Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Problem Is Bigger Than Them

10 Comments

Jim Manzi has some useful thoughts:

Commentators on both the Left and Right seem to think that if only we could get the right person to take over these companies and clean up the financial mess, everything would be OK. All it takes is somebody competent and honest, because the answers are so obvious. A rotating series of scapegoats has been created. Paulson? Fool. Geithner? Moron. Liddy? Stooge. It’s funny how their idiocy didn’t seem to surface so much in their prior careers.

Maybe the issue isn’t with the men we’ve selected, but with the problem we’ve asked them to address. Some problems don’t have solutions. The American electorate seems to be intent on re-learning the lesson that how to effectively manage socialized means of production is one of them. The tuition for this course tends to be pretty steep.

I’m sure that Liddy is deeply regetting that he took the job, particularly given the (lack of) financial compensation. The notion that a government, or any one person, is smart enough to run an economy is what Hayek called the fatal conceit.

[Update early evening]

James Pethokoukis:

It’s cliché to say there’s a lot of blame but going around — but there is a lot of blame to go around.

Everywhere you turn in this mess, you can find government right there. To say this is a private-sector failure is ridiculous. It’s like Forrest Gump, where he keeps showing up at historic moments. Everywhere you look in this mess, again and again, you see government.

The most infuriating thing about these clowns, both in Washington and the press, is how a non-existent free market and “deregulation” keeps getting falsely blamed for this as an excuse for bigger government and more regulation.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fun With Teleprompters

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Somehow this seems appropriate:

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Well, who else should he have thanked? He is The One, after all.

And I agree with this:

Imagine if George W. Bush had such a crutch and pulled a monster gaffe like this. It would be played 24/7 on television until the end of time.

For some strange reason, the networks refuse to release video of this great moment in hilarity.

This reliance on his TelePrompter is just embarrassing.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

Who considers him a great orator other than his slobbering media sycophants? Any time the man has to utter more than two sentences off script he becomes The Wizard of Uhhhs.

We know that it would have been shown endlessly had it been George Bush.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Turnabout Is (More Than) Fair Play

14 Comments

I agree with the AIG execs — Congress should resign or commit sepuku:

“In all candor, I don’t know why they’re so exercised by some bonuses. These pathetic excuses for politicians cost the taxpayers trillions of dollars and, worst of all, they’re still in power.”

Of course, in order to do that, one must have some sense of shame. Or honor. I don’t see any evidence of that in the likes of Chris Dodd or Barney Frank.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Uninvited

I’m thinking that along about now Ezra Klein is wishing that he had invited Mickey:

We non-elite writers learn something just from watching the sausage get made. One thing we learn is it’s just sausage. Ezra Klein has taken a lot of what could be highly informative back and forth on the World Wide Web and privatized it, much as rich people in gated communities reclaim green space from the public sphere and wall it off behind guards and fences. It’s not an egalitarian or democratic impulse.

I for one, am unshocked. These folks have a much higher opinion of their democratic impulses than is justified by their actual behavior.

[Update a couple minutes later]

An Instapundit emailer has an amusing suggestion:

Funny, isn’t it, how during the Bush Administration, the New York Times and the “mainstream” news organizations spilled national security secrets on a whim, but Journolist is a sacrosanct temple of secrets. The CIA should run all secret programs from within a “tea party” protest, it will guarantee a media blackout.

And note, we’re discussing all this stuff, making the sausage, in public.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Missing The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

6 Comments

Gerard van der Leun isn’t:

The death of the P.I. and its “life in death” on the Web is only the second in a trend that will grow. And as the other papers fail into the Web we will hear, again and again, about the Internet, about Craigslist, about The Drudge Report, and a hundred other reasons these papers are dead. What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about “taking personal responsibility” when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There’s no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There’s only “The Internet ate my newspaper.”

It could apply to a lot of the corpses.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Glimpse Through The Veil

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…of the travesty, indeed atrocity that American public education has become:

The reporter, Ginger Thompson, describes how a teacher prepares students for a standardized test. It’s a classic case of “teaching to the test” rather than teaching the subject itself. But that’s only part of the problem:

“If you see a question about Bolsheviks on the test,” Ms. Cain said, “the answer is probably Red Scare.”

So that’s the one thing Virginia high school students are apparently expected to understand about the Bolsheviks: They inspired American paranoia. That’s the Bolshevik legacy, you know.

