"Writing is a skill, not a talent, and thus one's ability as a writer can be improved by thoughtful effort. The problem with some people is that they graduate college as good writers, experience early success on account of that, and thus never devote themselves diligently to the relentless quest for improvement that could make them great writers."
Eight people were in custody Saturday after a crowd of angry protesters broke windows and threw burning torches at UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's campus residence in protest of fee hikes and budget cuts, authorities said. . . . The crowd, including a man taken into custody in a university protest a day earlier, chanted, "No justice, no peace," and began smashing planters, windows and lights.
Sure, she's made some mistakes. But now Ashley Dupre, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is sharing what she's learned in her new sex, love and relationship column -- exclusively in the New York Post.
(Hat-tip: Newsbusters.) Wonder if the New York Post would give me an advice column to balance the Ashley Dupre column? I'd call it, "Shut Up, You Stupid Whore."
Now, if only the Atlantic Monthly would give me a blog to balance Sully . . . well, let the reader imagine what I'd call that.
Understand that I have nothing against angry mobs, per se. Heck, I nearly got trampled when I was front of the line to buy tickets for Prince's "Purple Rain" tour, so I understand both mobs and anger.
However, it matters very much what you're angry about, and what your mob actually does. University of Alabama fans once burnt Bear Bryant in effigy after the coach benched Joe Namath for the Orange Bowl. That was understandable.
But "no justice, no peace" and attempted arson because of a tuition increase? Where's the Ohio National Guard when we really need them?
"We defeated the Daily Kos candidate," said Eric Odom of the American Liberty Alliance, one of four blogger-activists on the ground in New York over the past several days as conservative pressure mounted on Scozzafava to withdraw. The other bloggers were Ali Akbar, Stephen Foley and Robert Stacy McCain . . . McCain was in the district first and has been filing reports on his personal blog, as well as at AmSpecBlog and Hot Air's Green Room. Akbar, Foley and Odom did their reporting for a new site called 73wire, which bills itself as a "collaborative, people-powered news project." . . . Odom said it was frustrating that more blogger-activists weren't in the district to cover the race and fight for Hoffman last week. The election is "our chance as conservatives to hit back" against the Republican establishment that backed the left-leaning Scozzafava over Hoffman, Odom said. But he said the bloggers who were there played a "significant role" in shifting the dynamics of the race. . . .
I'm sure I'll have more to say about this at some future point. The "blogger-activist" label is a little uncomfortable for me. I'm just a writer working via the medium of the Internet after 20-odd years in print.
Opinions? Yeah. But everybody's got an opinion. What we have done up here is to break news by working the phones, developing sources, and being on the scene where the story has happened. As I like to say, Old School in the New Media.
So I'll have more to say, but not now. We have to make the white-knuckle run to Saranac Lake in a few hours. Just read the whole thing.
And hit the tip jar. The New York State Police may not be so lenient if they catch us again. Note the hypothetical.
UPDATE: OK, less than 10 minutes after filing this, I immediately thought of other people who deserve a lot of credit, and couldn't sleep until I'd named a few:
Erick Erickson of Red State -- Erick is a conservative Republican and, at times, I've felt that the "Republican" part tended to dominate. But in recent months, Erick has become fed up with the backstabbers and sellouts, and he took the lead role in making the Hoffman campaign a national crusade for conservative bloggers. His leadership in this must be acknowledged.
Michelle Malkin -- A journalist by training, Malkin was one of the first conservative commentators to recognize and capitalize on the power of the blogosphere. Her Oct. 16 column made a difference, and she has followed up consistently, not only with her own posts, but also by throwing traffic at other bloggers who paid attention to NY23. Some bloggers think of Malkin's Fox News enormousness as making her "too big" to be counted among our number, but she often takes notice of even the smallest bloggers who do good work, calls them to the attention of a larger audience and, in so doing, expands the 'sphere. She deserves more credit for this than she gets.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News -- He has given posting privileges to lots of bloggers over the years, including me. In doing so, he has also expanded the 'sphere. Like Erickson (and Malkin, too), Hawkins has helped to draw the line in the sand against the RINOs who were trying to lead the GOP into political irrelevance.
