Last week Dana was just pissing in his pants he was soooooo mad that a blogger asked the president a question, but I bet he’s got nothing to say about the paper that employs him – the Washington Post – auctioning off access like so much meat. The mainstream media in this country grows less relevant and more disliked every day, and they earn every bit of the scorn on their own.
Media News
Expect more of this for the next 4-8 years. Right wing group backed by oil/big business makes attack on the president, Fox amplifies it, like its an actual thing. As they showed when they cheerleaded the nation into war, facts and consequences simply don’t matter to them.-
Fair. Balanced.
Fox News received Doug Hampton’s letter about Sen. John Ensign’s adulterous affair three days earlier than the network reported, according to information obtained exclusively by the Las Vegas Sun.
Fox said it didn’t receive the letter until June 15, when it arrived as an attachment to an e-mail. But FedEx tracking of a ‘priority envelope,’ which a reliable source said contained the hard copy, shows it was delivered on the morning of June 12.
That would mean the national news organization had additional time to investigate and report Ensign’s affair before the senator’s own admission of the relationship with Hampton’s wife, who worked for the senator’s leadership political action committees.
Okay. I’m not against a little sexuality in advertising. In fact, I’m all for it. But, is it possible to be less subtle than this Burger King ad? Jeez. (via)
Nice series here from the St. Petersburg Times on the Scientology cults based on interviews with some high-up former insiders.
Remember, y’all, the media is totally liberal.
Media Research Center’s Tim Graham thinks that – ho-ho! – he’s got Huffington Post by the tail because in a story about Bill O’Reilly’s serial use of sexy images to denounce sexy images, Huffington has a few stories with sexy images. Of course, the problem is, as far as I know the HuffPo has not made it one of its major goals the eradication or shunning of this material. In fact, based on what Arianna Huffington herself has said on these issues in the past they’re okay with them. But what Fox News does, and particularly O’Reilly, is try to eat their cake and have it too.
Often O’Reilly will discuss how disgusting it is to “exploit” some “young women” to sell a product or whatever and in order to display his disgust they roll b-roll footage of scantily clad poledancers. It’s hypocritical. That, of course, flies right over Tim Graham’s head.
The Washington Post gets rid of Dan Froomkin. His apparent crime was being well read and not cheering the Iraq War like most of the rest of the Post’s editorial section.
Drudge pushes out story that doesn’t remotely pass the smell test, conservatives flock to it. So gullible.
Based on 24/7 Wall St. conversations with people with knowledge about recent Fox Business viewership figures, including one former executive with the network, audience numbers have hardly budged in since The Post article eleven months ago. Average hourly viewership runs between 2,000 and 8,000 during most hours from 6 AM to 6 PM. The network’s most watched prime-time shows rarely pull more than 15,000 viewers per hour.
Fox News Channel is a clear success for Rupert Murdoch. But people forget he’s got a pretty strong track record of failing: TVGuide.com failed, iGuide.com failed, Fox Sports Net as an alternative to ESPN failed (Keith Olbermann was a part of that strategy), NY Post and The Weekly Standard are money losers, and MySpace is getting spanked big time by Facebook.
It’s easy.
1. Claim that the product/service will revolutionize its industry, no matter how unlikely that is.
ie “Google Pies Will Make Your Kitchen Obsolete”
2. Make accusations versus people/organizations without actually checking.
ie “Apple’s iPods are eating your brains. A source we’ll only refer to as S. Ballmer assures us that this is probably true and says Zune(tm) is the only MP3 player that won’t eat your brains.”
3. Have your founder/editor always play the victim, and do so dramatically in public.
ie “I’ve suffered so much in publishing this site, that I’m going to retire to my remote mountain lair to count the money I make from it. Tear.”
4. Hold a conference, then require the companies you cover to pay to be involved, then – with a straight face – insist that has no influence on your coverage.
ie “You don’t want to come to our conference and pay to be an exhibitor? Sigh. Ok, but I’ve heard some rumors that your site causes rabies…”
I enjoy hyperbolic news media probably more than the average media consumer. But even your nuttiest British tabloid seems to exhibit more integrity than TechCrunch does in the tech media, and because they’re not covering the wider world of journalism they seem to get away with it.
Since hosting Countdown, Keith Olbermann has released two books. And yet, his invite to the Sunday morning altar seems to have been lost in the mail.
Conservative whack-job supporters of Sarah Palin are having a rally to fire David Letterman. I feel pretty safe in making two predictions here.
1. The rally will be poorly attended.
2. CBS will not fire David Letterman. Letterman is worth millions, probably billions to CBS. While TV networks don’t like cranky pants protestors outside, what they like more than that is MONEY.
As Steve Benen rounds up here, last night was an epic failure for 24 hour news in America. I turned it on thinking they would have something about the disputed Iranian election. It was all reruns and garbage on all three networks – CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. I turned the TV off in disgust and turned to the web.
Because as we all know, we should ignore news from the middle east because nothing over there ever affects us at all.
Surely its time for another roundtable chat with tireless purveyors of conventional wisdom. I wonder what James Carville and Mary Matalin think????
“Meet the Press with David Gregory” was again the #1 public affairs show last Sunday morning, but the gap between NBC and its competitors on CBS and ABC continues to shrink. Just 190,000 Total Viewers separated first place NBC and third place ABC. “Face the Nation” moderated by Bob Schieffer, the most senior member of the four show hosts, tied MTP in younger viewers with a .7 rating.
Mark Tapscott, writing in the Washington Examiner, the free newspaper that litters the subway that has usurped the Washington Times as the premier wingnut newspaper.
These milestones remind that what we’ve seen “nuthin’ of so far during the Obama administration is the aggressive accountability journalism relentlessly aimed at the Bush administration during the eight years prior to the ascension of President Obama.
You remember that accountability?
When the press pushed Al Gore to concede?
When the press cheerleaded us into Iraq, putting Bush administration propaganda on A1 of the NY Times?
When the press gave millions of dollars in free air time to the Swift Boat liars?
When the NY Times delayed warrantless wiretapping stories until after the election?
When the press refused to provide any serious, probing scrutiny of the Bush policies that lead to the Great Recession and near-collapse of the global economy?
Yes, that accountability.
1. Conservative blogs just make something up. It doesn’t have to be an actual thing, just a loose collection of words.
2. Other conservative blogs link to the original blog, egging it on by saying things like “someone ought to look into this” or “Hmmm” or “Odd”.
3. Conservative leaning newspapers and magazines then collect the brain droppings of the previous 2 groups and begin puffing out their chests wondering why the story is being suppressed, or why the NY Times is “sitting on this”.
4. Talk radio jumps in, bewildered that magazines and newspapers and the blogs are “all over this” and why the MSM is covering up.
5. Then a moron like Major Garrett completely mainstreams it via Fox News and asks a stupid question at the daily White House press briefing.
Thanks to the American voters we now have a #6.
6. Press secretary slaps down the stupid assertion, sensible people continue to run the government, the rest of us protected from the lunatics being anywhere near the levers of power.
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