Newsbusters busts CBS, then plays advocacy games themselves
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

A great example of how twisted news coverage is getting on both sides of the health care debate.

Newsbusters.org caught CBS lying about that "Harvard Medical" study which turned out to be from a pro-single payer group; too bad, because that was the lead to an otherwise not very objectionable news segment (it's really too bad when you have to pat CBS on the back for only lying ONCE on a story, but that's how it's been since the 1968 Tet Offensive).

Then Newsbusters went overboard, not content with exposing the blatant lie, and started playing right-wing advocate themselves.  That wouldn't be so bad, but they gave a really good impression of being soulless bastards.

You really can't trust packaged news on the heatlhcare beat - everyone's got an agenda.  As sorry as it sounds, you have to find the people who lie the least, and double-check everything they tell you.

Jena 6 - It's racism - through and through, and from every angle.
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

From the Newspaper of Record:

"Teenager Released in Louisiana Case

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 28, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 27 — One of six black teenagers arrested in the racially charged beating of a white youth in Jena, La., was released on bail on Thursday, a week after the case drew thousands of protesters to the small town in the central part of the state.

The release on $45,000 bail came shortly after the district attorney in Jena, Reed Walters, announced that he would not seek to maintain adult charges against the teenager, Mychal Bell.

Mr. Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery as an adult, but that conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court, which said he should have been tried as a juvenile.

Mr. Bell still faces the same charges in juvenile court, but instead of a possible sentence of 15 years in prison he can now be held only until he is 21.

Others involved in the December beating of Justin Barker also still face charges. Mr. Barker, knocked unconscious in the beating, has $14,000 in medical bills, according to lawyers in the case. "

______ 

Sharpton just keeps on trying.  He couldn't frame those guys for raping the girl in New York, so when 6 other guys jumped a school kid and beat him unconscious, doing $14,000 in medical damage, it's Al Sharpton to the rescue.  Not to the kid who was left for dead, but his attackers.

And the mainstream, liberal press is printing everything Sharpton says as gospel. 

It sounds evil when you leave race out of it.  

Put race back into it and it's even worse.  Thousands of people have converged on a small Louisiana town to try to get six would-be murderers out of jail.  Why? 

Six thugs beat one kid unconscious.   Why?

Because three kids with too much time on their hands tied three pieces of rope to a tree.  

Idiotic, hateful, sure.  Racist?  No doubt, and psychotic to boot.  But no reason to beat another kid unconscious.  Why, then?

Racism is STILL at work.

Al Sharpton and his followers are full of it.  Racism caused a stupid prank to be blown up into a week of violence and racism caused six men to try to kill a high school kid in the modern equivalent of a lynching.

And racism is dressing up the attempt to rescue these men from justice as something other than an attempt to create a monumental injustice and free six would-be killers.

How would Sharpton and the press feel if it were six white men who had beaten a black student unconscious?  Oops, we already know that one.  Sharpton gave us the answer to that one in the Tawana Brawley case.

There was a song that went like this:

"Free your minds and the rest will follow...  " 

Pity everyone forgot how it went.   It's almost as though the song didn't mean a single thing.  Just a lot of noise made to sell records.

Screwed-up value judgments at CNN...
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

A sports anchor at Cable News Network (CNN) was accused by a Headline News commentator of saying that dogfighting is worse than rape. 

Aren't you glad they cleared that up, folks?

In a CNN Headline News segment about Atlanta Falcons' Michael Vick (recently arrested for running a dogfighting ring), commentator Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith (one of CNN's sports anchors) of saying that the dogfighting-related crimes were worse than rape.

I'm not so sure he said that, reading the transcript.  The feminist blogs have, of course, hit the ground running to portray this as a relative endorsement of rape when it may well have been more a case of hoof-in-mouth disease.  It wouldn't be the first time a well-meaning sports announcer simply got tangled up in the English language.

The remarks in question followed a short bite of Kobe Bryant denying the rape charges (probably intended as an example of how Vick should respond to the allegations in the media):

"SMITH: Yes, well, that’s — he’s been in a lot of trouble lately, when you think about all the other incidents, and this is just the worst one of all.  

