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This might be one of the worst articles I’ve ever read. Its dripping with the biases of the writers, in no way illuminates the deep divisions behind the bill, and fails to give equal time to both sides.
No wonder we’re about to damage our economy irreparably.
Jamie posted this at 11:05 AM EDT on Friday, June 26th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Convenient Truth, Journalism
That phrase may particuarly apply to this telecast, but, honestly, that sounds like a good description of most network news programs over the last few years.
I don’t watch tv news anymore, but, with commercial radio being pretty bad here in Corpus Christi, I do listen to NPR. It is really quite striking how they present the president’s government-run healthcare plan as the Great Hope to Save Us All, and anyone opposed to it is a knave or liar. “Industry” is portrayed in a good light when it supports the president, but when it doesn’t, it’s a bunch of self-interested fiends out to steal granny’s last Social Security check.
Apollo posted this at 8:09 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Journalism
After the Palins’ over-the-top reaction to Letterman’s joke, Letterman apologizes. I’m no fan of canned outrage, but since canned outrage isn’t going away anytime soon, I’m pleased to see it work in favor of a conservative. One can hope that this is the beginning of the end of the utterly meritless and shameless treatment that Sarah Palin and her family have received.
But let me also say that Letterman’s apology is one of the most sincere sounding that I’ve read in a very long time. And it comes a full week after his bad joke, when he could have let the whole incident slide on into the oblivion of television’s memory.
In an age where “I’m-sorry-that-you-were-offended” apologies are par for the course, it’s pleasing to see someone apologize by actually admitting that he was at fault, and by stating that he will try to mend his ways. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be noteworthy; people would routinely accept the blame for their wrongs, and say that they will try to do better in the future. In that ideal world, we wouldn’t congratulate people on apologizing correctly. Indeed, only in a world turned upside down would we congratulate Letterman on describing exactly how classless and bad his joke was. But we live in that world turned upside down, and we should applaud the better to help guide others toward the best, and, perhaps, to eventually right the place.
How do we do that without encouraging more bad behavior? It’s a difficult question; I wouldn’t have applauded as his audience did, but I suspect my standards of behavior are different from the average late night show audience member’s.
Apollo posted this at 9:46 PM EDT on Monday, June 15th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Journalism, Pop Culture Is Filth
I am not feeling the Hope and Change vibe here:
White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the right-wing extremist report originated in the Bush administration and Napolitano was working to keep the nation safe from terrorists.
“She doesn’t have time for these games – and neither does the president,” Shapiro said.
That’s harsh. At what point of being shut out and insulted by this administration does the mainstream press come down from their high?
Apollo posted this at 9:00 PM EDT on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Journalism
Untie the other half of your brain. You need it.
Tom posted this at 9:18 PM EDT on Monday, April 13th, 2009 as Journalism, Possession by the Coultergeist
From the Big Picture’s spread on Afghanistan:
Afghan girls attend school on February 16, 2009 in the village of Sandarwa in eastern Afghanistan. Women’s education has been severely compromised in Afghanistan as a resurgent Taliban has practiced a policy of intimidation of female students. Women, who make up a significant proportion of Afghanistan’s population, have been killed, burned and threatened for attending school. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That’s true!
Tom posted this at 12:30 PM EDT on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 as Journalism, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
A great myth of the left is that Edward R. Murrow was a heroic broadcaster who took down Josephy McCarthy, amongst other evils. Quite some time ago, Andrew Ferguson took apart the myth of Edward R. Murrow:
Murrow’s most celebrated moment on television — the summit of his career — came in March 1954. This as the broadcast broadside against Joe McCarthy. The mythologists point to it as the blow that brought down the terrorist Tailgunner. The claim calls to mind Mark Twain’s remark about his military service in the Civil War: “I left the Confederate army in 1865. The South fell.”
The show was indeed masterfully done. It consisted almost entirely of clips of McCarthy himself — a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film. Murrow, it was said, allowed McCarthy to hang himself, but in truth McCarthy had been hanging himself quite efficiently in the several months before Murrow offered him more rope. By the time the show aired, a mutiny was underway on his own subcommittee to relieve McCarthy as chairman. Prominent Republicans had joined Democrats in publicly denouncing him, even, gingerly, his former comrade Vice President Richard Nixon. In the mainstream press, anti-McCarthy feeling was endemic. Among those routinely critical were Time magazine and Col. Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. If Col. McCormick and Henry Luce were denouncing a right-wing icon, you could feel pretty safe in firing away. “Ed didn’t want to get too far ahead of public opinion,” Fred Friendly said. And he didn’t.
