Today's Wonderment

So, tell me again - why is everybody always so down on The Media?

Outrage and shock and dismay, oh my! It was all over Facebook the last coupla days too.

C'mon - really?  With all the really weird and horrible shit going on in the world, Miley Cyrus is what we need to worry about?

And when I stop to think about it for a moment, maybe the people who're throwing their little hissy fits might wanna thank her for letting them retreat back into the fantasy of believing an exhibitionist teenager is at the root of all our troubles.

Our Esteemed Press

This made it onto the air at KTVU in Oakland:

According to PR Spokeswoman, Lotta Suxon-Swallows, KTVU's General Manager Edgar (Curly) Hawgpekker was unavailable for comment, but she did say a statement would be posted to their website by the company's legal advisors, Dumas & McPhail.

Would it come as a surprise for anybody to learn KTVU is the local affiliate for DumFux News?  Yeah - I didn't think it would.

big hat tip = Balloon Juice

Beat The Press

Smackin' My Forehead

Once in a while, I need somebody like Julianna Forlano to remind me - it's not about delivering content to consumers.  It's about delivering consumers to advertisers.

Today's Nonsense

So the DumFux News affiliate in Hartford CT ran a story about Women's Day at the Capitol, and the 'b-roll' (the video they run so you have a visual to go with the copy being read) - yeah you prob'ly already guessed - it was nuthin' but tits.

Don't get me wrong here: I like boobies; bazongas; headlights; cans; melons; honkers; breasts; mammaries etc ad infinitum.  I like female, and I like all that 'female' implies which happens to include the tasty sensual and sexy bits.

I am also not stupid, and so I know about a little thing we grownups like to call "appropriate to time and place".  We also call it "respect for the wholeness of a human being", and sometimes we call it "trying not to think with your dick once in a while".

But I digress.  Take a look:



First, this kinda crap doesn't happen by accident. Some producer sat in a meeting and made a decision about what b-roll to put on the air; and even if that producer delegated the actual decision to an underling, that underling chose clips from the file footage that he/she knew to be in keeping with whatever is Standard Operating Procedure according to the station's and/or the network's style book. Those jiggle shots didn't happen by accident. Of course, the affiliate's PR folks tried to claim otherwise:

Second, this shit happens a lot at DumFux News, but somehow the "apology" never includes a mention of any disciplinary action being taken against the Producers, Associate Producers, Reporters, Editors, Interns, et al.

The kicker though is that a majority of viewers who called the station about the story were pissed off and that's what prompted the apology.

When 51% of DumFux viewers find something on Dumfux News objectionable, I have to take it as a good sign.

(more than a) hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Could Be A Good Thing

Andrea Seabrook (NPR's Capitol Hill Reporter) just couldn't take the shit any more.

So she split, and started DecodeDC:

"I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say.

...

We need to stop coddling lawmakers, stop buying their red team, blue team narrative and ask harder questions of them."

Hoping it works out great - worried that it won't.

The bit on NPR from a few weeks ago:



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Politicizing Mothers' Day

Ann Romney has a piece in USA Today all about the glories of motherhood and the importance of cherishing our moms.  Wow - way to take a tough stand on that one, Annie.

Go read it if you think you need a little blast of meaningless treacle from about 1915.  For my own self, this is one of those times I wish I could spell the sound I make when I puke.

It's hard to imagine now, but before the birth of my first child, I had never held a baby. Not once, not in my entire life. No baby at home to tend, no niece or nephew to babysit. So you can imagine, the day my first boy was born I felt woefully unprepared.

She tries to make it sound like she's some kinda "regular person".  She isn't.  She'd never held a baby?  Seems odd 'til you take a quick little Google spin thru her old neighborhood, or do a bit of reading on Bloomfield Hills Michigan* where she grew up.  She probably never did any laundry or cooked a meal for herself either.  Not that any of that makes her a bad egg in any way - just that it doesn't make her any kind of kindred spirit with anybody who's ever struggled with any of life's little obstacles.  It's hard to imagine Ann Romney ever being denied much of anything, or a time when somebody wasn't shinin' her ass over one thing or another.

*Bloomfield Hills ... consistently ranks as one of the top five wealthiest cities in the United States with population between 2,500 to 9,999 — it currently is listed at the number four position and in 1990 it was ranked number two,[6] and has the highest income of any city outside of California, Florida or Virginia. The median income for a family is over $200,000. In 2000, 49% of residential property in Bloomfield Hills had a value of over $1,000,000.[7]

Generally, I don't mind when campaign consultants insist on trying to pull this kind of crap; I just wish they weren't always so fucking clumsy and obvious about it.

Uh Oh

At least one headline writer at one media outlet has had a sudden attack of conscience or integrity or truth-telling - or something - I'm not sure we even have a word for it anymore.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Not to worry tho'.  I'm sure it was just a momentary lapse.  A little Paycheck Reduction Therapy should straighten that guy up and make sure he doesn't run the risk of becoming Fact Addicted or anything.