Keep in mind, too, that while Kobe Bryant is a situation we can sort of compare this to, this really is much worse. Not only can you argue that the crimes are much worse in terms of, you know, killing dogs and that kind of thing, but as an NFL starting quarterback, you are the most visible face in that city. I’ve said all along, in fact, you know, if you go through and, you know, very quickly name 10 mayors of major cities in the country…

GRACE: Larry Smith, did I just hear you say…

SMITH: … you could have a harder time doing that…

GRACE: … mistreatment of…

SMITH: … than naming 10 NFL starting quarterbacks.

GRACE: Did I just hear Larry Smith, CNN sports correspondent and anchor, state that crimes on a dog are much worse than crimes on a woman? Did I hear that?"

OK.  I didn't see how Larry Smith could reasonably be accused of saying what Nancy Grace says he said.  

What I saw was a compound-complex sentence whose diagram would look like a map of the London Underground. 

Smith was obviously (to me, anyway) trying to say that Vick's position as starting QB of the Falcons made him more visible than Kobe Bryant AND the mayors of many major American cities, and that he should have conducted his private life accordingly.  (Of course, that analogy gets all snarled up when you consider the sterling examples of Rudy Giuliani, Marion Barry, Ray Nagin and other mayors of large US cities, but.... )

You really (again, in my humble opinion) had to be anticipating, even wishing, that Mr. Smith would say something that could be taken as diminishing the seriousness of rape. 

You can't get to what Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith of saying without some help along the way - she jumped on remarks which barely managed to convey their intended meaning, much less what she accused him of saying, and carried the ball all the way for a touchback - 180 degrees away from where the sentence was going.

(Also, last time I checked, Bryant had formally been cleared of rape in a Colorado court, despite echoes of the O.J. Simpson trial which seemed to confirm that if you want to get away with hurting a woman, you should bring your national championship ring, your checkbook and some of the Dream Team to court with you.)

I think the worst Larry Smith can be accused of is minimizing Michael Vick's offenses to "doing the wrong thing, at the worst time, from the most visible public forum possible." 

That's true, but Vick also provided the place, time and physical resources for incredible cruelty against dogs - a species whose main defect is trusting humans too much for their own good.  And Vick's attempt to say that all of this was happening on his property without his knowledge over that long period of time is crap, pure and simple.

By comparison, Nancy Grace committed a much graver offense - against both Larry Smith personally and against journalistic ethics in general.  She either carelessly or knowingly impugned a colleague's character on camera, accusing him of saying something that he never intended to say.

There's plenty of callousness toward female victims of crime in the press, in popular music and other public forums, without falsely accusing people of the act - a reciprocal callousness toward those who mis-speak with no intent to harm anyone, simply because an opportunity to make easy rhetorical points presents itself.

Shame on you, Ms. Grace.  Shame on you.

NBC discovers buyouts
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

Tonight, the NBC Nightly News is going to ask us the rhetorical question - what would you do if your employer offered you money to leave?

Well, you'd probably thank God that you didn't work for NBC's parent company General Electric when they moved half the manufacturing jobs in Indiana south of the border to Mexico or sold them off to Thomson Consumer Electronics (same difference, it just happened through a layer of Frenchmen).

Does anyone seriously think that anyone at GE besides Neutron Jack Welch or his buddies in the executive suite were offered money before they were laid off?

Just when you think NBC couldn't get more hypocritical....

What if JFK were still alive? What a load.
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

 

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams interviewed famous historian and academic plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin on the ponderous question – how would we be different if JFK were still alive? (A verbatim quote - hey, I couldn't make crap like this up.)

 

Apart from all the clichéd references to JFK’s vitality (code for the fact that “little JFK” kept making public appearances with the “interns” who for some reason clutter up the West Wing when insecure forty-something morons get elected), Professor Goodwin informed us that we were deprived of the sense that there were no limits to what we could achieve, of the boundless optimism… of, indeed, all the benefits of an academe which is endlessly willing to prostitute itself to the Democratic Party.

