UPDATED BELOW: (Saturday) Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin. For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra [...]
Out here in the Northwest, nuclear power has a long history of being dismissed as the kooky, plutocratic boondoggle it is, even while we have been spared the worst of the fears it understandably creates. Back in the 70′s, when our local utility, Portland General Electric, built the Trojan nuclear power plant, its remote location [...]
Ted Koppel, one of the last eminences of the old broadcast news era, weighed in some days ago on the never-ending debate about how things just aren’t as august as they used to be (whenever that was) when it comes to informing the American people (instead of just yelling at them). Koppel targeted Fox News [...]
“That really hurt,” he said. “You can disagree with my politics, but don’t ever accuse me of being a racist. . . . I can see how the perception would be ‘Bush didn’t care,’ but to accuse me of being a racist is disgusting.” Former President George Bush lying, uncontestedly, to Oprah Winfrey. Behaving as [...]
One can hardly argue that something awful hasn’t happened to our news media in the last few decades, but those actually in the media still steadfastly, and at times almost comically, refuse to see it. In short, a calculated plan by the right, beginning in the 1970′s, has reached glorious fruition in 2010: the right [...]
When CNN hired the tubby, bigoted know-nothing Erick Erickson from Redstate, I yawned. After all, the New York Times hired Ross Douthat, the Los Angeles Times hired Jonah Goldberg, and no dying media outlet could be without its beady-eyed, teenage water-carrier for for the “kill ‘em all” faction of the right. Notably, Douthat replaced the [...]
Further evidence emerged today that the storied Wall Street Journal has well and fully become Fox News, only boring, a process that took even less time than I’d initially thought. James Taranto typed the following today: “It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia,” Daisy Khan, wife of Ground Zero mosque planner Feisal Abdul Rauf, told [...]
“At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified ‘reports’ that Park51 has ‘money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.’ As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., [...]
I almost laughed out loud when I saw that Forbes Magazine had published an article about the absurdly tiny but nonetheless (to them) significant, headlong rush of the rich to leave Socialist America, which to the folk at Forbes was a bad thing, rather than a cause for exultation. Would that it were so: think [...]
Well, it’s about time. In light of the McChrystal fiasco, the Pentagon has suddenly discovered that its 60,000 or so PR flacks must have been lying down on their multibillion dollar jobs, perhaps on Facebook or Craigslist, and has a new plan to prevent any more Rolling Stone episodes upsetting its most sacred moss, the [...]