Episode Niner

 Episode Niner

Well, hello! Welcome to this edition of the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. This week, we’ll hear about how the New York Times is censoring Twitter, the debate about insulin prices, some scams to look out for, and how China is waging a war against a sandwich, but first, (not the headlines).

A writer and personality for WNYC, the legal editor and Director of New York Public Radio’s Race & Justice Unit, recently resigned from her job. It was after her employer found evidence of plagiarism, and removed more than 40 of her articles from their website. The articles in question date back as far as 2010, and her audio recordings are also being examined. According to an article by Thomas Barrabi, the plagiarism also spanned entire paragraphs from other sources and were published on WNYC dot org and Gothamist dot com. According to the New York Post, it was the Gothamist that first noticed the pattern. The woman said these were her stories, then said, “This is my worst mistake ever, but I challenge anyone to get to the age of forty without having made some mistakes in their professional or personal life.” The author of the story looked up her age on her Wikipedia site. It says she’s 57! If you do the math, the mistakes in question happened after she turned 40. So that was a silly thing to say and a strange way to defend yourself. She went on to challenge further investigative efforts into older article attributed to her, saying to the staff at WNYC, “So now, for some reason, we’re digging around for stories going way back in time. Why is that happening? That’s my question that I want all of you, as leaders in this newsroom, to ask yourselves.” That’s even sillier still, challenging an entire newsroom to not investigate if their colleague is a plagiarist! It sounds to me like this woman knows she’s been plagiarizing her whole career and now that the cat is out of the bag, her entire body of work may be flushed down the toilet. 

Here’s a little bit of the backstory on how it went down. WNYC put out a statement saying that more than forty articles were removed from their website because unattributed passages are discovered, but they didn’t name the articles or the author, or even say if all of the articles were written by the same person. So now the entire newsroom is suspect. All the reporters are looking around at each other wondering who the culprit is, and worry that plagiarism is running rampant through the office. When the staff raised the issue to management, WNYC updated the statement to say that only one author was behind the removal of the articles. Before the name of the author was released, she quit her job. It turns out that when she was presented with the evidence and told there could be serious disciplinary action, she just walked out. Honestly, I think that’s probably the most honorable thing she could do under the circumstances. Knowing she’d been busted, she put her tail between her legs and left. Her past had finally caught up with her, her life’s work now in shambles because of her alleged plagiarism over more than a decade, and perhaps even longer. Time to walk away and find another profession, at age 57. It won’t be easy, but if you can make it as a journalist in New York City, you can accomplish anything, right? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and forge ahead. That’s what’s great about America. It’s ok to fail, because you can always try again or try something else.

But that’s not what she did! No. She hired a Public Relations firm called Reputation Doctor, who announced a press conference to be held at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. At the press conference, attended by less than a dozen people by some accounts, it was announced that the alleged plagiarist accused WNYC as having a toxic work environment and that she’s now free to bring to light what others have been too afraid to go public with.

Even after the press conference, WNYC still hadn’t named that author of the articles in question, only saying that one author was responsible. That led to accusations of protecting the offender and the organization, while not protecting the people in the newsroom itself. The accused plagiarizer, at the press conference, says she plans to sue WNYC for “race discrimination, gender discrimination, age discrimination, retaliatory workplace harassment, defamation, and violation of her civil rights.” Let’s look at these a little more closely. As far as race discrimination goes, WNYC hired the woman, so there’s no discrimination there. They didn’t fire her, she walked out, so there’s no discrimination there. If there was race discrimination between her hiring and her leaving, why did she stay for so long? Gender discrimination? Again, they hired her and didn’t fire her. Where does the gender discrimination lie? Did WNYC not have a restroom for her gender? Age discrimination? Well, she quit, so she can’t say she was fired because of her age. Plus, as we noted earlier, she still thinks she’s 40! She discriminated against her own age! Besides, WNYC created a Race and Justice Unit and put her in charge of it! That doesn’t sound to me like she’d been discriminated against. Retaliatory workplace harassment? Did she do something that would make the company retaliate against her? If so, what was it? If you’re going to claim that you’re being retaliated against, you must also admit that you’ve done something to cause the retaliation. So far, she hasn’t admitted and wrongdoing, and when asked about the plagiarism charges, she claims to have no idea what anyone’s talking about. The next reason she’s suing is defamation. Well, even after her press conference, WNYC still hadn’t named the person accused of plagiarism! She’s threatening to sue for defamation while the company she’s suing still hadn’t said it was her! And last but not least, a violation of her civil rights. Well, that’s a pretty broad term and in this day and age, sometimes it’s easy to do that even if you’re not trying. Overall, though, I’d say this is a frivolous lawsuit with the goal of getting an out-of-court settlement of six figures or more. It’s likely to happen, and WNYC doesn’t need the bad publicity or a protracted court battle. But if the plagiarism is proven, then I think that lawsuit should be thrown right out the window. 