 

I mean, come on – JFK was the proto-Bill Clinton.  His vitality, we now know, came out of hypodermic syringes wielded by a full-time, 24/7 on-the-staff Doctor Feelgood, and the vacillation which was the true hallmark of his abbreviated career nearly plunged the world into a nuclear holocaust.  His personal conduct as President, including his sexual misbehavior, stands as a shining example of What Not to Do in The White House.  (Dan Quayle can take comfort in the fact that when he was told he was no Jack Kennedy, it was actually a compliment.)

 

A close examination of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis show that JFK was his own worst enemy – as well as the worst enemy of the poor guys on the sharp end of the stick who were counting on him for air support, for timely decisions, for moral support – for some of that courage profiled in a book long, long ago.   A photo-recon pilot died because JFK wouldn’t act decisively in the face of clear photographic evidence that the Soviets were infesting the island of Cuba with nuclear weapons – instead of trusting the U-2 imagery and giving the Russians the bad news that they’d have to pick up their toys and leave - or filling the Turkish Caucasus range of mountains with Titan and Minuteman ICBM silos.

 

Prof. Goodwin also told us that JFK wouldn’t have pursued Vietnam with the ambition that LBJ did.  Come again?  What happened to that famous vitality?  Would JFK’s finest contribution to American history be marked by the broad yellow streak down the middle of his back as he turned South Vietnam over to the murderous Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh?

 

Anyway, who got us into Vietnam in a big way in the first place?  Who gave a nod and a wink to South Vietnam’s military junta to bump Ngo Dinh Diem off with the CIA’s connivance?  Who turned Robert MacNamara and his systems analysts loose to mismanage and alienate their way through the Pentagon?  JFK.

 

No, the cult of JFK-nostalgia ignores the fact that Americans went on to achieve every one of the promises that Kennedy’s flacks held out to them – without JFK. 

 

The greatest libel perpetrated on the American people is that somehow it was necessary for someone to steal the 1960 Presidential election so they could proceed in the direction in which they were already moving – away from Jim Crow, toward scientific and cultural greatness, and eventually in a decisive triumph over Communism.  All it took was for JFK’s party to lose the 1980 Presidential election.

Hurricanes, Lies and the Mainstream Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks
The Mess After Hurricane Katrina isn't Bush's Fault.

I'm feeling like crap, but feel as though I must weigh in on the merde du boeuf emanating from the Democratic Party's designated Newt Gingrich surrogates (Pelosi, Schumer, Kennedy, et al and ad nauseam) and their groupies in the alleged mainstream media.

The Mayor of New Orleans, from his "emergency operating center" in a hotel room at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency, issued a missive blaming everyone else for the inundation of his city, especially the President of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. His analysis is a bit skewed, to say the least.

I have observed civil defense and emergency preparedness operations for many, many years, and have some observations about the mess post Hurricane Katrina:

- In peacetime and the absence of an immediate disaster or crisis, FEMA and Homeland Security basically write checks to state and local governments, trusting the local agencies to prepare for floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc., as each agency perceives its needs. Not much checking up on how the money is spent happens unless an extraordinary cock-up or scandal occurs.

- The Levee Board of New Orleans is infamous for scandals, misappropriation and outright stupidity in its operation. Last year, they spent $2 million dollars of money which might have been used to buy concrete, aggregate and labor to shore up the levees near the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish on a statue. A statue.

Before then, there have been a regular succession of low-key scandals involving defrauding of gun companies and such at the Levee Board.

- Not much clarity of thought is used to determine where emergency operating centers (basically bunkers or other facilities used to coordinate emergency action during a disaster). The practice has been to bury the things in basements of tall buildings, assuring that

(a) the Governor, Mayor, whoever would be entombed under many tons of rubble in the event of nuclear attack and

(b) in the event of a flood, these people would at the very least be driven from their emergency operating center by flood waters (I've seen it happen personally at the Louisiana State Emergency Operating Center after unusually severe rainstorms).

Perhaps the most cheering part of the President's speech tonight is the promise to send inspector generals to audit how the sums we've spent to date to assure the people of New Orleans failed to do so - and possibly to arrange the relocation of those responsible across the Gulf Coast to the Federal Prison for political crooks in Eglin Air Force Base known as "Club Fed".

