Another Spin on the Media Merry-Go-Round

The last thing local media wants to do is write about…local media. Let’s break that rule.

A Tale of Two Headlines

Same facts, different conclusions. First, the Oregonian’s take on mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez…

…by the O’s city hall hitman, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh. God forbid we should “punish” the homeless, although Kavanaugh tried to split the difference in his lede…

…one city commissioner—and mayoral hopeful—is pitching a potentially more punitive alternative.

Meanwhile, WillyWeek’s headhunter Sophie Peel got, to be charitable, half the real point of the kerfluffle…

…with the cute infra-dig, “happens.” Snotty journalism ‘r’ us!

Neither writer (both of whom ignored the deliberations over devising the radical new city charter until it was too late) really gets it, as we explained too many times to count (here’s the most recent, along with this, this, this, this, this…among others).

Here’s the short version for local reporters:

The mayor will have almost no real power. Beyond handing out keys to the city.

In any of the obligatory powder-puff interviews with the prospective mayoral candidates (call it three-and-one-half, since Mingus Mapps’s campaign seems to be on some weird hiatus), no one thought to ask: how the hell will you get anything done when all the real power exists in the city council?

You, Mr. or Ms. Mayor, will be able to propose but not dispose, since you won’t have a veto if (and, almost certainly, when) the council goes off-tracks. And you’ll get a vote only in the event of a tie, since the charter’s architects brilliantly set up a 12-member council.

So, everything the mayor does will have to be the result of stuff the council allows him/her/them to do, including hiring the “professional” city manager to “help” the mayor run the city day-to-day. (As if anyone could run a massive and ever-growing black-box bureaucracy made up of people who have jobs for life.)

Thus we have mayoral wannabe Gonzalez attempting to create something unmentioned in the charter’s list (a brief one) of executive powers. An “executive order” to run Homelessness Inc.? Sounds to us like lawsuit-bait, if nothing else. Unless utopia happens and the mutts on the council give that power to the mayor. Which they won’t.

Gonzalez seems to know about the coming train wreck. If so, he’s keeping it a secret. Doesn’t bode well.

And—a fearless prediction—local media won’t tell us anything until it’s too late.

Do Not Disturb the Local Chop-Shop

It’s astonishing, really, to look at the list of controversial issues that local media has ignored.

High on the list: Oregon Health Science University's thriving gender clinic. It’s locally untouchable.

However, the kind of medicine they’re practicing up there on Pill Hill figured in an international story recently…

…which ran in major papers and TV worldwide; the above was front-page in the nation’s second-largest newspaper, the Wall St. Journal.

Here in Portland? Silencio.

This was not a surprise, since the ‘stack you’re now reading is the only place that has reported—here, for example—on OHSU’s gender trade. It’s a big business, as we discovered after a months-long effort to pry numbers out of the clinic: 1,919 patients were treated with everything from chest binders to artificial whozits between January and August, 2023; 205 patients were under 18. (Why the eight-months? Ask OHSU and prepare for a long wait and a charge of $194.82, credit cards not accepted.)

Here’s what the WSJ said…

LONDON—The underlying medical evidence for gender treatments for adolescents is “remarkably weak,” according to a landmark review commissioned by the U.K.’s National Health Service that questioned why drugs suppressing puberty had been allowed to be prescribed so widely.  

The findings, released Wednesday, are the latest example of members of the European medical community casting doubt on the practice of prescribing drugs for transgender minors that suppress or alter the physical changes of adolescence. The report, by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health from 2012 to 2015, was commissioned by the NHS after demand for treatment for gender dysphoria shot up exponentially in the last decade. 

In the wake of the Cass Report, this popped up in yet another big newspaper, the London Daily Telegraph, so someone was paying attention…

Not wanting to be among the local media numbskulls, I fired off a letter requesting comment to OHSU’s crack 24/7 PR team. An automated reply said the team was out of the office until April 12. That date came and went. I’m still waiting.