Meanwhile, the company’s union members issued a statement wondering if WNYC will ever explain why it took months to investigate the plagiarism. 

Meanwhile, another woman who works for a talk radio station was fired over a tweet. One that she didn’t entirely make up all by herself, but borrowed a line from a famous delivery company. Now, she wasn’t fired for plagiarism over the borrowed tag line. No, she was fired for what people considered bigotry. The tag line in question is, “What can brown do for you?” You might recognize it as the catchphrase of the United Parcel Service. UPS, the company with the big brown trucks, delivering packages to people all around the country. I have a UPS hub near my home. Those big brown trucks go by my house all the time. Quite often, they stop to deliver stuff that my wife bought on-line. Once, they delivered something I ordered. I’m sure the delivery person was surprised to find out that someone besides my wife lives here. Who’s this Bob guy? Anyway, the woman who was fired is a conservative radio talk-show host, and she made a social media post that I’m sure her fellow conservatives thought was funny, and maybe even a majority of independent thinkers was a humorous play on words, and that most liberals didn’t even pay much attention to at first. Her post was an observation about the wardrobe Vice-president Kamala Harris was wearing during the State of the Union Address. You can’t miss it. The Vice-president and the Speaker of the House always sit right behind the President in full view of the citizens. Now, I watched the State of the Union Address, as I always do, but I didn’t notice anything about the clothes people are wearing because I don’t know anything about fashion. Prior to writing this, I looked at the outfit Kamala Harris was wearing, and yes, it’s the same shade of brown that’s on the UPS trucks I see passing by my house everyday. The talk-show host posted, “Kamala looks like a UPS employee-what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently.” Now, this isn’t anything you should be surprised to hear coming out of the mouth of a conservative talk radio host. Although in this case, she didn’t say it, she wrote it. Here’s the thing about the internet: Nothing ever truly disappears if you post it on social media. That’s why, even though there was no immediate backlash of what she wrote shortly after she wrote it, it was still there, waiting to be discovered, should she draw attention to herself in some other way that predicated the need for people to find evidence of prior misbehavior. Well, that’s exactly what happened. The woman, who worked for WMAL in Washington, D.C., is also the Washington Editor at the Spectator. In a recent article she wrote for the Spectator, she says she criticized the protests in favor of “trans kids at the University of North Texas.” After that, she said a group of maniacal left-wing activists who want to chemically castrate children in the name of “gender affirmation” came after her. She says that all of a sudden, the Kamala Harris tweet was being re-framed as racist, and dozens of other social media accounts were bragging about contacting her employer about what they described as bigotry. Now, when the two news outlets were alerted to the Kamala Harris post, each reacted in a very different way. The Spectator laughed off the accusations that the post was racist. After all, the criticism was about her clothing, not her skin color. WMAL, on the other hand, decided they no longer needed the services of the woman, who was brought on in January. According to the woman, she received a call from the Vice President of Cumulus Washington D.C. and the company’s vice president of human resources, and they told her the the social media post she made about the Vice President of the Country was racist, and that her subsequent posts defending her self and making fun of efforts to cancel her were violations of the company’s social media policy, and that she was being terminated immediately. Boy, those vice-presidents stick together, don’t they? There are only two ways the management at Cumulus Media can consider this woman’s post as racist: A: The management at Cumulus Media is racist, or, B: they’re being guided by racists. Even so, there’s a big difference between racism and bigotry, and her post certainly didn’t dive to the depths of the definition of either. She’s decided to use her voice through the written word, which she still has at The Spectator. She finds it ironic that the radio program she was recently fired from often spoke out against the dangers of cancel culture and censorship, yet she was let go because of pressure from a special-interest group.

