Slate’s War Room has a list of thirty opinion makers and commentators they’re calling their Hack 30. “We’re listing the worst columnists and cable news commentators America has to offer. Think of this as our all-star team — of the most predictable, dishonest and just plain stupid pundits in the media.” I plan to read through it, unsure how irritated I’ll feel by the end, not that I want to carry the water for anyone, but a list like this could easily be the work of one cynical curmudgeon against many.
Related to this, Patrol Magazine has a list of “Ten Worst Christian Media Hacks,” which appears to have angered the Internet gods because their site has been down ever since they put the second part of the article on it. (links defunct)
Category Archives: The Press
The Answer is Blowing in the Wind
“The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year,” reports Steve Milloy. So cap-and-trade is over, though carbon offsets persist. Have you heard or seen this in the news? (via Roy Jacobsen the Beneficent)
Williams Fired by NPR for "Crossing the Line"
“My Fox News Sunday colleague Juan Williams has been fired by NPR for telling an inconvenient truth,” writes Bill Kristol on The Weekly Standard’s blog this morning. Apparently, NPR’s high and mighty can’t allow their people to express certain emotions or honest fears. Perhaps certain entire topics cannot be touched on.
Here, Mr. Williams describes what he thought and how he was fired for it over the phone.
Update: For a liberal take on this story, see Gawker. Max Read writes: “‘I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot,’ he told O’Reilly, and you knew it was going to be good, because who says that unless they are about to say something racist.” Help us.
Wall Street Journal to Begin Book Section
The Washington Post canned its book reviews from the printed paper last year. Other papers have been cutting book coverage for a long time. But behold, the Wall Street Journal say it will expand its Saturday edition and add to that expansion a portion of book reviews. The people rejoiced, and there was peace in those days.
Outtakes from TV News (or Are We Live?)
Here’s a curious collection of TV news people making gaffes or showing their true colors. It begins with Katie Couric insulting the Palin family, and get much worse. Some of these clips are offensive (the second and third particularly), and there’s a good one in the middle of Rush Limbaugh’s comments about NFL Quarterback Donovan McNabb, which is not a gaffe at all, but the context around his comment which got him removed from that sport’s show. Watch the whole thing and you’ll hear what he’s saying and that at least of his co-hosts believes he is making a good point.
Can We Ever Believe Them Again?
Ed Morrissey of Hot Air describes more of the coverage of the JournoList revelation, talking about the few reporters who stood up for honesty on occasion:
James Surowiecki offered a longer exposition on the same theme after Journolisters started debating whether the media should report on Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan’s ties to radical Islamist terrorists. When Luke Mitchell of Harper’s argued that reporting on the ties would lead to something “alarmingly dangerous, such as the idea that there is a large conspiracy of Islamists at work in the United States,” Surowiecki reminded Mitchell and others of the entire purpose of journalism, emphasis mine:
“I find it bizarre that anyone would argue that an accurate description of what happened is somehow pointless,” Surowiecki said. “That is, that it’s not useful to offer up an accurate picture of Hasan’s actions because nothing obvious follows from it. We want, as much as possible, to have a clear picture of what’s actually going on in the world. Describing Hasan as a violent Islamist terrorist is much closer to the truth than describing him as a disturbed individual.”
One has to wonder why a journalist from Harper’s — and other publications — would need that reminder, especially about terrorism.
"Didn't Know I Had This Much Hate in Me"
The Daily Caller has an exposé of a Journalist discussion group called JournoList.
If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.
But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.
In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.
In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”
Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.
Read more on The Daily Caller.
Politico.com did a story on this list last year, giving it a much less radical appearance. Perhaps the comments at the time were much less radical. The senior editor of The New Republic described the conversations on this exclusive email list.
“There is probably general agreement on the stupidity of today’s GOP,” he said. “But beyond that, I would say there is wide disagreement on trade, Israel, how exactly we got into this recession/depression and how to get out of it, the brilliance of various punk bands that I have never heard of, and on whether, at any given moment, the Obama administration is doing the right thing.”
