Category: Media
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FOIA Council Responds on Request to UVa for Threat Assessment Team Records on Shooter
by James C. Sherlock On Sunday I asked the FOIA Council to provide an advisory opinion on the University of Virginia’s decision that information about that school’s threat assessment team deliberations in the case of the November shooter, Christopher Jones, will not be released as I requested. I received the answer this afternoon, which is…
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Dead Students, UVa, and the Virginia Freedom of Information Act – Part One – Only One Client
by James C. Sherlock Updated Dec. 18 at 16:30 The deck is stacked against the press, at least in the first step. The University of Virginia, unsurprisingly, considers it not in its interests to release information to the press about the work of its threat assessment team in the case of Christopher Darnell Jones. Mr.…
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The Progressive Left Has Only One Story. It is on Endless Loop in the Press
by James C. Sherlock It is called defining the terms of the debate. Sort of like naming a climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The war to define the ground in a headline debate in Virginia is between supporters of either: Virginia DOE’s draft “2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity and Respect for All Students and…
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Trump, Missiles, COVID, and Youngkin
by Kerry Dougherty Yes, I heard. The whole country heard. Donald Trump announced last night that he was running for president in 2024. The worst-kept secret in American history. If I were a Democrat I’d be delighted. While Trump always sucks the air out of the room and dominates the news cycle, other events were…
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Not Gilly Sullivan’s Alumni Association Anymore
by James A. Bacon Aiming to address the lamentable decline in state/local news coverage, States Newsroom supports local news operations in 29 states, including Virginia. As Jim Sherlock detailed here, the nonprofit organization was launched in 2017 by the left-of-center Hopewell Fund, which itself is managed by the left-of-center Arabella Advisors. Its Virginia Mercury digital…
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Virginia Not Ready to Criminalize Parents Who Reject Child’s Transgender Identity. Not Yet.
by James A. Bacon Delegate Elizabeth Guzman, D-Prince William, stirred the hornet’s nest when she told WJLA last week that she would reintroduce a bill to expand the definition of child abuse to include inflicting “physical or mental injury” on children due to their gender identity or sexual orientation. Republicans criticized the criminalization of parental…
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Independent Journalism – The Special Case of the Virginia Mercury
by James C. Sherlock I look every day to the Virginia Public Access Project’s (VPAP) VaNews. I am a donor. It proclaims: VaNews will consider ‘original news reporting’ that is published online by print newspapers, broadcast radio and TV stations and outlets that meet our standards as ‘online news providers.’ On that same page VaNews…
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Youngkin Admin Questions Value of School Accreditation Standards
by James A. Bacon A Virginia Department of Education press release issued yesterday contained a vitally important message: Virginia’s school accreditation standards are failing to do their job. Despite unprecedented learning losses during the COVID epidemic, the percentage of Virginia public schools meeting the standards fell from 92% pre-COVID to 89% post-COVID, a decline of…
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FIRE to VMI: Hands Off the Independent Student Newspaper
by James A. Bacon The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has asked the Virginia Military Institute to refrain from pressuring an independent student newspaper, The Cadet, to change its editorial stances. “Cadet staff have faced interference from VMI leadership, including pressure to make the paper’s content more flattering to the Institute, suppression of…
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Remember When News Outlets Engaged in Fact-Checking?
by Kerry Dougherty Dang it. The BYU women’s volleyball story had everything the corporate media salivates over: A conservative Christian school and an alleged racial slur against an African-American female athlete. Pity that like so many other stories that feed the narrative that America is just a nanosecond away from Jim Crow and that conservative…
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The Richmond Free Press and the Contrast with Other Progressive Outlets
by James C. Sherlock I celebrate the Richmond Free Press (RFP). I discovered that newspaper in a terrific article in Richmond Magazine in 2015. RFP calls itself a progressive newspaper. And it is. Black progressive. I find it sometimes, but not always, mirrors the views of the White progressives who dominate the national press. RFP staff reporters…
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Be Careful with Survey Results, Especially About Education
by James C. Sherlock I am a prolific reader and analyst of statistics about education. I find it constantly necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff. Chaff is the term I have chosen for this article, not the one I use in private. The results of the latest Education Next Survey of Public Opinion (2022…
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Richmond Times Dispatch’s Flexible “Community Guidelines”
by James C. Sherlock The Richmond Times- Dispatch motto is “Where Your Story Lives.” They fail to define “your.” I posted a comment this morning on a story in the RTD titled “Hanover County School Board introduces transgender policy; discussion is limited.” The headline is unconsciously ironic, but I did not comment on that. Picking…
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School Discipline Issues Meet Unshakeable Progressive Dogma
by James C. Sherlock Moral panic has been defined as a: …widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. Virginia’s progressive community is in moral panic over the refusal of school discipline outcomes to bend to their prescriptions…
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Liberal Democracy, Illiberal Institutions
Maybe no one wants to work for a public education system that hates our values. by Shaun Kenney Carl Schmitt isn’t precisely a household name. The German political theorist was a deep reader of Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes, whose evolution of thought occurred during the fratricidal tumult of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. One of…