news media
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2008Ezra Klein has this to say about the Gang of 500 Mediocrities (also known as our national political press corps):
For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think the two proposals were impossible to estimate, or…
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2008Recently, I finished Pretty Vacant which describes the origins of the British punk scene. At one point, the author describes one of the first punk-ish shows ever, and how, even though there were only about 65 people in the audience (a crappy black box hole), those 65 people would go on to have a tremendous influence in music, art, and politics*. They definitely punched above their weight.
Well, our national political press is the antithesis of that basement audience--a point I've made, oh, once or twice before. The 'Gang of 500' is one of the greatest collections of mediocrities going (...…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2008...the Crazy Twenty-Sevens. From driftglass:
If you replay the video, and listen under Stephanopoulos' interruption, this is point Koppel was trying to get across:
"And I think there is just a small but significant fraction of Americans for whom...the truth in this instance is never going to matter."
Which sounds like a small thing, but for me it was almost a cultural event, because it is almost the only time in my memory when a Big Time Newscritter sat in front of a camera and called bullshit on some specific, identifiable group other than "bureaucratsinwashington" or "liberalelites".…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2008Brad DeLong isn't the only one who thinks the Washington Post's reporting stinks:
At a lunch of eight people I was at last week--former cabinet secretaries, newspaper executives, deans, et cetera--somebody (not me) asked what learning-about-the-world reason there was to read the Washington Post. There was silence. Then, after a while, somebody said "the Style section." And then there was more silence.
My call for people to nominate reliable reporters--those whose bylines tell you that you can trust the truth, the importance, and the relevance of the matters asserted by the reporter--working…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2008More DHS follies. In this case, what we have here is a failure to communicate. From a Californian living near the wildfires (the good folks at skippy don't like capital letters):
we've been out of power here since about 7:00 p.m. this evening. we just finally got back up. 140,000 people were hit by this outage. try as i might, i could not get any information from the radio. all that was on was baseball games, right wing radio bloviating and a replay of larry king live.
which does beg the question...if the "terrorists" attack, will you ever know...because our emergency information system…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2008In my response to my post about Maureen Dowd's brief relapse into sanity, PhysioProf writes:
Dowd's been on the list of the top ten mainstream shitbag media enablers of the depraved right-wing Democrat-feminizing-gayifying shell game for twenty fucking years. As far as I'm concerned, she can go fuck herself, and take her fake-ass new-found Dirty Fucking Liberal Hippie Commie Islamofacist schtick and shove it up her fucking ass.
The only reason she's doing this is because she has finally figured out that the right-wing scumbags she's been tongue-bathing for the last two decades are losing…
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2008I usually don't read Maureen Dowd (if I want funny, I'll go here), but my eyes wandered and I ended up reading today's column. Either all of the shouting from the bloggysphere did some good, or else she's been replaced with a pod person. About the charge of 'elitism' leveled at Obama by Karl Rove, Dowd writes:
Unlike W., Obama doesn't have a chip on his shoulder and he doesn't make a lot of snarky remarks. He tries to stay on a positive keel and see things from the other person's point of view.
He's not Richie Rich, saved time and again by Daddy's influence and Daddy's friends, the one who…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2008The Washington Mandarins are clutching their pearls over this dastardly Democratic ad:
Seriously, some of us were against this war, in part, because we didn't want people we know (and, in some cases, knew) to die. We are not John McCain's (or Michael O'Hanlon's) serfs: he has to justify a long-term occupation and he hasn't done so to million of his fellow and equal citizens.
Meanwhile, insinuating that the Democratic nominee isn't entirely American, that's still ok. No fainting there.
Our chattering class is a bunch of flaming shitbags.
mikethemadbiologist | June 10, 2008The NY Times has an article recapping how Obama defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary. The article is a prime example of the myopia that afflicts our political press. And it's not what's in the article, but what's missing.
Iraq.
In a story of over 4,000 words purporting to describe the campaign, the word Iraq does not appear once. For a fair number of Democrats, the Iraq War featured prominently in their decision to support Obama. More accurately, Clinton's support for the Iraq War* gave Obama an opening. It might not have been a deal breaker, but it certainly encouraged Democratic…
mikethemadbiologist | May 24, 2008I had no idea how deeply involved nepotism was in the New York Times' decision to hire William Kristol as an op-ed writer. From the Greenwald:
The NYT should be very proud of itself. Of course, Kristol was hired at the NYT because his dad, Irv, was really good friends with former NYT Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal, whose son, Andy, currently runs the NYT Op-Ed page. Andy and Bill followed in their dad's footsteps by becoming good friends (and in every other sense), and Andy then hired his friend, Bill (son of his dad's friend), as the new NYT Op-Ed writer. So this is typically what one gets…
mikethemadbiologist | May 19, 2008A loyal reader mentioned to me a while ago that political news is morphing into sports news. Consider the now-famous Chris Matthews' smackdown of rightwing radio host Kevin James. Instead of focusing on Matthews' deconstruction, instead listen to the first thirty seconds or so:
How is this any different than ESPN's Jim Rome or anything on Fox Sports News? James has the same bloviating, loudmouth manner. He has no idea what he is talking about. When he wants to make a point, he just shouts louder. The only difference is that what Rome discusses--sports--doesn't matter. We don't wind up…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2008I was reading this post about the possible strengths and weaknesses of Clinton and Obama among different demographic groups, and I grew very annoyed.