Similar but different liner

These two stories have a couple things in common, but are different in important ways. Both of the women we heard about worked for radio stations, but also wrote stories for publication. One was accused of plagiarism and quit her job, one was accused of bigotry and was fired. The woman who was accused of plagiarism was presented with evidence of the charge, quit her job and hired a PR firm to represent her and claimed she made a mistake, but also claimed she didn’t know what she did wrong.. The woman who was accused of bigotry was fired not for bigotry, but for violating the company social media policy. Everyone in media knows that plagiarism is taboo. It’s the ultimate intramural sin. Nothing in the world you can do as a journalist that’s worse than copying somebody else’s words and claim them as your own. There’s a lot of stuff journalist expect of each other, and there’s a lot of stuff journalists let each other get away with. Depending upon what company you work for, you’re allowed to say or do certain things that wouldn’t fly with another network, and they understand that and even use their own news against each other. But they try to do it while crediting the source! In most cases, you can lie, cheat and steal to get a story and you’ll be applauded for it, but if you copy somebody else, you’ll serve a life sentence of being an outcast.

With the second woman, her Cardinal Sin was bigotry. That’s what she was accused of, but not what she was fired for. She was fired because her racist posts violated the company social media policy. She wasn’t taking credit for something she didn’t do. Although she did use a catchphrase that may or may not be copyrighted by UPS. She was fired for making a political statement about the color of the clothing a woman was wearing. That statement was made racist by people who were upset by an entirely different thing she wrote about trans children. This special interest group took a completely unrelated social media post and weaponized it to ruin the woman, while not even advancing their agenda. Nothing about this woman getting fired makes sense. She was fired from an opinion radio show for writing something that was used against her in a way that is fundamentally wrong by a fringe group of people not even related to the post itself! And the post was only seen as racist after the fringe group found a way to classify it that way, equating the brown of the UPS uniforms with the not really brown, but close enough to suit our needs brown. This is a clear example of a group of transexual supporters using race as a tool to silence those who question their motives. Clearly, Cumulus radio has fallen for it. The question is, how many more will? OR, was Cumulus using this as an excuse to get rid of somebody they had second thought about hiring? If that’s the case, then that’s even worse.

In the meantime, Elon Musk’s purchase of a significant share of Twitter, and having been appointed to their board, has already had an effect on the media. The New York Times, which recently decided that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was real, has told their journalists to limit their use of Twitter. Calling it a reset in its stance on Twitter and other social media, although only naming Twitter, the executive editor said having a presence there is purely optional. He went on to describe how social media can become an echo chamber and could be harmful to journalism. There’s a perception that the Times has become to reactive to social media, specifically Twitter. The executive editor went on to say that those who continue to use Twitter do so with the same journalistic inquisitiveness they would have with any source. He went on to talk about how Twitter can be a tool, but its role has become more complicated and the New York Times view on it will continue to evolve. What the leaked memo doesn’t say is that Elon Musk just bought almost ten percent of the company and is now the largest shareholder and is on the board of directors and that in the not too distant future, the Times may not be able to rely on Twitter to be as liberal as it has been in the recent past. The Times knows that Elon Musk is about to make a monumental change in the landscape of social media. The richest man in the world is about to outduel the Koch brothers and George Soros. The stage has been set, the players are coming out of the locker room, and the New York Times has already predicted the winner. 

Let’s go back liner

This week in 1923, insulin becomes generally available for diabetics. Ninety-nine years ago. Almost a century. The insulin diabetics need has been available for nearly a hundred years. Just this week, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would limit the cost of insulin for the people who need it at 35 dollars a month. That’s great news for diabetics. My late wife was diabetic, and needed insulin twice a day. When she passed away in 2005, a vial of insulin cost about 14 dollars, and she’d need two or three a month to keep healthy. Since then, prices of insulin have skyrocketed, while an ABC News story cites experts who say it only costs 10 dollars to manufacture what would cost 35 dollars. Americans are now paying anywhere from 300 to a thousand dollars a month! Every Democrat in the house voted for the bill, along with 12 Republicans. So why did the rest of the Republicans vote against the bill? Here’s why: The house bill shifts the cost of the insulin to the insurance companies, not the manufacturers. So the companies that are making the insulin can continue to charge as much as they want for it, but the insurance companies and employers have to foot the bill instead of the consumer. The Republicans don’t agree with it because they call it price-fixing, and the Democrats say it’s needed to save lives. They’re both right. But we need price-fixing on life-saving insulin that requires little research, since it’s almost a hundred years old and only costs dollars to make, and we need the manufacturers to charge a fair price for the product, not let the pharmaceutical companies charge whatever they want and make your employer and insurance company pay for it. There is a bill being worked on in the Senate that would address the underlying cost of insulin, but in the meantime, diabetics are paying a premium on staying alive, while insulin manufacturers and middlemen are reaping profits while insurance companies, employers and diabetics are paying a premium on twentieth-century technology. 

