybe look at something no other reporter is writing about. Then, they should thank Trump for doing them a favor.
LOSER: Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Bad School Confession
So much has been said this week about the New York Times story in which Nikole Hannah-Jones confesses what a bad parent she is, under the arrogant and obnoxious title — In Fighting for Every Black Child Did I Betray my Own?
As a reminder, Hannah-Jones wrote the 1619 Project, a lie that “reframed” American history exclusively around race and slavery. The 1619 Project did not propose broader inclusion of black people in our history. Instead, it insisted on the complete exclusion of white people, pronouncing everything from the revolutionary war to the Constitution as rooted in racism and white supremacy. Until now, the 1619 Project has been Hannah-Jones’ only claim to fame and she has been blasted because it has been shown to be wildly inaccurate by historians across the spectrum – right and left.
In this new “personal” report, Hannah-Jones tell us, with huge doses of self-righteousness, that although she could send her daughter to a good school, she chose to enroll her in a low-performing, predominantly low-income and black school, because she believed that is what affluent black people should do.
Finally, after 9 years – 9 years! – her daughter, who couldn’t do math or anything else, begged her parents to take her out of the school, which she did, concluding that poor performing schools like her daughter’s will not succeed until they receive the same funding as white schools.
So now Hannah-Jones is pushing a new lie: that black public schools fail because they are underfunded – it’s the teachers’ union lie. In fact, the school that Hannah-Jones’ daughter attended, PS 307 in Brooklyn, receives $52,000 per student, three times the national average of $16,226. Teachers earn more than $100,000 annually.
WINNER: Cuellar Challenges Hasan Piker on Anti-Semitism
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, repeated his concern this week that Hasan Piker is scheduled to speak in Austin next week, saying his statements that America deserved 9/11, his praise of Hamas and his denial of the rapes that occurred during the October 7 massacre reek of anti-Semitism. Cuellar said there is no place in Texas for Piker’s “rhetoric excusing terrorism” if Jewish students are made to feel threatened or unsafe.
The San Antonio Express-News quickly came to Piker’s defense, reporting that Piker says he isn’t anti-Semitic, so he must not be.
Piker will not be appearing on the University of Texas campus as originally planned, causing local Democratic Socialists to scream that they have been “soft-cancelled.” No word yet on where he’ll be dishing out his anti-American, pro-terrorist stand-up routine.
LOSER: Abdul El-Sayed Goes After College Football
We know that Democratic Socialists hate America and want to destroy our way of life but nowhere was that more evident than last week when Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed blamed college football for the housing shortage in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
El- Sayed was speaking at a “Students versus Billionaires” Town Hall and claimed one of the factors that contributes to a lack of affordable housing in that college town was “Football Saturdays.” El-Sayed lamented that Ann Arbor had become a tourist destination because of University of Michigan games and too many people were buying houses there to use as rentals, depleting the housing supply.
El-Sayed apparently is unaware that college football is the lifeblood of towns and cities like Ann Arbor. Let’s ask business owners there what happens to them if there are no “Football Saturdays.” Finally, not being judgey here, but El-Sayed got his undergraduate degree at Michigan and owns a rental property in Ann Arbor.
WINNER: San Antonio is Smarter than Dallas and Houston
Some outfit called Maxwell Studios put out one of those reports this week ranking the Top 50 Most Intellectual Cities in the Country. Their methodology is unclear but one red flag is that all the top cities are Blue – Boston, San Francisco, Providence, Portland – Austin is No. 13, wedged in between Seattle and Philadelphia. Other Texas cities don’t make an appearance until the bottom of the list but I did want to note that these lefties ranked San Antonio as more intellectual than Dallas or Houston – both of which are included in the top 5 dumbest cities list. If we were taking this seriously, we might ask why so many people are moving out of those “smart” cities, but why bother?
WINNER: Texas is Still No. 1, Texas A&M is Not
The University of Texas at Austin must face down its road curse this week and travel to Tennessee to play that other school that calls itself UT. President Trump is reportedly scheduled to be in the stands. Texas A&M, which has fallen to No. 23, must go into Death Valley to play No. 10 LSU tomorrow. Texas Tech is playing Sam Houston State. Going into Week 4, it is still very hot in Texas, but some weather reports indicate we might be getting some football weather soon.
Have a great weekend!
Listen to Winners & Losers on Talk 1370, the Cardle & Woolley show, every Friday morning at 8:30 AM. Here’s the listen live link.
Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
