Why you should stop complaining about "the media": You're the media.

A friend posts a protest against CNN, which she thinks has done a lousy job of covering the North Dakota oil pipeline protests. In response,  I suggested that she's part of the solution — and so are you, if you have a Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat account. (This is slightly edited.)

One last thing to consider that I don't think most people have: You're part of the media ecosystem now. Scratch that: You're part of the media distribution system now. 

Which means: You don't think people are hearing enough about the pipeline protests in North Dakota? Well, you've heard about it. And you have a Facebook page! Post an article about the protests from a source you consider reliable — and there are plenty of reliable sources that have reported on it — and post your link, perhaps a few links, and add your own perspective. If your friends agree to its importance, they can and will amplify it further. 

We increasingly see examples where social media amplification prompts legacy and mainstream media to visit a topic at greater length. Protesting that a story hasn't been covered might get attention, but probably what's more effective in getting attention from big news outlets is showing them that a story matters to a sizable-enough audience to warrant a portion of their resources and time.

You're the media now. If you've heard about a story, that means someone has reported it. Spread the word. You're a vital part of the chain now.

The Horrors of NRO's "I Was Forced to Join a Union"

At NRO, Diana Furchtgott-Roth celebrates Labor Day by lamenting that she's been forced to join a union as a condition of her new job as an adjunct instructor at George Washington University:

I have no need for anyone to represent me. I can represent myself. If GW does not offer me enough to make it worthwhile for me to teach, I can look elsewhere or find other employment.

That's the standard argument. But this is also true: If Furchtgott-Rott doesn't like other conditions of employment at GW — such as unionization— she can also "look elsewhere or find other employment." Somehow, this doesn't come up.

But honestly, it doesn't sound like SEIU representation at GW's been such a bad thing for its members.

George Washington University’s part-time faculty union has made some real gains since it was formed in 2006: It negotiated a minimum payment of $3,500 per three-credit-hour course, secured a supplemental retirement plan and a medical leave of absence, and designated a small pool of money for adjuncts to pursue professional development. ... The group raised the minimum rate of pay per course by as much as 32 percent in some departments, introduced a “just cause” agreement to ensure adjuncts couldn’t be dismissed without reason, and secured more benefits, among other things.

I mean: Sign me up!

Anyway, Furchtgott-Roth doesn't have to join a union to join GW — should could pay a fee that's less than her union dues. But despite her very strong feelings against forced unionization, she's not going to take that option. Here's her bio at the end of the piece.

— Diana Furchtgott-Roth is senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a part-time faculty member at George Washington University. She will soon be a member of the SEIU Local 500. 

She doesn't have to take the job. She doesn't have to join the union. But she's going to do both — and accept the benefits that unionization has wrought — and complain about it. Very principled.

One of my values: Doubt

It’s been nearly nine years now that I’ve had the privilege of being an opinion journalist, at least on a part-time basis. I’ve won a couple of awards for my work, and the column I co-write is distributed to papers across the nation. It’s the kind of gig a lot of people dream of and never attain, and I know that I’m lucky as hell to have had this privilege.

During the nine years, two big personal goals that have motivated me:

• To prove I belonged: I know I wasn’t the person John Temple had in mind when he hired me, along with Ben Boychuk, for RedBlueAmerica. He told me as much — he was expecting somebody who had done a stint at the New Republic, and I’m guessing an Ivy League degree was probably part of that package. I worked hard to prove that while I was green in opinion journalism and had an unusual background for the job, I was well-read enough, smart enough, and thoughtful enough — curious enough — to express opinions at something deeper than a family-argument-at-Thanksgiving level. I don’t know what John’s opinion on the topic is, but I’ve satisfied myself on that score. Oh, there are always going to be people smarter and better-read than I — I argue with them! Often! — but I can generally hold my own at the Grownups Table.

• To keep alive my relationships with conservatives.  Even back in 2007, the country’s increasing polarization was obvious. I was liberal, but had gone to a conservative college, had conservative friends, and though we sometimes contended with each other, it seemed important to maintain those relationships. More broadly, it seemed more important that some of us liberals and conservatives keep trying to talk to each other — rather than at or around or near — because, well, we share a country. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and all that.

