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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Please lay back and close your eyes. You are getting sleepy, sleepy. Now.
This is not the news you think it is. This news was never “fit to print”. It never fit with what we must print. Assimilate before it is too late. You will wake refreshed, your mind rebooted.
Wake up. Time to sleep.
The Deciders.
Unfortunately I can’t boycott them any harder than I already am.
If this had been a Republican….
sigh
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don’t need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren’t the scandels you’re looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren’t the scandels we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along… move along.
bunch a freakin mediots covering for they man and ACORN.
Didn’t Al B. Sure do a cover of this song?
Project Vote, an Acorn affiliate whose tax-exempt status forbids it to engage in partisan politics.
Say that out loud three times with a straight face. I dare you.
eleven, if this crap keeps up there won’t be a NY Times left to boycott.
A boy can dream, anyway.
Just don’t do it in front of a mirror.
Isn’t it rather amusing that the folks who natter on about “media consolidation” and the threat thereof focus on FoxNews (a cable-only presence) and talk radio, while completely ignoring the way the rest of the press decides what’s “newsworthy” based on its presence in the NYT?
Howsabouts we go back to the day when being a reporter didn’t require a college education? I mean, it can’t hurt.
Consolidating the media in O’s pocket is a good thing, though, Rob.
And let’s not forget the Magic Web Site, where all kinds of shady foreigners could dump payola into the O! coffers… Somehow, the FEC is completely uninterested, as is the DOJ.
Killing me softly
It didn’t hurt when lawyers did not need college educations either. Abe Lincoln did pretty well without one.
BMoe – the person that wrote that about Project Vote and Acorn being strictly non-partisan should be tarred and feathered. For starters.
if u find one of them little subscription cards
inside of the paper and mail it to them they have to pay postage
..i like to fill it out with nasty comments like blow me
and such
hello boston globe..that was me!
this is…bad.
Does it “shock the conscience” mcgruder? Could be that torture test will come in handy after all someday.
The NY Slimes was in the tank for Obamarama? Excuse me while I fetch some smelling salts, I think I’m feeling faint…
8^°
This is… business as usual.
Dont get your point or tone SDFerr.
I think I’ve noted here pretty clearly that the interrogation techniques we used on 3–if memory serves–truly vile AQ ringleader sorts I’m ok with. Torture test? The phrase escapes me. I think waterboarding is torture but one that we have to use on occasion. Im for it as it appears to be somewhat effective, as opposed to medieval fingernail pulling, which seems totally conterproductive.
I could be wrong of course, but it does seem that waterboarding gets a very, very bad job done.
actually Rob, i hadn’t thought it was. I saw some pretty hard-working and honest reporters where i worked (two big NYC papers and big huge print/TV media corp.) and I never saw anybody drop a valid angle because of favoritism.
I would have heard of things along those lines. this story seems particularly bad as they got the ACORN woman to go on the recrod, which, let me emphasize to you, is really frigging hard to do in complex cases.
none of which takes away from the fact that Hoyt screwed up here. At the very least, he owes us an explanation of what Strom said and what the meaning of that email was.
recrod=record. sorry.
Sorry, mcgruder, my apologies, it’s my poor expression that causes your confusion. My point wasn’t meant to be about torture at all, actually, though I see where it seems to be. The only reason I mentioned the torture test is that I ran into the phrase “shocks the conscience” in Victoria Toensing’s piece in the WSJ about the apparent failure of the critics of the OLC memos to have read them and hoped to create a jokey connection to the story killing.
Setting that aside, what I meant to get at is what I would have assumed many years ago as a commonplace but no longer can assume, namely that the very idea of this Powerline piece would have “shocked the conscience” pretty readily. That it no longer does, itself ought, by rights, to shock the conscience — though we may learn that, in general, it won’t or doesn’t — of the people at large.
mcgruder — not speaking for Rob, but for myself on the same subject: You are displaying the symptoms of a boiled frog.
That is, I don’t think it used to be this bad. Oh, there were always partisan journalists, but there used to be partisans on all different sides. Nowadays it all goes in one direction. Part of the problem is professionalization. If journalists have to have degrees in journalism, and all the j-schools have the same political orientation, it follows that journalists will tend to agree with one another and with what their teachers told them.
Regards,
Ric
SDFerr,
it is appalling. thanks for the clarification. Consider my conscience extraordinarily rendered.
Ric,
I take most of your point. There is a signals and noise aspect to this though.
I did not go to J-School and i was a highly paid, respected investigative reporter. I think I did well in that milieu as an “out” conservative because I had good editors and lawyers who asked hard and tough questions before running the piece. It seems many of my colleagues did not.
I think the economic collapse of media just stripped everything bare. All the good, hard-thinking editors left or were laid off. The experienced and numerically literate reporters who were comfortable working with documents…left or were laid off.
what is left is dross: a cohort that can write fast, develop a repartee with sources quickly and all too often, is not inclined to think a mile down the road, let alone a mile deep. basically, people who get spoon fed stories.