Maybe it’s expecting too much for local editors to read the WSJ—after all, it’s owned by the arch-fiend of journalism, Rupert Murdoch. And London is far away. But one suspects that a call from one of the dinosaurs might get some sort of knee-jerk response from the OHSU gender reassigners. Maybe even a defense from one of OHSU’s ace cutters, Dr. Blair Peters (discussed here), whose robot machine creates brand new artifical vaginas. That was also revealed, not in local media, but by another national writer, Christofer Rufo, on the Manhattan Institute’s website.¹

Something local editors also don’t read.

Yet Another ‘Print the Press Release’ Covid Folly

Also among the prime noseeums in local media is our old friend Covid-19. It’s gone down the memory-hole; no one in local media has devoted any effort to delve into the history and aftermath of that surreal two years of lockdowns, hysteria, and government cancellation of the bill of rights.

All ended by the vaccines!

Well, sorta: they were later revealed to do a lousy job of preventing infection or transmission and needed a seemingly endless number of “boosters,” which quickly wore out.²

Then—in the various pirate media out there—came findings that the vaccines might actually have some nasty side-effects and failures.

Chief among the little surprises were well-documented cases of a heart-inflammation called myocarditis. It seemed to affect young men, as they say, disproportionately.

And so the Oregon Health Authority rode to the rescue. It did a “study,” and issued a press release. Local media, with few exceptions, lapped it up.

…with a bunch of stories under eerily verbatim headlines. Here’s the Oregonian’s rewrite of a dispatch from the Oregon Capitol Chronicle ³…

During the pandemic, reports linked the COVID-19 vaccine to cardiac deaths, especially among young people, but a new study by the Oregon Health Authority found no connection between the two.

…which in typical lazy journalism fashion didn’t source any of the “reports,” which renders the story an obvious straw man (who is in permanent residence in the Oregonian newsroom). The other TV and print reports were just as credulous. Here’s KOIN’s take…

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – A new study from the Oregon Health Authority found COVID-19 vaccinations are not connected to cardiac-related deaths.

Researchers examined nearly 1,300 deaths among Oregon adolescents and young adults between 16 and 30-years-old over a 19-month period from 2021 to 2022.

The study found none of the deaths that occurred within 100 days after receiving an mRNA COVID vaccine dose were attributed to vaccination.

Sounds great! Get those jabs, kids!

And let’s forget that every editor forgot to follow the age-old journalism adage: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Fortunately, for people who hang out at the Substack of an actual epidemiologist, Vinay Prasad, there was a different analysis⁴…

…which pointed out…

As a professor of epidemiology, I have no idea why the authors or CDC think this proves anything. The sample size is woefully inadequate to see a safety signal for cardiac death. Worse, relying on death certificates biases the whole enterprise as doctors who code death certificates may not even be aware of the potential risk and may themselves wrongly exonerate the vaccine.

At one point in the paper, the authors actually admit the truth, the “small population size made it less likely that Oregon would see a rare event such as sudden cardiac death among adolescents and young adults.”

Of course! The study has no power to find a signal for cardiac deaths. And we know for certain that men between 16 and 24 have a 1 in 3000 risk of myocarditis (from many studies) from dose 1 and roughly a 1 in 10,000 risk of myocarditis from dose 3 (KP experience). We know that sudden cardiac death or death from myocarditis will be much less frequent than this.

Let’s also note those wily tricksters at OHA focused on deaths—better for headlines—but completely ignored heart damage, which is troublesome, to say the least. But then there’s another old journalism adage: Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

Meanwhile, OHA just won’t give up…

…note the word, “may.”

1. Which we reprinted here.

2. Here’s the latest on Substack from one the earliest Covid skeptics, Alex Berenson. This sort of reporting resulted in the feds asking Twitter to ban him. Which they did.

3. Which was the centerpiece of the most recent drop from Jeff Eager’s Oregon Roundup ‘stack, Leftwing money pulls Oregon news media (further) left. Eager reveals that the “Oregon Capital Chronicle sprang into existence a few years ago as part of the national States Newsroom organization, which itself was founded with the assistance of the Arabella Advisors network of leftwing dark money groups that has received millions from, you guessed it, George Soros and similarly situated lefty billionaires.”

4. Prasad has a full pedigree, here.