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Category: Media & Journalism
The dumbest elite
“But as we’ve told you many times: These people [the press corps] have only the dimmest sense of what a ‘fact’ (or a ‘quotation’) is. In their remarkably unimpressive minds—this may be our dumbest elite—there’s a very fuzzy line between a quotation and a paraphrase.”
That would be — for the most part — NewMexiKen’s personal experience too. While reporters don’t always get it wrong, in my experience they almost never get it right. There’s something about seeing your byline in print or your image on the screen I guess that — for many — creates a sense of knowing more than they ever do.
Stupidest line of the day, so far
“The Obama campaign has a woman problem. How big? How small? It’s not clear, but in a close election, small can be big.”
That’s Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin as reported at Daily Kos.
Except Ms. Marin is wrong. As kos reports, “Kerry won the female vote 51-48. … Obama leads that demographic by 22.”
So, umm, Ms. Marin, wouldn’t it have been more factually correct to say that the McCain campaign has a woman problem, being down 56 to 34 among women in a poll taken three days ago.
Elsewhere it’s been reported that Obama has a Latino problem, too. Except that he’s up 66-33 among Latinos according to Pew.
I’d say it’s the media that has a problem. But you knew that.
Most difficult to challenge line of the day
“In our view, the dumbness of this year’s general-election coverage has been its defining feature.”
BTW, Somerby has a very good analysis today of a misreading of student scores in an article in last Sunday’s New York Times. Recommended.
Sporting News Today
An online newspaper (albeit sports newspaper) that looks like a newspaper — Sporting News Today.
What d’ya think?
Boob job undone
In a decision that clears CBS of any wrongdoing for airing the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” a federal appeals court overturned the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission levied against the station, calling the fine arbitrary and capricious.
Cover Story
Particularly good stuff.
My dead-tree copy of the cover should be in today’s mail.
The story is always a story
“There was even racial dissension over Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle: She was viewed favorably by 58 percent of black voters, compared with 24 percent of white voters.”
From a front page story analyzing poll results in The New York Times.
What the article doesn’t say is that only 20% of the whites surveyed viewed Mrs. McCain favorably.
Rebuttal to the New Yorker cover
Satire or ?
Everyone else is writing about this, NewMexiKen might as well too. That’s this week’s New Yorker cover, art by Barry Blitt. That’s Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office, she with AK-47, he in Muslim garb. The American flag is in the fireplace.
This cover work for you?
Update: New Yorker editor David Remnick —
Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention — I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics. I can’t speak for anyone else’s interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama’s supposed “lack of patriotism” or his being “soft on terrorism” or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.
The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are… We’ve run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.
How many things can you find wrong with this paragraph?
“I just don’t drive as much,” said Herman Heaton, a 72-year-old retired lumber mill worker, leaning against a Chevy Silverado pickup that now costs him $80 to fill up. “We don’t go to Mobile as much as we used to for shopping.” Heaton said he now spends about $600 a month on gas, about 10 percent of his income and about double what he spent last year.
The above from an MSNBC story.
A retired lumber mill worker in Alabama has an income of $72,000 a year?
He’s buying, roughly, 150 gallons of gas a month? Even figuring just 10 miles a gallon, what’s a retired 72-year-old doing driving 18,000 miles a year?
He says he “just don’t drive as much,” but he also is said to be spending double on gas when gas has gone up just 33%.
Correction
A front-page picture caption on June 26 describing an 11-month-old boy whose legs were in casts stated that his legs were broken and that his mother said the injuries were caused by an episode of state-sponsored violence in Zimbabwe. After the picture and an accompanying article that also described the injuries were published, The New York Times took the boy to a medical clinic in Harare for help. When the casts were removed, medical workers there discovered the boy had club feet. Doctors said on Monday that X-rays of the baby’s legs showed no evidence of bone fractures.
The mother subsequently admitted that she had exaggerated injuries she said had been sustained by the boy during an attack by governing party militia. …
Corrections – NYTimes.com has a bit more.
Imagine that, the reporter got it wrong
Senator Barack Obama and his famous fist bumps have been drawing a lot of attention in recent weeks. So in Ohio on Tuesday, when it was reported that he refused to oblige a boy’s request for one, it created something of a stir.
An instant replay, however, shows that it didn’t happen the way it was reported.
The Caucus has the details.
Newsweek embarrasses itself
Newsweek has an article online about a psychic who charges $10,000 per month to her clients. The article gushes all over her — she must have needed a towel after reading it — detailing her intuition, her successes, her clients.
