On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” National Public Radio’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg spelled out the consequences of the government becoming “intertwined” with the press in response to the scandal Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World publication is embroiled in England. (more)
“I still can’t believe it happened,” my student said to me. “He got away with it just because people thought he was cool.” (more)
I was skeptical of the attempted rape charge against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn when I heard that a Frenchman had been involved in an assault without surrendering. But the media have been more gullible. Most have taken the New York Police Department’s word that Strauss-Kahn attempted to rape a chambermaid at his New York City hotel and have come out looking stupid because of it. (more)
Former Bush speechwriter and FrumForum editor David Frum derides what he calls “the conservative media’s pay-to-play deals.” But if I didn’t know better, I’d say David is simply jealous that conservative talk radio hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, have pioneered a financially lucrative business model, which we’d all do well to emulate. (more)
1) Weapons of mass distraction: (more)
The Sarah Palin email saga produced exactly one bombshell: The mainstream media actually managed to elicit sympathy for Sarah Palin from the showbiz elite. From Jon Stewart’s brilliant rant to the supportive tweets from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Palin found defenders in quarters where she had previously found nothing but ridicule and scorn. (more)
Something happened a couple of months ago, something big . . . and American. I can vaguely recall it, mainly because I have a hazy memory of the network news anchors, drunk on peppermint schnapps, going live on the air with grave expressions on their faces. There was wild speculation and rumors flying — was it Libya? Iraq? Another campaign speech? The president, I remember, came out looking solemn and announced . . . jeez, what was it? Oh yeah, Osama bin Laden! Dead! Hooray! Phew. Don’t cha just hate that? Now I can get back to working on my tan. (more)
When Raymond Donovan, President Reagan’s labor secretary, was finally found innocent of all charges in a three-year, multimillion-dollar prosecution brought by a politically motivated district attorney in New York City, he famously asked the court, “What office do I go to now to get my reputation back?” (more)
“Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.” — Norman Mailer (more)
When did the media become a bunch of girly men? (more)
The New York Times’s headline on Monday, concerning President Obama’s speech on Israel the day before to the national pro-Israel organization, AIPAC, read: “Obama presses Israel to make hard choices.” (more)
When you read an opinion article, how can you be sure that the author of the article isn’t being paid by an undisclosed party with a vested interest in the topic? Same with other news reports that you read or watch: how can you be sure that a public relations firm didn’t pay the media outlet to run it? (more)
Broadside Books, Harper Collins’s new conservative publishing arm, is launching a series, Voices of the Tea Party, in an effort to give a media platform to grassroots conservatives who aren’t getting national attention. Editor Adam Bellow told The Daily Caller the series will offer local leaders an opportunity to highlight issues that interest them, instead of letting the mainstream media and establishment conservative media frame the conversation. (more)
In the halls of American power, the Arab Spring has brought Al-Jazeera in from the cold. (more)
After the 2008 election, I spent an enormous amount of time and money documenting the media-induced ignorance of Obama voters for my documentary film, “Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.” The video I shot of Obama voters on Election Day has been seen by over 2.5 million people (not including millions more via television coverage) on YouTube. (more)
After much huffing and puffing, a group of unpaid Huffington Post contributors, led by blogger and union organizer Jonathan Tasini, is upping the ante and will bring a class-action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington, HuffPo and its new parent company AOL, according to Forbes blog Mixed Media. (more)
In Japan they have a phrase: Yamato gokoro (大和心). It’s three Japanese ideograms sometimes translated as “Japanese spirit.” The last character, 心 — pronounced “kokoro” when standing alone — is usually translated as “heart,” but the character is a picture of not just the heart, but the heart, the lungs, and the liver — “innards,” or better yet, “guts.” (more)
For years, newspapers have struggled to cope with the challenges of the Internet age: declining print circulations, the evaporation of the market for personal ads, and advertisers’ gradual shift from print to online media. But that may be about to change, because The New York Times has finally found a solution to the newspaper industry’s troubles: preying on the guilt and ignorance of loyal readers. (more)
Al Jazeera is planning to expand into the United States, and the chattering classes are treating it as a simple free speech matter. Let’s not let the Islamic supremacists once again invoke the freedom of speech to kill our freedom of speech. The ruse of using freedom of speech to allow propaganda broadcasts over our airways is another stealth attack on the United States of America. The issue of the expansion of Al Jazeera into the United States can only be likened to an expansion of Goebbels’s media network into the U.S. at the height of World War II. (more)
BEIJING — Apparently unnerved by an anonymous Internet campaign urging Chinese citizens to emulate protests that have rocked the Middle East, the authorities this week have launched a forceful and carefully targeted clampdown on activities by foreigners that the government deems threatening to political stability. (more)
