The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Least Surprising News of the Week?

Posted on | January 17, 2025 | Comments Off on Least Surprising News of the Week?

I’m not surprised. You’re not surprised. Nobody’s surprised:

A Trump-bashing, Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist — whose illustrations have been published by the Washington Post, New Yorker and Los Angeles Times — was arrested for possession of child pornography.
Darrin Bell
, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons, was busted Wednesday and booked in California’s Sacramento County after detectives from the Internet Crimes Against Children unit were tipped off by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, law enforcement officials said.
In a search of Bell’s home, detectives found 134 videos of child pornography linked to an account owned and controlled by the 49-year-old married father of four as well as computer-generated artificial intelligence child pornography, authorities said Thursday.

One hundred thirty-four videos — this is not a trivial number and, from another story, this important point:

The investigation began when detectives fielded a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone was uploading 18 files of child sex abuse videos, the sheriff’s office said.

Uploading, not downloading — you see the significance? In other words, this was not about him merely getting illegal material from the Internet, but rather him acting as a supplier/distributor of aforesaid material.

Where did this father of four children obtain these videos? Did he actually produce the videos, thereby directly victimizing children?

“Allegedly,” I hasten to add. Far be it from me to commit libel by forgetting to add “allegedly.” Of course, some people are less careful.

Obviously, I would never call someone a “pedophile” on the basis of mere allegations, but to quote other people calling Darrin Bell a pedophile? Well, that’s just what we professional journalists call “reporting,” see?

Darrin Bell, Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonist, Faces Child Pornography Charges,” is the New York Times headline, and perhaps a judge would consider it an obvious inference from such a headline for someone to call Darren Bell a pedophile, but a professional journalist would never make such a mistake. Instead, we might do a Google search (Darrin + Bell + pedophile) to see if other people were calling him that, and then share that with readers, so that they would be fully informed.

Journalism is a noble calling — a “sacred mission,” to quote Jen Rubin, who may or may not be suffering from tertiary syphilis.

UPDATE: Dana Pico at First Street Journal has a good roundup of reaction to the arrest of Darrin Bell, thoughtfully including a translation of Jugendverderber (which I had deduced from context). However, Dana carelessly omits the word “allegedly” from his post, which omission I expect him to correct in an update.



 

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