Freedom Rings A Little Hollow

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.

hat tip = FB buddy VWE and Addicting Info

What We're Not Talking About

So, it's not about "Amnesty".  But it is about using the word 'Amnesty' to stir up the shit-for-brains-knee-jerk bunch.

I guess I'm wondering a tiny bit - why does Megyn admit it on the air like that?  I get the feeling she's the DumFux News version of Up-Chuck Todd - not the least bit interested in getting to the facts; she's only there to keep the mill wheels turning; her job is to tend to the Horse Race.  If she ever asks Ted Cruz on the air why he opposes Immigration Reform when it seems pretty clear Obama's trying to do basically what Repubs want him to do, she'll be fired immediately.  So maybe she's feeling so confident of her position of power she just let's it slip(?)

Dunno, but here's the thing: As soon as there actually is some kind of amity and collaboration in DC, ad revenues at Fox and NBC and CNN hit the skids.  They need the fight - shootin' wars, political campaigns, race trouble, gun violence - whatever makes us more likely to watch the coverage is what gets pushed by the image-makers and the pollsters and the lobbyists.

The reason we keep hearing about "both sides" is because billions of dollars are being spent on both sides of any given issue in order to keep us in a state of constant tension.

Tried and true - divide and conquer - if we're kept busy enough fighting each other over a few scraps that slop onto the floor, we're more likely to discount the simple fact that we've been bustin' our humps workin' together to put the food on that fuckin' table in the first fuckin' place.

KO'd

I miss Keith's rants.



And I wonder why a smart guy like Stephen A Smith decides to say incredibly stupid shit like this:

I understand that Smith's main function at ESPN is Provocateur - the guy who gets paid "to say what nobody else has the balls to say on the air" (which sometimes just ends up being the SportsGab version of "both sides do it; let's hear the other side blah blah blah").  That's his niche, and he's good at it, and he's done quite well by it.

Smith got (rightly) slammed hard because his remarks sound a whole lot like Blame The Victim.

And he continues to get slammed (again rightly) for his stoopid-sounding attempts  "to set the record straight", which sounds like: "I love women; some of the people dearest to me are women; and all they need to do is not make me beat the fuck out of 'em."

This will be a long tweeted message, folks. So please stay with me and let me finish my complete thought before responding...b/c i'm ANNOYED

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

In discussing the Ray Rice ruling earlier today on @ESPN_FirstTake, me and@RealSkipBayless ventured into discussing domestic violence.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Upon hearing what I had to say, although admitting I could've been more articulate on the matter, let me be clear: I don't understand how on

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

earth someone could interpret that I somehow was saying women are to blame for domestic violence. And when I saw @MichelleDBeadle -- a

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

colleague I have profound respect for -- tweet what she tweeted, enough is enough. Something needs to be said right now.
REPEATEDLY i said:

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

There is absolutely no excuse to put your hands on a women. REPEATEDLY, I said dudes who do that need to be dealt with. REPEATEDLY, I echoed

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

when confronted by it in the past -- when someone was stupid enough to touch a loved one of this man, raised by 4 older sisters, a mom and

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

numerous female relatives and loved ones, that man was dealt with. From that point, I simply asked: now what about the other side.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

If a man is pathetic and stupid enough to put his hands on a woman -- which I have NEVER DONE, btw -- of course he needs to pay the price.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Who on earth is denying that? But what about addressing women on how they can help prevent the obvious wrong being done upon them?

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

In no way was I accusing a women of being wrong. I was simply saying what that preventive measures always need to be addressed because

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

there's only but so much that can be done after the fact....once the damage is already done. Nothing more.
My apologies to @MichelleDBeadle

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

And any woman out there who misconstrued what I said. I have always -- and will always -- find violence against a women every bit as

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

horrific as women, themselves, find it. Always have. Always will, which my personal behavior exemplifies. I'll strive to be more articulate

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

in the future. But be clear, I wasn't BLAMING women for anything. I was simply saying to take all things into consideration for preventative

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

purposes. Period.

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) July 25, 2014

Yeah - kinda like Bull Connor saying, "We have lotsa negras down here; and we don't have a problem with 'em as long they don't do nuthin' that makes us turn the dogs and the fire hoses on 'em."