It is revealing that Murrow is most honored today for broadcasts — 1960’s “Harvest of Shame,” about migrant farm workers, is another — that were works of unbridled advocacy. He had always been as much advocate as reporter. In the late 1930s Murrow saw himself as a subtle propagandist for bringing America into the war. His advocacy was always artful. Cloud and Olson quote a CBS executive in the 1930s, advising a reporter to “disguise his own opinions by attributing them to others.” “Don’t be so personal,” the executive said. ” Use such phrases as ‘It is said . . .’ and ‘There are some who believe . . .’” This is how Murrow did it, he said, and it’s a trick still widely employed. Other times, Murrow’s advocacy was completely behind the scenes. In 1956, the newsman secretly rented a studio to coach Adlai Stevenson, then running against Dwight Eisenhower, in hopes of improving the candidate’s television performances.
Eric Alterman seems to believe in the Murrow myth, and he compares Jon Stewart to Murrow:
The Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer confrontation on The Daily Show is being widely compared to that between Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy over alleged Communist subversion in the Army. The analogy is considerably less crazy than it first appears. Sure, Murrow was Murrow, but there was a shlocky side to the Great Man. On Person to Person he would visit the homes of stars and suck up to them with a cloying mien that might impress Barbara Walters. And while the celebrity-stroking aspect of Murrow’s career does not comport in our minds with the brave, tough-minded reporter who covered war, famine and the like, it probably helped build much of his audience and garner the trust of those who did not follow national affairs closely.
In logic, it’s possible to make errors that cancel each other out—that is, to arrive at the correct conclusion from the wrong premises. For example:
Alterman’s logic seems to be as follows:
Alterman is coming to this conclusion in large part because of Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer. Tucker Carlson explained why the interview was less a knockout than a hit piece:
Jon Stewart’s recent attack on CNBC’s Jim Cramer was so brilliantly performed, so smoothly produced and cruelly compelling, almost nobody noticed that it didn’t make sense. The climax came as Stewart put up a number of grainy clips of Cramer describing how to artificially (and unethically) depress a company’s stock price. The video was damning. Cramer looked sweaty.
Stewart summed up the significance of what Cramer had said on the tape: “You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG, and all this derivative-market stuff,” he said sternly.
Except that you can’t draw any such line. In the video, Cramer hadn’t mentioned derivates or securitized loans or credit-default swaps, or any of the other exotic financial instruments that caused the fall of AIG and the current recession. There’s no evidence that Jim Cramer had anything to do with any of that, and Stewart didn’t offer any.
So both Stewart and Murrow manipulate the camera to make their political enemies look bad. A correct logical syllogism would look somewhat like this:
Hubbard posted this at 3:54 PM EDT on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 as Journalism
Now I remember why I don’t like talking to leftist intellectual types who take themselves seriously. This is hilarious, beginning with stupidly calling someone racist, delving into catty personal attacks, and then having an insufferable meta-discussion about the nature of the list. It more or less reads like what I would script a leftist email group to say. Though the funniest thing – and something I wouldn’t have scripted – is how much Brad DeLong hates Dr. Sullivan (Ob/Gyn). Please don’t take that as an endorsement of Brad DeLong.
Apollo posted this at 9:16 PM EDT on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Journalism
Conor is a former co-blogger of ours, but that doesn’t change the fact that no other journalist is as qualified or deserving to fill Ross Douthat’s shoes at the Atlantic Monthly than our former co-blogger Conor Friedersdorf.
Conor’s the young conservative movement at its best: brave, funny, insightful and as willing to stand up to his own party as his opposition. With Ross’ departure, Conor’s perfectly suited to fill the big gap there for a conservative voice that’s as strong as it is thoughtful.
If you’re not familiar with his writing, here’s a sample from the last year.
Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism
The Beach: A young man’s tribute to America’s veterans.
Location Matters!: Vignettes from scattered locales shed light on our polity.
