Category Archives: The Press

The Press, Uncategorized

World Radio Live and Free North Korea Radio

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If any of our readers live in the Twin Cities area, you may be interested in a live event coming September 30 to Free Lutheran Bible College & Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. Key voices heard on The World and Everything in It podcast will be there, and we’ve boosted that excellent show a few times on this very blog. Seating is limited, so register ahead of time.

Today, The World and Everything in It has released the first of a two-part program on Free North Korea Radio, which has broadcast into the Hermit Kingdom for several years. Read some of the story in this piece, “The Campaign Against Kim.“

In today’s program, they tell of humanitarian supply trucks going into North Korea and government troops following up afterward to collect everything that was given out. Children came to understand that they shouldn’t eat the cookie given to them because one of Kim Jong Un’s agents would be along to take it away.

The Press

Will California Have Its First Black Governor?

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If [Larry] Elder were running as a Democrat, the press would be celebrating the possibility of California’s first black governor. Instead, we hear nothing about “shattering glass ceilings” or “diversifying” the ruling elite. The New York Times ran an entire front-page article on Elder’s candidacy without once mentioning that he was black. (The article did claim in passing that Elder was an affirmative-action admit to Brown University, an unthinkable charge regarding a black liberal.)

Larry Elder is a nationally syndicated talk show host and lawyer running to replace the current California governor, if voters approve the recall. Real Clear Politics has recall polling results stepping over the line toward approving a recall and Elder is clearly ahead of the many candidates vying for the governorship.

That has the heads of national media outlets spinning.

City Journal describes the issues and some of the media’s attempts to whitewash Elder as a white supremacist. Editor Heather Mac Donald notes how the press celebrates minority status with leftist candidates but have ignored it with Elder’s gubernatorial victory close at hand.

Blogs, Socials, The Press, Writing

The Fact-Checker Has Been Checked

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The co-founder of Snopes.com has been outed as plagiarist. David Mikkelson has been suspended from editing his own website, but I gather he has not been dismissed entirely, if that’s even possible since he owns half the company.

Buzzfeed News has the story today. A few years ago, a statement like that would have sounded like saying, “ClickHole reports this shocking bit of truth.” But Buzzfeed does real work now. Who would have thought?

The article quotes from a couple former Snopes staffers who say Mikkelson’s policy was to plagiarize first, rewrite into original wording later. “I remember explaining that we didn’t need to ‘rewrite’ because we’d always done this stuff quickly,” Kim LaCapria said, “He just didn’t seem to understand that some people didn’t plagiarize.”

Have you put much or any stock in Snopes recently? I haven’t looked at it for a long while, having become disenchanted with it after reading a couple articles that weren’t fact-checking at all. But most of my fact-checking for the last few years has been etymological.

In the spirit of transparency, I got distracted while writing this post by my need for a good turnip greens recipe. I thought you should know.

Fiction, The Press

‘The Girl Who Did Say No,’ by David Handler

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I’m going to do something different tonight, in reviewing David Handler’s short Stewart Hoag mystery, The Girl Who Did Say No. I’m going to give the book a less than enthusiastic recommendation, in spite of my fondness for the series as a whole.

The set-up is pretty standard for the series. Hoagy, one-time literary wunderkind and current ghost-writer to celebrities, gets a high-priced offer to do an editing job. Anna Childress, a legendary Hollywood sex symbol of the 1960s, died recently and left her personal diaries behind. Rumor has it the diaries contain the straight dope on all the film industry’s dirty laundry from the big studio days. Her agent has arranged to have the removal of the diaries from the bank safe deposit box broadcast on national TV. Millions are expected to watch, and the book is a guaranteed monster bestseller.

But when Hoagy arrives in LA, he’s immediately waylaid by the last of the old studio moguls. The studio head is willing to pay him twice his promised fee to just walk away from the project. The industry’s secrets need to remain secret, he says. That’s what people would really want, if they knew what was good for them. Hoagy refuses.

The story worked out in a fairly predictable way, it seemed to me, and was uncharacteristically downbeat for this usually light-hearted series. Plus, I detected at least one political barb. And it seemed to me the price was a little high for a book of this length.

But you might like it better.

Reading, The Press

Why Read the News? Seriously, Why?

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Gary Furnell notes Sturgeon’s Law in his review of Rolf Dobelli’s book, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life, saying the news fits in that law too.

“Sturgeon’s Law” is named after sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon who, when needled by a patronising critic complaining that 90 per cent of science fiction was rubbish, replied that 90 per cent of everything published was rubbish.

Furnell agreed with the premise before he picked up the book. He notes Dobelli chapter titles to show the rationale. News works against your creativity. It gives you the illusion of empathy and obscures the big picture. It create artificial fame.

Dobelli admits that when he was a young man he was constantly reading newspapers, fearful of not knowing what was happening in the world. He describes himself as an addict, a news-aholic. He doesn’t quote Kierkegaard, but I will: “What we need is a Pythagorean silence. There is far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol.”

This is probably the advice we all need. Stop Reading the News (Bookshop link) (via Prufrock News)

Non-fiction, The Press

Many Foxes grow grey, few grow good

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Another chapter in Carl Trueman’s 2010 book Republocrat deals with Fox News and many people’s uncritical support of it. You’ve heard some of this before; it’s a common complaint that people are not more discerning of their news consumption, just as it is common to praise someone’s wisdom when they agree with you. Trueman begins his critique from a more British angle.

