It certainly seemed a strange coincidence that both the Times’ and the Kaplan’s ombudsmen declared their fealty to Lord Beck in the same week. A reader reminded me that this not the first time the Daily Kaplan has gone down this road. Here’s Deborah Howell on teh librul bias last year:
Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.
At the time, Michael Calderone wrote a pretty good reply:
There’s no problem with more rigorous editing or questioning the placement of stories. But I don’t know any newspaper editor who would be comfortable asking reporters their political views and then using that information to help determine whether they should be hired or not. And trying to stuff the Post with avowed conservatives to correct “perceptions” of bias won’t work.
The Post, I’m sorry to say, is still going to be viewed as a liberal paper to a large swath of conservatives no matter who’s in the newsroom. Or The New York Times, for that matter. Despite public editor Clark Hoyt showing there were more tough investigative pieces in The Times about Obama than McCain, I didn’t notice right-wing talkers all of a sudden saying the Times 2008 coverage was fair.
Of course, news does not have to break only in the pages of The Times or The Post. And Howell doesn’t mention the Internet. What there needs to be more of in covering politics today, as my colleague Jonathan Martin wrote in July, is right-leaning websites doing original reporting like Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post. And that could be where future conservative reporting comes from.
And therein lies the central issue: conservatives for the most part have no interest in journalism in the sense of a first draft of history. What they want is quasi-journalistic affirmation of their own feelings. The TED blog (via Sully) wrote of the death panel lie that:
So when Palin threw out the term “death panels,” the term struck a chord that had been played many times in recent years….Liberals were flabbergasted, because it’s a blatant lie, but it’s false only in a logical sense, not an emotional one. (bold mine)
Don’t get me wrong, I realize that we all like to read things that confirm our own opinions. But I can’t think of any analog of the 2 million 1.5 million 800,000 60,000 moran march controversy outside the wingnutosphere. It’s worth noting, for example, that the discussion of the number of people at the Million Man March involved a much tighter range of numbers — that’s how crazy the teabaggers are, they manged to make Louis Farrakhan look sane by comparison in this instance.
What Clark and Alexander and Howell suggest is that we need more stories about tempests in tea bags because it hurts the wignuts’ fee-fees when they don’t see enough stories about ACORN and Van Jones and the massive size of wingnut rallies in the newspapers. It’s odd that the media believes it needs to attempt an emotional rescue of the very same people who have declared war on empathy.
shoutingattherain
Well those chickens aren’t going to fuck themselves, ya know.
Svensker
Dear Doug,
This is a very good piece.
That is all.
DougJ
@Svensker
Thanks!
Ash Can
Blockquoted, bolded, repeated, and highlighted for the fucking truth.
These conservatives have been told all their lives — by their parents, teachers, peers, relatives, everybody — that being selfish, mean, cowardly, petty, narrow-minded, irresponsible etc. is wrong. But they refuse to believe it, and instead spend their lives searching for justification for their own faults. Assaults on journalism are a direct result.
SiubhanDuinne
@shoutingattherain: There are little bits of Waldorf salad all over my new keyboard. Thanks a LOT.
noncarborundum
So “death panels” was false only in the sense of not being true?
Evolved Deep Southerner
If “Technically true, but collectively nonsense” is in your lexicon, surely “False only in a logical sense, not an emotional one” deserves a place there as well.
slag
Brilliant. Just. Brilliant.
asiangrrlMN
@shoutingattherain: Priceless! First answer and you nailed it. Er…
Walker
The fact that the Earth is flat is false only in a logical sense, but not an emotional one.
Crashman06
I’d like to see them try this. It won’t happen, of course, because the far right is not interested in facts or reporting. But it would be fun to watch them try.
Midnight Marauder
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
A big co-sign on this one.
This Lexicon might be the best thing that ever happened to the internet.
Zifnab
Newspapers are in the business of selling ad space and newspapers, in that order. When FOX came along and started plugging out 2-3 million viewers, the allure of the conservative demographic became a siren song. And the fact that corporation barons are more than happy to finance the NYPost or the Weekly Standard at a loss, makes catering to the right wing look highly profitable. So someone, somewhere decided that selling out the NYTimes and WaPo newsrooms to the wingnuts was going to turn a big profit.