Smoke And Mirrors

I've been noticing lately that the officiating in the NFL has been something less than stellar.  This isn't a terribly new thing.  The players get bigger and faster, and the game speeds up, and it can take a while for the Stripes to catch up - pretty simple formula.  What really bugs me tho' is that I don't see any of the blown calls on any of the highlite shows, and I never hear any of the commentators talking about it either.  It starts to look a lot like a media blackout.

I'm not saying the games are rigged, but I will say that in the absence of scrutiny, the potential for dastardly behavior will flourish in sports, business, government, religion, whatever.

Connecting those dots with any of these other dots may a bit of a stretch, but it feels like there's a real corollary at work here.

(hat tip = HuffPo)

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.

News Poodles

DumFux News viewers got an eyeful recently. (hat tip = Democratic Underground) Some points of emphasis: First, Eva Golinger's comments starting at about 1:45. Second, CNN screwed up on some of its coverage too, but they aired the appropriate correction/apology. Third, DumFux News, of course, made no such attempts to correct the record that I've been able to find (and the original video has mysteriously disappeared from foxnews.com). Which very much reinforces my assertion that when you see this shit on DumFux News, it's no mistake.

Keeping Score

Anybody with a living, functioning brain knows DumFux News is a sham.  When was the last time they won any of the several awards for any kind of journalism?

From Loose Live Stock in 2007: (*)

CBS News: 154
ABC News: 122
NBC News: 114
PBS: 42
CNN: 33
BBC News: 15
MSNBC: 3
CNBC: 3
Dumont: 1
Fox News Channel: 0

Fun Fact #1:  Dumont only survived for about 12 years, and has been off the air for 55 years - and they still have more awards than DumFux News.

Fun Fact #2: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is on Comedy Central for 30 minutes a night, 4 nights a week, about 40 weeks a year - Jon Stewart has won the Peabody more often than DumFux News.

Fun Fact #3: The only "awards" DumFux News has managed to win are the ones that have been made up by either former News Corp execs, or by the heavy hitters behind phony organizations like AEI and AFP.

(*) A quick turn thru Wiki and the awards sites indicates that the only thing that's changed is that everybody's won a couple of more times - except for Dumont and DumFux News.

Not News

This cannot be considered any kind of news - not after almost 2 generations of constant and concerted efforts to chip away at every democratic tradition anybody cares to name.

I'm NOT saying CongressCritters haven't contributed greatly to their own crappy image by doing things that everybody thinks are stupid; and by not doing things that everybody thinks are smart.  What I'm saying is that on top of all that, you don't get to spend 35 years and a gajillion dollars trashing each other in very public ways and then wonder why everybody's looking at you like you've got scabs on your dick.

NYT Late To The Party - Again

Some pretty decent analysis from Numerian at The Agonist, on the main reason our 4th estate is in the middle of an Epic FAIL.

As an ex-subscriber to The New York Times, I too have been outraged by such stories, but not because I read them in the paper of record, which is not simply very late to the game of reporting on this phenomenon - it is too late. I’ve been outraged by these stories because I have been reading about this for years on internet blogs. Some of the most persistent reporters and analysts who write about this problem include Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, Yves Smith at the Naked Capitalist blog, and Karl Denninger at the Market Ticker blog. All three of these writers have no doubt lost some readers over the years because they write about these stories over and over, and manage to maintain a sustained fury over the debasement of the rule of law that is evidenced by the way the big banks operate, and the inability or refusal of the government to do much about it.
These are the sort of people who have been criticized for years by The New York Times for sloppy reporting because they don’t have to live by the strict journalistic standards that are upheld every day by the mainstream media.

Whether or not this is true – and for the most part these writers have been careful about ensuring that the facts they present are verified – it is definitely the case that mainstream media reporters and analysts have not taken the angry, vituperative, and in some cases vulgar tone that bloggers take when talking about the collapse of the rule of law.

Therein lies a problem, and it is one that the mainstream media is only now beginning to comprehend. The undermining of the US Constitution and the laws as passed by Congress, and the refusal by government to investigate or prosecute these violations, which are now rife, represent some of the most serious challenges imaginable to a democracy based on a republican form of government. Anyone who takes their responsibilities as a citizen of the US seriously should be outraged by these circumstances.

Maybe we're starting to see some signs of revolt from inside the closed-loop crony-driven system which has tied Business, Government and Press together into a neat little bundle. We need that rebellion because we've allowed our little experiment in self government to slip into the oldest game in the world - ie: once everybody's guilty, nobody can be held responsible.  We have to figure out how to split it all up again, and put clearly discernible dividers back into place.  Balance has gone out of the system and must be reestablished.