He says he grew up conservative in the British sense and began to question that when conservative leaders showed themselves to be just as self-servingly corrupt as the opposition party was supposed to be. Then the UK had to turn Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997. The last governor of Hong Kong as a British colony was Chris Patten, and he pressed as hard as he could to move the region into safe, democratic territory before he left. Everyone knew it was an uphill struggle, and Patten intended to publish his thoughts in a book (entitled East and West when finally published).

His contract was with HarperCollins, a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man Trueman believed to be a champion of free speech and the free world. His news empire would help guard the world against the Soviet Union and all the evils therein. But Murdoch got Patten’s book cancelled under the guise that it was substandard and boring. That caused what The New York Times called “a week of relentlessly bad publicity” and provoked the publisher to issue a public apology.

The apology represents an unusually public embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, who ordered that the book be canceled because of its highly critical stance toward China, a country in which Murdoch has considerable business interests and even more considerable financial ambitions.

The top brass ordered Patten’s editor to make excuses and cancel the book, because it could threaten Murdoch’s relationship with people Rush Limbaugh calls “the Chi-Coms.” Editor Stuart Proffitt was already on record praising the book, calling it a upcoming bestseller, so a public 180 would embarrass him personally. He refused and was suspended.

This event and others like it caused Trueman to question what the good guys were up to. Were they really standing up for freedom or their business interests? As we’re seeing in the NBA and Disney Studios today, Trueman writes, “Freedom, it seems, was only important so long as it did not do damage to profit margins.”

This is the man behind Fox News and many other news organizations, including Britain’s popular tabloid The Sun, which delivered nude photos to its readers daily on Page 3 and spurred its competitors to do the same. That’s enough to raise serious questions about Fox’s moral authority and general objectivity, particularly to those who think it is the one unbiased news source on the air.

Photo by Martin Sepion on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews, The Press

New Viking book by Neil Price

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Via our friend Dave Lull, a London Review of Books review of Neil Price’s new book on the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm.

In one of several vignettes, Price imagines a younger son on the impoverished west coast of Norway, whose childhood sweetheart has a new brooch: a present from a boy who spent a successful summer raiding. What is young Orm or Gunnar going to do? Not only does he need money for the bride-price paid to her family, he needs a reputation: ‘The act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.’ And if he went raiding he might in any case acquire a woman for free. DNA has shown that ‘a very large proportion – even the majority – of female settlers in Iceland were of Scottish or Irish heritage.’

Looks like the kind of book a man of my pretensions needs to read. It’s coming August 25th.
The Press

Ratings Distort Content: How the News Isn’t Just News

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Television producer Ariana Pekary left her job at MSNBC recently, saying it’s a bad time to leave, but she can no longer stay. Her criticism touches more than this particular network.

It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would “rate.” The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing.

But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done. “We are a cancer and there is no cure” . . .

I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”

Fiction, Reviews, The Press

Nat’l Review on D. Keith Mano’s ‘The Bridge’

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“We of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours,” the decree states. “It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species.” The operative word is contrition. Guilt is a force eating people from inside. Citizens are too cowed, too stricken with guilt, to mount any organized resistance to the Council’s diktat. Although not all have chosen to give up on life, everything is in ruins and life expectancy for citizens is low indeed.

Our friend and instigator Dave Lull is well aware of my fondness for the late author D. Keith Mano. He sent me a link to this recent article from the National Review on one of Mano’s nearly forgotten but uncomfortably relevant novels, The Bridge.

Perhaps the scenario evoked in The Bridge is too general in nature to belong to Mano or to any one writer. But anybody who reads Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Mano’s The Bridge, published 33 years earlier, will quickly see how much the later novel has in common with the earlier one. 

I thought myself audacious (and feared I was prescient) when in my Epsom novels I postulated a near future in which “Extinctionism” was a popular movement. I in fact cherished a hope that I could manipulate Fate by exploiting its reluctance to ever prove me right. But we’ve seen Extinctionism begin to take hold in recent years, and one looks at imagined futures like those of The Road and The Bridge, today, with growing alarm.

The Bridge, writer Michael Washburn notes, is out of print but can be obtained online. It sounds intriguing, but – honestly – I’m afraid to read it. Also, look at the price on Amazon!

Authors, Reading, The Press

Sigrid Undset, the I.S.I., and I

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I wrote an essay on Sigrid Undset for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s web site:

Like one of her own characters, Sigrid Undset followed her heart, confronted the consequences, and learned. Enabled by a government grant to live abroad, she began an affair in Rome with a married Norwegian painter, Anders Castus Svarstad. They married in 1912, after his divorce, and divorced in turn in 1919. By that time, they’d moved back to Norway, where their third child was born. Their second child, a daughter, was mentally handicapped. When Sigrid learned to her horror that Svarstad’s ex-wife had placed her children by him in an orphanage, Sigrid adopted them. One of these was also mentally handicapped. (Years later, when she received her Nobel Prize, she would donate the entire sum to children’s charities.)

Read the whole thing here.