Baby it’s cold outside in Minnesota, but we’re getting warmed up on our recap of Hot Air’s top 50 posts of the year. Today we tackle positions 40-31, in which we find media bias, bad polling, media scrutiny of tweets but not so much on explanations for physical collapses — and another intrusion from 2015 to boot. Let’s start with a story in which the national media hasn’t shown a lot of interest — a political corruption story with high-ranking figures involved that has largely escaped notice because it’s taking place in the media backwater of, er ….New York?
- #40: NY Governor’s top aides indicted on sweeping corruption charges. (Is Hillary next?) (11/23/16) – Call this the sleeping scandal, because it’s not getting much attention in the media. Jazz Shaw picked up the New York Observer’s coverage of indictments against eight high-ranking insiders of Andrew Cuomo’s administration in New York. Oddly, while “Bridgegate” got wall-to-wall coverage on the national cable channels, indictments against Cuomo’s inner circle got treated like “a local news story,” Jazz notes. Hmmmm.
- #39: Activists push to ban ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ because it promotes date rape (12/6/2016) – Baby, it’s stupid inside the halls of Academia and the Social-Justice Warrior clique. A harmless bit of holiday merriment gets its lyrics reworked so badly that its Soundcloud clip has mysteriously disappeared. Believe Larry O’Connor when he says it’s no great loss.
- #38: Breaking: Active shooter at Ohio State; Update: Began with SUV crashing into building, CBS reports; Update: Two people arrested in parking garage; Update: One suspect dead; Update: Shelter order lifted; Update: No shooter? Update: “We believe there was one suspect, and he’s DOA” (11/28/2016) – This incident will be most remembered for being covered as an active shooter incident when it turned out the only guns involved belonged to the police. That’s not really the media’s fault — police called it an active-shooter situation at the time, too — but that doesn’t let all of the gun-control activists who lectured us during the incident off the hook. Wait for the facts.
- #37: Flashback: New York Times mocked Trump for saying “there is something bad going on” in Brussels (3/22/2016) – When Donald Trump made a valid point about assimilation and mentioned Brussels as a potential powderkeg for lack of it, the New York Times ridiculed him … two months before a terrorist attack whose plotting took place in Molenbeek. It’s not as if that sector of Brussels was unknown, either; the Paris attack in 2015 had connections to Molenbeek as well. Maybe the New York Times’ editors should read their own paper from time to time.
- #36: Vox editor: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot; Update: Vox suspends Rensin (6/3/2016) – Advice: If you want to promote political violence, don’t do it where the bosses can see you. Ezra Klein booted Emmett Rensin over his tweet, but Rensin was neither the first nor the last person to lose their job over social-media postings in 2016. We’re still debating the limits of professional branding and personal speech, but this one seems like a pretty clear case.
- #35: CNN: ‘Secret Service agents helped her into a van’ but law enforcement says ‘they threw her in like she was a side of beef’ (9/11/2016) – This week, the media stumbled onto the major medical exposé that Trump’s height might be an inch shorter than advertised, and yet three months ago, the media had trouble providing an accurate description of Hillary Clinton’s collapse at a public event — at least until video of it emerged. Later, Hillary’s team offered a series of conflicting explanations for her distress; to this day, no one’s quite sure exactly what happened.
- #34: Good question: why is Hillary Clinton using Air Force One on the campaign trail? (7/5/2016) – To the victor goes the spoils, that’s why. Air Force One is a symbol of power both abroad and at home, which is why Trump complained about Hillary’s hitchhiking on it. However, how many times has power transferred between a president of one party to another member of his party (absent a death or resignation) in the era of airplane travel? There’s Coolidge to Hoover, and Reagan to Bush, and … that’s it. It’s probably not as impressive in electoral terms as one might think, and Hillary’s loss puts an exclamation point on that conclusion.
- #33: The truth about that Trump “black murder rate” chart on Twitter (11/23/2015) – This is our other holdover from 2015 that racked up enough 2016 page views to make our year-end list. The biggest lesson is not to retweet dubious charts with inflammatory claims with citations from outfits like “Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco.” Hopefully the new president will have already learned that.
- #32: Much of President Trump’s possible cabinet is revealed and there’s one big name missing (11/7/2016) – And he’s still missing. With only slots at Agriculture and the VA still open, it seems like Chris Christie won’t be rewarded for his support during the latter half of the primaries, perhaps in part because of his own political woes at home in New Jersey.
- #31: Oh my: Cruz 45, Trump 29, Kasich 13 in Indiana? (4/29/2016) – This is one of those humorous caught-in-amber moments that speak to the difference between seeing history while it’s unfolding and seeing it in its full arc. Five days after this Mike Downs Center poll, Trump trounced Cruz in the Indiana primary by a 53/37 margin — almost the exact reverse of this survey.
Be sure to tune in tomorrow, when we have another presidential-debate live blog, gender-neutral bathrooms and their inevitable issues, cold opens, and an Obama cold shoulder to voters in Louisiana.