Not at Digby, but the whole debate. What's really frustrating about most voting demographic stories (besides the obvious, which is that they don't have much to do with actual governing) is that I have no way to evaluate the claims made. Sometimes there are bar graphs that show how one group compares to another (blacks vs. whites, old vs. young, etc.). On very rare occasion, there is a two-by-two table, but that's still not enough. If news…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2008Sometimes I get a little frustrated with media critic Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler because he's a little too cryptic about what he thinks drives lousy media coverage. But on Thursday he wasn't:
Which raises a question: Why would conservative pundits have screamed if their candidate had been getting savaged? Our guess: Because conservative pundits can make a good living within the realm of the conservative press corps! They get hired, for good pay, by conservative entities. And they get paid to voice conservative views within the mainstream press.
Conservative voices can earn a living…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2008By way of Kathy G, I see that Caitlin Flannagan won an award for being "thoughtful and bracingly honest, filled with humor and empathy, and free of cliches and political correctness." This gives me an excuse to rescue from the Google cache an old post, "Hell, I'll Pile on Flanagan Too", illustrating some of Flannagan's thoughtfulness:
I'll leave to these fine people to criticize Caitlin Flanagan's efforts to bemoan her sorry lot as a faux stay-at-home mom. What honked me off in the Time article was this:
The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2008Over at the Intersection, Sheril asks the following about new media and science communication:
consider these questions from the program:
* New media addressing S&T issues - what/where/who are they?
* Who do they see as their primary audiences?
* What do they try to convey (or try not to convey)?
* What do they see as missing from the current dialogues on S&T and policy?
* How are they addressing those elements?
* What are the new media missing?
I think the primary role that new media can play is the development of new narratives. Most science stories are…
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2008...the New York Times gives David Cay Johnston a buyout, and keeps Maureen Dowd on payroll.
Johnston is one of the few reporters with the brains and the patience to understand the intersection of politics and economics. He makes tax policy interesting for Intelligent Designer's sake. And unlike Dowd, he is actually part of the Coalition of the Sane.
Fucking insane.
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2008You might have read about the latest conclusive proof that Democrats are the party of out-of-touch elitists: Senator Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee. While many see this as an attempt to manufacture controversy, I think the hypothesis that the press corps is so stupid as to border on mental disability is operative here. Hunter writes:
I can understand why a presidential candidate doing badly at bowling would be a fun, two-minute diversion from weightier matters. And I can understand why a presidential candidate speaking imprecisely about a difficult political issue would…
mikethemadbiologist | March 25, 2008I've argued before that one problem with the news media is that they are quite stupid. A recent speech by CNN celebrity journalist Candy Crowley reinforces that idea. While others commented on her sleep deprivation, this quote leapt out at me:
"On the Democrat side, we never get a chance to see anyone up close. The public has not been as well served because it doesn't know who these people are," she said. "Something in me says, 'Do we know enough?' It's hard to find a moment when we think 'This is the person, not the candidate.' We don't have a chance to flesh them out."
She said neither…
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2008David Sloan Wilson is asking Huffington Post readers if they want a science section at the Huffington Post. I always think science sections are good things...except when the blog lets Deepak Chopra say crazy things about evolution:
Deepak Chopra, over at the Huffington Post, has some absolutely ridiculous things to say about evolution (PZ Myers holds his nose and refutes Chopra here). What Chopra says is so inane (oxygen has intelligence?) that one's brain just locks up. Unfortunately, this silliness isn't limited to Chopra, and is far too common. One of the comments on his post sums up…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2008Let me count the ways. Actually, Greg Mitchell has done that for us. Here's a couple for you:
11) In one of the purest "my bads" of the war, Fox News' John Gibson ripped Neil Young after the rocker released his protest album Living With War. Gibson demanded that Young go see the new United 93 movie and even offered to buy his ticket. Young, it was soon pointed out, had actually written one of the first 9/11 songs--"Let's Roll," about, you guessed it, Flight 93....
15) In April 2007, CBS' Bob Simon admitted to Bill Moyers that his network should have dug deeper into the false claims on WMD…