Category Archives: Media

Chris Matthews Ousted For Not Being A Girly Guy

Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Etiquette, Feminism, Gender, Media, Sex

Chris Matthews has always been a tough-talking, gnarled interviewer. His style is manly and abrupt. You can’t have that in the Age of the Girly Boy—where men are expected to be clones of the females with whom they work. Or, else.

Guy talk, like calling a woman, actress Kerry Washington, “a total knockout,” and commenting to one Laura Bassett, “Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?”—those won’t do in the age of the wimp.

Matthews also used silly hyperbole to describe Mr. Sanders’s victory in the Nevada caucuses, and he dared to question, rather than just accept, E. Warren’s version of Mr. Bloomberg’s alleged sexual misconduct.

Ageism is also a factor.  A stupid society worships the stupid. Unfortunately, in our age, The Age of the Idiot, the younger the individual, generally the more ill-educated and illiterate he or she is.

Irony of ironies: Conservative-minded people (check) are more likely to defend Matthews on principle than progressives, creators of the culture that has just cancelled him.

New York Times:

… Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.

On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.

Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.

“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”

His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”

Mr. Griffin, who is close with Mr. Matthews, traveled to Washington over the weekend to discuss his future in person, according to three people who requested anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.

On the air on Monday, Mr. Matthews made clear that the timing of his exit was not entirely his choosing. “Obviously, it isn’t for a lack of interest in politics,” he said, going on to apologize for his past insensitive comments.

“Compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK are never OK,” he said. “Not then, and certainly not today.” …

… Commenting on the Nevada caucuses, Mr. Matthews compared Mr. Sanders’s victory to Germany’s takeover of France in World War II, drawing the ire of many liberals. He later apologized on-air, saying, “In the days and weeks and months ahead, I will strive to do a better job myself of elevating the political discussion.”

A day later, he was under fire again, this time for repeatedly questioning Ms. Warren about her assertion that Michael R. Bloomberg had mistreated his female employees. Ms. Warren was referring to a widely reported anecdote, and Mr. Matthews’s disbelief was criticized as sexist and dismissive.

On Friday, yet another faux pas: Mr. Matthews confused the identities of two African-American politicians, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Jaime R. Harrison, a Democrat running for Senate in that state. “Big mistake; mistaken identity, sir, sorry,” Mr. Matthews said after he was corrected on-air. …

* Chris Matthews, Via Slate

UPDATE II (3/6/023): China’s Disease-Breeding, Barbaric Wet Markets Are Hell On Earth For Animals

China, Conservatism, Culture, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Media, Science

China’s “wet markets,” set up by immigrants in the US too, are hell on earth for animals: They are tied up, stacked in cages and slaughtered on the spot for “freshness.”

UPDATE II (3/6/023): And no, Tucker Carlson, wet markets are not only for fish, as the host asserted in the first week of March, 2023.

A wet market (also called a public market[4] or a traditional market[5]) is a marketplace selling fresh foods such as meat, fish, produce and other consumption-oriented perishable goods in a non-supermarket setting

Here is an objective news report-–yes, these still exist—of the nature of the typical Chinese “wet market” scene, where filth and unfathomable barbarity combine to breeds diseases like the coronavirus syndrome, which came out of Wuhan Province.

AP: “Virus renews safety concerns about slaughtering wild animals“

The Wuhan market was also like many other “wet markets” in Asia and elsewhere, where animals are tied up or stacked in cages. Activists say it’s difficult to distinguish between those that were legally farmed and those that may have been illegally hunted. The animals are often killed on site to ensure freshness. The messy mix raises the tiny odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.

“You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which works to protect wildlife and public health from emerging diseases.

UPDATE (2/17): Where’s the moron US media?

Some ethical truths can’t be denied: However well-regulated and legal, abattoirs are also hell-on-earth for animals.

