That's too bad that optics and politics got rid of something that would have saved taxpayers money, or at least had it used a bit more efficiently.
well, again we don't know what it would have done. What we do know is that somehow the Biden administration 100 percent completely bungled every aspect of this incident, from its conception to the rollout to its disintegration. And here we thought Biden was elected because he was the professional politician--you know, the grown up in the room--a.k.a. "not Trump" I actually kind of feel sorry for Nina J, I think they left her out to dry on this . . . but there again, she had no government experience whatsoever, so perhaps it's not surprising she went down in flames
For me it's pretty clear what it would have done. Basically save every agency from having to create a role to sift through everything they collect and decide what to pass on vs having one entity to do it for all agencies. As for Nina J, yeah, she got hung out to dry, but she did have gov't experience - didn't she work with Ukraine on countering Russian propaganda?
that's not what I'd call government experience, as in working FOR government IN a government bureaucracy
The Ukraine Foreign Ministry is legit experience in my opinion. Anyway, there's a long history of people coming in from the private sector into gov't roles for both Dems and Reps. And academics for that matter. She seems like she's be well qualified and has a pretty impressive resume. My sense is that she's being picked apart on minor things more out of politics than anything else. But anyway, I think she's be an asset for the US in fighting Russian misinformation so hopefully she is used in some capacity.
her biography (cited earlier) says she "advised" the Ukraine Foreign Ministry while on a Fulbright. She is essentially an academic who has held a number of temporary positions over the years. That's not a knock against her; but it is also not necessarily a kind of "real world" experience that a career politician might have accumulated.
Althouse pokes fun at the Post's reporting: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/05/now-just-three-weeks-after-its.html
I would not want a career politician in that role but rather someone more academically minded. In any case, based on her experience I think there is a governmental role for her to help, that's all I am saying - it doesn't necessarily have to be the head of a board at this stage.
It seems odd that multiple right wing media would quickly jump to the conclusion it would police free speech and attack it as such without knowing what it is. That appears pretty coordinated.
lol. because you know Trump and the replacement theorists and ULTRAMAGAS are all on the same party line. again, or else maybe it just was really such a bad idea that everyone came to the same conclusions in about 30 seconds time
Apparently the disinformation board was mentioned in 70% of Fox news segments for a few weeks after the story was first reported. That's crazy. The right wing media outlets - the major ones - are tied to a political agenda. I don't think there's much dispute about that. And it was politically advantageous to blow this up by characterizing it a certain way. There's a difference between criticism and character assassination, and it's quite clear that the effort made against Nina J was the later.
Nina Jankowicz's Faulty Record, Not Her Critics, Doomed the Disinformation Board And The Washington Post's wildly one-sided account of Jankowicz's fall was an exercise in government PR. https://reason.com/2022/05/18/disinformation-board-nina-jankowicz-taylor-lorenz-pause-dhs/ excerpt: . . . That's the explicit message of the article, and it's hammered home over and over again: expressing concerns about Jankowicz and the Disinformation Governance Board is an act of sabotage by bad-faith right-wing harassers against a noble public servant. The Washington Post does not grapple with legitimate criticisms of Jankowicz. The article doesn't even acknowledge that any exist. Bad people oppose Jankowicz, in the Post's framing, and if you oppose Jankowicz, you're probably one of them. Yet there is good reason to be skeptical of both the Disinformation Governance Board and Jankowicz's fitness to run it. Informal efforts to police disinformation on social media are beset with serious challenges, as moderators and fact-checkers routinely make odious mistakes: Just today, Facebook dubiously censored a recipe for homemade baby formula. The social media site's fact-checkers have previously flagged Reason articles as spreading false information, only to later admit the articles in question were accurate. John Stossel, host of Stossel TV and a contributor to Reason, is currently suing Facebook for characterizing his videos as misleading, even though fact-checkers eventually conceded he was right. Government disinformation cops are no better; time and time again, public health officials circulated false information about COVID-19, and suppressed perfectly legitimate discussion of the theory that the virus originated from a lab leak. And when The New York Post reported on the salacious contents of Hunter Biden's laptop just weeks before the election, the story was widely dismissed by so-called disinformation experts and government security experts on grounds that they presumed it to be Russian malfeasance. "Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say," reported Politico back in October 2020. Jankowicz repeatedly made public statements indicating that she held this view, too. She shared national security officials' "high confidence" that the Hunter Biden story was part of a Russian influence campaign. She described the idea that the laptop had been left behind at a repair shop as "a fairy tale." This was a critical test of whether disinformation experts could keep their innate tendency to ascribe everything unfavorable to the Democratic Party as Russian nefariousness, and they utterly failed. Jankowicz failed as well. Somewhere in Lorenz's article, amid the repetitive praising of Jankowicz's qualifications, anonymously sourced lamentations that DHS will no longer be able to recruit effectively, and broad characterization of criticism as nothing more than sexist harassment, perhaps that failure deserved a mention. The article reads like it was ghostwritten by Jankowicz herself, which makes the underlying scoop less impressive: It's easy to get a government official to cooperate for a news article when the news article takes the form of PR. more at the link
Maybe I didn't get the whole WaPo article but it seemed to me that it was critical of the Biden administration for caving into the right and that was the main thrust of the article.
basically, but that's a very one-sided, tendentious telling of the story. And Taylor Lorenz is not the most reputable reporter in the world right now
You mean because it didn't report that the board would be policing speech and editing tweets on twitter - things Nina J never said? And it just feels that now Taylor Lorenz character is being attacked in the media as a biased reporter. They aren't criticizing just her article, they are criticizing her character. And this seems to be a common tactic of the right of late - is to go after the people and villainize them - which to me is the very cancel culture and division they are supposedly railing against.
