Tag: Media Watch

GOP Radio Host: Send Critics of Dear Leader Bush to Detention Camps

Jon Ponder
“I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar, round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann, take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they’re a bunch of traitors.”
— GOP mouthpiece Mike Gallagher

The black soul of Republican authoritarianism was in full voice on Bill Hemmer’s show on Fox News this week. Rightwing radio talk show host Mike Gallagher made his case for rounding up liberals like Joy Behar, Matt Damon and Keith Olbermann and sending them to concentration camps:

Bill Hemmer: They talk about Godwins Law, internet junkies, as discussions grow longer someone makes a comparison to Hitler and that person loses the argument. The view, Joy Behar weighing in on the Times Person of the Year.

Video Clip of Joy Behar: “I don’t think anyone cares anymore about Time Magazines Person of the Year. You have to put like a Hitler type, like you put Donald Rumsfeld there or something.”

Onscreen is a picture of Hitler and Donald Rumsfeld side by side and the words ‘The View from the Left?’

Bill Hemmer: Rob, can you defend that?

Rob Thompson: Who can? Godwins Law stands true in all instances. Nobody believes he’s like Hitler, c’mon.

BH: I like Joy Behar. I think she’s smart. I think she’s funny but this is a bit unexcusable, Mike?

RT: Now, if she’d have said something like Rumsfeld alone or Rumsfeld is a lot like Bob MacNamera, we’ll put him on the cover of Time Magazine.

Mike Gallagher: You know it’s a little bit ridiculous that we continue to watch these TV stars and movie stars who smear our leaders. I just wonder, Rob, if you’ll think for a moment what our enemies think … of seeing TV personalities comparing the outgoing Defense Secretary to Adolph Hitler.

[…]

Blogging Will Peak in 2007

Jon Ponder

Post-modern: A post about blogging:

“Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

[The Gartner analysts firm predicts] that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs…

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Mr Plummer said.

“Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

Last month blog tracking firm Technorati reported that 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3 million blog posts were written.

Technorati is tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55 percent are “active” and updated at least every three months.

Another 1990s Sitcom Star Apologizes for Using ‘N-Word’

Jon Ponder

The most racist region of America may actually be TV Land.

Now Andy Dick has apologized for using the “N-word” on the stage of the West Hollywood Improv Saturday night, December 2, 2006:

According to sources, the hopped-up comedian hopped onstage … at L.A.’s Improv comedy club and dropped the n-bomb on a room full of stunned clubgoers.

Andy was heckling comedian Ian Bagg during his routine, when Dick allegedly got out of his seat, jumped onstage and began joking with Bagg. The subject of Michael Richards came up, but the two comics quickly moved past it. As Dick exited the stage, he suddenly grabbed the mic and shouted at the crowd, “You’re all a bunch of niggers!”

Apparently, Dick, who starred in the 1990s sitcom “News Radio” felt bad after he sobered up:

“I chose to make a joke about a subject that is not funny,” the statement said. “In an attempt to make light of a serious subject, I have offended a lot of people, and I am sorry for my insensitivity. I wish to apologize to Ian, to the club and its patrons and to anyone who was hurt or offended by my remark.”

At the Laugh Factory, the N-Word Is Back

Jon Ponder
“Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘[N-word] Night.'”
Damon Wayans

Michael Richards wasn’t being funny when he used the “N-word” on the stage at the Laugh Factory in mid-November. On Sunday night, December 3, 2006, another television star stepped onto the stage and used the same word as part of his routine, and got very different results:

Comedy, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and there was a rather prominent six-letter hole in the air at the Laugh Factory on Sunday night. It was the West Hollywood club’s weekly showcase of mostly African American comedians — the first “Chocolate Sundaes” show since the club banned the N-word after Michael “Kramer” Richards’ now-infamous vocabulary malfunction.

At least there was a hole until comedian-actor Damon Wayans took the stage.

“Give yourselves a big round of applause for coming down and supporting ‘[N-word ]Night,’ ” Wayans said, using the word itself, to gasps and laughs. The producers “tried to prep me backstage — ‘Don’t say the N-word.’ They’re going to fine me.” Wayans sprinkled folded bills across the stage floor, green confetti at his feet. “How much you want?” he asked, looking at club owner Jamie Masada, who sat with his head in his hands at his table in a back corner of the intimate room’s main floor.

