Hello everyone. I think Michael is going to make an official introductory post later, but I couldn’t wait to get started. My name is Michael (you all will be confusing the two of us now), and I am one of the new bloggers here at Poligazette! I am a student who is about to enter the professional television production field, so I thought it would be fitting as my first post to speak a little bit about the news media and political biases.

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The media is looking at the horoscopes of Obama’s potential VEEPs, and ignoring McCain’s. What gives?

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This post is difficult to write because, as I’ll elaborate on later, it will be my last one at the PoliGazette for the foreseeable future.

Last week Joe Gandelman this piece about the declining fortunes of newspapers, the dominant news media form of the 20th century. These once-great institutions are dying, their life’s blood - ad money - cut off and their circulation declining. Paper, too often out-of-date before it’s read, is no match for the immediacy of the Net. Conversely, bloggers often hit the wall, cut down by the perfect storm combination of love of writing, major time commitments, and lack of financial rewards. Such is the world of new media.

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Emily Gould’s piece about blogging for Gawker last year is a love-lorn letter to the business of blogging and what it can put a person through.  A bit fluffy, but personal, entertaining, and worth a read.  I particularly liked this bit:  "you know, you really shouldn’t read the comments."

Good advice - unless you like to bicker, which I don’t.

The Jerusalem Post says that a “senior member” of President Bush’s posse said that Bush and Dick Cheney said that military action against Iran is warranted.

In other news, the Chicago Cubs will win the World Series this year and al Qaeda has issued a public statement saying that the terrorist network is laying down its guns and will begin work rebuilding the World Trade Center starting June 1.

Taking a tangent away from our conversation about why I think it might be better for conservatives to simply allow Barack Obama to win in 2008 and regroup in 2012 - my current thinking is to just get the pain over with, like getting a root canal, ala Jimmy Carter, so we can get back to reality - a friend asked me why I thought George W. Bush’s approval ratings were so low. Being a know-it-all, I naturally took the bait. (more…)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described Fitna as "offensively anti-Islamic" and issued the press release that follows (via memeorandum):

I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film.  There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.  The right of free expression is not at stake here.  I acknowledge the efforts of the Government of the Netherlands to stop the broadcast of this film, and appeal for calm to those understandably offended by it.  Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.

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Two recent articles about the way women work and are portrayed in the media caught my attention.  The contrast deserves an eye, I think.

First, John Hawkins has a really interesting article up in which he interviews 5 female bloggers of conservative mind about their experiences working in Internet media.  One common theme:  Female bloggers are frequently targets of degrading attacks on their sexuality and their intellect. 

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ValleyWag, the National Enquirer of the tech industry press, outed Jimmy Wales, founder and driving force behind Wikipedia, over the weekend for using his position as head of the online encyclopedia to “encourage” editing of his lover’s profile in the site’s database. 

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Is there a growing wave of criticism against Barack Obama? PoliGazette has already pointed you to Karl Rove’s piece. Amba at Ambivablog directs us to other anti-Obama pieces here and here. Even Obama supporters are starting to get worried. Why the negativity?

Sure, some of it is just Republicans calibrating their opinions for the upcoming general election. But, as the above links show, this is much more than a Karl Rove attack agenda. This is something in the zeitgeist. And I think it goes straight to the roots of media and storytelling.

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Dave Winer, who’s well known for his work in the technology field, particularly as a pioneer with the RSS and XML-RPC tools that underlay many current web tools, including blogging software, asks an excellent, pertinent question about political conference calls:

I’ve been asking around, where can I get MP3s of all the conference calls, the day they happen, in full, not spun through the reporters, and so far have come up with nothing. So I’m bringing this issue to as many people as I can think of who might either know how I can get them, or apply pressure to one or more news organizations to make them public.

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It’s hard to tell from this editorial:

All of the Republicans want to continue President Bush’s disaster of a war in Iraq, including Mr. McCain.

[ . . . ]

The Democrats are united in their opposition to the war, but none have spelled out a persuasive plan for getting American troops home without setting off a wider conflagration.

What course would the NYT follow? The editorial doesn’t say.

I thought “changed everything” was a phrase reserved for 9/11. I was wrong.

From Variety:

The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary “We Were Warned — Iran Goes Nuclear.” (more…)

As the facts on the ground in Iraq change, the words of MSM’s pundits follow suit:

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman

For more on what’s happening on the ground, see this article in The Times of London.

Yesterday, the New York Times started — “The Board” — a blog written by the 19 people responsible for the paper’s editorials.

It seems the Washington Post and a large number of other mainstream U.S. newspapers will refuse to run the next two Sunday’s worth of Berkely Breathed’s Opus cartoon strip.  Why?  Judge for yourself:

Pretty mild.  And mildly funny.  Certainly not worth censoring, voluntarily or otherwise.

There are times when it can be embarrassing to be an American, like when George Bush 41 lost his lunch on the Japanese Prime Minister’s shoe or when bearing witness to pretty much anything done by Britney Spears.  But these sorts of cultural setbacks could happen in any country.  Bush probably had some bad sushi, that’s all, and Britney, well, lots of people actually like to shop at Wal-Mart, too.

But I always thought that the American press, for all of its liberal foppery, would at least guard its own domain, that of free speech.

It’s suicidal, really, this decision, because it says that the press is frightened of offending and willing to placate a noisy sub-culture that is openly using the country’s legal, social, and now journalistic institutions against it.  Against mainstream America.

It’s one thing for a fundamentally biased media to sell out America’s traditional values as they’ve repeatedly done.  Being generous one could write that off to a legitimate belief in their values, however misguided.  But it is quite another for the WaPo, et al, to cede their own domain without so much as a protest.

Happily, the ‘Net is here to take up the slackers’ slack.  I’m glad Al Gore invented it!

Cross-posted at Black Shards.