Again, out of respect for states' and municipal rights, FEMA and the Federal Government basically wrote checks to local governments and told them to go forth and make their people safe. If FEMA had sent people down to assure that this really happened, there would have been sharp words about the Federal Government's interference in local affairs.

In New Orleans that approach failed dismally.

Another encouraging statement by the President was the announcement that emergency operations would from now on be coordinated from the top down, with Federal confirmation of state and local actions.

I believe the investigations into what happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will show that this Federal oversight is badly needed in many local government emergency preparedness agencies.

The Democratic flakmeisters on Capitol Hill tried to blame President Bush for something which was mainly local responsibility. They are going to wind up with plenty of egg on their faces, God willing.

Just don't hold your breath waiting for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and PBS to report on it when it happens, because they prostituted their journalistic integrity in exchange for a chance to be king-makers, trying to shoe-horn their favorite party back into power last year.

They just don't get it - no one believes them any more.

Jon Stewart as Rather's "permanent replacement" - who does that ding worse?
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

I inadvertently left my TV tuned to the local station that broadcasts "Access Hollywood" tonight and learned something valuable, just as inadvertently - 53 percent of their viewers think Jon Stewart should be Dan Rather's permanent replacement on the CBS Evening News. I think it was a "Yes/No" question, but I try not to allocate valuable space in my asymptotically shrinking middle-aged memory to things like whether that poll may have mentioned an more appropriate choice - Chevy Chase, maybe.

Think about it, though. Even CBS president Les Moonves (in an interview I referenced a few months earlier in this blog) thinks Jon Stewart might be a reasonable choice for the job. His network's competitors probably think Jon Stewart looks good for the CBS Evening News, too - which goes to show that Moonves and the people polled by "Access Hollywood" may not know the crucial difference between a comedian and a joke. (I'm willing to give Moonves' competitors credit for having a sly sense of humor and a morbid curiosity as to how long it would take the CBS Evening News to self-destruct - further - under a Jon Stewart regime).

Jon Stewart is rumored to be a comedian (I don't see it) and does, in fact, portray a television journalist on what is purportedly a comedy show (again, I don't see more than sporadic comedy in the little of his show I've watched). As a television journalist, Dan Rather was undoubtedly a joke on what is purportedly a news program (one which spends up to half its air time editorializing against the party which more than half the voters choose every time they get a chance. That Rather, his producers and their bosses hate the President and the Republican Party is not news, believe me, which means that much of each episode of the CBS Evening News is not, in fact, spent on news).

But to proceed from there to saying that Jay Stewart would actually make a good television journalist is like saying that when Bill Cosby was playing Dr. Huxtable on his 1980s feel-good prime-time comedy show, he should been licensed to practice medicine in real life on the strength of his performance and ratings.

Or is it?

Journalism is not to comedy as medicine is to comedy.

You don't have to:
- go to college for four years of pre-journalism training in some allied but less rarefied field (which is a good thing, because contrary to popular myth there aren't enough credit hours offered in basket-weaving at most universities to fill up a four-year degree program since the NCAA tightened up its rules);
- then take a special Journalism College Admissions Test and compete against thousands of other would-be journalists for a place in a School of Journalism in which you are worked twelve to sixteen hours a day for four years;
- then compete all over again for an internship and residency, for a total of eight to twelve years of post high-school education... just to work at a local paper or radio station.

You don't have to have one hour of post-baccalaureate/graduate school education in order to work as a journalist.

You don't have to pass a state-administered licensure exam and/or a nationally-standardized journalism board exam in order to practice journalism.

If you got your journalism training overseas, you are not required to pass a Examination for Foreign Journalism Graduates before being allowed to practice journalism in this country.

There are no significant barriers to Jon Stewart's crossing over from playing a journalist on television to being a journalist on television. He is not obliged to make the stereotypical disclaimer from cold medicine ads, "I'm not a journalist, I just play one on TV."

I just can't decide who should be more offended by the breathless buzz that Jon Stewart might make the transition from mediocre comic manque to journalist manque - real journalists or real comedians?