Category Archives: Journalism

Kvetch Cable

Feminism, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

CNN anchor Campbell Brown tries here to parlay into a CNN advantage a valid point about the Fox News-White House tiff. She does not convince. While MSNBC most certainly does not do neutral news—and Brown and her CNN buddies are not blatantly biased—the CNN message seeps through via a steady stream of soporific, soft-news stories, to say nothing of the reign of the King of Kvetch, Anderson Cooper.

Mercifully, Brown et al. don’t engage in straightforward opinion, but their unadulterated leftism—not to mention hard-core statism—creeps into reports by way of story selection, slant, and facial grimaces. Examples are punishing programs such “Black, Blue, Brown, and plain Bored in America.”

Call it the CNN meta-message.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting interlude:

Over to Brown:

Videotape: Brown: officials have been very public about their feelings about fox news and what they believe fox news is and represents and they made a point of coming out and saying it.

Jarrett: that’s a different issue. What we’re saying is that we want the public to understand what’s going on. When we saw the kind of distortions this summer, particularly directed at seniors, over health care reform, it was really outrageous.

And I think what the president said in his message before congress is we’re going to speak directly to the American people and make sure that they understand the truth.

And so, certainly, if we see somebody distorting the truth, we’re going to call them on the carpet for that. But we don’t want to take our focus away from the core issues that are so important to the American people. Now, when there’s all that chatter and distortion and false information, we have to disseminate — we have to distinguish between truth and fiction.

Brown: so do you think fox news is biased?

Jarrett: well, of course they’re biased. Of course they are.

Brown: do you also think that MSNBC is biased?

Jarrett: well, you know what, this is the thing. I don’t want to — actually, I don’t want to just generalize all fox is biased or another station is biased. I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by-case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we’re going to be honest about that pattern of distortion.

Brown: but you only see that at fox news. That’s all — that you’ve spoken out about, fox.

Jarrett: what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.

When we saw all the distortions during the course of the summer. When people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death. When we’ve seen commercials go up on television that were distorting the truth, we’re actually calling everybody out.

This isn’t something that’s directed at fox. We want the American people to have a clear understanding, there’s so much at stake right now. We really don’t have a lot of time for nonsense and distortions.

The American people are also smarter than that. Let them reach their own judgments based on the facts. Let’s just take health care, for example. Reasonable people could differ about the right approach. So let’s have a conversation about that. Let’s not scare people by telling them that things are going to happen that are actually not even on the table. Let’s just talk about the facts. (end clip)

Brown: so, I am stating what I think is the obvious here. Jarrett seems loathe to admit that MSNBC has a bias. And that is where I think the white house loses all credibility on this issue.

Just as fox news leans to the right with their opinionated hosts in primetime, MSNBC leans left. I don’t think anyone at fox or MSNBC would disagree with that. In fact, both fox news and MSNBC are….

Updated: Lackeys On The Left (‘Olby’)

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Morality, War

During the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.

The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.

A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.

Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:

“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.

“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.

Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)

The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.

Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”

Update IV: Falcon’s Flight Of Fancy (Farce Continued)

Family, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist

Is the following item a metaphor for the American state of mind or what?

Grown-ups, who happen to be parents too, had been building a balloon-like experimental aircraft at their home on Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins. “The family has described the structure as a dome-shaped ‘homemade flying saucer.’ These kooks kinda believed they had secured the helium-filled contraption to the ground. Kinda, because their 6-year-old boy proved them wrong, when he climbed into the loosely tethered thing and is now afloat in the sky over eastern Colorado.

“We’re trying to determine the best course of action,” said Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Spokeswoman Kathy Davis. “This is a first and we’ll do what we need to do.”

I’d say!

A “silly people in serious times” is how Pat Buchanan characterized the contemporary America’s mindset.

Update I: The balloon has deflated and landed. No child was found therein. That’s not exactly surprising given the heights the thing scaled. The nation is searching, chicken-little style, for the poor boy, son to Richard Henne … a known storm chaser, who might have done some extracurricular chasing too: Henne made an appearance on the television program WifeSwap.

Mom’s name is “Mayumi.” It is not clear if Henne was on the tawdry reality show to “trade.” The media is characterizing the family’s “belief system” as a love of science. The Age of the Idiot…

Poor little “Falcon” (boy’s name).

Update II: On listening to the adjectival approval heaped on this family and its lifestyle—quirky, interesting, spontaneous, adventurous, science and mysticism lovers—it occurred to me that the parents of a Christian home schooler gone amiss in an air borne contraption would be met with an entirely different reaction. To wit: What were these atavistic homeschoolers doing to their child? Deluding him about the presence of G-d and the ability to reach Him with a man-made device? Why was he off school? Should social services be called? Improvise…

Update III: An entire news cycle was devoted to following the imaginary “Falcon,” as he flew through the air. Falcon was eventually located at home hiding in the extra-terrestrial transportation box engineered by his brilliant father, who was described by some members of the media as a mad genius. Publicity stunt? Journalistic ineptness? A pulse of the people’s tastes and proclivities?

Update IV: If you read the storyline, as I tracked it above, you’ll glean that from the get-go, the news media hawked the Falcon-In-The-Sky story as though it were fact. All failed the most basic journalistic test. A lede written by an old-school journalist would have specified the What, Where, Who, Why and How of the story, and then left it.

It is, moreover, amazing that the authorities and the media began from the premise that Falcon was levitating 10,000 feet above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma. This is an example of the contagion that is mass stupidity.

Update IV (Oct. 16): FARCE CONTINUED. It transpires that the “Silly Sex” had a lot to do with how this story was accepted on the face of it. With the same confidence with which allegations of date rape are accepted from women, the police Spokes Skirt had reported that there was no doubt that “Falcon” was flying high. News media then ran with this factoid without checking it. Apparently, said a male police spokesman, the family (amateur actors and all-round grafters) behaved in a believable manner.

This hearkens back to that famous American naiveté—a chronic incuriosity and lack of inquisitiveness. The absence of a learning curve probably comports with this eternal wide-eyed wonderment.

Falcon, the child, is exhibiting what, I would wager, are the symptoms of severe stress: vomiting during the press and TV performances his grease ball of a father has put him through.

Update IV: Falcon's Flight Of Fancy (Farce Continued)