The story this week is that JournoList members assume the worst of conservatives, and perhaps each other occasionally, pioneering new interior ground on the quest to learn how much hate they truly have. Maybe they should read Chesterton. Then they’ll get an idea of who is at fault for the world’s ills, and it isn’t Bush.
…and every postmodern family is a dead loss in its own way
Our friend Dale Nelson sent me a link to this New York Times column by Ross Douthat, all about why many “literary” authors are turning to writing historical novels, rather than setting their stories in contemporary settings. His interesting conclusion is that modern culture just doesn’t present the kind of conflicts that made the family sagas of old work so well:
You can write an interesting contemporary novel based on the “Anna Karenina” template in which the heroine gets a divorce, marries her modern-day Vronsky, and they both discover that they’re unhappy with the choices they’ve made — but the last act just isn’t going to be quite as gripping as Tolstoy’s original. You can turn the Jane Austen template to entertaining modern purposes, as Hollywood did in “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” but the social and economic stakes are never going to be as high for a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet as they were for the Regency-era version.
I think he’s got something there. If you want to write a novel about, say, an unwed mother, you can suggest that your plucky heroine’s Neanderthal, Bible-thumping parents don’t want her to have an abortion, but there’s really nothing they can do to stop her. The only other problem her romantic passions are likely to get her into is that of sexually transmitted diseases. In that case, she either takes medication to get better, or she’s stuck with the problem for life. There’s little scope for her to heroically defy convention and shame the small minds; there is no convention to defy.
P. G. Wodehouse wrote stories about couples being kept apart by unsympathetic fathers and guardians, well past the point in history when such parental figures had “sunk to the level of a third rate power” (to quote “Uncle Fred Flits By”). He was able to get away with it because his stories were light confections, not intended to reflect real life in any serious way. If he’d been forced to be realistic, the fun would drained out like water from a lion-footed bathtub.
Is it an indictment of modern society to say that it doesn’t offer scope to certain forms of fiction? Probably not.
But I often think of the popularity of Amish stories in the Romance genre, as I’ve mentioned here before. I don’t think it’s unrelated to highbrow authors writing historical novels. I think there’s a hunger out there to be able to live in a society where people care enough about you to tell you when they think you’re messing up your life.
The autonomous life, in the end, is a pretty lonely one.
Would You Pay to Comment?
The Sun Chronicle hasn’t appreciated reader feedback recently and has now guarded its article comments with a 99 cent fee. So you can fill out the order form, pay almost a dollar, and comment freely thereafter. I don’t know if that system will apply to only this Massachusetts paper or also to the other two papers the D’Arconte company owns.
Infamy
I attend a Lutheran congregation in north Minneapolis, one that belongs to the church body I work for. It’s large but not huge. The senior pastor has made himself visible in the media for a number of years as a critic of the liberal church, and of modern trends such as universalism, women’s ordination, higher criticism of the Bible, and the normalization of homosexuality. He is a single man.
Last night, while watching local news on television, I discovered that he’d been “outed” as a homosexual.
He was not discovered in a “gay” bar. He was not discovered having sex with another man in a public rest room.
According to the news accounts I’ve seen (emanating from liberal sources) he was discovered attending a support and accountability group in a Roman Catholic church. He was speaking honestly, to men he trusted, about his struggles, slips, and temptations.
In other words, he was doing precisely what people on our side of the argument say a man in his situation ought to do. He is the very opposite of a hypocrite.
On the basis of the accounts I’ve read, the “journalist” who produced the story infiltrated this accountability group, lied about his purposes, and then broke the promise of confidentiality he made to get in.
The television story pretended to be a high-minded think piece about whether it’s ever appropriate to “out” someone against their wishes.
I don’t believe that was the real purpose of the story. I believe it was to splash my pastor’s picture all over TV screens in our state, with a metaphorical scarlet letter on his chest.
My pastor has my full support, and my prayers. God bless him, and all godly men in his situation.