Frankly, after seeing guys write books about DOW 36k during a Wall Street bubble and watching Moody’s slap Triple A on anybody that can cover it’s fee, and learning about manipulation of the media from the Million Malkin March to the extra $500 billion the AP slapped on the health care price tag to the massively disparate body counts in Iraq to the repeated accounting scandals coming out of the NRSC and NRCC, if someone told me the for-profit corporation Nelson gave Glenn Beck an audience size on FOX that regularly dwarfed his (or fellow traveler Lou Dobbs’s) numbers, I’d take it with a bolder of salt.
But I’m a bit tired of being played for a sucker by GOP numbers games. So… whatevs.
KG
It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with employment law (my first lawyer gig was for an employment law firm), but I’m pretty sure one of the reasons the editors would be uncomfortable with such questions is because that would be illegal as all hell. You can’t ask questions about employees political beliefs and then base hiring/firing/promotion on the answers.
Zifnab
Damn you lack of edit button.
*gave Glenn Beck an audience size on FOX that regularly dwarfed his (or fellow traveler Lou Dobbs’s) numbers on CNN
superking
This isn’t perfectly on topic, but here’s a take on the tea partiers that I really enjoyed.
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,41728494001_1925792,00.html
Nice post, Doug.
WyldPirate
Doug, right wingtards have wanted the “librul” media to acknowledge their delusions as reality for at least 40 years.
I think the more interesting story is how the media heavy weights have progressively knuckled in to the insane caterwauling of bias. It’s gone from “he-said-she-said”, false-equivalencies galore to the very people who are supposed to watch the shop for piss-poor journalism–the ombudsman–suffering from the same delusions as the Rethugtards.
News media is going “Galt” in the sense that the Rethugtards have a virtual Baskin Robbins of “truthiness” tailored for their specific twisted fantasy or hissy-fit.
It’s worse than the fable of the Boy who cried Wolf; The supposedly sane people recording the first draft of history have become conditioned to find the non-existent wolf even after thousands of false alarms.
chuck
@Evolved Deep Southerner:
I think we can shorten the term to “emotionally true”. Which is essentially a synonym for “truthiness”.
SpotWeld
It seems like the right has come to the conclusion that they can act as crazy as they want since they can demand that the media be “balanced” and do the hard work of proving thier opposite number is just as crazy as they are. (Which not to say left doesn’t have thier share of crazies… they just don’t seem to take as much of a leadership position.)
J
There are times when one thinks that willed, cultivated cretinism is a requirement to get ahead the news biz. today. Any paper, TV station, whatever must and should listen to reactions from its readers, viewers and so on. Complaints need to be looked into, errors to which people call attention corrected. But surely any journalist worth his or her salt has to be aware of the fact that there are pressure groups out there, people who want to bend the news to their purposes–not to put too fine a point on it, propagandists, lots of them paid. The right wing, in particular, has created a huge industry of people who are essentially paid liars. It’s their job to see ‘liberal bias’ everywhere, to scream bloody murder, with a view to bending the independent media to their propagandistic purposes. They can’t be placated or appeased. The constantly invoked Munich analogy would be better applied here than most of the places it is. It’s the job of journalists to tell the truth (supply context, background, explanation–it’s no doubt complicated, and more needs to be said.) Complaints that show the press isn’t doing its job, from whatever source, should be acted on; others not.
The Grand Panjandrum
Wasn’t the “first draft” part of PJ media’s original mission?
Brachiator
Sweet Boneless Jesus! Affirmative action for conservatives?
What’s next, a quota system?
flavortext
Now the ACORN “scandal” makes more sense. Sure, the accusation that ACORN facilitates human trafficking is factually false, but it validates the emotional truth that ACORN is nothing but a group of
niggerssocialistsfar-left radicals! I can see why conservatives decried the initial lack of media coverage on the issue – here is the only truth that actually matters in their world, and the media are ignoring it!asiangrrlMN
@superking: That was very funny. Thanks for linking.
Mike
It is now the clear responsibility of all when reading some bit of rightist lunacy to send it to the New York Times and the Washington Post and demand they print it soonest.
