Tag: MSM

45 Seconds

Rachel Maddow touches on something critically important while discussing the GOP’s latest complaint: that Obama simply doesn’t use the word “terrorism” enough:

[Republicans are] lying in a way that can be obviously, demonstrably, embarrassingly proven by anyone who has a spare 45 seconds and the Google. When the people in the Republican Party who have the highest profile on national security say things that are easily, provably, flagrantly false, that’s a mistake. That makes it look like the party doesn’t know what it’s talking about a national security issues…. You guys, when you say President Obama doesn’t use the word terrorism, try to remember that when you say that, people are laughing at you.

That’s wonderful. Except that it’s easily, provably, and flagrantly false. First: The Conservative Media (and their beloved right-wing noise machine) still, still hews to the notion that the GOP is automatically and always the National Security Party. Cokie Roberts said so just the other day on that “liberal” bastion NPR. Everyone on-air agreed with her. Her comments and those of several others are what led to the creation of this handy guide. Second: The fundamental constituent for this sort of unsupported-by-facts nonsense is not someone who knows what “a Google” is, may think “the internet” is that Explorer shortcut on their desktop, and frequently worries that this time they’ve really missed their chance at riches from a mysterious Nigerian businessman who wanted to send all his money their way, just for a few days.

People are not laughing at the GOP, Rachel. You and I are. Unfortunately, we don’t really matter. The GOPers peddling this nonsense never had our vote to begin with. Low information voters, hell, no information voters are bathed daily in information- and context-free nonsense from Rush, FOXnews, Glenn Beck, talk radio, and 50 other sources. To them, these claims sound not only supportable but utterly reasonable and serious-minded. Google, if they even know what it is, doesn’t enter into the equation. Until Democrats internalize this and message accordingly, nothing will change. Until the media at large internalizes this and begins to challenge, immediately and on the spot, and embarrass into silence these asshats the instant this sort of statement emits from their fetid pie-hole, nothing will change.

This is what Karl Rove fundamentally understood: in the modern media environment, the truth doesn’t matter. The initial lie, no matter how quickly or decisively defenestrated it may be, is out there. And, just like Cokie’s Law states: if it’s “out there” we have to treat it as fact and discuss it. Repeatedly and without recourse to anything approaching helpful context. That’s what we call good, hard-nosed journalism.

How long is yours

Michael Kinsley wants to cut down newspaper articles by removing “legacy code,” overlong or overly florid lines that, while checking some traditional journalistic content box, don’t actually advance the story or inform the reader. Fair enough. Felix Salmon more or less agrees, again going on mostly about story length, noting that the Atlantic still does long stories in print (so wonderful for the train!) and but has shorter, web-only content online (along with those dreaded longer stories “reprinted” from the physical magazine). He points out what he sees as the crux of difference via a newspaper example:

…newspaper conventions have been built for physical newspapers, and can look silly in the age of the web — especially when the stories themselves appear, pretty much unchanged, on newspapers’ websites. It might make sense for the physical LA Times to run one big story about Afghanistan, but once that decision is made, no one is going to chop that one big story into three smaller ones for the website.

Right off the bat, he implicitly accepts an assumption that the web version needs to be shorter. If anything, the online edition should be longer, with a note in the physical version to go online for more depth about this or that tribal issue, interactive maps, whatever. That way, when you’re reading the Times on your 2025 model iTablet, everything is suddenly knit together in a way that allows you to expand or contract the amount of information you’re taking in based on your wants/needs of the moment.

I’m not exactly sure why this concept is so hard to understand: In the electronic era, there is no a priori limitation to the relative length or brevity of a story. It need not be artificially and randomly cut to 250 words to squeeze into a particular newshole or avoid a page-jump (think: USAToday), nor stretched to 15,000 words to buff up its apparent “importance.” Stories should be exactly as long as they need to be. I agree with Kinsley that all false equivalencies and labored prose that largely represents today’s idea of journalism needs to go, and soon. This means that if you can cover an important (but expected) House vote in 75 words by excising the fat, then by all means: do so. If providing useful, analytical context demands you go to 400,000 words on the same subject: then do so. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE SELLING NOW. Editorial opinions (e.g. what is news?) are your only asset. Everyone working in media today should be entirely focused on maximizing the electronic product. Period. Forget about page impressions. Forget about the physical product (e.g. the monthly Atlantic or the daily NYT) and focus on making the best stories you can, whatever their length. Then repackage the very most important of those from your website (that naturally updates whenever it needs to, not on some arbitrary, print-based schedule) and you move it from there into the necessarily very scheduled, physical box that you still put out as best you can (hey, what do you know, that’s where your only physical constraints relative to length and layout are).

That neither Kinsley nor Salmon, both at one level or another tasked with rethinking how journalism works in the internet era mention this at all, and furthermore go so far as to make a case for ever more arbitrary cutting is, shall we say, depressing. That all of legacy media seems to be responding to this by utterly decerebrating their writing, then chopping it up into arbitrary “next page” chunks (even when the story is less than 50 words long), and then festooning the whole package with great gloopy wads of aggressively intrusive advertising that would make Vegas blush is, shall we say, demoralizing.

You’re ridiculous

This is what we need more of from the MSM here in America; Jim Inhofe parachutes into the global climate meetings, finds no one around, rustles up what reporters he can find, and is promptly notified of his own foolishness:

The senator didn’t have any meetings scheduled in Copenhagen, and he did not see chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern or the members of the House delegation, who were not scheduled to fly in until later in the afternoon.

