Archive for the 'Media' Category

Yesterday, I asked if Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) was the stupidest man on the planet, and implied that he is. But it’s obvious that Bill O’Reilly is even more stupid:

In my defense, I have to say that this clip confirms what I said about the Republicans’ math problem.

The folks at Fox News, who have been telling us for almost a decade that Iraq is the central front of the War on Terror, can’t even place the country on a map.

Note, though, that Fox isn’t the only news outlet where ignorance reigns when it comes to the Middle East. Just before the 2004 election, while President Bush was busy eking out a narrow victory by riding a wave of fear and loathing of Muslims, Newsweek published a photo of Iranian tanks massing “at the border with Israel“. The photo and caption served as a non-sequitur illustration of a story about Israel spying on the United States.

And people wonder how why Americans gave a second term to the Worst President Ever.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

Here’s Pat Buchanan, articulating the bigoted assumptions that underlie the current backlash against women, minorities, and affirmative action:

And here’s Rachel Maddow, correcting the record:

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Here’s a partial transcript of this video clip:

KILMEADE: Different. Leave it to the Finns and Swedes to some up with something. They literally –

CARLSON: Don’t look at me, pal.

KILMEADE: Because that’s a — we are — we’re — we’re a — we’re — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other –

CARLSON: Are you sure they’re not suffering from some of the –

KILMEADE: I mean, the Swedes –

CARLSON: — causes of dementia right now?

BRIGGS: What are you getting at?

KILMEADE: See, the problem is, the Swedes have pure genes.

BRIGGS: OK.

KILMEADE: Because they marry other Swedes. Because that’s the rule. Finland — Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society. In America, we marry everybody.

This sort of racism wouldn’t be tolerated at any other major news outlet. But at the White Supremacy Channel, it’s par for the course.

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Earth to Media: this was not Michael Jackson’s natural color

It’s been a few days since I’ve been able to turn on a news program without hearing about Michael Jackson. I wouldn’t mind so much, if it seemed like the media was making any effort to get their facts straight.

The most egregious example of the media deliberately avoiding the facts is their coverage of the custody battle surrounding Paris, Prince, and Blanket Jackson, the children Michael Jackson allegedly fathered. Fox News provided a typical example of this avoidance during a discussion between Greta Van Sustern and Associated Press entertainment editor Alicia Quarles. Quarles dropped a potential bombshell in response to a question about Jackson’s Dermatologist, Arnold Klein:

There’s been rumors for years, people saying that these kids might not even be Michael Jackson’s.

Ya think? Have a quick look at the kids, and see if you can figure out why people might think Jackson’s not the real dad:

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Alert CNN reporter poised to break the next big story

The latest from CNN is the rise of the Real Life Superheroes, people who dress up in costumes and prowl the backstreets of their hometowns, looking for crimes to thwart:

As people become disillusioned from financial woes and a downtrodden economy and look to put new purpose in their lives, everyday folks are taking on new personas to perform community service, help the homeless and even fight crime.

“The movement is growing,” said Ben Goldman, a real-life superhero historian. Goldman, along with Chaim “Life” Lazaros and David “Civitron” Civitarese, runs the New York-based Web site Superheroes Anonymous as part of an initiative dedicated to organizing and making alliances with superhero groups.

According to Goldman, who goes by the moniker Cameraman because of his prowess in documenting the movement, economic troubles are spawning real life superheroes.

“A lot of them have gone through a sort of existential crisis and have had to discover who they are,” Goldman said. People are starting to put value in what they can do rather than what they have, he said. “They realize that money is fleeting, it’s in fact imaginary.”

Estimates from the few groups that keep tabs put the worldwide total of real-life superheroes between 250 and 300. Goldman said the numbers were around 200 just last summer.

So according to an obvious lunatic, this is a growing movement. There are now almost 300 real life superheroes, or slightly fewer than one for every million Americans. And they’re inspired not by the recent proliferation of comic book movies, but by their realization that money is imaginary.

Nice source, CNN.

And as well-meaning as the superheroes are, they come across as being just as ridiculous as the journalists who cover them:

“A lot of factors led me to become a real-life superhero, not the least of which was 9/11,” Geist says. “I have to do something positive with my life. This is my admittedly unusual answer to that.”

There were some real-life superheroes who were inspired by 9/11, but none of them wound up running around alleys and parking garages at night wearing hockey pads.

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Alexander Mooney contemplates the significance of Bush’s reading habits

CNN’s Alexander Mooney decided to take a break from all that boring news stuff and compare the reading habits of Bush and Obama:

It appears President Obama has to step up his reading pace if he wants to beat his predecessor in one particular measure: how many books a president can polish off a year.

In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Obama said he is currently reading Joseph O’Neill’s 270-page novel “Netherland,” a book Obama first said he began back in April.

If Obama is close to finishing the novel, that puts him on less than a 10 book-a-year pace, far less than the close to 100 books President Bush was reportedly able to finish in the same amount of time.

According to former top Bush aide Karl Rove, he and the former president engaged in a friendly wager every year to see who could read more books.

In 2006, Bush read 95 books to Roves 110: a Herculean pace of nearly two books a week — in an election year to boot — for the ex-president. But, according to Rove, Bush’s reading slowed a bit in the final years of his presidency, finishing a not-too-shabby 51 books in 2007 and at least 40 in 2008.

And if that’s not impressive enough, Rove also said Bush found time to read the Bible “from cover to cover” every year.

It’s hard to see how Bush found the time to read the Bible eight times while he was so busy planning invasions and authorizing torture. And I don’t know why Karl Rove would be considered a reliable source on any subject. Also, Mooney ignores the most obvious explanation for Bush’s ability to get through so much reading material: Bush spent one third of his presidency on vacation. It’s no coincidence that Bush happened to be on vacation when the worst natural disaster in 100 years hit the US, or when the country was struck by the worst terrorist attack in its history. Bush was at his ranch or at Camp David a total of 977 days, or about 2 years and 8 months. You can get a lot of reading done in 2 years and 8 months if you don’t have any distractions, like running the executive branch.