Here are some of the relevant people to inform:
NY Times Ombud and editors
Clark Hoyt: [email protected];
Jill Abramson: [email protected]
Heekin-canedy: [email protected]
arthur sulzberger: [email protected]
exec ed: [email protected]
Washington Post Ombud & Editors
[email protected]
Bill Hamilton: [email protected],
Jonathan Diehl: [email protected]
Katherine Weymouth: [email protected]
Marcus Brauchli: [email protected]
Perhaps it would be appropriate that you insist they ‘stop the presses’ for the latest GOP charges.
freelancer
So what I should gather from this story is…
Shitty newspaper is shitty.
Got it.
Legalize
There are 2 rules here:
1. Anything that hurts a winger’s feelings = news and must be reported seriously as such.
2. Criticizing winger tantrums = “bias,” and in some instances “trying to silence dissent,” which of course is a violation of their free speech rights.
Treating these assholes as “serious men,” is akin to giving an A to a lazy, disruptive, slovenly student when his parents scream and bitch at the teacher about the kid’s poor performance.
KG
@The Grand Panjandrum: it turned out, in the fine print, when they were talking about “first drafts” they were talking about cutting themselves checks.
truculent and unreliable
There’s a point when you realize that it’s less about stupidity and incompetence and more about being part of a system that will work to keep select people in power at all costs, even if it means giving legitimacy to people who are absolutely fucking batshit.
Cruel Jest
Not only that, but in the midst of a continuous beating from the wingnuts, they try to ease the punishment by handing them a crowbar. But then, everything looks like a crowbar to Malkin, so …
SGEW
Can anyone think of any historical precedents to this phenomenon? Seriously, I’m drawing a blank here.
Zifnab
@Legalize:
Is our childrens learning?
georgia pig
@Brachiator: It’s always hilarious when the wingers treat a political ideology as a constitutionally protected class like gender, race or religion for purposes of employment in private businesses. Maybe because politics is more like a religion for them, or they don’t distinguish between the two. Don’t they think being conservative is a choice just like, they would argue, homosexuality?
truculent and unreliable
@SGEW: I can’t, which is why I’ve gone all “WAKE UP SHEEPLE.” But seriously, how does this make sense AT ALL when we operate on the assumption that the newsmedia are actually trying to do their jobs?
Mark
Yet another problem with newspapers giving affirmative action to conservatives: There are a lot of unemployed journalists right now. I’m sure they’d all love a job at the Post or the Times. How would you stop the liberal pinkos among them from gaming the system and casually mentioning during their job interviews how much they hate flag burning and love Jesus? Unlike being black or a woman, being conservative is impossible to prove.
slag
@asiangrrlMN: @superking: The style of that video totally reminded me of the guys from Brotherhood 2.0. Who happen to have a good video up now about how our healthcare system discourages innovation: http://nerdfighters.ning.com/profiles/blogs/health-care-reform-the-hank. Love those guys.
Bubblegum Tate
OT: I do believe the lexicon needs an entry/definition for the Goldberg Theorem.
freelancer
@Mark:
The Shibboleth would be to give them a desk next to a black person or a woman and tell them they’re getting paid the same amount.
BFR
So I think this is one of the risks in building a party whose base consists largely of religious fundamentalists. There’s no reason to do investigations if you already know the truth, ergo there’s no reason to put time, money and energy into the search for an answer that you already “know.”
Why bother with an investigation when it’s just as easy (and just as compelling to your audience) to just make something up that fits the already defined narrative?
Midnight Marauder
@Mark:
On this point, I would have to disagree with you.
I think you could easily identify conservatives within a 60 second conversation, just as long as you ask the right questions.
asiangrrlMN
@Mark: Easy. You start making statemnts such as, “The earth is 6,000 years old”, “The only way to be fiscally responsible is to cut taxes to the rich and to stop spending”, “Obama was not born in America”, and then you ratchet up the crazy. “We should return to the gold standard.” “People who work three part-time jobs (none of which offer healthcare benefits) deserve to die.”
True socio-fascist pinkos won’t be able to keep a straight face and won’t be able to refrain from arguing with you as you increase the idiotic nonsense.
Midnight Marauder, damn you and your brevity!
slag
Comment didn’t post. No moderation notice. Do I exist?
truculent and unreliable
@Bubblegum Tate: Speaking of: Irving Kristol wuz awesum he loved dogs LOLOLOL!
kommrade reproductive vigor
Excellent work DougJ.
