All Posts Tagged With: "media"
Urbanagora Friend Kiyoshi Martinez in NY Times
Check out today’s NY Times in the Technology section. You will find an important article, both because of its subject matter, web privacy, and because Urbanagora friend Kiyoshi Martinez is featured in it. Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress begins by introducing the subject and Kiyoshi:
Here are some things Internet users can discover about Kiyoshi Martinez, a 24-year-old man from Mokena, Ill., from some of his recent posts online. He watched “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday night, he likes the musician Lenlow and he received bottles of olive oil and vinegar for his birthday. Mr. Martinez has Facebook and LinkedIn pages, a Twitter account and a Web site that includes his résumé.
Brain Tumor
Robert Novak, columnist and conservative pundit has been hospitalized with a brain tumor.
My guess is that the “hit-and-run” described last week in our blog was due to the mental blackouts that accompany such maladies before they’re diagnosed. I would like to send my best wishes for his speedy recovery.
Tom Trumpinski
U of I alum Bob Novak’s attempted hit and run
The Prince of Darkness tried to take out a jaywalker today, and then started to speed off like he didn’t notice. From the witness description, it would be hard not to notice:
The bicyclist was David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, who was on his usual bike commute to work at 1700 K St. N.W. when he witnessed the accident. As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said “a black Corvette convertible with top closed plows into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed into the windshield.” Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a “Walk” signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “This car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.
In a 2001 interview, Bob Novak commented on his loathing of jaywalkers: “He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jaywalkers. I despise them. Since I don’t run the country, all I can do is yell at ‘em. The other option is to run ‘em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that.”
Point of Order
I make a motion for all political pundits to hereby stop saying how many years it’s been since X party won Y state, e.g., “Virginia is a state that Democrats haven’t won since Lyndon Johnson in 1968″ or “A Republican hasn’t won Minnesota since Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972.”
Reporters…Senseless
Many of you probably have heard about the recent deadly earthquake in China. I was looking at some photographs of the situation on the New York Times website. I came across this photograph of two boys trapped in the rubble. The caption for this photo is “Boys trapped under a collapsed building awaited rescue”
This photo of these two boys who are not being helped by the photographer reminds me of artist Banky’s rendition of a similar theme:
Let’s stop treating people–especially children–like news stories. They are humans–who are suffering and need assistance more than they need glamor shots.
A post-Indiana conversation
Note: The following exercise in Obama wankery and bitching about the media is only for those with a high tolerance for such things. All others should use caution. In other words…
We won, bitches! Suck it!
Buck B: Can I just say that this is the fucking awesomest thing ever?
Brian Pierce: I keep thinking that it’s finally, finally over, and then realize there’s a whole general election campaign left
Buck B: Yes. But I was a lot more worried about Hillary than I was about whoever the Republicans nominated.
Brian Pierce: I’m not worried as much as I am exhausted. But, yeah, it’s a fun night. Nice to see none of the nonsense the past few weeks has hurt him.
Buck B: Amazing, really. Maybe people are actually. waking up.
Brian Pierce: Yeah, for all the talk about Obama not responding effectively, it seems like in reality he has an almost uncanny ability to cut through bullshit in a way that is actually persuasive to voters.
Buck B: It’s called “telling the truth”.
Brian Pierce: No kidding! I think it’s not so much that people are waking up, but that the media has this weird view of what “regular people” think that kind of assumes they’re all really dumb. So you hear a lot of talk about, “Well, Hillary may be totally full of shit on the gas tax holiday, but it’s good politics!”
Buck B: Right. The media won’t just give the candidates to the people directly and let them make up their minds, they think they have to analyze it for them. It’s hard to build a convincing case in 15-second sounds bites followed by five minutes of analysis.
Brian Pierce: And analyze it not based on what’s true, but what’s “effective.”
Buck B: Yup. With “effectiveness” based on absolutely no empirical evidence.
Brian Pierce: I mean, it should be extraordinarily offensive every time some pundit says that this gas tax holiday stuff was good politics and then in the same breath say that it’s bad policy. Yet they say it totally un-self-consciously. Even though there’s no way that could be true unless you are saying, “The American people are too stupid to understand they’re being lied to.”
Buck B: Well…unfortunately, that’s at least partly true. But that’s why it’s so important the media take on the role of informing them. And not reporting on them like they’re some sort of amusing beast.