Anger bubbled just beneath the surface.

“I’ll be damned if the white man uses that word last,” Wayans said, then he went on to use the word 15 more times during a 20-minute routine that suggested Richards apologize personally to O.J. Simpson — “If I Killed Michael Richards, This Is How I Did It” — envisioned Jesus Christ as ethnic stereotypes, cracked offensive jokes about gays in church, lambasted the Iraq war as another fight by whites against dark-skinned people and mocked white celebrities who adopt black children. If they really want to help, he said, “give the … father some money” to improve the family’s life.

Froomkin: Mainstream Media Is Verging on Irrelevance

Jon Ponder
The Washington press corps have become the highest paid and most elaborately be-wigged courtiers since the reign of Louis XIV.

Flock of hair-dos: Dan Froomkin writes the often-controversial “White House Briefing” column in the online edition of the Washington Post. He has an article up today at Watchdog Blog in which he proposes that the Old Media journalists may be close to losing their relevance, primarily because they steadfastly refuse to call bullshit when they hear it:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

What strikes me is that these same expensively coiffed Kool Kids in the Capitol were all too eager to call bushwa on Pres. Clinton but have treated George W. Bush with kids gloves from the getgo — even prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Why the change in dynamics? My theory about this is that the journalists in D.C. looked down on Bill Clinton because a) he was a hick from Arkansas (Rhodes Scholar, pish-pish!) and b) they made four times as much money as he did even on his salary as president. Conversely, this same group sees the Bushes, whose family fortune is in the millions, as aristocrats — literally as their “betters” — and so treat them with deference.

This makes the Washington press corps the highest paid and most elaborately be-wigged courtiers since the reign of Louis XIV.

But Froomkin’s central point is key: Until the midterm elections last month, these journalists stood as the last bastion for democracy against a six year onslaught by Republicans to convert America from a republic to a corporatist oligarchy. Generally, they have been derelict in their duty. The Democrats won back the Congress despite the so-called liberal media. It is telling that within days after the voting the cable newsers were ignoring the infighting and disarray among Republicans and focusing instead on Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi’s clothes and botox treatments.

If the United States survives the Bush era, it won’t be because the media stopped the GOP from systematically shredding the Constitution but because the Republicans’ incompetence at (or lack of interest in) governing caused them to fail.

Jews Don’t Heart Huckabee

Buck Banks

From the mouths of dolts: What is it with Republicans this year? Did they all attend the Earl Butz School of Public Speaking? Or the Cheney Institute of Insensitivity?

The latest bumbling blabbers is Arkansas’ governor, who joked that he lost weight at a concentration camp. Jews were not happy, according to the Jewish Telegraph Association:

Mike Huckabee, a Republican, has advertised his diet as a health model for obese Americans, and he bantered Thursday with radio talk show host Don Imus about his weight loss. Imus chided Huckabee that he looked “emaciated.” “I have just come from six weeks at a concentration camp held by the Democrat Party of Arkansas in an undisclosed location, making a hostage tape,” Huckabee replied. “That’s why I look that way.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council said Huckabee, a likely contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, “ought to think about the people who he might offend with such insensitive words. At the very least, he owes all of us an apology and explanation for his tasteless comments.”

Wasserman: A Timid Media Dropped the Ball in the Foley Case

Buck Banks

To out or not to out: I don’t always agree with Ed Wasserman’s media analyses. Indeed, I often think the Miami Herald columnist has brown eyes for a very good reason not related to genetics. However, his take on the Mark Foley scandal adds a new dimension to what has gotten to be a very old story. Here’s an excerpt, but to grok the nugget, read the whole column here.

[S]hould Foley have been outed?

If so, the argument has to rest on more than a visceral sense that nobody can be both gay and a conservative Republican. Why not? We all decide on our political allegiances based on a near fit, not a perfect fit. A gay man may well decide that the GOP, even with its recurring homophobia, still is more broadly to his liking than the alternative.

Foley’s sexuality had become the central issue in his career.

