Repost: On AOC’s statement regarding her recent non-vote

Originally posted on October 6, 2021. Reposted here without edits. Parenthetically, since that time, AOC has grown increasingly more “institutionalist”, which, perhaps, is to be expected of someone transforming from an iconoclastic rabble rouser into a professional politician enmeshed within a large political machine. There is likely more to be said on this topic in […]

Repost: On the Emily Wilder firing from AP

Originally posted on May 26, 2021. Reposted without edits. On or about May 19, 2021, it transpired that The Associated Press (“AP“) has fired one of its newsroom assistants, Emily Wilder, after only 16 days on the job. While AP has remained fairly cagey regarding the firing, only noting that Wilder had violated the organisation’s […]

Repost: Mini-case study – how to bury the data and not ask the right questions, CBC-style

Originally posted on March 17, 2021. Reposted here without edits. On March 9, 2021, CBC published an article on its website under a rather worrying headline – “New outbreak of COVID-19 in B.C. care home where 82% of residents were already vaccinated”1. At face value, in fact, the headline is downright alarming, since the last […]

Repost: One of these things is not like the other…

Originally posted on June 15, 2021. Reposted without any edits. Thus past Sunday, June 13, 2021, The Guardian published a fairly lengthy piece on the present flare-up of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, in particular among native and migrant factory workers1. The piece in general is laudatory, describing at times truly atrocious conditions and circumstances faced […]

Commenting on House Resolution 9 – “Denouncing the horrors of socialism”

It turns out that one of the first initiatives undertaken by the newly elected Republican majority in the US House of Representatives was to demonstrate its unswerving commitment to the still apparently ongoing fight against socialism by enacting a resolution, H.R. 9, entitled “Denouncing the horrors of socialism”1. This resolution was duly passed on February […]

Repost: Snap reaction to the Guardian’s July 2021 “Russiagate” exclusive

Originally published on July 16, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical edits and spelling corrections. On July 15, 2021, the Guardian ran a front-page exclusive story based on a document purported to have been leaked from the Kremlin concerning Russia’s 2016-vintage plans to help Donald Trump win that year’s US Presidential election1. Essentially, the article relates […]

Repost: Reporting and context – an example from 2021

Originally published on September 21, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical corrections. Although the article at the heart of the piece is now rather dated, it nevertheless serves as a notable example of how the press routinely fails to contextualise statistical data for the sake of eliciting an emotional response from the reader. On September 20, […]