The media is looking at the horoscopes of Obama’s potential VEEPs, and ignoring McCain’s. What gives?
Vote against Hillary and it’s sexism, deny Obama’s hope and it’s racism, forget to vote for McCain and it’s ageism. Frankly I’m sick of it. Our criteria for choosing a candidate is our own concern and there’s no need for voters to justify themselves. Candidates and media alike are so thin-skinned it’s a wonder sharp words don’t cut them to the bone. Or perhaps they do, in which case some of the whining might be justified.
One thing is for sure: You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so pick one, stand by it, and be proud of your "ism"! By the time this election’s over it may be the only thing you have left to cling to.
This is the very first thing I read after getting out of bed and before the coffee was ready. Needless to say, it was an eye-opener:
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Kids these days - it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Turns out the 11-year-old boy who reported an abduction attempt in Houston earlier this week was making it all up.
"He admitted that he had been missing his mother who was at work a lot and and made up the story to get attention," [Houston Police Department spokesman John] Cannon said.
Here’s hoping little Johnny gets "the attention" he needs.
My favorite writer at The Moderate Voice is Polimom and it’s good to see that she’s back and blogging again! Today she writes that the Houston Chronicle’s policy of using “racial or ethnic identification only when it is clearly pertinent” went too far by failing to include important information about the at-large suspect: (more…)
In this hyperpolarized election season, when even the major parties find endless new ways to splinter into hateful factions, accusations of media bias are pervasive. The operating standard usually appears to be fairly simple, though stupid: Any source that reports anything that casts a negative light on someone’s preferred candidate or casts a positive light on their opponent will be seen by some to be “biased”.
The idiocy of such a standard should not, however, discredit all observations of media bias. What is needed instead is a better standard for detecting it. I suggest that the best way to detect media bias is when the same source treats different candidates or parties differently over time. And using this neutral and objective standard, the common conservative complaint of pervasive media bias towards Democrats appears to be justified. (more…)
Shorter Reuters: those brave and heroic Hamas terrorists. It’s a strange article. It seems to be quite positive about those Jew-hating, intolerant and extremists Hamas terrorists. The title alone gives one the impression that this isn’t a journalistic article, but a piece of pro-Hamas propaganda. “Inspired by God, Hamas Fighters Battle On.” (more…)
Good news for people (entrepreneurs!) like myself: increasingly more Americans are turning to the Internet for news. That’s, of course great because it means that more Americans are likely to read my drivel (and of course the high quality posts of my co-bloggers), but it’s also great because America often sets the trend globally. (more…)
Scanning the DirectTV guide last night I decided to switch on the Miss American pageant just in time for the winnowing down to the final 10 contestants. As one who despises Survivor and other so-called “reality” shows I was unpleasantly surprised to see the six young ladies being eliminated called out and told goodbye American Idol style. (more…)
Fred Thompson, straggling behind the Republican pack as he has been in recent weeks, has not attracted as much negative attention from the liberal crowd as the other, more popular candidates. But while he’s still ing 4th place, Thompson is polling reasonably well in South Carolina with 16% of the vote. That’s enough to get him the attention - and the resulting barbs - of today’s #1 SIM (Self-important Mudslinger), Michael Gerson of the Washington Post.
Gerson’s thesis: Fred Thompson is obviously a morally inferior person and unfit to be president because Thompson does not place the same importance on funding AIDS mitigation in Africa as he does.
Earlier today, Jason linked to an article at Salon, in which Stephen M. Walt writes that American newspapers should hire some foreign policy realists; they’ve got neoconservative columnists, and liberal columnists, but no realists. (more…)
Read Eugene Volokh’s post and be stupified by Ms. Magazine’s cowardly decision not to run the ad he highlights.
Earlier today I listened to PoliGazette co-blogger Rick Moran’s Blog Talk Radio Show, logically called “The Rick Moran Show,” and it truly was a great show (I know that he’s calling in through Skype, like me, but he doesn’t seem to have any quality problems).
