Category Archives: Media Criticism

General, Media Criticism, Popular Culture

Another Great Newsman Gone

2 Comments

Condolences to friends, family and colleagues of Tony Snow. I wonder if major television news people die in threes as well? Unlike Russert, this wasn’t as unexpected–he had been fighting the cancer for a long time, and his mother died of it. But I hadn’t been aware that he was near the end.

[Update in the evening]

Mark Steyn has a short tribute (not to imply that many others don’t, and I suspect that he’ll have a longer one in due time). This is a very interesting point politically:

He had a rare temperament in today’s politics, and the Administration might have been spared the vicissitudes of these last five years had he become press secretary earlier.

Yes, of the many failings of George W. Bush, one of them is loyalty to previous staff. Scott McClellan was completely out of his element as WH spokesman, yet he was allowed to blunder through during many of the worst years of the administration. Things might have gone much differently had Tony Snow been brought in earlier. He would have challenged much of the nonsense that the press was putting forward much earlier, without looking like a deer in the headlights. It just shows how important perception can be.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an encomium from Rick Moran.

It’s very hard to come up with anything negative about Tony Snow, though I’m sure that one or two of my regular commenters will make the attempt in the service of their vile political agendas. I hope that I’m wrong.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Lileks On Keillor

5 Comments

James takes on, once again, his fellow Minnesota scribe:

Mr. Keillor feels he has done okay in the last eight years but has a hot collar and ground-up teeth thinking about what the Current Occupant has done to the country the little girl will inherit. He’s mad about spending – I’m with him there, although a bit perplexed to find Keillor coming down on the side of spending less – and he doesn’t approve of the war. It ruined his Rockwell moment.

Being unable to watch a kid play baseball because you are mad at George Bush does not necessarily mean you are a better person or a person more attuned to truth and the future.It might mean, at best, you are a person who writes run-on sentences stringing together predictable assertions; at worst, it might mean you’re anhedonic, and looking for scapegoats. I look at my daughter and consider her future, and I see possibility and peril as well. But that’s up to us, and while I’m sure Mr. Keillor anticipates the day where he is legally required to pay the taxes he heretofore feels he is morally required to pay, we can do fine without him. We’ve done fine without his money so far, and I think we can keep that up. Unless he’s been paying in at the pre-tax-cut level, of course. In which case: hats off! A principled man is rare in any era.

You know, I actually greatly enjoy Keillor’s books, but when you let him loose on an editorial page, he seems to go completely nuts. Bush derangement is a very real thing.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Resume Padding?

2 Comments

In Obama’s campaign ad:

Even under the most generous reading imaginable could any of that count as passing legislation that extended health care for wounded troops? The Chicago Tribune noted the problem on its blog last week but defended Obama by pointing out that John McCain didn’t vote for the bill either. That would be an interesting piece of information if John McCain had cited this bill as among his chief legislative accomplishments.

The Obama team’s desire to pad the resume is understandable — it’s awfully slim after all. But this kind of dishonesty will catch up with them…or at least it should.

Yes, it should, but maybe it won’t. Bill Clinton’s supporters didn’t seem to mind that he was an inveterate liar. But Obama’s supporters (which includes much of the media) not only don’t mind, but actually hope he is.

[Afternoon update]

Is he finally losing his teflon?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Media-Induced Malaise

Lileks has more thoughts on the subject:

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Being All Judgmental

10 Comments

That’s what Rachel Lucas is doing. Well, someone has to do it, since society at large seems to have abdicated its role.

Like her, I was struck by the stupidity of this, reported apparently completely unironically, as though it made, you know, sense:

The Gloucester baby boom is forcing this city of 30,000 to grapple with the question of providing easier access to birth control…

Well, hey folks. It’s hard to see what that would do for this particular little baby boomlet.

There may be some problems that are solved by easier access to birth control, but brainless young women going out of their way to get knocked up isn’t one of them. I think, for that, there will have to be some other solution (unless by “easier access,” they mean tubal ligation).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Bombing John McCain

6 Comments

…with Google:

Bowers chose the news articles by matching the topics to existing polling data that shows what issues likely will turn voters off to McCain. He also makes sure that the articles come from news organizations like CNN.com, which already are highly ranked in Google search results, he added.

“We’re just using McCain’s own words — everything we are targeting are things McCain has done or said himself. There’s no bias at all. There are no opinion pieces. They are all news pieces that quote McCain himself. Obviously it is manipulating, but search engines are not public forums and unless you act to use them for your own benefit your opponent’s information is going to get out there. This is the sort of ‘Do It Yourself’ activism that is very much in line with the tone of this campaign,” Bowers said.

Somehow, based on some of Google’s actions in the past, I suspect they don’t mind.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

He’s No Jimmy Carter

1 Comment

Unlike Jimmy Carter, Obama apparently will lie to us.

Of course, I’m not aware that Obama has ever made a Carter-like pledge.

By the way, I don’t mean to imply that Carter doesn’t speak falsehoods. I just think that he’s delusional enough to believe them.

[Update in the early afternoon]

Here’s more on Obama’s campaign-finance hypocrisy.

…public financing and lobbyist money are yet additional examples of how Obama is on both sides of every issue — Iraq, the Cuban embargo, a divided Jerusalem, NAFTA et al. Is the press at all interested in pointing this out?

That was a rhetorical question, right?

[Update a few minutes later]

Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Obama for declining public financing per se. I think that public financing is an ugly chancre on the body politic, and I cheer when it’s foregone. I wish that McCain would do the same thing. Unfortunately, he’d look even more hypocritical if he did so, due to his having become the point man for all of these idiotic and unconstitutional campaign finance laws. He could use this as an excuse to follow suit, saying that he had no choice, given Obama’s going back on his word, but we all know that if he did, the howls from the media would be deafening.

Well, according to the BBC, he didn’t lie. He just “reversed his promise.”

Well, that’s all right then.

It’s only fair to note that technically, they’re correct. If Obama said it while having no intention of doing it at the time, it would be a lie, but we can’t get into his mind. Sometimes promises aren’t kept, but that doesn’t mean that they were a lie at the time they were made. I was always annoyed when people told me that George H. W. Bush lied when he said “read my lips, no new taxes.” A broken promise is, in fact, not the same as a lie. But it’s a reason to not consider voting for someone.