OK, I've named five people whose contributions ought to be recognized and apologize to the many others who played a role but haven't been named here. Let's remember a famous quote:
"You can accomplish much, if you don't care who gets credit." -- Ronald Reagan
For the past 10 years, [Lynn] Vincent has been working for the Christian-based World magazine, from which she took time off to work on Palin's book. She is a creationist and strongly anti-abortion, the subject of many of her World columns. She is also staunchly anti-gay, backing the controversial vote to re-criminalise gay marriage in California, and - this is where Palin and her publishers might have drawn the line, but didn't - she is closely associated with a well-known white supremacist.
Et cetera, et cetera, the repetition of the Ransom Note Method, based upon . . . well, what, really? What is your authority for this assertion that I am either "well-known" or a "white supremacist," let alone a "well-known white supremacist"? Do you believe everything you read on the Internet, Mr. Horne?
So far as I am aware, sir, you never contacted me in an attempt to verify the content of your article. Nor am I aware that you have spoken to any of my family, friends, neighbors or colleagues.
While I am not litigious by nature -- my views being rather Jacksonian in that regard -- perhaps Governor Palin, Mrs. Vincent and their publishers have different views. It is my understanding that British libel law is far more inclined toward the plaintiffs than is true here in the United States, especially for "public figures" as covered under the U.S. Sullivan precedent.
Should Mrs. Vincent retain the services of a British attorney, I suspect that your publisher would be advised to settle the suit at any sum asked, as it would be quite impossible to prove that Mrs. Vincent is "closely associated with a well-known white supremacist," which I most assuredly am not, no matter what any particular idiot has published to that effect or how often it has been repeated.
Think of the cost to your publisher, Felix Dennis, of flying Charles Johnson, Michelangelo Signorile, Rachel Maddow, et al., to London for a libel trial, sir. Ask yourself how such witnesses might stand up under cross-examination, or what witnesses might be called to attest to the plaintiffs' good character and goodwill vis-a-vis harmonious, free and peaceful race relations.
Here in the United States, we have enshrined in the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution an ancient principle of English common law, whereby the fact that I have not chosen publicly to address any specific defamatory accusation against me cannot be taken as evidence that the undenied accusation is true.
Were it otherwise, every citizen would be compelled constantly to disprove any malicious thing said or written about them, lest it be considered to be fact that, for example, Nigel Horne is a notorious syphilitic poofter.
What accusation of secret vice might the executive editor of The First Post be compelled to deny or repudiate? Nigel Horne is a pedophile, who buggers boy prostitutes while on holiday in Phuket? Nigel Horne is a pornography freak, whose hard-drive is crammed full of the most vile photos and videos imaginable? Nigel Horne is a heroin addict, who supports his habit by embezzling from his employers?
You see there is no end to the mischief that might ensue if journalists were to adopt a habit of recklessly repeating accusations that the accused would then be required to disprove.
Having worked since 1986 as a professional journalist, my acquaintance with the principles of the craft -- including the avoidance of malicious libel -- is such that I am frankly horrified at the heinous malpractice by which you disgrace your employer and yourself.
Allow me to suggest that it is high time you sought treatment for that syphilis infection, Mr. Horne.
MANCHESTER, Ky. -- She is only 20 years old, but already she's news director of her hometown paper, the ManchesterEnterprise. So guess what kind of e-mail Morgan Bowling got when the mysterious death of local Census worker Bill Sparkman made national headlines? From Gary S., in Malta, N.Y., came this Sept. 24 missive:
To M. Bowling I just read the story on the AP about the Census worker who was hung. What I want to ask you is, are you people for real down there? I mean what kind of f---ing animals live in Clay County? I live in New York State, and this story is above and beyond even for New York! Are you a bunch of uneducated, ignorant, toothless, dirty scumbags? What f---ing century are the residents of Clay County living in? Do you realize what this crime makes you people look like? Good God! What kind of people are you? This is a story one would expect would come out of Iraq or Afghanistan! What are you people, backwoods ignorant freaks? Let me tell you this ranks up there with terrorists cutting peoples' heads off. This crime is a reflection of all the residents of Clay County. Are you all proud of that? What is the average education level of the residents of Clay County? Third grade? You are all disgusting pigs, and if one could level a curse at a community, then I curse the whole lot of you. May Clay County Kentucky be wiped off the face of this earth by fire or some other disaster such as a flood or an earthquake!! And may all the residents of Clay County -- man, woman, and child -- rot away in Hell forever!! Gary S----- Malta, N.Y.
