Have You Forgotten?

An email correspondent - and a bright up-to-the-minute one - mentioned in response to a comment of mine that he "had forgotten about Scalise." (Which bothered him. Don't misread that.)

I'm sure he's not the only one.  This is where the enormous, ocean-liner inertia of the MSM media bias is at its best. They can undermention something when it is fresh, leave out important details, interpret it in a non-threatening way, and seldom mention it again. The alternative press may put out great energy to keep a story alive, but they can only keep a limited number of plates spinning. Most of the time, liberals don't even have to roll their eyes and say "move on." The event has gone down the memory hole. The Washington Post and NYT reported briefly in April 2017 on NSA surveillance of private citizens, without fanfare and without mentioning that this had occurred on Obama's watch. The ACLU called it "unprecedented and unlawful." They seem to have stopped mentioning that, BTW. One article since then. Oh, take a guess what they have been writing about since April 28. The NYT did run an article 2 weeks later indicating that under Trump, this had been halted. Good for them. Nothing since.  What is a much easier story to find is that Fox News, acting on an article in Circa, reported that major media was boycotting the issue in order to protect Obama. Whoa, baby, did Fox ever have to retract and apologise for that, eh?

Have you heard anything about this since? So the Fox story, following the Circa story, was not fully accurate, but turned out to be spot on.

Perhaps I should devote a serious amount of blog space to this, because I am rather cut out for it.  I remember things by association, especially if they contain annoyance. I see articles all the time that may me think "wait, when the shoe was on the other foot..." It is a cousin to James's idea about a news organisation which dedicated itself to the rest of the story, days or weeks later after the dust has settled and more information has trickled in.

Consider the case of Sir Timothy Hunt, an eminent (friggin' Nobel Prize!) British scientist who was accused of sexist remarks at a science conference in Korea. To put the Wikipedia article in perspective, you need to know that his accuser, Connie St Louis, seems to be nearly 100% fraud.  They don't mention this - one of the small ways that Wikipedia puts its thumb on the scale over and over.  She is described as an award-winning science journalist. Not only do I not see the awards, I don't see the science journalism.  Here is her website - not very up-to-date, I guess; here is her twitter account, which seems to consist of occasional tweets of black grievance. Not much science before, or after the controversy. She doesn't seem to do much of anything. She is an instructor of some sort at City College in London, for which she presumably receives some money.  She received a fellowship of £50,000 ($65,000) to write a book, which she never wrote.

Hunt claimed his remarks were taken out of context, and subsequent investigation revealed this to be entirely so.  People who criticised him had not heard his entire speech - they had in fact were not aware of more than 37 words of his speech. This includes female colleagues who went out of their way to say that they liked him and owed a great deal to him.  They still threw him under the bus. Those who had heard the speech or read the whole of it later waved off the remarks as misunderstood.

His career was destroyed. He retreated into hiding and despair.  It looks like she's still working and no one is challenging her anymore. Down the memory hole.

You do remember where the memory hole image comes from?