Also this week in history, in 1947 Jackie Robinson becomes 1st black in major league baseball, and in 1968 Major League Baseball decides to postpone Opening Day because of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. These are two important events in American history. The struggle of our Black population has been very well documented, and Jackie Robinson’s achievement and Martin Kings demise more than 20 years later demonstrates the roller-coaster ride civil rights have taken in America. It’s a shame that the struggle still exists in America today, but it does. President Biden’s nomination, and subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, will be another landmark event in the history of America. From what I saw of the confirmation hearings, she’s capable and qualified, with an extensive ledger of judicial experience. I hope that she serves our country well. I hope that she understands that a lifetime appointment means that whatever personal beliefs she may have go out the window. I hope, as I do of all Supreme Court Justices, that she will interpret the law and our constitution as if she were there in the room when it was written. I hope that she, along with the other Justices, will imagine being there in the room when all of those original arguments were taking place, so that they can understand the perspective from which the document was written. 

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it was this week in 1970 the Senate rejects President Nixon's nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Court. That got me thinking, “How many Supreme Court nominees have been rejected?”

Look that up liner

According to a Newsweek story from 2020, since 1789, only 11 people who made it all the way to a Senate vote didn’t make the cut. Eleven out of 163 who were nominated. Not all of them served, as there were those who declined the nomination, and those who never made it through the nomination process to get to the Senate vote, among other reasons for not getting the seat. Merrick Garland was the last to not make the cut in 2016. Today, he is the United States Attorney General. The Republican Senate stalled until President Obama’s term expired. Nixon actually had two nominations get rejected, and many presidents had multiple nominations that were ultimately unsuccessful.

It was this week in 1979 that the 205th & final episode of "All in the Family" aired. Some say a television program like that couldn’t be shown today. Archie Bunker, and his wife Edith, along with their daughter and son-in-law explored many of the prejudices we had as both white and black Americans in a humorous way that was eye-opening to audiences without causing an outrage as they might today.

This week in 1999 The World Trade Organization rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas. This is an interesting topic, but the fact is the dispute wasn’t resolved until 2001. Maybe we’ll look at it again then. I like bananas.

And this week in 2020 China ends its lockdown of Wuhan, the city at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic after 76 days, as the country reports no new deaths for the 1st time. For some perspective, this week in 2020 in the United States, we were in the second week of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” I remember it well, not only for the impact it had on our entire country and the rest of the world, but I also lost the hearing in my right ear just as the lockdowns began. It’s been two years now, not two weeks, and while the curve has finally flattened, it’s trying to bubble up again. Some reports suggest China is currently going through a spike in Coronavirus cases right now, but it’s impossible to have any faith in statistics coming out of China. The Communist Party there maintains tight control over the media, in much the same way that Russia is telling the world that Ukraine is killing its own people. 

