Being Dumb Like Michelle Malkin

2:01 am EST January 20th, 2006 | Republicans | 12 Comments

One of the downsides to the conservative hegemony in the media is that they’ve got so many outlets to repeat the same nonsense, they start believing their own spin. Sometimes it’s on vitally important matters – like the nonexistence of WMDs in Iraq, the scientific proof of global warming, or the medical evidence that Terri Schiavo was long dead.


(via apj)

But other times, it’s the more trivial things that bother me. In this instance Malkin uses the bad stock price of Tribune Media to declare that due to its overwhelming liberalism, that’s why newspaper companies are in trouble. By that idiotic logic, should all the nation’s newspapers turn into print versions of Fox News tomorrow, their circulation will go through the roof.

Of course, if I used MalkinlogicTM this chart would tell me that the overwhelming conservatism of the Wall Street Journal (the flagship publication of the Dow Jones Company) is obviously causing the paper to suffer.

Then again, I keep hearing that Google is liberal, so this must be boom time!

Or, I could grow a brain. And I could acknowledge that print – especially in the form of newspapers – has been in decline for years now, not because of any sort of idiotic ideological issues, but because by the time the paper gets to the news box the stories have already been done on tv, radio, and via email and the web.

Michelle Malkin is infamous for her shoddy scholarship and intellectual shortcomings (not to mention her blatant dishonesty) but she’s quite clear what’s going on in this instance. But the noise machine is a beast that must always be fed, and if it takes her being dumb on purpose to clang the drums of bias – then clang on soul sister, clang on.

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12 Responses to “Being Dumb Like Michelle Malkin”

  1. pgg2 says:
    January 20, 2006 at 8:01 am

    Finally, Ollie, you’ve said something I agree with!!!

    You could grow a brain.

  2. nawoods says:
    January 20, 2006 at 8:01 am

    “like the nonexistence of WMDs in Iraq”

    Are you claiming that Saddam’s Iraq never possessed a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons?

  3. factcheck says:
    January 20, 2006 at 9:01 am

    Are you claiming that WMD’s existed in Iraq at the time of the invasion?

  4. Dugger says:
    January 20, 2006 at 10:01 am

    You are absolutely 100% wrong about Malkin’s ‘shoddy’ scholarship and the other character assassination tripe, but your analysis of the decline of print media is pretty good IMO.

    Dugger

  5. DanielS says:
    January 20, 2006 at 11:01 am

    The Tribune Company Liberal? I live in Chicago and the Tribune is my home time paper (maybe I’ll give the Sun Times a second chance now that Conrad Black is on the way to the slammer – but the Trib has always had better reporting)

    Here’s the endorsement of Bush in the last election
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/elections/chi-0410170332oct17,0,4673811.story?page=2&coll=chi-news-hed

    I guess the wingnuts will just say anything

  6. Leroy Brown says:
    January 20, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    I dunno, her defense of internment book was reeking of shoddy scholarship. I agree with the paper argument, the days of Hurst and Pulitzer are gone.

    And you gotta love that photo.

  7. Dugger says:
    January 20, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    The fact that someone disagrees wiht her professionally does not equal shoddy. She was defending a controvresial position taken by one of history’s great liberals. She rebutted every argument against her work (how successfully is a matter of subjective judgement). Now if tyou want to talk shoddy scholarship lets talk Doris Kearns Goodwin.

    Dugger

  8. guither says:
    January 20, 2006 at 5:01 pm

    The Trib is far from liberal. I’d call it at least moderate conservative.

    …Unless you count the fact that they actually print news and verify facts and stuff as being a liberal thing.

  9. drpedro says:
    January 20, 2006 at 7:01 pm

    well Ollie,

    the NYT dropped 50% over that time period, the WSJ dropped 20 percent. I guess people like the conservative paper twice as much eh?

  10. Oliver Willis says:
    January 20, 2006 at 9:01 pm

    If you’re as dumb as Michelle Malkin and you use that line of thinking, sure.

    Dugger: Malkin hasn’t rebutted anything. You sound like Tom DeLay saying Terri Schiavo just needed a drink of water and she’d be up on her feet.

  11. Rational says:
    January 21, 2006 at 5:01 am

    The paper of Col. McCormick liberal!!!
    Be real.
    If this was true the friction from his body spinning would have set a flare shooting out of his grave.

  12. Dugger says:
    January 21, 2006 at 8:01 am

    OW, Then you have not been keeping up. This is a quote from Rasmussen – picked completely at random.

    ” I come very late to the Muller-Malkin debates over Japanese internment in World War II, but maybe that’s not a bad idea, since they’ve written summary posts by now. I’ve only skimmed, but they don’t seem to address what interests me most: whether internment can be explained simply as a special interest economic grab.
    …

    ..Muller’s wrap-up has a lot of weak, peripheral objections to Malkin’s book— things like the complaint that since she wrote the book in 16 months, it can’t be good. That’s a dumb criticism. Her claim is not that through years of research she has found some subtle problem in the conventional wisdom; it is that the conventional wisdom is massively wrong and misguided. If she is right on that, her advantage is in a fresh point of view analyzing existing secondary literature, and her points won’t depend on archival research.”

    And that reviewer favors Muller.

    (Right as usual King) Dugger