Snowmobile Wreck: Sarah Palin’s disastrous candidacy must be stopped
Substance Matters!: Debate about problems with Conservative Journalism
Asking the Right Questions About Newspapers
I’ve created a Facebook page as well. Please join!
Tom posted this at 12:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 as Journalism
. . . the news here wouldn’t be that Michael Steele didn’t respond appropriately to a tv host saying that the Republican National Convention, at which Steele spoke, “literally looked like Nazi Germany.” It would be that the supposedly unbiased news network gives a show to a man who thinks it’s appropriate to say on national television that the Republican National Convention “literally looked like Nazi Germany.”
It would have been nice if Steele had responded with the appropriate righteous indignation, called the host an irresponsible idiot, and walked off the set. But having been in similar conversations, it’s actually quite difficult to respond appropriately when people say things of such jaw-dropping stupidity and offensiveness – what Camus called the nakedness of man when faced with the absurd. The ire here should be entirely at CNN for employing this chump host.
Apollo posted this at 10:42 PM EST on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 as Journalism
Michael Steele derides Rush as merely an “entertainer.” If that’s the case, why is it that people who aren’t entertainers keep responding to him and talking about him?
Honestly, I don’t understand this line of attack against Rush. He is indisputably presenting ideas to the world for acceptance or rejection; if he does so in an entertaining way that people actually enjoy listening to, why is that a slight on him? Are only the boring to be taken seriously? That would explain a big part of our current political class: they’re so boring that people simply presumed they’re serious.
Rush more consistently presents ideas for debate and seriously addresses the ideas of others than any politician in Washington or any “serious” journalist on TV or in newspapers. If you watch the Sunday morning talk shows, you’ll hear an awful lot of talking point drivel and name calling, and will very seldom hear any substantive matter addressed substantively. This was particularly obvious during the last election, when weeks could go by and the only discussion on the news shows would be who had momentum or who had made a mistake, rather than who had the better plans. Rush talked about the ideas and the issues every single day I listened to him.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Rush is the leading public intellectual in America. That people enjoy listening to his show and that he makes extraordinary amounts of money from it should be a point in his favor, not a cause for nitwits to look down their noses. Michael Steele has seriously disappointed me by delving into this crap.
P.S. Seriously, in an age when Al Franken (!!!!!!!!!!) got elected to the senate, why is this a line of attack? Franken was just an entertainer like Limbaugh, except he wasn’t nearly as successful. Does that somehow make him a serious person? If Rush’s ratings would collapse to the level of Franken’s old show, would he then be considered a serious ideas guy?
Apollo posted this at 2:53 PM EST on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 as Conservatism, Journalism
An article from a New York-based publication tells us to cook pasta in less water (though honestly, are there people out there using 1.5 gallons of water for a pound of pasta?). The merits of the idea aside, this sentence is, I think, a good demonstration of the level of ignorance in America regarding energy:
My rough figuring indicates an energy savings at the stove top of several trillion B.T.U.s. At the power plant, that would mean saving 250,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil, or $10 million to $20 million at current prices.
At the power plant? I know the interwebs is a complicated thing, probably too complicated for journalists and editors to use, but I pretty quickly turned up some statistics about the sources of our electricity. 1.1% comes from oil. So unless he’s claiming that Americans could have an overall savings in electricity of $1-2 billion a year by reducing the amount of water they use to cook pasta (a savings of over a dollar per pound cooked!), this writer and his editors are part of the ignorant masses who just presume that energy = oil, so saving energy = saving oil.
I’m reading a lot about wind power right now, and the number of people who are ignorant on this matter is truly remarkable. If people ever refer to “energy independence” as a reason to reduce electricity consumption or to invest in renewable energy, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and probably haven’t even thought much about it. Our electricity comes from coal (all-American mined), nuclear (we could produce enough American uranium for our needs, even if we choose to import when it’s cheaper), natural gas (domestic produced, with practically limitless reserves under Texas and a few other places), and hydro (obviously not imported). Strangely, if pure “energy independence” is your objective, you should oppose wind farms, since we import most wind turbines from Germany. No one ever complains about those imports, though.