Phone liner

The world is full of scams right now, not just the scams that the Russian government is trying to pull on us and their own citizens, but also the kind of scams that try to trick you into doing something you’ll eventually regret or something that costs you money. It’s usually both. Two examples I’ve run across recently involve media that I haven’t really addressed on this program, but are just as harmful as the scams you find on social media. Among these two, one you’ll find in your e-mail, and the other you’ll get on your phone. The e-mail scam is an official looking e-mail from Paypal. Plenty of people have Paypal, so this scam has a pretty good chance of working. It comes from service at paypal dot com, but if you look closer at the sender’s address, it’s a 57-character-long string of letters and numbers that have nothing to do with paypal. The subject of the e-mail is Receipt for your payment. When I open it, it tells me that I’ve made a payment of 53 dollars and 98 cents in US dollars, and if I’d like to see the full transaction details, I should log in to my paypal account. It has a transaction ID number, which appears to have a clickable link, the transaction date, which is the same day I got the e-mail. It has a place for the merchant to be listed, but no merchant is listed, as well as any instructions to the merchant, which in this case there weren’t any. It also has my shipping address confirmed, but hidden, for my security, of course. Then it has an item number listed, the price I paid for it, how many I bought, the shipping and handling charges and the fact that I paid for it with a credit card. Then it asks if I have any issues with this transaction, and goes on to say, “If you didn’t make this order or if you believe an unauthorized person is attempting to access your account please click the button below for cancel your order. Then it has a button below that says “cancel the payment.” Below that was the Paypal logo and some links to social media sites. Then, in small print at the bottom, it says “Paypal is committed to preventing fraudulent eails. Emails from PayPal will always contain your full name, with a link that helps you identify phishing. Then how to get in touch, and other boiler-plate information. So, what was the first thing to tip me off that this was a fraudulent email? Was it the fact that I didn’t make a recent transaction for said amount? Was it the fact that I didn’t recently use a credit card? Was it the grammatical error in the body of the email? Well, it could have been any of those things, plus the fact that it said e-mails from Paypal will always include my full name, and my name didn’t appear anywhere in the body of the email. I didn’t click on any of the links in the email. Not the one with the transaction ID that would tell me whatever, I don’t know. I didn’t click on the Cancel the Payment button or the link to Learn how to identify phishing, or the Help & Contact link or the link to click if I wanted to learn why I got the email. I knew this was a fraudulent email before taking any of that into consideration because I don’t have a Paypal account. However, many of you do, and this is a warning to you. I got phone call recently that I couldn’t take. I try to answer my phone whenever it rings because of my occupation, but sometime I have to let the call go to voicemail. If they don’t leave a message, I figure it wasn’t important. In this case, the voicemail I got said, “Press 2 to confirm this order.” Of course, I didn’t press 2, but I realized how easily I could have been tricked into pressing 2, assuming I had to press 2 to hear the rest of the message. I don’t know what might have happened or what I might have bought if I had pressed 2, but it’s certainly something to be aware of. 

Unfinished business China edition Liner

Earlier we heard about a special interest group focusing what little power they have like a magnifying glass on an ant to get a conservative talk-show host fired. Well, it doesn’t just happen in America. A story by Daniel Anderson tells of a New Zealand cafe called Cosmo Coffee that’s been bombarded by one-star reviews because their menu has a Taiwan flag on it. The cafe caters to people from various countries and nationalities, and features foods from various cultures. To make them easy to spot on the menu, they include a small picture of a flag symbolizing the dish’s country of origin. Google actually agreed to remove a review of the cafe because of its political nature. The user complained that the Taiwan flag made them feel uncomfortable and suggested the establishment be educated on the One-China principle. The cafe owner doesn’t know or care about a one-china principle. They were just trying to make it easy for people to spot something on the menu they might enjoy. Then along comes a special interest group, in this case a group sympathetic to the Chinese regime, and floods a mom and pop cafe with negativity in support of China. A Taiwanese official told Radio New Zealand that “the Peoples Republic of China government has never ruled Taiwan for a single day and definitely has no right to claim or to represent Taiwan or dwarf the name and flag of Taiwan.” The Taiwanese Foreign Minister said, “China has infiltrated our open societies and even started cracking down on the freedom of a sandwich. Exposing and criticizing is the only way to deal with this scourge.’ 

Finally, a new poll says people often don’t speak their minds for fear of backlash. A poll was developed by Siena College in conjunction with New York Times Opinion that took a look at how cancel culture and political partisanship effect how people express their views. As it turns out, they don’t! More than half of respondents said they’ve kept their mouths shut rather than experience the wrath of an opposing opinion. Sixty-six percent said they keep their opinions to themselves to avoid harsh criticism, and just about everybody who kept their feelings to themselves said it was to avoid conflict. According to the story, the director of the research institute at the college said, “There’s a reticence for people to simply say ‘this is how I see the issues of the day; this is what I’m thinking.” That’s a sad commentary on our society today. If we can’t express ourselves, share our ideas and ideals, then we sell ourselves short of what we could accomplish. If we don’t feel free to speak about the subjects we’re passionate about, even if they’re political subjects, then we deprive ourselves of possibilities that may bear fruit. If more than half of us are afraid to say what we feel, then who benefits? We should ask ourselves who has the most to gain by the silence of the largest number of people. Oddly enough, one quarter of respondents to the survey also admitted that they have tried to silence or retaliate against someone else who was expressing their views. Twenty-five percent of them means that special interest groups are teaming up to increase their influence. In any case, keep expressing how you feel, if not for yourself, for the rest of us. As long as most of us keep exchanging ideas and thoughts, the few who are trying to silence us will not succeed. Plus, if everyone keeps their opinions to themselves, eventually I’ll be the only one left with a podcast. So, if you want that, well….if you don’t, keep them lips moving!

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly. Copyright 2022. I’m your host, Bob Woodley, for thou ad infinitum.