I didn’t see this coming from Malkin one of Malkin’s employees:
This makes twice in the span of four days that a major newspaper’s been caught cribbing material from nutroots blogs, which stands to reason. According to a survey of more than 200 journalists recently conducted at BYU, “despite equal awareness [of lefty and righty blogs], journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.” Contain your surprise.
[….]They’re taking more than just ideas, champ. In fact, the beauty of MoDo’s snafu is that not only does it show a major player in the media being led around by nutroots talking points, it involves her lifting stuff from a blog that’s actually called “Talking Points.” Glorious.
What I like about this is that it shows how nearly any event can be turned into an example of liberal media bias, given a sufficiently determined wingnut blogger. I also like a blog called “Hot Air” making fun of another blog for being called “Talking Points”.
The Grand Panjandrum
What about Red State? I remember when it was better dead than red, but alas that was back in the good ol’ days when Dick Nixon was staggering around the White House in a drunken stupor praying to portraits of dead presidents in the hopes of getting a reprieve.
geemoney
All it shows is where you have to go, blog-wise, if you want facts, and discussion thereof, even if you are cribbing it. And that’s the sad fact for Malkin and Hot Air, their stuff just isn’t good enough to be stolen. That’s gotta hurt a little.
Bill E Pilgrim
It’s funny though, I never really thought about it that when the press took dictation directly from say Dick Cheney or Scooter, no one thought of calling it “plagiarism”.
I guess when you’re actually the place where the propaganda is published, then calling it plagiarism made less sense. The main difference being that repeating things verbatim that the White House wrote would be unlikely to elicit any complaints from them.
I wonder sometimes if they called Judith Miller to complain that she got a word wrong or something though. I guess we’ll never know.
geg6
Hmmm, methinks Ms. Malkin is just a little jealous that nobody’s cribbing her virtual crayon scribblings.
Earl
Just a thanks for reading that (excrement) so I don’t have to waste my time…
Calouste
I thought Malkin would realize that this is the free market at work. There is just nothing worth being plagiarized on right wing blogs.
Bart
Except that it isn’t called “Talking Points”, it’s called “Talking Points Memo“. They’re too dumb to figure out the title of the bog…
kommrade reproductive vigor
Waaah! Stupid liberuls don’t read MY blog!
I bet her husband wears earplugs all the time and just nods. “Yep. Uh-huh. Whatever you say…”
DJShay
Maybe if the righty blogs stopped publishing conspiracy theories about birth certificates and resolutions to rename the Democratic Party the “Socialist” party, the MSM would take them seriously. As it stands now, the righty blogs are comparable to the dude pushing the Illuminati and Lizard People crap.
Bill E Pilgrim
“We’re a tiny fringe, and no one listens to us!”
First part is true. If only the second part were also.
JGabriel
Mightn’t that be because most conservative blogs don’t permit comments?
.
kay
@Bill E Pilgrim:
It might be true. I watch FOX sometimes. It gets further and further outside the mainstream.
On FOX this morning, Nancy Pelosi is getting ready to resign, banks never needed TARP money, and black people and Barney Frank caused the financial collapse.
It’s an alternate universe. I can drop in and see what’s going on there, like a tourist.
Josh Hueco
Hm, righties shriek at journos constantly, calling them traitors or worse, and then wonder why journos don’t read your stupid blogs? Shocking.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Not to mention the irony of a blog called Hot Air being mocked by a blog called Balloon Juice.
.
Bill E Pilgrim
@kay:
The “no one listens to us” might be true?
Ah, were it only so.
The amount of influence that this 20 percenter group has on discourse is still many, many times in excess of what its population merits.
Tom Tomorrow has a more or less perfect take on it today:
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/05/19/tomo/
Alien radio
forgive me this might be long and hard to follow, and not necessarily on topic But I’ve been thinking about the peak wingnut model.