To which the young journalist replied courteously:
Mr. S-----, If you've read the story on the AP about Mr. Sparkman, then I hope that maybe you've been following other coverage . . . and you might know that details given to the AP surrounding Sparkman's death may or may not be true, according to police and the FBI. What has happened to Mr. Sparkman is a tragedy, and no one is saddened more than I that this happened here. To answer your question, no, we are not animals. People here are just as educated as anyone might hope to find in New York. Rural Appalachia is a sincerely beautiful land and I challenge you to find a place parallel in beauty to this region. The stereotype we have been slapped with is unfair, undeserved and, like all stereotypes, born of fear and blindness. . . . But the truth is, the world is filled with ignorant, evil people, Mr. S-----. And if you honestly believe that this incident, which was an isolated incident, can't happen anywhere else, then that shows how ignorant you are. I feel sorry for you, because you can only see the very elaborate picture the media has painted for you. Maybe if you pulled the wool off of your eyes, you might accept this for what it is: a horrible tragedy that shouldn't have happened here, or anywhere else. But it's easier to hate than to accept, isn't it? Thanks, Morgan Bowling
Well, we could leave it at that, but let me tell you a little bit about this 20-year-old college junior who works full-time as a professional journalist. When she met me in the lobby of the Enterprise on Tuesday afternoon, Miss Bowling led me back to her office and I noticed a tattoo on her back, just below her neck.
Miss Bowling is not exactly what someone in New York or Washington might expect a small-town Kentucky girl to be. She wears black fingernail polish and black clothes, has a sort of alternative-rock hairstyle and sports a "Johnny Cash Is My Friend" bumper sticker on her car.
After we had talked for several minutes about the Sparkman case and the situation in Clay County, I asked her, "What's up with the tattoo on your neck?"
She laughed and told me that actually she has four tattoos. The one on her neck says, "Born to Suffer" -- the same motto as her grandfather's tattoo, the one he got while serving his country in Vietnam, more than 20 years before Morgan was born.
Miss Bowling was largely raised by her maternal grandmother. Her father, who never married Morgan's mom, was named John Farmer. He was murdered -- gunned down in an ambush -- when she was 4 years old. Her father's murder has never been solved, and the case is still in the cold case files of the Kentucky State Police.
After explaining how I ended up in Washington, D.C., I told Miss Bowling that I'd been a mentor to many young Washington journalists (among them Josiah Ryan, now of the Jerusalem Post). I was giving a thumbnail version of my career pep talk and, when I got to the point about finding a role model to emulate, Miss Bowling interrupted.
"Let me ask you something," she said. "What do you think about Hunter S. Thompson?"
Heh. As I always say, whenever in your journalism career you are confronted with a tough decision, sometimes it helps to ask yourself, "What Would Hunter S. Thompson Do?"
Then I told her the story of how, in January 2008, I'd made the decision to leave the Washington Times and go to Africa. I told her about my resignation letter, in which I wrote that it was as if God said, "Go."
Anyway, just so TV and radio producers can get an idea of Miss Bowling's persona, I did a short video: The producers of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, "Red Eye," etc., should contact Morgan Bowling (e-mail) at the Manchester Enterprise, (606) 598-2319.
Yeah, all the publications, the degrees from hither and yon, blah, blah, blah.
Is she married? If so, how long has she been married? Does she have any children?
I point this out because I was just looking at the sidebar feeds at NTCNews.com -- a good source of fresh blog-fodder -- and happened to notice the headline of her latest column, clicked over, and thought . . . hmmmm.
Adultery has payoffs for a woman. For example, having someone else interested in her means more resources.
So I'm thinking that this sort of morally-neutral anthropological attitude toward adultery doesn't make her a Girl Just Like The Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad, y'know? If the "sexpert" happens to be single, my hunch is she's likely to stay that way.
Maybe some of you bachelors out here can spot me on this. Maybe attitudes have changed, but I'd suspect guys would be more interested in marrying a woman who expressed horror and repugnance at even the slightest suggestion that she would ever cheat on her mate. "Oh, no -- I'm strictly a one-man woman!"
On the other hand, if Fulbright is married, why does my cynical mind leap to the conclusion that her professional insights into the anthropological incentives of adultery for women aren't merely professional insights?