I can’t even begin to convey how depressing it is that anyone in the business of journalism thinks it is a newspaper’s job to promote, nurture or support any particular political ideology. Thank God Howell is gone. Not that it seems to have done the Post any good.
steve s
“But seriously, how does this make sense AT ALL when we operate on the assumption that the newsmedia are actually trying to do their jobs?”
The job of the newsmedia is to attract viewers, whose attention is then sold to advertisers. Since outrage and controversy attract viewers, it’s possible that paying more attention to the conservative noise machine constitutes ‘doing their jobs’.
Napoleon
@KG:
Actually yes you can. Political beliefs are not protected like race, religion, and the like.
A PS, here in Ohio unless you have a contract it is employment at will and anyone can be hired or fired for any reason whatsoever unless it violates a federal employment statute.
freelancer
@truculent and unreliable:
Lawls. Always Trust the Shorter!
wonkie
It’s bad business for the corporate written media to court conservative readers because the ony way they will get that kind of readership is to turn themselves into the print version of Faux news. Conservatives don’t want to be informed; they just want to be affirmed. It’s liberals who read for information and who are willing to tolerate facts they don’t like. All newspapers like the Post do by dumbing down their reporting to pander to conservatives is drive their current readers away.
jeffreyw
@SGEW:
via
steve s
Napoleon, are you a lawyer? That KG guy seemed to be a lawyer.
Not that he’s therefore right, but it does lend his statement some weight.
liberal
That’s fine with me, as long as at the same time there are more liberals among newspaper editors and publishers.
What a bunch of asshats…acting as if the workers are the ones coloring the commentary, not the owners.
(Not to mention that I’d wager the poll of newsroom workers has been misinterpreted.)
Napoleon
@steve s:
Yes, though I have done very little employment law in recent years, but in many states, Ohio being one of them, you can fire/not hire anybody for anything.
Radon Chong
@Crashman06: They are trying, except the result is WND and Orly Taitz producing fake birth certificates. But, yes, it’s fun to watch them.
liberal
@steve s:
I’m with Napolean. Can’t believe political orientation is a protected class under either the Const or labor statutes.
Bubblegum Tate
@truculent and unreliable:
ROFLcopter!
liberal
@Napoleon:
Not strictly true. Not possible to believe you can do it based on race, for example.
LoveMonkey
No, say it isn’t so, Doug.
Tsulagi
Not so much a march as it was a collective circle jerk. A social affair. Peacocks puffing out their chests or tits (not gender specific) displaying their outrage plumage. It’s the wingnut mating dance.
freelancer
@liberal:
He qualified that up the thread:
El Tiburon
Yes, we like reading that which confirms are own belief.
But the difference is once confronted with the verifiable truth liberals tend to accept that truth and not seek to destroy the messenger.
Conservatives are incapable of accepting facts that don’t fit their worldview. In fact, they accept and welcome what they know to be lies and distortions as long it affirms their beliefs or what they hope to be true.
So no matter how many times you point out that the ACLU defends Rush Limbaugh, etc, it just does not make a dent in their dense skulls. Bush sucked, sure, but it’s because he was a secret liberal. To many conservatives the question of Obama’s birth WILL always be murky. Always.
steve s
Hmmm. Okay, I’m assuming Napoleon’s correct until further notice.
SGEW
@jeffreyw: I thought of Hearst and other propagandists, of course (the Soviet press also came to mind), but they were all organs of either the state or a sizable plurality of the population. What we’re talking about here is over-representation of a fringe group that has a radical ideology in direct opposition to the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens in a nominally representative democracy.
It’s like the national media all decided to highlight and stoke the ideas of, I don’t know, Beatniks in the 1950’s, or Communists in the 1890’s, or Fascists in the 1920’s, or something. I just can’t think of any parallels.
Napoleon
@liberal:
I covered that in my original post as a PS. The only 2 exceptions are you are in a federal protected class or you have a contract, which would ordinarily be because of collective bargaining.
Corner Stone
@KG:
Monica Goodling just lost a lung from laughing so hard.
