Category Archives: Media

Assassinations Under US Auspices?

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Journalism, Justice, Law, Media, Middle East

I hope the failed assassination attempt on Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s vice president, recently appointed to quell the unrest in that country, is not a harbinger of things to come. I am thinking of the vulgar cellphone images that circulated the Internet, in which a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, is heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner. Even more repugnant than the hasty hanging carried out under US auspices were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein obtain here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” had more in common with the French Revolutionary Assembly (See “No Due Process For A Despot”).

Similarly, such a barbaric specter in Egypt (conjuring the French, and not the American, Revolution), will have been greatly inspired, like in Iraq, by American media screeches.

I worry because the US is not necessarily averse to hasty hangings, considering that the strongmen we betray may turn around and tell all: You know; the stuff about how they helped the U.S. with its rendition and torture programs.

UPDATED: The MEDIA Is The Message (Amanpour’s Anticlimax)

Ethics, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Good journalism doesn’t assert or hypothesize; it reports the facts dispassionately, and from all sides of a dispute. Alas, I have just heard Neil Cavuto suggest, casually, to a guest on his FoxNews show, that the Egyptian police are probably embedded in the crowds and causing the commotion. The stupidity of the American media’s mindset; the need to see matters in simplistic, either/or dichotomies—this alone should disqualify them from reporting on the news. But inherent in what I’ve said is a presumption of standards. These no longer matter in journalism (and in many more fields of endeavor).

Cavuto’s sentiments, shared by the media monolith, proceed from the assumption that the Egyptian protesters are as pure as the driven snow, and that, therefore, the aggression witnessed must be the handiwork of agents provocateurs. This, even though we don’t have reliable information from all sources to determine what is unfolding on the streets of Cairo. Neil could be right. But good reporting is not a chance affair. In floating assumptions, Cavuto, like almost every other journalist reporting on Egypt, is out of line. They are helping to cement opinion in the absence of facts. Where is Michael Ware when you need him? (http://www.mickware.info/2011News/2011News.php)

Ware is probably too manly for the girls at CNN. Which brings me to that channel’s Alpha Female: the vain, posturing, preachy Anderson Cooper. Remember when this narcissist had his crew film him lugging around an injured Haitian boy? Cooper was roughed up in Egypt (a good producer should have taken him to the woodshed a long time ago). So he turned that into The Story; found a safe haven, where he hunkered down, and whiled-away the evening broadcast repeating what he had endured. Like Cavuto, Cooper also allowed himself to carelessly hypothesize—this time about the possibility of a Tiananmen-Square type occurrence the following day. Quite a few of his colleagues in the “profession” referred irresponsibly (almost wishfully) to the Tienanmen Square massacre, vis-a-vis Egypt.

The American media colors events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism, often creating reality on the ground, instead of reporting on it.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Is that still true? It is not the technology that molds the events—technology facilitates and frees information. Rather, it is the jet-setting journalist whose persona and ideology propel his pursuits.

UPDATE (Feb. 6): AMANPOUR’S ANTICLIMAX. Via Larry Auster:

Watching Christiane Amanpour on ABC this morning, it appeared this woman devoutly wished a revolution along certain lines. It had to be a world-shattering, epoch-shaping event. For this media moment, she was brought forth, along with her male counterpart, Fareed Zakaria.
However this breathless, transcendent moment got bogged down in bureaucracy. In her interview with Egyptian Vice-President Suleiman, it became apparent that Muburak would not step down before September, that the Egyptian parliament would proceed in an incremental, step-wise fashion to implement reform, and that the government was asking the crowds to disperse and go back home to their daily lives and jobs.
So much for the orgiastic climax to the days of rage and the revolution. ‘Twas not the consummation devoutly to be desired.

The point being that this is not how news is done.

UPDATED: Boob Attacks Bachmann

Intelligence, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

Meghan McCain has issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, which is being lapped up by the most fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity: MSNBC. “Michele Bachmann … is no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin,” she told Lawrence O’Donnell in her most grating of Valley-Girl inflections. “I take none of this seriously,” McCain declared grandiosely about Bachmann’s Tea Party address.

Meghan McCain is a licentious, self-adoring, dense liberal. Yet nothing she does, including to plaster a grotesque image of her exposed appendages on Twitter, gets her laughed off the prominent platform she’s been accorded thanks to her famous father and her mother’s money. It is clear that Meghan is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. The real disgrace here is that no conservative with clout has dared to eviscerate this cow.

If David Frum, a neoconservative with some sway, had any self-respect, he would have refused to dignify the host O’Donnell’s request that he address the bitchy substance-less attack McCain launched against her betters, in this case Michele Bachmann.

Bill O’Reilly, similarly, was quite serious about discussing “Ms. McCain’s” pronouncement with Laura Igraham, who played along peacefully. What is she afraid of?

Read the mild response of Breitbart’s Big Government correspondent.

What is Ann Coulter waiting for? I call on Ms. Coulter to dispatch this ding-dong forthwith with a few masterful syllogisms mixed with a sobering reality check or two. She’d be doing us all a mitzvah.

UPDATE (Jan. 30): To the funny letter below: I’ve heard the gangsta in the White House mention “Snookie,” so she must be a cultural icon as worthless as the others BHO entertains there—the president has even complimented one of the Kardashian hos for her performance.
I’m pleased to report I’ve hear the name “Snookie” mentioned, but have not bothered to find out who she/he is.

UPDATED: Yes, Bachmann’s Brainy

Elections, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has all the brain power poor Sarah Palin is without. Chris Matthews says she looks like she’s dazed, hypnotized, irrational. I think this is because to Matthews, a fully engaged female is someone like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who talks up a storm in promoting Obama’s statist schemes. Simpletons perceive a fulminating statism as “good,” “caring,” and certainly “smart.”

Bachmann is in the news for a change as she is “mulling a presidential bid.” As you know, I do quite like this woman. She is quick and cannot be rattled.

Very little has been said in the muck-raking media about Bachmann’s background. You can just imagine what publicity Wasserman Schultz (of the double-barreled, affectatious surname) would receive had she provided foster care for 23 children in addition to raising five of her own.

Most women lawyers, moreover, do not go into tax law; family law is more like it. Michelle has a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. Now let’s not go off on a tangent about the evils of tax law and its enforcement. We’re agreed; The Sixteenth is the Number of the Beast (and Bachmann is forever tainted for having enforced the law). The point made here is that tax law is quite a bit more cerebrally taxing than immigration or family law. Not that you’d know it from the manner in which she is portrayed, but Bachmann is clearly very clever.

Indeed, from the media scrum one hears very little about Michelle Bachmann’s undeniable intellectual aptitude, as they hate her with a purple passion.

In any event, it is this rational, steely quality that drives Chris Matthews crazy. After all, he is the emotional wreck who regularly experiences daytime nocturnal emissions over Obama and genuinely believes that the president is an intellectual of the highest order.

UPDATE (Jan. 6): According to her foes over at Hardball, “Michele Bachmann (R-MN) introduced the first bill of the 112th Congress today, and she’s landed a prime spot on the Intelligence Committee.” Somewhat vapidly, the WSJ characterizes Bachmann’s challenge to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as “an interesting strategy to gain more attention.”

Could it be that the financial bill, in all its 2,300 pristine, unread pages and the 500 odd new regulations it imposed simply needs to go? Bachmann has been consistent in her vehement opposition to a bill that will “further increase in the overweening powers of the Executive branch, which will now be able to seize a firm it designates as systemically risky.”