But the Foley problem was different, as I’ve been slow to recognize. Here, the issue wasn’t that his public performance wasn’t consistent with his private life. It’s that for years, his public performance made no sense unless you knew about what was happening behind the scenes. After his infuriating 1994 vote he dramatically softened his position on gay rights to deter further efforts to out him. In turn, he sought out off-the-wall issues — clamoring, for instance, for a state crackdown on a central Florida nudist colony — to appease his family values base. It’s almost certain he pulled the plug on his Senate run because his gayness would come up.

As [on-line Huffington Post columnist Eric] Boehlert correctly writes, ”Foley’s sexuality had become the central issue in his career.” And yet it was kept not secret, but in the shadows, known to those in the know, hidden from the main body of his constituents.

This wasn’t a matter of deferring to a legitimate area of privacy. Foley’s public actions were unintelligible unless you knew this backstory. And in failing to tell it, the media failed the public, and endorsed a principle of timidity that’s sure to fail the public in the future as well.

U.S. Dept. of Interior Blocking Employee Access to Pensito Review

Buck Banks

Well, maybe: There’s a bit of a tempest in a teacup going on at the Department of Interior, with a number of leading wingnut bloggers getting their panties in a twist over DoI’s recent moves to block access to weblogs. See, a couple weeks ago, an internal report was released that showed DoI employees spend thousands of hours visiting gaming, porn and auction sites when they should be working. DoI has about 80,000 employees with Internet access, but since 1999 has only reprimanded 177 employees for inappropriate Web surfing � 112 of those for skeazing slease while on the job.

Fast-forward to last week. The Interior Department has now started blocking access to a wide range of sites that it has determined are not related to the business of managing the interior of the United States, including weblogs because “some include sexually explicit language, libelous or defamatory commentary, and outrageous language,” Frank Quimby, spokesman for the agency, told FederalTimes.com.

( The funny thing is, DoI’s public affairs office now has to appeal for special access to be able to view weblogs that carry news about Interior.)

However, and here’s the rub � apparently, some wingnut employees tried to visit their favorite neo-Nazi sites, only to be blocked. But they could still visit Daily Kos and a whole slew of lefty weblogs. Gasp! There’s obviously a conspiracy at the top of DoI to prevent employees from being exposed to the brand of truth served up by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill OReilly. But why?

I like this explanation. It�s simple, it�s elegant, and it satisfies Occam�s razor.
� Baron Bodissey

Enter Baron Bodissey of the conservative weblog Gates of Vienna. He was given the task of “investigating” the story. If you have the time, it’s worth reading the article, which is told in a deadpan yet breathless kind of noir Web detective tone, as he drags the reader through every last step of the investigation. Here are a couple of the more interesting excerpts:

She passed me on to the Director of Communications, Mr. Frank Quimby. He was pleasant, and explained that the Department most emphatically did not selectively block conservative blogs. �We block all blogs. We�re still getting the glitches out of the system, so some get through here and there, but we�re blocking all blogs.�

I told him that I would report what he said, but that it strained credulity, because the chance of the system randomly blocking blogs that just happen to have a conservative political content � and not blocking liberal ones � was so small as to be negligible. Someone, somewhere had to have done this intentionally.

Mr. Quimby passed me on to to his deputy, Mr. Ed Meagher, who was more familiar with the technical aspects of their internet filtering system. Mr. Meagher was not as friendly as Mr. Quimby � he bristled at any suggestion that the Interior Department was selectively blocking blogs based on their political orientation. �I can guarantee you 100 percent that we do not do that,� he told me. �We block all blogs.�
[…]

What Would Jésus Do? If He’s the Publisher of the Herald, Resign

Buck Banks

Publisher’s clearing out: Okay, this might seem like a very local story, but the publisher of the Miami Herald, Jésus Díaz, resigned today. Whoo-hoo, you say, big deal, right?

Well, it is interesting insofar as there were two front-page stories about it, one a sometimes abstruse letter from Díaz himself and the other was a long, rambling account of the events that led to his resignation. Those events happened a few weeks ago when the Herald reported that several reporters for its Spanish-language sister publication, El Nuevo Herald, had received money from the U.S. government to provide anti-Castro commentaries on the U.S. government-run, Spanish-language Radio Martí network, which broadcasts propaganda to Cuba.

So Jesus fired them. On the spot. No appeal, no deal, no tolerance for ethical lapses of the sort that brought one reporter/commentator $179,000. That’s a lotta propaganda.