I’ve been dubious of the latter project lately. Some of it is election-year exhaustion, exacerbated by the presence of Donald Trump in the race: We’ve been on Full Hyperbole for a year now, and it seems possible things will get worse.

There are a couple of other incidents that have made me want to throw my hands in the air.

In the first, a conservative friend responded to an (admittedly frustrated) post on race with a frustrated post of his own — one that featured, prominently, the words “fuck you.” Directed at me. I’ve got a thick skin, but it didn’t feel like the kind of comment that welcomes further dialogue.

The same day, I heard from a very smart liberal friend who suggested — or maybe I simply perceived in her words — that I am a useful idiot for my conservative friends. In any case, she said, my ability to maintain friendships with people who had such bad attitudes on race was essentially a function of white privilege. “Some of your friends don't seem interested in change; instead, they just want to catch a hole in your liberal logic and can say to their conservative friends, "Oh, I have liberal friends" in a way that shows how magnanimous they are,” she wrote. “I don't think it's a healthy relationship, but that's just me.”

I wasn’t all that sure I disagreed.

All in all, it has not seemed, lately, like there’s much room for pursuing friendship and conversation with people who don’t already share my values to a nearly complete degree.

The problem, for me, is this: One of my values is doubt.

What nobody remembers about KU football and sexual assault

Lot of people rightfully angry about this today:

The University of Kansas has concluded a former KU football player accused of sexually assaulting two former KU women’s rowers had “non-consensual sex” with one and violated the school’s sexual harassment policy in the case of the other.

Folks are rightly pointing out there's a name for "non-consensual sex" — I can only imagine KU didn't use it because that name is a legal term, and it reached its findings in a setting outside the legal system.

As the controversy has gone on about two KU athletes who say they were sexually assaulted by a football player, I've been frustrated that nobody seems to remember that we've been through all of this before. Back in 2000....

A Kansas University soccer player says KU football coach Terry Allen discouraged her from pressing sexual battery charges against two of his players. 

She didn't immediately go to police about the February incident, she said, because Allen promised he would punish the players in an "appropriate way" if the woman didn't press charges.

The "appropriate" punishment? Allen made the players run stairs at the stadium.

There was much chest-beating and a few public tears by KU Athletics when this came out. There was even a blue-ribbon panel that set out how KU Athletics should respond to similar complaints in the future. And I'm guessing that the panel's report was promptly shelved.

Yes, this is 16 years ago — today's student-athletes were toddlers at the time. But KU is pretty good about preserving the institutional memory of things it really cares about. That this incident is so thoroughly forgotten would suggest the issue isn't one of them.

This is the first and only time this sentence has ever been written about Donald Trump.

"He doesn’t have that kind of hubris, thank God."

Donald Trump is going to North Philly today.

This will almost certainly end in tears and a lot of shouting. And that's what everybody, on both sides of the issue, wants. Donald gets to play "law and order" in front of a hostile crowd; the hostile crowd gets to show its hostility to a racist blowhard. Politics always feels like kabuki, but today more than most.

Heather Mac Donald is a hack.

Over at City Journal, Mac Donald starts out:

One of the most revealing contradictions of left-wing ideology is the determination of liberals to bring as many Third World “immigrants of color” as possible into the U.S., where, if those same liberals are to be believed, they will face bigotry of appalling proportions.

And she keeps going from there. It's a strawman piece of epic proportions.

Why? Because it's possible for a reasonably intelligent person to hold these two thoughts in their head at the same time:

• America offers more freedom and opportunity than many countries, including the countries where immigrants come from.

• America nonetheless is not yet perfect, and has improvements to make in offering freedom and opportunity to all who seek it — particularly people of color.

All it takes is just a touch of nuanced thinking and the desire not to mischaracterize your opponent. Mac Donald apparently lacks the desire or ability to do so. She seems smart, so I'm guessing she just doesn't care enough. And that makes her a hack.