But oil? Oil goes for lots of uses, but very little of it is used for electricity. There may be lots of reasons to reduce the amount of water you use to cook pasta. Personally, I don’t use nearly as much as you’re supposed to simply because I’m impatient and don’t like to wait on huge pots of water to boil. However, if you think you are reducing the amount of petroleum America imports by using less water for pasta, you are sorely misinformed. It’s a shame – predictable, but a shame nonetheless – that the Times chose to perpetuate the energy = oil myth.
Read this chart. At first glance, it looks complicated, but a moment’s study will reveal it to be very accessible. And after reading it, you’ll know more about energy than virtually every journalist in America.
Apollo posted this at 3:08 AM EST on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 as Grumblin Mumblins, Journalism
If you think this is objective journalism, you should probably get out more often. Jindal has said, roughly a brazillian times, that he has no plans of running for president in 2012. That may or may not be true (just because Obama irresponsibly ran for president when he didn’t have enough experience doesn’t mean that every inexperienced politician is simply biding his time until the next presidential election), but judging by the AP story, his impending presidential run is the defining feature of Bobby Jindal’s life. Jeez Louise, Obama’s been in office for barely a month and already anyone who speaks out against him is attacked as a potential usurper.
Apollo posted this at 12:03 AM EST on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 as Journalism
Back in 1991, Andrew Ferguson wrote a thorough take down of Bill Moyers. It’s not available in The New Republic archives, but it’s in his book Fools’ Names, Fools’ Places. Here’s what Ferguson had to say about it in an interview:
LAMB: What do you think of Bill Moyers?
FERGUSON: I think Moyers has the capacity to be a very gifted documentarian. In that piece, I praise a number of his documentaries which I think are really first rate. But I think he is also — as a public person, which is all I care about — just insufferably pious and self regarding and censorious about people that he feels are his moral inferiors, like conservatives or Republicans.
LAMB: What evidence do you have of this?
FERGUSON: Well, there’s 20 years of television work, and I go through a lot of it. You know, one of the points of the piece is to show how when, for example, the Iran Contra stuff came out, he wrote some or did some blistering documentaries about it, about malfeasance in government and misfeasance and so on — misbehavior and using the legitimate parts of — law enforcement parts of government and so on for political ends. And then I simply went back to parts that — most of which were in the public record, but were seldom talked about. See, Moyers is so loved by so many people in the mainstream press that nobody had really examined his career.
And you go back and you see when he worked for Lyndon Johnson in the White House in 1964, he was intimately involved with some of the uglier aspects of Johnson’s politics having to do with the monitoring of Martin Luther King’s activities under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, some of the hanky panky that the FBI undertook in the 1964 convention to unseat a delegation from Mississippi, and various things like that. He once ordered the FBI to do political checks on Goldwater’s staffers, which is the source of Goldwater’s contempt for him. And then he can then — whatever — 15, 20 years later — more than 20 years later — come out with these pious condemnations of Republicans. And I thought somebody ought to point this slight discrepancy out.
Today, B. Daniel Blatt has another take down of St. Moyers:
Moyers, a former Democratic White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, singles out an aide to a Republican president for using gay people as political fodder. When he occupied a similar position in the White House of LBJ — a president far more eager than Rove’s employer to destroy his political opponents — Moyers did not hesitate to use sexuality as what he might call a “weapon of political combat.”
And not just political combat. Moyers even tried to find out about the sexuality of a number of aides to his Democratic boss.
When investigating the secret files of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1975, then-acting Attorney General Laurence Silberman learned how Hoover “[1] ” rel=”external”>had allowed — even offered — the bureau to be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes.” Bill Moyers took advantage of that invitation to help his boss deal with a crisis which the Democrat feared could jeopardize his reelection in 1964.
Many of Moyers’s sins have been a matter of public record, but he still gets away with sanctimony. He’s still a fixture of public television. It’s nice that another generation is hacking away at the old fraud, but it seems likely that nothing short of death will get Moyers off the tube.
Hubbard posted this at 12:53 PM EST on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Journalism, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
What sort of racist idiot looks at a cartoon of a man-eating chimp and thinks, “the subtle message was clear*: comparing President Obama to a chimpanzee”? For the love of Pete, Obama famously delegated the writing of the pork bill to Congressional Democrats. The day Americans can’t compare their Congresscritters to monkeys without being called racist is the day a part of this country dies.
*How clear can a subtle message be?
Apollo posted this at 12:34 AM EST on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 as Journalism, Race, That's Not Change!