Sadly, it’s no doubt a tip of the iceberg. And of course the NYT reporter found nothing remarkable about it.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Making Orwell Proud

32 Comments

Some examples from VDH:

Guantanamo is still open, but there are no longer “enemy combatants” there (Perhaps the name of the camp can be changed next?). The old campaign snicker that a naïve McCain really believed that a then-stronger economy is “fundamentally sound” is now the new Obama gospel about a far weaker one. There are to be no more earmarks in spite of 8,000-plus new ones. A $3.6 trillion-dollar budget is proof of commitment to financial responsibility; the remedy of Bush’s borrowing profligacy is to increase the deficit from $500 billion to $1.7 trillion. Bush’s signing statements bad; Obama’s signing statements good. An end to lobbyists in an administration ensure there are over ten; the highest ethical standards mean the nominations of Daschle, Richardson, etc. The changing meaning of words really does trump memory and reality itself.

Not to mention what a disaster that it would be to make health insurance benefits taxable, which was one of the many mendacious ways by which they slithered into the White House, except that now, maybe it’s not such a bad idea:

Now that Mr. Obama has begun the health debate, several advisers say that while he will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits, neither will he oppose it if Congress does so.

Let me translate: “Yes, I don’t want to take responsibility for it, because even my lapdogs in the media might find that too much hypocrisy to stomach after all my demagoguery on the issue last fall, but I’ll sign the bill when it gets to my desk, so go for it.”

Well, actually, I’m not sure that it would make Orwell proud. More likely sad at his own prescience.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Did We Get For Spendulus?

24 Comments

Bupkis:

…that prediction and the job calculations cooked by the president and his economic advisers have already been proven wrong. A Republican insider on Capitol Hill explains that the “forecast for saving or creating jobs is based on the stimulus ensuring that the unemployment rate not exceed 8% between now and 2014.” But we are already passed the 8% mark.

What would have happened without the stimulus? According to the administration’s calculations, we would then hit 9% unemployment. But that is the very figure that many economists now predict we will hit in a matter of months. Some predict we will hit 10%. Four states have already hit that figure.

This is the biggest financial fraud in history. It makes Madoff look like a humanitarian.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Lileks Versus Etzione

24 Comments

Guess who wins?

Only after we come to see that additional goods add precious little to our happiness;

Nonsense and hypocrisy. Computers aren’t basic needs. E-mail isn’t a basic need. Who says so? Me. So this person’s life cannot possibly be happier by the addition of a device that lets him peruse the words and deeds of the world. As for me, base shallow grasping materialist that I am, let me spell it out:

My computers bring me happiness, for they are instruments of knowledge and art. My cameras bring me joy, yea, for they allow me to capture the fleeting shadows of the day or the laughter of my child or the happy romps of my old dog in the new snow, and fix them forever in a form whose quality exceeds the fond dreams of D. W. Griffith. My car gives me pleasure, for it gives me freedom and ease of movement, allows me to meet friends, gather food for the family, and drive to work with the glories of Beethoven crashing from the speakers. Or AC/DC, depending on the mood. For that matter the morning drive is made pleasurable by possessions like the coffee maker, which serves up a hot delicious beverage the moment I wake from a comfortable bed – and the waking, I should add, was gently occasioned by a machine that cost a bit more than one of those $19.99 alarms that sounds like someone tripped the perimeter alarm at Los Alamos.

Since I seem to be seeing possessions in terms of the flow of the day, let me go on: my computer, which is hardly a basic need, gives me freedom at work unchained to a veal-pen desk; my cellphone lets me write messages to a network of beloved strangers or listen to music from around the world – and take a picture of something, if I choose. Photography is art, right? Art is good, right? Yes, I know – if it serves the general weal in a spiritual burning-issue sense. If I use the camera to snap a picture of the Catholic-run men’s shelter down the street, do I get a pass if I buy a new camera this year?

Or would that be overshadowed by the bilious negativity that rolls in dark waves from my large TV? It’s not a basic need, I admit – can I still have one? Yes, if it’s not LARGE. People who grudgingly admit the usefulness of a TV for pedagogical purposes reserve the right to frown on your TV if it’s larger than it need be, for several reasons: 1) you probably went into debt to get it; 2) it uses energy that makes the planet die; 3) you watch the wrong kind of programs; 4) the size of the screen is regarded as a direct reflection of the stupidity of the viewer.

Unless we’re talking about careful, pained, exquisitely sensitive motion pictures about the horrors of life in the suburbs in the Fifties.

They really should have called the fight after the first round.

Amitai Etzione calls himself a “communitarian.” But there is nothing new about his beliefs. There’s an older, shorter word for them. It starts with “f.”