Rick’s guests were Rich Baehr, political correspondent of the American Thinker, and Tom Lifson, Editor-in-Chief of the same website, who brought quite some knowledge about politics and journalism to the table. As said, it was an interesting show, you can listen to it below the fold. Some quotes and thoughts of my own: (more…)
As we get deeper into the campaign, I do not have a problem with excluding candidates who are not generating any substantial public support. Gravel, I think, was an example of that in the Democratic debates. But I think the Paulbots have a pretty good case for outrage with Ron Paul’s exclusion from the upcoming Republican debate in New Hampshire.
Don Surber says that Fox is in the right for not allowing Ron Paul’s participation in the final pre-primary debate in New Hampshire. His justification? The fact that Paul’s fans “stuff every online poll on the Internet”.
Whoop-ti-doo. First, polls are a joke anyway, particularly in a close election cycle like this one. Nothing is more irritating than the constant navel-gazing that dominates memeorandum and other aggregation sites on slow news days. Who cares? Poll reporting is merely an opportunity for writers to attempt to influence the debate.
The relevant facts are that Ron Paul is on the primary ballot in New Hampshire, he significant support in the state, and he has something that the American people deserve the opportunity to hear. (more…)
In what will probably cause quite a controversy, the New York Times is set to announce that neoconservative Bill Kristol will have a weekly Times column in 08.
The Anonymous Liberal explains why the NYT decided to ask Kristol to become a columnist for them: “The key to reaching the pinnacle of your profession is, apparently, to be 1) catastrophically wrong about everything, 2) utterly unwilling to acknowledge error, 3) willing to repeatedly lie and mislead your readers, and 4) completely batshit crazy,” he writes. (more…)
I don’t think TNR comes out of the Beauchamp affair looking good. Beauchamp, from a distance, seems like a major douche whose reliability is weak. The anecdotes in question, however, are pretty trivial when compared to things that happen in every war, and can be viewed on Youtube if you look, as soldiers goof off. That’s why I’ve never quite grasped why this story was so maddening to the Bush right. But when you read a usually mild-mannered Pete Wehner accusing TNR of hating the troops and wanting to smear them, you realize how deep the nuttiness has gone… (more…)
After months of wrangling over Scott Beauchamp’s disturbing little war story entitled “Shock Troops“, The New Republic has acknowledged that it cannot stand behind the facts of the story as printed. (more…)
The Guardian’s Seumas Milne — ever on the lookout for an opportunity to launch another verbal attack on the U.S. — should be ashamed of himself. Without giving any credit to Seymour Hersh, Milne’s latest column mimics Hersh’s recent New Yorker article. One paragraph from that column suffices to make my point:
What is becoming clearer is that the likely pretext for aggression against Iran has shifted from the possibility that Tehran might develop nuclear weapons to its role in supporting and allegedly arming the resistance in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration is increasingly convinced that it will be far easier to convince the American public of the case for war on Iran if it’s seen as being about the protection of US troops rather than nuclear scaremongering from the people who brought you Saddam Hussein’s WMD. So the focus of the military plans has changed accordingly: from a wide-ranging bombing assault on Iran’s known and suspected nuclear sites to “surgical” strikes on the Revolutionary Guards, who the US claims are backing armed attacks on its occupation forces.
One thing is certain: the drumbeat about the drumbeat is getting louder.
Is the Media deliberately attacking Democratic candidates and praising Republicans? The Daily Howler says yes.
I am not getting into that mess, but what I do find incredibly interesting is that one can already see a narrative being developed in the media:
- Giuliani: pro-choice candidate, strong on defense, hero, might be impossible to win the nomination
- Romney: pretty boy and flip-flopper (and from that strange faith!)
- John McCain: decent, good guy, his own worst enemy though
- Hillary Clinton: inevitable, intelligent, calculating, vicious, overly ambitious
- John Edwards: pretty boy and hypocrite
- Barack Obama: new voice, the revelation of this season, might not be able to challenge Hillary despite all of that
I find it fascinating to see that the media spend a lot of time building images, but do not spend an equal amount of time discussing policies / plans / issues.
Question: why are columnists so respected? Why do they get paid as much as they do (the best ones) for only a couple of columns per week? There are a couple of columnists I like, but I have to say, that if I look at the blogosphere, there are quite some bloggers out there who are better and who do more important work - in my opinion - than the far majority of columnists.
Aren’t columnists outdated?