And all this misses the real point, which is that it doesn’t matter how much recreational reading a president does. Do you know how many novels Abraham Lincoln read during his presidency? Why do you suppose none of your history teachers bothered to tell you how many books Theodore Roosevelt read while he was in office? The reason you were never asked to learn these facts is that they DON’T MATTER. They are a WASTE OF TIME. They are the kind of facts that CNN provides to its viewers as a way of avoiding the time consuming and expensive process known as journalism.

It’s hard to understand why anyone takes Fox News seriously

Once again, the folks at Fox News have decided that scoring political points is more important than maintaining their credibility. This time around, they’re taking shots at Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s proposal to paint roofs, roads, and pavements light colors in an effort to combat global warming:

Energy Secretary’s White-Paint Proposal Puzzles Climate-Change Experts

Energy Secretary Steven Chu stunned the audience at a London scientific conference Tuesday with a radical but simple proposal to combat global warming: Paint all the roofs of all the buildings in the world white.

According to the Times of London, the actual proposal is to paint the roofs of flat buildings white, lighten the colors on the roofs of other buildings, and lighten roads and walkways to the color of concrete.

The Fox spin continues:

If we did so, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist said, and if we also made sure the world’s roads and sidewalks were light-colored, it would have the same effect on global warming as taking all the cars in the world off the world’s roads for 11 years.

But at least one science expert thinks Chu is nuts.

“It’s past simplistic — it’s ridiculous,” says Steven Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com and an avowed climate-change skeptic. “Imagine the glare on roads, in urban areas, imagine the UV radiation bouncing around. Snow blindness would be replaced by road blindness.”

Note how legions of “climate change experts” gasping in stunned amazement has been replaced by the bleating of a Steven Milloy, a lobbyist and public relations executive who is a paid advocate for ExxonMobil. And the problem of “road blindness” is specifically addressed within Chu’s proposal:

Building regulations should insist that all flat roofs were painted white, and visible tilted roofs could be painted with “cool-coloured” paints that looked normal, but which absorbed much less heat than conventional dark surfaces. Roads could be lightened to a concrete colour so they would not dazzle drivers in bright sunlight.

Fox does quote an opposing point of view, though:

But Dr. Gordon Bonan, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says there’s a kernel of truth in the science behind Chu’s idea.

“That’s been a pretty standard idea many for many years now,” says Bonan. “It’s related to the idea of an urban heat island — that a big city will generate a large amount of heat. In urban planning and urban design, the idea is that painting roofs white will absorb less solar radiation and keep the city cooler.”

A standard idea for many years now? So how is it that all of those climate scientists were shocked to hear Chu’s proposal? You don’t suppose Fox is lying about that, do you?

Also, notice how a single expert, Gordon Bonan, is counterbalanced by a single non-expert, Steven Milloy. Milloy’s views are given much more space in the article, despite the fact that he has no expertise in the field of climatology, and despite the fact that he’s voicing an opinion that runs directly counter to one that has been “pretty standard for many years now” among the world’s climate experts.

Fox presents Milloy’s views without disclosing his association with ExxonMobile, even when Milloy’s arrogance gets the better of him, and he winds up discrediting himself:

Milloy says he’s certain that it would be a huge waste of time and money.

“How would this accomplish anything? What’s the expense?” he asks. “This shows you how even Nobel winners get lost when they step outside their fields of expertise.”

Remember that climate change is outside Milloy’s field of expertise. Malloy has a law degree and a graduate degree in hygiene and public health, and he’s shown remarkable aptitude in the fields of public relations and fundraising. The man he’s criticizing, Steven Chu, was awarded the Nobel prize in physics, and was the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for five years before Obama named him Secretary of Energy. Given the fact that the Berkeley laboratory specialized in solar energy research during Chu’s tenure, I think it’s safe to say that he knows more about solar radiation than Steven Milloy.

So there you have it: given a proposal that’s based on uncontroversial scientific principals, Fox News quotes an oil industry shill and pretends that most climate scientists agree with him. Welcome to the No Spin Zone.

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Look at how sad they are! And according to the liberal media, it’s all Obama’s fault!

Here’s a recent headline from NBC News, the flagship of the liberal media:

Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?

According to the story, a busload of kids were turned away from the White House, and their parents say it was because they arrived 10 minutes late for a tour. The story goes on at length with details of the trouble and expense the kids and their parents went through, and how disappointed the kids are.

Sounds pretty bad, huh? And only those few who read all the way to the end of the piece learn this bit of information:

The White House tells a slightly different story. A spokesperson said the group was actually supposed to be there at 9:30, but they held the gates for the group until 10:30, 15 minutes longer than they told the group, but when they still hadn’t arrived, they had to draw the line.

Frankly, that sounds like it’s probably a lot closer to the truth than the outraged ranting of the parent quoted in the article. It seems as though a media outlet with a pro-Obama bias would have given the president the benefit of the doubt.

Fox News continues to provide America with vital information

Are you a teenage girl with a cell phone? Do you want to tell your boyfriend to get naked and masturbate via text messaging, but you’re afraid you’ll do it wrong and he’ll think you’re a n00b?

Fear not! Fox News has helpfully provided you with a guide to sexting, including 50 helpful phrases like GYPO (get your pants off), DUM (do you masturbate), and FMLTWIA (fuck me like the whore I am).

I am so not making this up.

Actually, it’s 49 helpful phrases, but the folks at Fox News don’t know how to count.

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