Brian Pierce: Yeah, it’s true to great extent because the media doesn’t even attempt to ascertain whether the claims politicians are making are true or false. Every time I see Tim Russert chuckling about spin I want to punch him in the face.
Buck B: That’s why I prefer partisan media.
Brian Pierce: Ideological media.
Buck B: I don’t like wasting energy trying to figure out how a reporter is responding to spin. I want to know what his position is from the start. Who the fuck’s side is Russert on? What is he doing? No one knows.
Brian Pierce: And because Tim Russert doesn’t have a particular stake in anything, there’s much more of a focus on game-playing.
Buck B: Yes. Surprisingly, taking a particular side makes you focus more on issues and less on politics.
Brian Pierce: In part because a focus on politics leads the public to view everybody as being the same, because it’s just this confusing haze of spin. But if you’re trying to advocate one side, you’re going to be jumping up and down trying to draw clear distinctions on issues.
Buck B: And because you assumably believe in what you’re advocating, you’re going to want to build sound and convincing arguments.
Brian Pierce: That’s why I used the term “ideological media” before, rather than “partisan.” If you’re advocating a particular point of view (as opposed to being purely partisan), you will be willing to call even candidates of your own party on shit you don’t like. Fox News is just a partisan version of CNN, but with all the same flaws as CNN that we’re talking about.
Buck B: Good point. That kind of distinction might be the eventual death of the two-party system.
Great Moments in Political Journalism
So I’m watching MSNBC for the Pennsylvania results, and Rachel Maddow makes the sensible and largely uncontroversial point that how Barack Obama performs against Hillary Clinton in a Democratic primary has little relation to how Barack Obama might perform against John McCain in a general election. Pat Buchanan then responds by calling this a “Marxist dialectic.” Maddow then looks at Buchanan like he’s a mental patient. Priceless stuff.
Nausea-Inducing
A new Rasmussen poll has this to report concerning the recent “news” about Obama and his pastor:
Overall, voters are evenly divided as to whether Obama should resign his membership in the Church—42% say that he should while 40% disagree.
Is it just me, or is that sentence truly sickening? We’re really a country that feels that comfortable telling a politician to resign his membership in a church?
Just out of morbid curiosity, do any readers here really, truly, actually care about this at all?
This is a pretty good rundown of the absurd media coverage of this story, particularly about 4:20 into it when it shows a pretty great exchange among Chris Wallace, Sen. Dodd, and Sen. Schumer on Fox News Sunday.
All this looks like it could be leading to this becoming the new attack on Obama: saying “What do we really know about Barack Obama?” over and over again.
Is that unfair? I’d say so. Is it racially charged? Absolutely. Does it make Geraldine Ferraro look like a moron? Clearly.
But I guess this is just the way it goes. Unless, by some chance, voters choose to reject it and actually vote for the guy running the kind of campaign they always say they want to see run.
On a lighter note, here is Tracy Morgan commenting on the racial politics of this presidential campaign on Saturday Night Live. Pretty quality.
Update: This news that Obama will be giving a major speech tomorrow on Wright in particular and racial politics in general makes me excited. (And honestly, how often can anybody – even political junkies – say they get excited to hear about a politician giving a speech? This is that whole “hope” thing people keep talking about.)
Later Update: This is spectacular.
Clinton and Media Bias
The Clinton campaign has been complaining for a long time that the media has been biased against her and has largely been giving Obama a free pass. And I want to say at the outset that I absolutely agree with that.
But at the same time, why is Hillary Clinton at this point not being treated the same way that Mike Huckabee was treated? For a very long time, Huckabee’s name was not mentioned by pundits without immediately noting that it was almost mathematically impossible for him to win based on the delegate count. It is a similarly impossible-seeming battle for Hillary Clinton, and yet there is much less bewilderment on the part of the media as to her choosing to stay in the race right now. Again, I think Hillary has every right to rail against the media’s treatment of her through much of this race. But right now, the media seems to me like the only reason she’s still breathing. In this way, while she’s gotten unfair treatment due to the fact that (1) she’s a woman and (2) she’s not particularly charming, she’s also gotten an unfair advantage due to the fact that she is a famous establishment figure in the Democratic party.
Chanting Makes Me Nervous
Okay, so as I’ve said before, I liked this first song, but this one is both annoying and kind of creepy, isn’t it? The whole “Obama” repetition makes me feel like it’s more about worshiping this one human being rather than what I think is the more sensible position of being excited about an energized and mobilized electorate.