Now this is interesting. The teabaggers have started storming the Bastille Congress - attempting to go shout at representatives who, you know, don’t actually represent their district - but are having a hard time getting in, and TPM is reporting some arrests (with teabaggers hilariously invoking “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”) Your usual teabag outrage.
But […]

[Read more →]

Scalzi hits the same pitch we’ve been batting around here for a while:
Fox News isn’t the number one cable news channel because it has a broad spectrum of viewers or because the quality of its news reportage is better than those of other cable news networks or organizations. It’s the number one cable news network […]

[Read more →]

Via Sullivan, an interesting comment from Brit Hume in an L.A. Times piece about the Obama-Fox war:
“We may be No. 1, but there is sort of an insurgent quality to Fox News. And that’s kind of our attitude: ‘Hoist a Jolly Roger, pull out our daggers and look for more throats to slit.’
The question, of […]

[Read more →]

And then, as if on cue, we get this:
The Obama administration on Thursday failed in its attempt to exclude Fox News from participating in an interview of an administration official, as Republicans on Capitol Hill stepped up their criticism of the hardball tactics employed by the White House.
The Treasury Department on Thursday tried to make […]

[Read more →]

Political journalists can be so stupid.
Case in point being this GOPolitico piece on Drudge’s “fascination” with the declining dollar, noting that stories of the greenback’s descent have been all over Drudge this October, and gee, why might that be?
I give you one guess. And to its credit, even GOPolitico figures it out - in the […]

[Read more →]

This is actually a fantastic call:
As a proprietor of Big Government and Big Hollywood, part of the team that runs The Drudge Report, and a regular guest on Fox News, especially Sean Hannity’s show, [Andrew Breitbart] is a leader among folks who complain that the Times is a pernicious force in American life—that it ignores stories that cut against […]

[Read more →]

So what happens if the biggest Wall Street players - Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan - wind up with a majority equity stake in, say, radio networks, maybe ultimately TV stations, newspapers and magazines?
Via Taibbi - Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge says don’t look now, but it’s happening:
And lest someone think that this yet another […]

[Read more →]

Interesting watching the tributes to Cronkite today - entirely justified, in my view. But with all the fawning, it’s easy to forget that Cronkite was at the height of his prominence/influence at the very time moment conservatives were developing their “liberal media” strategy - bashing the media as somehow unrepresentative of middle America, endorsing and […]

[Read more →]

Wow. So, the State newspaper down in South Carolina, using open records law, requested and got more than 600 pages of documents detailing e-mails and phone calls related to Gov. Mark Sanford’s disappearance. They found that the governor’s staff had no idea where he was. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing they found - that […]

[Read more →]

Via Atrios, Kevin Drum:
The Michael Jackson tribute is currently being aired on 18 separate channels on my TV.  Just sayin’.
Don’t get it. Understand that Michael Jackson was an amazing performer, amazing songwriter, groundbreaking in the early to mid-’80s. And maybe it’s because I lost interest in Michael Jackson along the way, post-’80s, when he was […]

[Read more →]

Linked a version of Matt Taibbi’s article on Goldman Sachs over the weekend; here’s Taibbi responding to some of the criticism he’s received - including Goldman Sachs itself - and he concludes with a few lines that I think will probably resonate on this board:
I’m aware that some people feel that it’s a journalist’s responsibility […]

[Read more →]

Sanford on the tube right now admitting affair. Unreal. Father’s Day weekend, no less.
In one respect, the way Sanford’s doing it is the right way to handle it politically. Caught; admit it rather than cover up; invoke your faith (to assure your people-of-faith constituents that you’re still with them, really, you stumbled but you still […]

[Read more →]

We’re going to get briefly into this in the print edition this week, but worth noting here as well. The story of the Letterman “protest” fascinates me for a lot of reasons - the paltry turnout and what it means being a big one. But also telling is the fact that the protest would not […]

[Read more →]

Hm, what a shocker.
So if you’ve been following the David Letterman-Sarah Palin business, you know that the right is in full professional OUTRAGE!!! mode. This is what they do; the only glue holding the conservative movement together is its resentment, its perpetual sense of victimhood. In this case there’s a legitimate reason for that grievance;Letterman’s […]

[Read more →]

Interesting. E.J. Dionne has a column today titled “Rush and Newt are winning,” asserting that a conservative media bias (to use his words, “Yes, you read that correctly”) is actually dragging the political discourse in the country further to the right, thus tilting the playing field in favor of Republicans despite the fact that the […]

[Read more →]

Philly Inquirer editorial page editor Harold Jackson admits that decision to bring John Yoo on board was “a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication.”
Memo to Mr. Jackson: It’s not going to work. So long as your publication continues to endorse Democratic […]

[Read more →]

This one’s pretty ridiculous. The Philadelphia Inquirer has hired John Yoo - as in, Torture Yoo - as a columnist. To go with Rick Santorum, I’m sure.
Let me tell you why newspapers do this.
As infamous as the likes of Yoo may be on this side of the aisle, he’s obviously lauded on the right side […]

[Read more →]

Right-wingers are always quick to tell you that the reason the newspaper business is in trouble is because newspapers are too lib’rul.
If media conglomerates were more conservative, they’d be more successful - just like Clear Channel Communications, which syndicates Rush, Hannity, and Glenn Beck. With that powerhouse lineup - how could anything go wrong?

It is […]

[Read more →]

So as you might know, former Pennsyvlania Sen. Rick Santorum writes a column twice a month for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Guess what he gets paid per column. Just guess.
Wrong:
Former U. S. Sen. Rick Santorum is collecting $1,750 a shot for the columns that appear every other week in the Inquirer, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy […]

[Read more →]

A British take on American cable news, with extensive focus on (3:02) “the fair and balanced newsmen of dystopian future sci-fi satirical shouting [??] sledgehammer channel Fox News…
“Fox generally leans more to the right than a man who’s just had his right leg blown off.”
They understand us pretty well over there…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_amyJCLmMY8

[Read more →]