Ash Can
Reading through this thread, I’m reminded of a brief discussion we had here not too long ago about the idea of news organizations restructuring as non-profit entities. Sounds pretty good to me.
aimai
the whole thing is really strange. On the one hand, they seem to think that what is happening in wingnuttia is happening in some version of deepest, darkest, crazy land. Basically as far away physically and mentally as you can get from the “real” world of ordinary reporters. On the other hand, they think its taking place in some “real” place with “real” concerns that are more real than the opinions and informed insights of the actual paid reporters and editors. But even if you *thought* that its not like Newspapers haven’t, historically, dealt with this issue by sending out reporters to, you know, report. That’s the ethnographic angle. You don’t actually have to be a Watutsi to report on the Tutsi and newspapers have never thought you had to be. In fact, “going native” and actually believing the shit your informants tell you has rather a bad rap in both the newspaper industry and anthropology. So aside from the stupidity of allowing the paid shills of the right wing outrage industry to set the editorial content of a major paper you get the astounding, jaw droppingly dumb assumption that in order to cover the dark underbelly of American paranoia you should hire someone who is probably crazy, too, or they won’t be properly sympathetic.
This is, indeed, the medium as the *massage* that the Original Poster pointed out. Now the Post and other top newspapers are going to treat crazy fringe talk as a legitimate “style” section feature in which anorexics, bulemics, racists, birthers, people who leave their money to their dogs, childless by choice, and a hundred other deviant lifestyles can feel reassured by knowing that htey are getting sympathetic treatment on a weekly basis. But the style section where the readership is coaxed by having its main concerns highlighted will be removed to the editorial pages.
aimai
Michael D.
“It’s odd that the media believe they need…”
Sorry. Editing some work today and couldn’t help myself. :-)
smiley
After reading the overstatement of the size of the crowd on the internet and also here locally (still!), I’ve become convinced that such overstatements are a delayed reaction to the crowds that Obama drew during the campaign.
“See? We can draw a gazillion people too!”
Mike G
“False only in a logical sense, not an emotional one”
It’s not true, but I really, really want it to be true, so that makes it true.
This is the kind of magical thinking we used to get from Bush. Most of us grow out of this pre-Piagetian fantasy system by the age of 7.
Citizen_X
@Crashman06:
Ahem.
Sly
This analysis leaves out the tactic of “working the refs,” whereby prominent wingers excoriate media institutions for a supposed bias in order to keep said institutions on guard and, hopefully, be more lenient on Republican ideology masquerading as legitimate analysis of daily events. This is explicitly why the Philly Inquirer hired John Yoo, or the NYT hired Kristol. “If only we give insane and/or perpetually wrong conservatives some ink, the rest of the insane and/or perpetually wrong conservatives will stop being so mean to us.”
It won’t happen, of course. The same way the Birthers wouldn’t disappear if they were suddenly transported to Kapi’olani Medical Center on August 4th, 1961. The purpose of their massive outrage isn’t to counter an alleged bias or get news reporting to be more objective. It’s to get news reporting to omit obvious failures in conservative policymaking and highlight (or make up) failures in liberal policymaking, thereby transforming a free press into a propaganda arm for the GOP.
truculent and unreliable
@aimai: I mostly agree with you, but this made my jaw drop:
“…top newspapers are going to treat crazy fringe talk as a legitimate “style” section feature in which…[the] childless by choice, and a hundred other deviant lifestyles can feel reassured by knowing that htey are getting sympathetic treatment on a weekly basis.”
Did you really just imply that people who are “childless by choice” are leading deviant lifestyles?
Crashman06
@Citizen_X: Sweet. Wingers are so juvenile. Project 73 is the name for your conservative reporting outlet? Really? Sounds like a teenaged emo band to me.
Bubblegum Tate
@smiley:
Which would make the fact that the wingnuts plucked a quote from some official talking about how Obama’s inauguration was perhaps the largest gathering ever to hit D.C. and tried to claim he was talking about the Million Moran March all the funnier.
Roger Moore
@Sly:
I think you mean:
Add it to the lexicon.
ChrisB
@freelancer:
Reminiscent of the classic Star Trek episode where Captain Kirks from alternate universes are transposed and the “good” Captain Kirk finds himself on an “evil” Enterprise (with the evil Spock sporting a goatee) and an evil Kirk ends up on the Enterprise. The good Kirk could navigate his way around the evil Enterprise but the evil Kirk immediately betrayed himself and quickly found himself in the brig.