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TV’s Stone-Cold Harridans Against Roger Stone

Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Gender, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Continued post impeachment is the non-stop huffing coming from “TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys. These people are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.” (See “The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror“)

(Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner who sat knitting as she watched the en masse public beheadings of aristocrats, 17,000 of them, in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution…)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shriek in vengeance on TV when anyone suggests mercy—or just justice—for the likes of Roger Stone or Paul Manafort, who were caught up in the derangement against all things Trump.

Susan Hennessey is one CNN ghoul who cannot tolerate mercy—or just plain justice—for Roger Stone, even though John Dean of Watergate fame indicated that the 9-year sentence imposed on Stone is brutally harsh. Dean, by the way, has nothing good to say about Stone; he was just being fair-minded or legally minded.

Not the ladies. (CNN activist/anchor Brooke Baldwin just kept up the breathless mutterings: “stunning. stunning.”)

READ: “The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror”

* Image courtesy of Politico

Why Is Glenn Greenwald In Brazil, In The First Place? Don’t Ask The Washington Examiner

Critique, English, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

Truly ghastly writing from Washington Examiner editorial staff, most of them still in short-pants, is nothing new.

This appallingly written, dog’s breakfast of a column, “The arrest of Glenn Greenwald reminds us what actual press persecution looks like,” repeatedly states the obvious: American journalists know not what it is to work under duress, bereft of freedom of the press.

Conversely, Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist based in Brazil, does.

But the worst infraction of journalism committed by the writer is the man’s lack of intellectual curiosity and shallow knowledge about the object of his justified defense, Glenn Greenwald.

In trying to make a point about the freedoms the American press enjoys, as opposed to the lack thereof in Brazil, the author, a “deputy contributors editor and commentary writer,” appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that, after helping Edward Snowden expose the U.S. National Security Agency, “the world’s largest surveillance organization,” Mr. Greenwald came under the scrutiny of the U.S. government, and is likely “a target of U.S. surveillance.”

It is still unclear whether Greenwald may return to the U.S. without risking arrest in the homeland.

How’s that for irony? This journalistic void renders ridiculous the outrage evinced by the writer (of “The arrest of Glenn Greenwald reminds us what actual press persecution looks like”) against Brazil’s authoritarian president, considering that Greenwald might be arrested on return to the U.S.

Via the Committee to Protect Journalists:

Glenn Greenwald would like to go home to the United States, at least for a visit. But the Guardian journalist and blogger is afraid to do so. He still has material and unpublished stories from his contacts with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden that he believes U.S. authorities would love to get their hands on. The nine-hour detention and interrogation of Greenwald’s Brazilian partner David Miranda by British security services at London’s Heathrow airport in August has only compounded his fears.
“I have been told by pretty much everybody I have asked, including lawyers for the Guardian, my personal lawyer, lawyers I trust, political people who are well connected that it would be very ill-advised for me to travel back to the United States right now because the chances that I would be arrested are something more than trivial,” Greenwald told CPJ in Rio de Janeiro.

To the Daily Beast, Greenwald said this:

“I’ve had lots of prominent [American] political and media figures calling for my arrest and prosecution and strongly suggesting, if not outright stating, that what I am doing is criminal.”

****

Other than from the title of the column, “The arrest of Glenn Greenwald reminds us what actual press persecution looks like,” and the embedded hyperlinks meant to be followed by the reader—the latter is none the wiser about the fate that befell poor Mr. Greenwald.

The rules of writing are that you tell readers in your lede paragraph about the thing upon which you’ve based your column. “The Five Ws” of journalism are:

What happened?
Who did that?
When did it take place?
Where did it take place?
Why did that happen?

Then there are what I call the “really-really” qualifications.

Greenwald is said to be “coming from a far-left perspective.” What a deeply silly statement. It’s like writing, “very-very left wing.” Who does that?

Bad journos who are subconsciously trying to set themselves in a camp other than the “far-left” do that.

Bad journos who are trying to emphasize their fair-mindedness do that.

Greenwald is a fair-minded liberal. That’s it. He is certainly not a far-left journalist.

There’s more white noise, but I’m tired of documenting shit.

 

* Glenn Greenwald courtesy REUTERS/Sergio Moraes