I’m sure you never saw any such thing. Fish don’t see water, after all.
mcgruder, I worked at a small daily in Bozeman, Montana, and all of the editors – and I mean every single one – was biased. They changed quotes in ways that changed meanings, they would selectively pull damning or idiotic quotes for people they liked and do the whole phonetic spelling gimmick for one’s they didn’t (“gonna” instead of “going to,” that kind of thing), they edited letters to the editor, they ran plagiarized stories on multiple occasions, and didn’t punish the sportswriter who plagiarized them. The competitive daily from the next town over did much the same thing.
I find it difficult to believe that New York City wasn’t rife with that kind of thing, and I don’t think the economic conditions could possibly make an impact one way or another. I mean, was the economy laying off editors when the fake turkey story was circulating about Bush? I was a reporter from 2002 to 2004, way before any crashing economies.
I get that you saw some “hardworking and honest reporters” during your tenure; I did, too. (Smaller paper, but same biz.) I just don’t get how you can say “and I never saw anybody drop a valid angle because of favoritism.” Because even I saw that. I lost a lot of faith in journalism from working there; it’s a vindictive and superior business, by and large. The one thing I learned best: everyone’s a liar.
If your experience was better, that sounds … nice. (I attract cynicism like, um, something that attracts other things, though. So you can ignore me.)
Rob. Youre wrong. Little more to be gained batting it around with you, but you are wrong. I reckon youre terribly proud of the “fish…water” bit, and its a nice line, but youre wrong. There’s an ugliness to your posts here that is absent from many of the others. People like JD, Carin and the lot of them are every bit as appalled as you at the crisis of decency and reason afoot, but they simply lack the personal bile at people they disagree with. I have no reason to complain: you use your real name, i dont. And it is the internet, and I am not a GOP automoton.
If I’ve done something to you, do forgive.
Ella. I saw a lot of ugly things too. I saw nothing like what you describe–intentional, reckless, willful defamation and outright falsehoods. The most obvious bias I saw was when i worked for Murdoch at News corp. where they simply dropped the pretense, you know? I had a special deal there though and was something of an anomaly. I had done a lot of investigative stuff for them and made old Rupert look real smart circa 2005-2006, so they didnt make me become some right wing drone. Yup, if youre looking for talking point type coverage, look no farther than the NY Post or Fox News.
I should be clear, ella: 90% of the reporters and editors I knew, and i knew or met most of them, were definitely left of center.
it matters little. The market will do what wants for doing.
Yeah, the Chronicle editors were bad. Bad, bad, bad. Ditto the nearby Enterprise.
I should reiterate, because my words weren’t clear: the reporters weren’t that bad. They worked hard and meant-well and tried to do right. They were liberals (naturally) but good-spirited. I don’t know that “fairness” really entered in, because I don’t think they believed there was anything to be fair about, if that makes sense.
The editors – bah, I say to them. They really were malicious, I think.
(I should add one exception: my very first newspaper job was on an alt weekly, and my editor there was terrific. And the most unbiased person ever to darken a newsroom door. He was and is a very good newspaperman.)
Huh, seems I could say the same about yours.
Lee? I may not agree with the man, but I haven’t seen “ugliness” in his posts…Maybe obfuscation, but not ugliness.
As far as Rob goes? Look Mcgruder, that’s not “ugliness”…Maybe a little anger, or more likely frustration…
You folks want to see UGLY? Look at Actus…She who must not be named…The thunder god…
Anyway, just sayin’….
CRAP…I forgot everyons favorite Eugenist!! Dr. Nishi Mengele!!….Now THAT’S ugly!!!
heh, I was making the point that Robs comments are only ugly if you think ugly is something like pointing out you think someone else is different from the rest because of their ugliness.
hoisting him by his own petard, as it were…
Oh, well. I guess I’m wrong, then. No need for you to provide any counter argument, no need for you to show how I’m wrong. I’m just wrong.
I can see that. Apologists for evil bring out the ugly in me.
See — and I think I’ve said this before — my whole goddamned life I’ve listened to an endless screed from the press about how goddamned important they are. More important than the guys running the water treatment plant, to listen to them. More important than the men and women in the military, more important than the cops, more important than every goddamned person in the world.
The press constantly held out that they were absolutely necessary for a free society. If it weren’t for them, we were told, government would run roughshod over everyone, grind us all into the dirt, make us all slaves.
Burbank’s “journalistic credo that your right to know supercedes your right to exist” is parody, but it succeeds as parody because it’s so close to the real attitude of the press.
Yeah, the press has done a hell of a lot of good. But when they fuck up, they never pay a meaningful price. Do you really think Richard Jewell got justice? Read through this litany and tell me the networks were punished commensurate with their negligence and fraud.
