Media watch: The Untold Story Behind the Tlaib-Omar Trip

Two scandals “went largely unreported” during last week’s debate over whether Israel should have granted visas to Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,” notes Warren Henry in The Federalist. The first was that the trip had been planned by the “anti-Semitic, pro-terror Miftah organization.” The second: that most of the press largely ignored the first scandal. At The New York Times, Miftah was described as “an organization headed by a longtime Palestinian lawmaker.” The Los Angeles Times mentioned the group only in passing and described it similarly. Politico, CNN and the Washington Post also failed to inform readers of the group’s sordid background. And Politico even noted that “Israel allowed a Miftah-sponsored group of congressmen into Israel in 2016,” even though Israel’s law banning Israel-boycott supporters didn’t yet exist. “The establishment press,” concludes Henry, “must be getting quite a crick in its collective neck from having to look away so often.”

Eye on the economy: Why Recession Forecasts Are Biased

The growing “volume” of 2020 recession predictions hardly makes it a certainty, cautions James Pierson in the City Journal. Fact is, “our current economic environment — low and declining interest rates, stable prices, modest quarter-to-quarter economic growth, the absence of wars abroad — does not suggest a recession-oriented climate.” Rather, the gloomy forecasts may be “driven partly by partisan hopes that an economic slowdown” would give Democrats the best chance to oust President Trump. Some forecasters apparently think that by “predicting a recession they can create one.” But that’s more a sign of their “exaggerated opinion of their own influence” than a reason to worry about economic slowdown.

Election beat: It’s Time for Blas To Call It Quits

Mayor Bill de Blasio won’t be the Democratic nominee, insists Kaylee McGhee of the Washington Examiner. “But don’t tell him that.” On Tuesday, he said he wouldn’t consider dropping out of the presidential primary, even though he has never gotten more than 1 percent support in the polls and has yet to qualify for the next Democratic debate. De Blasio claims his “record” and “vision” will ultimately win over Dems, but his “problem,” argues McGhee, “isn’t that voters haven’t seen his ‘record’ and ‘vision.’ They have. They just don’t want anything to do with it.” De Blasio may be hanging in purely because of his ego. As former de Blasio adviser Rebecca Katz puts it, “People don’t like him, and he doesn’t care.”

Historical take: The Times’ Perverse “Reframing” of America

The New York Times’ “1619 Project” last weekend was a “reframing” of American history aimed at making the importation of African slaves, reports Damon Linker at The Week. The paper said that was necessary because “out of slavery ‘grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.’ ” Throughout the “project,” every dysfunction in American life — even traffic congestion — is blamed on slavery. But if you treat history in this “highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way,” the “cumulative result” looks more like “agitprop” than “responsible journalism or scholarship.” The paper put aside “any pretense toward nuance or complexity” and “surrendered to the sensibility of left-wing political activists.” The result, he says, is “unpersuasive — and a sad comment on the state of our country’s public life.”

Libertarian: Who Knows If Vaping’s Bad for You?

The assumption that vaping causes breathing problems “seems to be based on little more than supposition,” writes Jacob Sullum of Reason. So far, there have been 15 reported cases of people who vaped and had breathing problems, but no one is sure where their vaping devices came from or what was in them. “At least some of the patients were vaping not nicotine but a cannabis extract, or what they thought was a cannabis extract,” Sullum notes. “Linking these cases to Juul, the leading e-cigarette company, seems a non sequitur. Yet that is what both NBC and the [New York] Times did.” Absent more information, it’s folly to link vaping to breathing problems. Doing so “is about as helpful as blaming food poisoning on eating.”

— Compiled by Stephanie Gutmann & Karl Salzmann