But it forgets to mention one thing. A small thing, a minor detail, really: psychic powers don’t exist.
. . .The Newsweek article is an embarrassment. It actually says this:
It’s impossible to objectively judge psychic powers.
Do you feel that somehow we are returning to the Middle Ages?
Best line of the day, so far
“Fox News is hopeless; you might as well get angry at mildew.”
What was that again?
Racism at Fox
NewMexiKen doesn’t watch Fox News and I try not to mention it too often around here, even to complain about it. But this is too much.
In case you can’t read it: “OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA!”
Excuse me, but Michelle Robinson Obama is not Obama’s baby mama.
A “baby mama” is a woman who has been left by the the father.
You know, like the first Mrs. McCain.
As if “Liberals” would use the term anyway.
Do you think any of these people might be terrorists?
Commenting on Barack and Michelle Obama’s on-stage “fist bump” before the start of a June 3 speech by Barack Obama, host E.D. Hill previewed a segment on the June 6 edition of Fox News’ America’s Pulse by saying, “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.”
An Internet search for terms “fist bump,” “pound,” “dap,” and “bumping fists” has revealed images of numerous athletes, celebrities, and politicians performing the same social gesticulation. Does Fox think any of the following might be terrorists?
Click Media Matters to see the potential terrorists.
Best line of the day, so far
“Da’Tara wins the Belmont at 38:1 odds, but who do they interview when it’s over? Big Brown’s jockey.”
Debby, official sister of NewMexiKen.
Historic
A fun day to look at the nation’s front pages — Today’s Front Pages — Map View.
Only works for the current day.
Another way to access the front pages — List View
I don’t know what I’m talking about much of the time either, why can’t I get a well-paid gig on cable?
On MSNBC, David Brooks asserted that “less educated” and “downscale” people “look at [Sen. Barack] Obama, and they don’t see anything,” adding: “And so, Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there.” Applebee’s officials have confirmed to Media Matters that its restaurants do not have salad bars.
How many things can you find wrong with these two dozen words?
It’s like the little kids’ activity, how many things can you find wrong with this picture.
This sentence is in an article by Liz Sidoti of The Associated Press:
“Obama, the lanky son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, was reared in Indonesia and Hawaii. He’s a Harvard University graduate and former Chicago activist …”
Is Obama ungracefully thin and tall? That’s the definition of “lanky.” I’ve seen a video of Obama with a pretty graceful move to the basket.
Obama was born in Hawaii (it was a state by then), and spent 13+ years in Hawaii and four in Indonesia. Is that “reared in Indonesia and Hawaii”? (He was in Hawaii for the fifth grade through high school. He was in Indonesia for ages 6 to 10.)
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University (B.A. 1983). He also attended Occidental College. He did graduate from Harvard Law School, but he is not a graduate of Harvard University.
Isn’t “activist” a charged word? Obama uses the terminology “a community organizer with a church-based group”.
The Gold Old Days
“I want to say also that the press is to be commended — complimented — on the manner in which the program was explained to the country. I think the press made a great contribution toward informing the people of the United States — toward showing just exactly what the intention of the legislation is.”
President Harry Truman 61 years ago today after signing legislation providing economic aid for Greece and Turkey, as reported then in The New York Times.
Best line of the day about retiring
“I guess I am officially retired in a couple of weeks. At least I got some certificates to the Cold Stone Creamery.”
Tony Kornheiser, leaving The Washington Post after 29 years.
NewMexiKen always enjoyed Tony’s writing much more than his radio-TV stuff.
Pundits Declare the Race Over
Who died and left Tim Russert in charge?
Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.
The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC.
As she so often does, digby sums it up best:
Who the fuck anointed Tim Russert as the final arbiter of anything? His job is to analyze the political landscape not declare the decision as if he were some kind of Roman Emperor giving a thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s bad enough that these gasbags put those thumbs on the scale as hard as they do, but actually taking the initiative to say when the race is over is even worse. To coin a favorite Village phrase, “it’s not their place.”
There’s a story about LBJ and former Washington Post and Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was at Newsweek (this was in 1964) and he predicted LBJ was going to remove J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI. The White House called a press conference and Bradlee expected to see his prediction announced. Instead, LBJ gave a testimonial about Hoover and exempted him from mandatory retirement. Moments before the announcement Johnson told press secretary Bill Moyers to call Ben Bradlee and tell him, “Fuck you.”
I’m eager for Senator Clinton to drop out, but not right now.