Category Archives: The Media

I'm not much into compiling 'top 10' lists and 'best of' lists, but I enjoy reading the good ones. This one, from Glenn Greenwald, is one of the good ones: Favorite quotes of 2007.

Poor Robert Waldmann, who has been living abroad for a long time, is now being exposed to US TV. Political TV.

And his reaction after a session of “Hardball”? “It is worse than I imagined possible.”

Then again, he admits he was warned:

The point, as has been explained to me by many on the web including Atrios and Yglesias, is to have dramatic conflict in which a tough journalist forces someone to answer questions he doesn't want to answer. The fact that they are not important issues is irrelevant.

It may be only temporary, but the netroots and the civil liberties crowd won a big victory yesterday by derailing FISA. Senator Dodd spent about ten hours on the Senate floor talking against retroactive immunity. It's the first sign of a Congress willing to stand up to the Bush/Cheney fear-mongering steam roller.

You might think some of this would be fairly big news?

But not much sign of it in the paper this morning, and nothing I can see on the front page of the electronic NYT or WashPost. There are small inside items: in the “Washington” section of the Times, and the “national” section of the Post (A02 of the print edition, which is better than nothing), but clearly neither paper thinks it's that big a deal.

Someone please explain how I can get a job as a columnist for a major newspaper.

I guarantee that no matter how badly I do I will never write the sort of ghastly risible utter tripe that appears to be in the new book by the LA Times's latest addition to its pundit stable. See Sadly, No! for a sneek peek at Jonah Goldberg's “Liberal Fascism”.

Surely after the debacle of Robin Givhan's inane essay on “Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory”, the Washington Post (DeLong deathwatch now down to four years) has learned its lesson, and would avoid wasting column ink on the candidates' — and especially the female candidate's — sartorial choices and perhaps instead try to write about their policy choices?

No such luck. Robin Givhan is at it again, with an equally inane article on “How She Looks” headlined “Wearing the Pants: Envisioning a Female Commander-in-Chief.” It's all about the colors of Senator Clinton's pants suits.

To be fair, it begins as it means to end, with a signal that the author hasn't got much upstairs: “The mind, so easily distracted by things mauve and lemon yellow, …” Um. Not the minds of most people I know.

Amazingly, given that start, it's actually downhill from there.

It's enough to make you channel Brad DeLong: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

I imagine that this week Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, is thinking something like, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.'