Professional Left Podcast 100

Episode 100 from The Professional Left:

(hacked from Crooks and Liars - how proud my mom would be)

Featured links:
Newt Gingrich lauded by WaPo

Rachel Maddow rips on Paul Wolfowicz

The Pentagon's double-dip on weapons

The Perpetual War Portfolio

Let Herman Be Herman

Cain has spent some time trying to defend having 2 or 3 different stances on the abortion rights issue over the last coupla weeks. So Bob Schieffer brings him on CBS's version of the Sunday morning Wave-Your-Dick-At-America show, and plays at being a real journalist by pinning Cain down on his abortion position. And Cain nails himself to the Pro-Lifers' cross like a dutiful little Repub who feels the need to pander to the crazies, and ol' Bob just smiles and nods 'cuz that's all according to the script. But then Cain goes on to make the usual ridiculous assertions about Planned Parenthood, and about how Margaret Sanger's real intention was to launch a genocide against black people. Schieffer "challenges" him for proof, and Cain pulls the standard malarkey out of his ass - "If you look at the history..." And ol' Bob just smiles and nods - way to get tough there, Bob.


So fast forward to the question of that goofy campaign ad. Schieffer asks a coupla puffball questions, and then we get to the real meat of the story - smoking. And now ol' Bob is on the attack 'cuz suddenly it's not about some esoteric nonsense of a political party fucking half the US population out of their rights; it's all about Bob and how Bob survived a bout with a smoking-related cancer; and how Bob feels so strongly that smoking ain't cool. Jesus H Fucking Schwartz.

Biased Media

The contention that "the mainstream media" is slanted toward the Liberal side of the spectrum is a myth that gets exposed on a pretty regular basis.

There's a good long post at Crooks and Liars:

As if to prove the truth of this study, The Hill ran with an amazing headline today:

Poll: Half of Americans believe Obama doesn't deserve reelection

Hmmm. Let's see. If half of Americans believe he doesn't deserve re-election, then that means the other half does, right? Which means that headline could easily have been flipped around to read "Half of Americans believe Obama deserves re-election." And if that headline could have been flipped and wasn't, one might ask why? Here's another way they could have worded it: "Americans evenly split on whether Obama deserves re-election". That would have been neutral, at least.

Makes Me Wanna Holler

My Dear Mr Santorum

This guy is just completely stuck in 1992.  He carps about 'Social Engineering' in the US Military when it comes to DADT, and ignores all the other social engineering that's been implemented with some real success stories coming out it all.

Black people serving side-by-side with white people.  That was a bit of social engineering.  They said  we couldn't do it because unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Guess what - it disrupted unit cohesion.  Guess what else.  The unit got over it; and in fact, the unit got better because we started drawing form a wider and deeper pool of prospective talent.
(ok - so I lifted most of that from an episode of The West Wing - it's exactly the point and it bears repeating)

Women - see preceding paragraph.

LGBT - see preceding paragraph, and understand that there's been an LGBT presence in the US Military FOREVER.

Santorum loves to warn us about the dangers of sexuality - especially HOMO SEX - In fact, it seems like every time anything pops up regarding LGBT, the guy goes straight to the Oh-My-God-There's-Gonna-Be-Just-Way-Too-Much-Fucking-Going-On-I-Can't-Stand-It-But-I-Can't-Stop-Thinking-About-It card.  Why should I not think he's just a little too obsessed with it?  Why should I not wonder if he's battling his own demons?  OK, too easy.  If he's a latent case, I gotta figure it'll show up soon enough.

What really gets me tho', is that none of the Press Poodles has picked up on the claim about LGBT's wanting us to "grant them special rights".  That's been bullshit going back 20 years as the Repubs have been trying to pass all those fucked up amendments aimed at denying equal rights to LGBTs.  Where the fuck is one decent journalist who'll ask Santorum to delineate exactly what 'special rights' LGBT's are demanding?

Isn't It Interesting?

The biggest deal in the last 20 years of Rupert Murdoch's media empire (his attempt to buy BskyB in the UK) is stalled and may be dead because Murdoch has to prop up the share value of News Corp by accelerating his buy-back program - and of course the reason he has a stock price problem is because he had to shut down his single most profitable daily newspaper in his UK operation because of his suddenly revealed trouble concerning illegal wiretapping (and maybe fraud and obstruction and official bribery too) and gosh - not a single word of any of that is to be found anywhere on foxnews.com or Fox Business or Fox Nation; and there's been no ink all in The Wall Street Journal.

A multi-billion dollar deal that may go in the tank, and a major scandal involving one of the biggest media players in the world - and WSJ... uh...what?  They missed it?  It just slipped by unnoticed?

The good news is that maybe this finally rips the bandaid off and we wake up to what these assholes have been doing to us.

The bad news is that maybe this is how the real collapse starts.

Watch out for what happens in Italy in the next few months. (read this at The Agonist)