So maybe we're getting a little better at seeing thru the bullshit(?)  I dunno, but it looks like a feud is erupting inside the ESPN family and it'll be interesting to see how Management handles it.

Call It "Quaint"

FAIR-TV looks at the week's Press Poodling:

Today's Best Tweet

In reaction to Obama stiffing the TV Poodles at his press conference yesterday:

Obama refuses to call on any TV network reporters at press conference, leading to nationwide false equivalence shortage.

Hey, Hey Paula

I truly don't give a good goddamn about Paula Deen or the little dramas that play themselves out behind the scenes of daytime cable TV.  If this was just another dustup over royalties or whose ego got bruised in a contract fight or whatever, then none of it matters at all, and I'd leave it alone.  But it isn't, and it does, so I can't.

I'll leave it at this, from Dan Bernstein at CBSChicago.com:

Until yesterday, she had the system wired to play up all the folksy charm of her heritage while smoothing away any rough edges of its horrific historical dark side. She even accomplished one of the most shockingly brazen endorsement deals in the history of modern media – finally getting around to admitting her own diabetes, only to begin shilling for a drug purported to fight the disease. She was stuffing her drooling viewers’ bodies full of excess glucose, only to grab at their money once they talked to their alarmed doctors.

A charade that never really should have been allowed to happen in the first place is finally over. An uneducated, unattractive woman who can’t cook somehow stumbled up to a prime position in American media by pandering successfully to similarly stupid, unhealthy people, aided by TV executives happy to keep cashing their checks.

hat tip = Blue Gal

Today's Un-Event

Smart people talking about important stuff:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Moment Of Clarity

NSFW

Lee Camp tells it.

About That Liberal Press Thing

Couldn't remember if I'd posted the graphic when it came out, so just in case I missed it, here it is.

And BTW, this isn't some kind of outlier.  The basics that lead to these results don't ever change more than a few percentage points.

I remember Pew doing the same thing after the 2000 election, when the heat was really on - seemed like the nutters couldn't stop howling about how the press was constantly trying to put Gore in the White House.  Well, guess what, boys and girls?  Pew's research in 2001 showed a bias in favor of Bush positives and Gore negatives in every major newspaper - it all worked out to be something like 7-5 against Gore.  And of course it got practically no play outside of Academe.

Guess what else?  The effect this slanted coverage has on our thinking actually has a name: "Media Priming", and while it's news to me, it's been around for a very long time.

Here's a fun little appetizer from Melissa Dahl at msnbc.com:

It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.

And from a guy named Scott London, a good breakdown of "Framing":

In his book Is Anyone Responsible?, Shanto Iyengar evaluates the framing effects of television news on political issues. Through a series of laboratory experiments (reports of which constitute the core of the book), he finds that the framing of issues by television news shapes the way the public understands the causes of and the solutions to central political problems.

Since electoral accountability is the foundation of representative democracy, the public must be able to establish who is responsible for social problems, Iyengar argues. Yet the news media systematically filter the issues and deflect blame from the establishment by framing the news as "only a passing parade of specific events, a 'context of no context.'"

--more--

In their 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, McCombs and Shaw argued that the most important effect of the mass media was "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us." The news media "may not be successful in telling us what to think," the authors declared, "but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."

There are no accidents when it comes to what goes on in our politics.  It's being carefully scripted for us, and we have to find ways to countervail it.

Koch Bros

My main question is always something like: Why do I have to go to Al-Jazeera to get this perspective?

--or--

Where the fuck is this Left-leaning Mainstream American Media we keep hearing about?

Makes Me Wanna Holler

Mainstream

Has anyone ever heard either Roger Ailes or Rush Limbaugh say that their organizations present a general viewpoint that ISN'T widely-held?  Don't they at least intimate that their political bent is in agreement with a big majority of the American people?

How do these bozos get away with bitchin' about "the mainstream media" when they ARE the mainstream media?

Makes Me Wonder

The main question is exactly what Olbermann asks: In a media environment that desperately needs content to fill a 24/7 airspace, where's the coverage for this? I can see how CurrentTV would use the lack of coverage by others to pump up their own cred, but that doesn't explain how practically every other outlet is avoiding the story of a days-long protest aimed at the heart of American economic power.