Rate of reproduction of wing nut = (duration of contact With Wingnut) x (likelihood of contact with wingnut ) x (duration of Wingnut mania) x (Factor of Wingnut receptiveness in individuals)
Peak production of Wingnuts will be when the product of these four factors are maximized
Size of Population x rate Of reproduction x Length Of time = Total Historical Wingnuts
This is Different from the Peak production of wingnut media, since in the Media all four factors are much Higher (likelyhood of contact with a Wingnut tending towards 1 and Factor of wingnut receptiveness also tending towards 1)
Duration of contact With Wingnut
Simple. Wingnuts will try to Evangelise you or eliminate you. The longer they’re in your presence and the longer you are not evangelised, the greater the likelihood you will be eliminated, this represents net gain for wingnut.
Likelihood of contact with wingnut
Wingnuts tend to sprout most virulently where they are insulated from reality. Work at Fox and the probablility would be 1
Duration of Wingnut mania
Depending on the person it could be for life, or it could be until The situation has got so bad that a serious re-evaluation of beliefs is neccessary, But during this period People Will Spout gibberish and expect others to buy it wholesale.
Factor of Wingnut receptiveness in individuals
We know that at base level 21 – 27 Percent of the population are right wing authoritarians. They are developmentally stunted and form the base wingnut reservoir. Wingnut is produced by a subset (leaders) of this population at a constant Rate, a nucleus if you will, the rest of the population follows blindly. Another 25 percent probably represent people who hold many beliefs in common with wingnuts but ultimately given the choice would vote for a black man over 4 more years of neocon policies.
The production of wingnut media follows similar laws for the individuals involved, But the production of wingnut spin has a couple of extra factors
Ratio of similarity between Wingnut reality and reality.
Rate of Message churn
These two factors are inversely proportional as ratio tends toward 1:1 message churn is Low and stick to the basics, “Buy Crap”, “Drink Beer”, “Hate Brown people”.
as reality and wingnut reality diverge churn increases
High message Churn is when we start to get “dijon gate” (cuil factor of 2) it causes the cuil factor to increase as the message space becomes crowded and abstraction increases
We need to treat wingnut in the general population differently from wingnut in the media for a couple of reasons, they represent two distict populations and the media peak production would lag behind the main population and the collapsing Wingnut sphere will drive down the values of some of the variables in the main population and there is one key variable that covers the interaction between wingnut media and the total population of wingnuts, degree of cognitive dissonance, this is not constant in the population, it is very high but it is not 1 it’s the factor that governs evaporative cooling of the wingnut body. As churn increases the threshold for cognitive dissonance required to remain part of the wingnut sphere increases, when an individuals exceeds the level of cognitive dissonance neccessary to remain part of the wingnut sphere they are ejected and the body returns to a smaller denser more stable state.
Ted the Slacker
For accuracy’s sake, it was one of Malkin’s employees who wrote this – no biggie of course, they are all part of the same wingnut welfare ponzi scheme.
Tom65
…sez the amateur cheerleader.
kay
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I agree with you, that the 20% on the far right dominate the dialogue, but there’s a credibility problem, and that isn’t going away. It’s cumulative.
The facts are, Nancy Pelosi isn’t resigning, and we’ll know that in week, when the fake controversy disappears.
They flogged the Chrysler/hedge fund/bankruptcy fake-controversy, and it was just bound to crash on them, because it was complete horseshit. Even the WSJ editorial page calls bullshit today on that one.
Nothing they trumpet actually plays out, or turns out to be true.
opium4themasses
@kay: It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It only matters if they can get people talking about it.
Just look at all the bullshit leading up the the Iraq War. The only person really stained from that is Judith Miller. The commentators are all unscathed.
They pretend no credibility and thus have none to lose.
IndieTarheel
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
I’d feel sorry for the guy except for the fact that he, you know, married her.
Bill E Pilgrim
@kay:
Oh I agree that they’re losing favor and credibility, but it’s still just far beyond what the numbers would merit. Even the 20% is actually ALL Republicans, so the ones with tea bags stapled to their heads is even fewer.
I don’t know if I’d agree with TT that they actually dominate the discussion, but being given even roughly half the air time and ink is nuts considering how few of them there are.
DougJ
I always thought they kind of stole the name, since hot air is what balloon juice would be.
JosieJ
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
But what about the children?! Won’t someone think of the children?!
Buy them earplugs, too.
Xenos
Jesse Malkin did a lot to create Michelle Malkin. It is like Dr. Frankenstein married the Bride of Frankenstein instead of trying to get his monster set up with a babe.