But then came the backlash. The local vocal Cuban community rose up, unsubscribed, pulled ads and boycotted the Herald in droves. Seems Jesus had run up against a basic difference between Spanish journalism and Anglo journalism. Apparently, in Spanish journalism it’s okay to eschew objectivism for partisan politics and accept money from the gubmint for it. Especially if you’re railing against Fidel Castro’s regime.

The twist came when the reporters said they had told their former editor — who happens to be conveniently dead — that they were taking the cash for bashing Fidel, and he had said it was okay. Whoops — suddenly Jesus is twisting in the wind, having rashly fired the ethically challenged reporters without having consulted his Quija board to see if indeed the dead editor had approved of the deal with the gubmint.

So amid the hue and cry, new Herald owners McClatchy, which just bought Herald parent Knight Ridder last spring, sent a couple of top guys to Miami to confer with the hapless Jesus. In the end, Díaz (who was born in Cuba and raised in Atlanta) was crucified on the cross of Cuban Castro hatred, and made to give “amnesty” to the reporters and very publicly resign, posting his letter of resignation on the front page of the Herald.

Only in Miami.

Forget for a minute that Radio Martí is heard by absolutely nobody in Cuba because its signal is blocked, despite the U.S. government spending $400,000 per month to broadcast the signal from an airplane that flies just this side of Cuban airspace. Forget that it’s our government spending our tax dollars to pay ethically challenged reporters to broadcast bullshit to Cuba. Forget for a minute that there’s supposedly some nebulous “difference” between Spanish journalism and Anglo journalism. Forget the questionable excuse of “The dead guy said it was alright.” The fact is that the Herald caved to local vocal Cuban pressure because of — money. Subscription money, advertising money, all kinds of money. What price ethics, eh?

Jésus Díaz was right to fire those reporters, regardless of their language and regardless of whatever carte blanche they’d supposedly been given by some dead editor. What they did as reporters was ethically wrong, and the fact that they did not recognize it only means they are not equipped to be reporters for a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper, crappy as it sometimes is. We should be able to expect a higher standard than that for our 50-cent-a-day subscription.

By the way, Castro sucks! Ka-ching!

Is There a Pentagon Patsy in the Audience?

Buck Banks

Planting questions: A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chair of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had a Q&A session with some lower-echelon staffers at the Pentagon. Now, it is entirely possible that it wasn’t staged and the questions weren’t planted, but … here, you be the judge. This is from the press release issued by the DoD today:

“Negativity in the press is absolutely detrimental to the morale of our forces and our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Cpl. John A. Stukins said to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Sept. 22 town hall meeting.

“What are we doing to confront this problem and to better the morale of our forces over there — not only over there, but here as well?” asked Stukins, a 23-year-old administrative specialist from Lafayette, La., who works with the Marine Staff at the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld and Pace both congratulated Stukins for asking his question.

Fielding Stukins’ query, Pace said there was around-the-clock media coverage of the overseas exploits of the U.S. military early on during the global war on terrorism.

“We had television, newspapers, magazines,” Pace explained. “If you were interested, you could read as much as you wanted and you could watch as much as you wanted, and you could form your own opinions.”

‘I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong.’
— Cpl. John Stukins

However, as the conflict continued, other issues began to compete with military news for radio or television airtime or newspaper or magazine copy inches, Pace said.

“News is a business, and now the news cycle is such that only certain amounts (of coverage) of every day are allocated to coverage of the war,” Pace said. “And, unfortunately, the parts of the war that then become shown are the parts that capture people’s attentions.”

And, more often than not, Pace noted, today’s military news coverage in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to focus on “where the bombs are going off,” instead of “where the schools are being built and the like.”

So, the general said, it’s important that department leaders and rank-and-file military members tell the public about the good, as well as the not-so-good, military news from overseas.

So Stukins is like the Radar O’Riley character in M*A*S*H, a paper-pusher. He just happened to be able to string together his two-part question well enough to give his bosses a segue into politely telling the rest of the staff to keep their mouths shut about the negative stuff.

In an interview later with American Forces Press Service, Stukins used the term “reprehensible” to describe people who criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the media. And he left us this gem:

Stukins says he’s a firm believer in freedom of speech as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. “But, I also have the right to respect your right to be wrong,” he said.

Thanks, Corporal! And we respect your right to be a tool of the military-industrial complex.