But Inhofe’s aides eventually rustled up a group of reporters […]

“We in the United States owe it to the 191 countries to be well-informed and know what the intentions of the United States are. The United States is not going to pass a cap and trade,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Indeed he is. He just never gets to hear it from anyone in the MSM over here. Wouldn’t be polite.

Enjoy it for a second. Then remember that you and I, the American taxpayer, underwrote this whole nonsensical journey. And that, because he denies global warming, our MSM won’t question the carbon footprint of his idiotic, wasted journey. They’re too busy speaking truth to power by asking the conference attendees about that, repeatedly, and then glossing over the actual events of the meeting as “too complicated.” That it never once occurs to them that spending 1/1000th of the time they devoted to the carbon footprint canard would allow them to cover the conference at length and to a high degree of detail never occurs to them is a huge part of the reason why this country is disintegrating into an ungovernable morass.

Tiger: Likely Bankrupted

Well, looks like this about wraps it up for Tiger Woods:

An Orange County Utilities manager told the Sentinel today his agency likely will bill the golfer about $600 for the expenses related to repairing the fire hydrant the pro-golfer struck.

It cost about $85 to pick up the damaged hydrant. And now there’s a work-order with the county for about $450 to repair and replace the hydrant.

No doubt Tiger will be too busy working double night-shifts at Winchell’s and/or take to driving a gypsy cab in vain hope of paying off these unbelievable debts. Thank you, Orlando Sentinel, for this sort of incisive, hard-hitting reportage. Truly a service to the Western World.

And, before you start feeling sorry for Tiger, get ready to feel really sorry for Tiger:

And eventually, the county will need to replace the sod around the hydrant.

Will it never end? Will we never let this poor man up? Hasn’t he suffered enough!?! I guess not, as the putative other-lady has this to say:

Although I’ve been romantically linked to a famous baseball player, a Broadway star, a musician, and various film and television actors, I will never kiss and tell

You stay classy, Orlando Sentinel.

Memo to Joementum and all his friends: Doing nothing will do harm. It will add to the deficit, and, according to this latest bit from the CBO analysis, it will cost families and individuals money, no matter what bracket they are inhabiting. Oh, and doing nothing leaves ~30 MILLION PEOPLE uncovered that would, in fact, get health coverage under the Senate plan. Those people need to shape up and go die in the streets like good American Citizens.

But, by all means, let’s play pretend that doing nothing is not only a viable option, but the only sane option. And media: let’s continue to let people say shit like this without challenge of any sort. To ask if they have any sane reasoning behind their obstructionism just wouldn’t be polite.

SHIELDS: We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process. … There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

–Mark Shields,
who should be shipped off along with his buddy David Brooks. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? Why are they still allowed to exert control over the print and televised discourse?

(via Think Progress)

A Joke

David Brooks, yesterday, 11/15:

[Sarah Palin is] a joke. I mean, I just can’t take her seriously. We’ve got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama’s trying to handle war. We’ve just a had guy elected Virginia governor who’s probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell, pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination – believe me, it’ll never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.

David Brooks, 10/08:

It took [Sarah Palin] about 15 seconds to define her persona – the straight-talking mom from regular America – and it was immediately clear that the night would be filled with tales of soccer moms, hockey moms, Joe Sixpacks, Main Streeters, “you betchas” and “darn rights.” Somewhere in heaven Norman Rockwell is smiling.

[–and, from his NYT perch–]

Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself.

The Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

Thoughtful people are welcome to change their minds. Encouraged to do so when the facts as we may know them change. What Brooks has been up to, though, is pretty clearly peddling that particular brand of NYT horseshit to the rubes whilst, simultaneously:

at a media panel for elites at the Le Cirque in New York City, Brooks denounced her anti-intellectual candidacy as a “cancer” on the Republican Party.

This sort of thing is the root of the problem with our discourse. At least in the past, it seemed you only had hearsay to go on; you suspected as much but could never hope to pin somebody on this sort of thing. Now, though, we have transcripts and often video of these sorts of brazen acts of dishonesty almost in real-time. And yet there’s still never, ever any accounting at the end of the day. Quite the opposite. Wrong on the war? Here’s a promotion, son; right on the war: You’re fired. Try not to be so shrill.

We’ve got to start unseating these people. Lou Dobbs makes a start, but is only the first of many. Elections have consequences. That Brooks didn’t learn this once and for all back in 2000 speaks volumes. He’s still playing at it like this is all some sort of elaborate parlor game that matters not at all. It’s unforgivable.

Simple enough for Joementum

Let’s begin:

LIEBERMAN: A public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that; I think that would be wrong.

But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt – $12 trillion today, projected to be $21 trillion in 10 years.

WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you’re a “no” vote in the Senate?

LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today. I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren.

That was Lieberman on FOXnews (where else?) this Sunday past. Doubtless just posturing, but let’s take him at his word: the deficit (and, by extension, the debt) is and should be held in absolute primacy to any and all other spending or policy decisions (which, of course, also have direct spending implications). Fair enough. We take that as a first principle.

The current GOP “plan” (in that it’s not even a plan so much as a policy statement) has been scored over the 10-year window as potentially resulting in a reduction of budget deficits by $68 billion while helping 3 million folks get coverage they wouldn’t otherwise have.

The plan passed by the House, on the other hand, extends coverage to 36 million currently uninsured Americans while cutting the deficit by $104 billion over the same 10-year window.

Which of those plans is more deficit neutral, Joe?

Of course, third option is do nothing. Joe himself has pushed this idea. Here’s what that looks like:

By all means, MSM, continue treating Joe Lieberman as a sober, deficits minded fellow only out for what’s best for the country. Let’s not once pause to ask him: Joe, just how does the public option contribute to the deficit?