At one point one of the SadlyNo boys started publishing all sorts of heavy accusations about Jesse, but I don’t know if that was ever followed up or supported in any way.
Napoleon
@Xenos:
Like what?
arguingwithsignposts
@DJShay:
Sadly, no. “Angels & Demons” did quite well at the box office this weekend. Not as well as Ross Douthat seems to think,but still quite well.
JGabriel
Alien radio:
I’m glad someone is thinking about these things. I can’t do it. Thinking about the mechanics of wingnuts reproducing gives me the queasies.
.
JGabriel
@DougJ:
Yeah, I kind of assumed the same too.
.
JGabriel
DJShay:
Y’know, the mere existence of Dick Cheney, in and of itself, gives the Lizard People dude quite a lot of credibility.
.
noncarborundum
In Bill Kristol’s first column for the NYT, he published a quoted from Michael Medved that he misattributed to Malkin. Strangely, Hot Air failed to publish the following response:
wasabi gasp
What kind of respectable plagiarizing journalist would tap a wingnut site to get teabaggins for their piehole? Nutty.
Xenos
@Napoleon: I tried googling it but maybe it was just a figment of my imagination. Other sites came up with similar rumors mental illness and vague references to other problems. They were partners way back in college at Oberlin together, where they established this tight duprass of oppressed fascism. They have been working that gig for 20 years now.
At least at the spiritual level, though, they present as pretty sick people. Michelle’s career is based on validating the racism of others, which is a profoundly sad way to dedicate one’s life’s work.
John Cole
Even funnier that this site used to be tagged “Hot Air and Ill-Informed Banter” for five years, and all the principles at Malkin’s Hot Air, including Preston, Allah, Michelle herself, and Ed read this website back when I was a Republican.
I dropped it after they creatively came up with the name “hot air” five years after I had been using it as a tag.
Morgan Bird
No offense, Doug, but how could you not see this coming? This was just about the most predictable wingnut response of the year. A prominent NYT columnist was found to be copying word for word from a liberal blog. Of course this is proof of liberal media bias.
Napoleon
@Xenos:
Amazing people like them could come out of Oberlin. There is obviously something wacked with her.
maya
But, there’s also, helium – great for kid’s birthday parties, and.
hydrogen – for that impressive flaming zeppelin..
bago
Can you imagine what would happen if Hunter S. Thompson were alive today? Hearing the phrase “At least Nixon had a sense of shame” would probably drive him to suicide.
skippy
just what i thought. if the weekly standard or abc had cribbed from josh, that would be newsworthy!
as it stands, the only thing modo’s plagiarism proves is that modo is a hack. and we libs have known that for a decade+.
b-psycho
Wingnut logic:
-Liberal opinion columnist w/ paper cribs from liberal blog for her opinion column = liberal media bias!
-Multiple media outlets portray participants in a calculated talking points effort from the Pentagon – who also have financial ties to military contractors – as unbiased analysts = no big deal.
jvill
There are two things I love about the comments on the Hot Air thread.
The first i the assumption that MoDo is some well-regarded liberal writer, when most folks I know would be happy to see her replaced. (Ditto Harry Reid)
This was my second favorite thing on the thread:
It is all most of them know and are like a bunch of lemmings waiting for the next talking point to go into action.
volsense on May 18, 2009 at 9:14 AM
Despicable echo chamber of propaganda.
marklmail on May 18, 2009 at 9:29 AM
It’s not plagiarism, it’s groupthink!
Blacklake on May 18, 2009 at 12:04 PM
Isn’t it the goal of the left that everybody think exactly alike? If so, what is the problem?
Elizabetty on May 18, 2009 at 2:58 PM
Those insightful observations on the danger of groupthink are from the third page only — I just couldn’t bear to read any more of the comments. It’s like reading one of Bilmon’s lists of ridiculous quotations, just mind fuck dipshitt’dness ad naeseum, until you want to poke your eyes out with knitting needles.
BRD
Another fundamental stupidity is that MoDo is a not a journalist, she’s supposed to be a left leaning opinion columnist, though she’s obviously no fan of the Clintons.