Thomas Lifson writes:
Like some robber baron capitalist of yore, the New York Times is telling the remaining full price readers of its print product that they will pay more and get less, the same message it has been sending advertisers for years. But far from a sign of strength, this move is an indicator that the slow motion business collapse of the New York Times Company may be picking up its pace.
Faced with rapidly waning print media revenue and internet revenues which are growing, but not even close to offsetting the decline of print, the strategic plan of Pinch Sulzberger is failing. He had hoped to replace print profits with skyrocketing electronic publishing revenues, but evidently lacked any concrete notion of how to get from here to there, and overpaid for a niche website in a business increasing ruled by ruthless giant players like Microsoft and Google…
Yesterday, New York Times Company Chief Executive Janet Robinson told investors at a Newspaper Association of America conference in New York that the company would be raising the price of single copy newspapers and home delivery subscriptions. At the same time, the company has suddenly accelerated and apparently made more drastic a previously-announced plan to shrink the physical size of the paper and cut the amount of news provided to readers. It is also speeding the closing of a mammoth Edison, NJ printing plant that was one of Pinch Sulzberger’s first strategic moves, opening in 1992, but which, after the decline of metropolitan circulation during the Pinch years, is now surplus capacity, its presses and skilled workers unnecessary burdens.
In the jargon of strategic consulting, this sort of price increase, asset liquidation and quality cut is known as “milking a cash cow” and indicates that a company is “harvesting” a business - realizing that it has no growth prospects, and that its role is to provide cash to invest in other more promising ventures. How long the business will limp along is anyone’s guess. People still buy The Farmer’s Almanac today.
It is common knowledge that newspapers are in a rough spot these days. The Internet has become a major source of news for millions of people who rather read newspapers and news online, than in print. The problem with that - of course - is that it is much harder to make a nice profit with a website (tell me about it).
Although I often criticize newspapers / the Media, I am aware of the fact that newspapers provide coverage we, bloggers, cannot or do not. We get our news from the MSM and then write about it / analyze it / put it into perspective, etc. We connect the dods, we summarize, we comment - but we are dependent on the MSM. If newspapers stop existing, or cut back their reporting, etc., we bloggers suffer as well. That is, of course, reason enough for bloggers to subscribe to a couple of daily newspapers. Or, it should be reason enough at least.
This is quite ironic, isn’t it?
Enraged Fatah leaders on Saturday accused Hamas militiamen of looting the home of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat in Gaza City.
“They stole almost everything inside the house, including Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal,” said Ramallah-based Fatah spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman. “Hamas militiamen and gangsters blew up the main entrance to the house before storming it. They stole many of Arafat’s documents and files, gifts he had received from world leaders and even his military outfits.”
Abdel Rahman said the attackers also raided the second floor of the house and stole the personal belongings of his widow, Suha, and daughter, Zahwa. “They stole all the widow’s clothes and shoes,” he added. “They also took Arafat’s pictures with his daughter.”
Of course, Arafat, the terrorist, should never have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place. So, in a way, one could argue that - finally, at long last - justice is done. He did not deserve it, it has now been taken away from his home.
I do wonder how the Palestinian people will react to this. Last time I checked, Arafat was quite popular. The majority of Palestinians might not be too happy with the way Hamas looted Arafat’s home.
Lets see, Hamas takes over Gaza, the result: homes of Fatah members are raided, everything that is worth more than $5 is stolen, everything else is destroyed. Aside from all the looting, people are being executed on the streets, in broad daylight.
I thought that Hamas wanted to bring peace and order to Gaza?
Meanwhile, the looting of Arafat’s home leaves Carl wondering: “How much would you pay for a Nobel Peace Prize on E-Bay?”
Noel Sheppard notices that Gazans - who are supposed to hate Israel because Israel is a brutal apartheid state - flee Gaza for… Israel. Also of interest is that Israel will allow food and other basic supplies into the Gaza Strip following Hamas’s takeover of the coastal area.
Let me join the chorus (with Charles and Joel): when will the American / Western media report about this? When? We constantly hear about how evil Israel is, how Israel oppresses the Palestinians, but now we see Palestinians fleeing Gaza for Israel and Israel sending food, water, etc. into the Gaza Strip to help out the Gazans.
Will this be reported? Probably not. After all, this doesn’t make Israel look bad.
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