A far reaching analogy, actually. Picture DougJ on FreeRepublic and cretin of the day Dan Riehl here. But could DougJ stand it?
Ash Can
@ChrisB: “Picture DougJ on FreeRepublic and cretin of the day Dan Riehl here.”
If Dan Riehl were to post here it could lead to an all-time record in Balloon Juice comment-thread snark. There wouldn’t be enough left of him to send back to his blog through the Intertubes.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
This isn’t about emotion, it is about power. The grass-roots level wingnuts may get their feeling bent out of joint when teh liberal media fails to fling the propaganda they want to hear, but that isn’t where the decisions are being made. The folks pulling on the levers of power to jerk the media around in favor of right wing BS only care about two things: (1) that the future is a boot stomping on a human face, forever, and (2) that they get to be the boot and we get to be the face. That is all.
CalD
I wonder how Lord Limbaugh is taking all this.
Wile E. Quixote
@wonkie
This is a great quote. I’d love to see someone use it to attack Faux News. It would be awesome to start a news channel with the slogan “News for people who can handle the facts and want to be informed, not for people who just need to be affirmed.”
freelancer
Is Huffpo useful reading for ANYTHING outside of Nico Pitney and Dan Froomkin?
“Don’t get a flu shot, because yeah, it might be effective, and there’s a possibility it’ll keep you from getting the flu, but vaccines are evil and you should do this instead:
Take vitamins, herbs, meditate, do yoga, wash your hands, but not with anti-bacterial soap b/c you might inadvertantly create Superbacteria, and oh, one more thing…Homeopathy.”
Fuckin’ Horseshit.
Brachiator
@georgia pig:
There is a serious core of of these clowns (including mainstream pundits like Hugh Hewitt) who believe that being born conservative is the natural and normal for “real” Americans, and that liberalism is thus a kind of deviancy.
tc125231
Actually, what conservatives want from journalism is their own version of Pravda –straight party line. Thus the high popularity of Fox News among the base, despite its wretched record on factual reporting.
BethanyAnne
@asiangrrlMN: heh.
http://scout-report.net/archive/074.html
:-)
DougJ
Picture DougJ on FreeRepublic and cretin of the day Dan Riehl here. But could DougJ stand it?
I got my start posting on FreeRepublic.
freelancer
@DougJ:
Jesus Christ, Doug! Now I see where the spoofing talent comes from. Re: Good Night, and Good Luck
truculent and unreliable
@freelancer: If I didn’t know better, I’d think those posts were for real.
Though I do have to take points off for the halfway decent writing and spelling.
Bubblegum Tate
That is almost verbatim Mark Noonan. Eerie.
Jay
It’s emotionally comforting for me to think the Earth is flat so I don’t have to worry about rolling off of it. Where are my flat Earth articles???
fish
Isn’t the assumption then that conservatives have no talent in reporting, photography, or editing? NRO would reinforce that belief.
Ed Marshall
Goddamn, that’s some good spoof. I could never do it. I never lasted more than a week without being banned.
Gregory
Stephen Colbert dubbed this phenomenon “truthiness.”
Ed Marshall
Freeper popular keywords:
Popular Keywords
* acorn
* afghanistan
* agenda
* bho44
* bhofascism
* corruption
* democrats
* education
* glennbeck
* hannahgiles
* healthcare
* homosexualagenda
* iran
* islam
* israel
* larrysinclairslover
* liberalfascism
* military
* obama
* obamacare
* palin
* socializedmedicine
* sourcetitlenoturl
* talkradio
* veterans
I forgot what a paranoid cesspool that place is. It was a paranoid cesspool from 2002-2006 when they had all the power, but now it’s on steroids.
Gregory
@georgia pig:
Well, after all, they defended the rights of people accused of being Communists to work in movies…oh, wait…
And props to the many, many others who noted the “truthiness” connection upthread.
freelancer
@fish:
You forgot web-design.
Aimai
Truculent at 71 c
sorry. That was a badly phrased joke. I don’t think anybof thevthings that I listed are deviant lifestyles. I was ridding off the tendency of the style section to “discover” new and important trends when their writers get there age cohort wise or financially or emotionally. I was actually thinking of the ways youthful or fringe or novel lifestyles get addressed as the jornalists and editors start to work and then age. Each generation discovers anew that it has astonishingly gripping personal insight into major trends and then forcescthem onto the public as a gift. First cruhing student loans, then kicky two income no kids, then biological clock, then where have all rhevgood men gone, then infertility, children, toddlers, teens, crazy old parents. All this routine reporting of the personal as the sociological. I guess I’m arguing that the editors assume that’s normal instead of really really bad journalism.
