Category Archives: The Media

Don't Mind Me. I'm Just Doing My Job is really funny until you think about it. Then it's not so funny.

One of the enduring mysteries of our time is how the media can fall for the Washington Monument Ploy time and time again. It's as bad as Lucy, Charlie Brown, and that football.

If only they would read Mark Schmitt, The Decembrist: How to Read a Bush Budget — A Rerun.

It's amazing that half the country votes Democratic, and yet no network wants to cater to this huge market.

The American Street » How CNN can Beat Fox.

If CNN wants to take over the news business again, they have one choice to make. And that is to be unrelentingly antagonistic toward the Bush administraton and the Republican party establishment.

This will generate a lot of attacks, whining, and complaining from the rightwing media machine. It may even generate a boycott of the network by the GOP, and/or a freeze out by the Bush administration.

If it does, that is 100% solid ratings gold for CNN. Nothing generates publicity like controversy. And nothing sends people rushing for their remotes to tune into your network like the prospect of fireworks.

Be honest. Do you tune in to watch American Idol to see some great feats of vocal gymnsatics? Or to see who will be the next William Hung?

CNN should summarily fire every one of its sycophantic, boring reporters, and hire evey liberal, entertaining, anti-Bush firebrand they can find. Do story and after story after story on the latest way Bush is screwiong America and the world. Hire Al Franken, John Stewart, Joe Conason, Ed Schultz, and Bob Somerby. Tell people that if they want balance, they should become buddhists.

You can bet that every network, and major newspaper will write editorials denouncing CNN, and attacking them. Howie Kurtz will have a connyption! Advertisers will pull out. The establishment will run for the hills. But you can also bet that CNN will no longer be hemorraging viewers.

People will tune in. And when they do, a market for anti-GOP, anti-Bush news will be born.

I accept as given that more Democrats want a more balanced, reality-based, news program than people from the Other Party, indeed like something that challenges them from time to time. But that can't be true of all Democrats — just as the opposite isn't close to true of all Republicans. But even so, that should leave a big narrowcasting market of red-meat Democrats.

Note that this is an argument against interest: I can't stand Air America any more than Air Fox.

Wonkette, even more than Talking Points Memo, has the definitive response to the news that tired William Safire is going to retire. I presume the language column gig is going too.

One way in which professors justify their existence — and especially the institution of tenure — is speaking truth to power. [In the case of some critical legal studies scholarship, it's more a case of speaking “power” to truth, but that's for another day.]

Comes now Eric Muller to note just how much of a double standard is operating in two parallel discussions of history with contemporary relevance: On the one hand, the massive blog-driven campaign to track down and prove CBS's negligence and obstinacy in Memogate. On the other hand, the relative silence and continuing propagation (in blogs and other media) of the repulsive falsehood in Malkingate.

Despite clear and as yet undsiputed proof that Michelle Malkin's new book (praising the Japanese internments and suggesting we might profitably emulate that history today) contains significant historical error that invalidates its thesis — and incidentally that the story she tells about one of the figures on the cover of her book is all wrong because she couldn't be bothered to drive a short way from home to see the evidence, partisans continue to endorse her book, and tp promote her.

Read all about it at IsThatLegal?

Personally, I'm writing to the Miami Herald, which sometimes runs her column, to suggest that they not do that any more.