The last decade or two has seen the press go from idiotic fuck-ups when they’re going after American businesses to full-out political partisanship. Do you think it proper for a news organization to retain even a talking head after he describes the results of an election as a “temper tantrum”?
I watched the press stoke the LA riots (and their associated spin-offs — did you know there were riots in Peoria, IL as well?). I watched how horribly they covered the 2001 Cincinnati riots — to the point of acting as the mouthpieces of the race-baiters and burying the facts.
(After the Cincinnati riots the head of the local FOP held a press conference. This guy had an undeserved reputation as a hot-head, and the almost Dickensian name of Fangman. CNN joined his press conference live, breaking away from one of their talking-head panels. Fangman started laying out the facts of the cases behind the race-baiters claims, claims which the press had been repeating largely verbatim without any attempt to dig deeper. CNN suddenly developed “satellite trouble” and had to break away. It could have happened as they claimed, but the timing was awfully convenient, and let them get right back to the primary narrative of Cincinnati cops killing black men, rather than the facts of a dozen clear cases of self-defense, a couple of accidents, and a few muddy cases that were prosecuted to the extent of the law. The needs of “riot ideology” trumped any desire to get to the truth.)
I’ve never seen the press make a mistake to the detriment of a Democrat or any leftist.
I’ve never seen the press hound a Democrat or leftist the way they do Republicans and conservatives.
I’ve never seen the press push a narrative that makes a Republican, conservative, or even the United States itself look good.
I’ve never seen the press really dig into the behavior of leftist and Democrat-leaning organizations.
As an example — the primary press narrative in re the Tea Party Protests was that they were just a bunch of white people riled up by FoxNews and were just about not wanting their taxes raised. There was the assumption that it was a top-down effort, that the claimed reasons were false, and that those involved were morally suspect (the “all white” line).
Now, during the 2004 campaign there was a day when a bunch of Bush-Cheney campaign offices were picketed by union organizations. A number of those offices were attacked — people trying to force their way in, assaulting the campaign workers, property damage, etc. All on the same day, in multiple states. The press limited the reporting to the local reports; I’ve never found a story that mentioned more than one incident at a time. I’ve never heard anyone in the press wonder about coordination, or motivation. In fact, the whole incident was pretty well buried.
In one case — peaceful gatherings to express anger at the actions of politicians — the press pushed a line intended to downplay and discredit those involved. In another — politically motivated violence, with signs of coordination on a national level — they ignored it to the point it’s tough to find any sign it actually happened.
Is it on purpose? Probably not, by and large. I think most “journalists” aren’t malignant, just so incredibly lazy they can’t even question their own assumptions. They hear a line of argument from someone they look up to, buy into it, it becomes Common Wisdom and, finally, it becomes TRVTH (or, if you prefer, Pravda).
They take a press release from an advocacy organization — complete with contact information for sources, canned quotes from “third parties”, and sometimes even convenient audio or video footage to accompany — and it becomes the lead story the next day. That’s pure laziness, but, you’ll notice, it’s infinitely more common to run with a story from NOW, CSPI, etc. than one from Heritage or CATO. That’s pure bias.
So I’m pissed as hell at the people who — again, for my whole life — have patted themselves on their backs, told us all how important they all are, and declared their own absolute necessity and became so lazy, corrupt, and biased they undermined everything they claimed to be defending.
I’m sure there are some good reporters out there. But, like the old lawyer joke, they let the other 99% give them a bad name.
Sure wish I could buy you a drink for that one, Rob. Well done.
And, yes, I stand by the description of “apologists for evil”. Contrast the amount of coverage given to what happened in Abu Ghraib while the US was in charge to the coverage given to what happened there when Saddam was in charge. CNN admitted they covered up stories to maintain their “access” to Iraq; Newsweek published clearly false stories about Korans being flushed at Gitmo; no one pays nearly as much attention to what happens to gays and rape victims in Iran.
How many news stories about the conditions at Gitmo have there been? How many contained a clear tone of condemnation? Now, how about a contrast between those conditions and those in a normal criminal prison in, say, Saudi Arabia? Or, hell, France?
Until just the other day, I’d read, but not heard, Rev. Wright’s “preaching”. It’s undeniable that the press has covered up for him and for Obama; a press truly concerned with either fairness or with just getting the facts out would have made those recordings unavoidable last year. They’re ugly, they’re evil — the depth of hatred and bigotry, are like nothing I’ve ever heard in my life, and are made all the more chilling by the background of a clapping, cheering audience. It’s cliched to say “what if the roles were reversed”, but in this case it’s unavoidable.
Palin’s church was turned into a joke — hey, did you hear she was blessed to protect her against witchcraft! — but the ugliness of Obama’s church was buried.
Why shouldn’t I have nothing but contempt for the press? Why shouldn’t I blame them for their willful boosting for a racist?
Thanks, kelly.
I admit, I needed to vent. :-)
Oh, and journalists still consider Sy Hersh worthy of anything but a swift kick in the nuts.
*chirrup*
*chirrup*