Aimai
truculent and unreliable
@Aimai: Gotcha. I wondered if that’s what you meant. It drives me nuts, too.
JK
Doug,
Thanks for mentioning the TED website. It’s one of the very best websites around.
Sly
@Freelancer:
If there’s one thing that consistently grinds my gears, it’s the level of Ludditism on the left vis-a-vis modern medicine and biotech. It’s flat-out embarrassing to see so many people decry vaccines and FRANKENFOOD because they are developed by for-profit companies (with substantial public subsidies, testing, and regulation).
I especially liked the response from HuffPo’s Anne Dunev:
She might as well have said that homeopathy works through pixie dust or a quantum energy wake routed through a flux capacitor.
cervantes
Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy.
Even if hiring were not at a standstill, you couldn’t disproportionately hire conservatives on that basis because reality has a liberal bias.
Chad N Freude
@KG:
Unless, of course, you are the Bush administration DOJ.
SGEW
Obligatory Mitchell and Webb video: “Homeopathic Emergency Room”.
freelancer
@Sly:
She said that? Micro-energy?! Jebus, she would have gotten more points for creativity if she would have said that the needles in acupuncture re-route Higgs-Boson particles to prevent viruses from infiltrating the human body.
Makewi
The left doesn’t have scandals, only more opportunities to show how the real problem is the right.
The Moar You Know
@SGEW: That is sheer genius. Thank you.
Emma Anne
@Sly:
Yes, ugh to the anti-science stuff. I know psychics and people with recovered memories in addition.
Nellcote
Frank Luntz’s business model.
CalD
PS: The word “conservative” should always be written it quotes when used in the context of right-wing extremism — or better yet, not used at all.
chrome agnomen
it really baffles me why the print media seems intent on suicide-by-gop. there are still sufficient numbers of people willing to buy a newspaper that presents the news in a balanced, informative, easily understood manner. subscriptions=potential consumers=advertising revenue=profit. to they all really aspire to descend to tabloid land? it’s easy to predict top reporters for the enquirer et al jumping to the major news dailies, and being told not to modify their reporting.
what am i not seeing?
Joel
@Sly: Sometimes – not often – I feel that it’s appropriate to quote the eloquent philosopher, Eminem.
For example, regarding that quote you cited:
“And all that gibberish you was spitting, you need to kill it
Cause your style is like dying in my sleep, I don’t feel it”
Sly
Obligatory Futurama clip. But of course, no one does debunking like Skeptic Santa Clause
@Emma Mae:
The worst is when you see a confluence of New Agerism and Ludditism. I know someone who swears that his child’s autism is a result of a vaccine because a psychic told him so.
ChrisB
@DougJ: What a collection! I unwittingly uncovered a gold mine.
mclaren
Where’s the pushback from Obama and Rahm Emanuel about this bullshit?
At this point you have to reluctantly agree with Umair Haque that Obama’s presidency is an ineffective and impotent one, easily pushed around by far-right kooks like Glenn Beck and long-discredited neocon lightweights like Sarah Palin.
John Cole is right. Health care reform has fizzled out, America is stuck deep in the Viet Nam Afghanistan quagmire, and we now have to start figuring out how to deal with the endgame of another Viet Nam plus a collapsed unreformable health care system. That will be the task of the next 3 years. Not reform.
me
“Schopenhauer’s premise was a simple one. There are two ways to win an argument. There is logic and there is dialectic. Since no one ever wins an argument with logic, he moves on quickly to dialectic — to 38 nasty ways to win an argument any way you can. Most (if not all of them) involve tergiversation, deception, chicanery, manipulation, insincerity, hyperbole, out-right lying and probably a number of other similarly descriptive concepts that I can’t think of offhand. ”
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/more-lying/
rachel
@chrome agnomen:
Rupert Murdoch as Slim Pickens a-riding that bomb down to ground zero?
Neon Vincent
@slag
That would have made a great haiku, except your last line fell one syllable short.