As to my curiosity about whether Fulbright has any children, that was prompted by reading her bio and seeing the title of her most recent book:
Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Sex Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know
Really? Here's where I need some of the lady readers to spot me, because I'm thinking that this isn't really one of the mother-to-be's top priorities.
In general, I have an especial scorn for the How-To-Have-Better-Orgasms genre of women's literature, seeing as how endless variations on this theme appear on the cover of Cosmo every freaking month.
By comparison, no man has ever read a magazine article to find out how to have a better orgasm, because no such article has ever been published in a magazine for men. There may be, somewhere among the 3 billion males on this planet, one who didn't figured out the orgasm thing before his 14th birthday. But they certainly don't seem to be seeking magazine advice on the subject, eh?
What's up with this? Women I've spoken to say that they read women's magazines mainly for fashion, hair and make-up ideas. I've never heard a woman admit to seeking out the How-To-Have-Better-Orgasms articles in these magazines. But maybe they're just embarrassed to admit it.
Mark Penn, the strategist who dashed Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes, is the Wall Street Journal's "Microtrend"-spotting columnist. He's also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller. Only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter. . . . Mark Penn's latest . . . column is about "glamping" -- glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients. . . .
You know, it's amazing know a sleazy, amoral scumbag -- a political operative who has never worked as an actual journalist -- can nevertheless get himself a newspaper column.
It's also amazing how the newspaper business -- the industry in which I worked for 22 years -- is now circling the toilet bowl.
Randomly occurring phenomena . . . or "Microtrends"?
"The kind of journalism that inhabits the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major broadcast-news organizations and CNN will not disappear. The government needs it too much, because national news is how the government does its PR. As the media business embarks on a bruising process of transformation, professional journalists will become a fourth branch of government in reality as well as in their own minds. Somehow, but inevitably, today’s mainstream news organizations will become government-sponsored entities funded with taxpayer dollars."
Jon Meacham admits it is hard to explain, even to his own people, why chopping Newsweek's circulation in half is a good thing. "It's hugely counterintuitive," the magazine's editor says. "The staff doesn't understand it." . . . Newsweek, owned by The Washington Post Co. . . . is bleeding red ink, losing nearly $20 million in the first quarter. Newsweek, whose circulation was as high as 3.1 million in recent years, plans to cut that to 1.5 million by the beginning of 2010, in part by discouraging renewals. The magazine will begin charging the average subscriber about 90 cents an issue, nearly double the current rate. "If we can't convince a million and a half people we're worth less than a dollar a week, the market will have spoken," Meacham says. The newsstand price will also jump from $4.95 to $5.95, a buck more than Time.
(Hat-tip: Hot Air Headlines.) Raise the price and discourage subscriptions? Brilliant! And check out their "innovative" idea for revamping content:
Meacham, an admirer of the Economist, is fashioning a serious magazine for what he calls his base, with a heavy emphasis on politics and public policy.
Right. You're going to turn a mass-circulation news magazine into some sort of highbrow policy journal . . . weekly! And then watch the money roll in! If this isn't the stupidest business strategy in the history of journalism -- that's a pretty tough competition -- it's certainly in the Top Five.
Notice that Meacham's idea is to publish a magazine resembling a magazine that he likes to read. Call it the Narcissus Reflecting Pool Theory of journalism: If the top editor admires a certain publication, then trying to imitate that publication must be a good business strategy. What you are doing, therefore, is producing a publication for your own editors, rather than for the readers.
This is all very good if the editor is a visionary with a sense of what the reading public wants. But if your editor is a clueless dingbat like Jon Meacham, you're screwed.
My advice to Newsweek staffers: Update your resumes.
It smells like they're trying to remake themselves into a lefty rag like the American Prospect albeit with a bit more populist appeal and investigative journalism. Not quite as highbrow as TNR, not quite as lowbrow as MSNBC, but extra "serious" and willing to charge a bit more for their new supposed prestige.
When a person's image is a commodity -- as was the case with John Edwards, the millionaire of humble origins whose family life supposedly kept him grounded -- the ideas of privacy and good taste become part of the marketing effort. The tabloids, rude and prying, are able to break through such images to the truth behind them in ways the conventional media cannot. . . . "False, absolute nonsense," an Edwards spokesperson told the Enquirer at the beginning of the Edwards-affair affair in October 2007, while the candidate was still working the heartland on his way to a second-place finish, ahead of Hillary Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses. Against that blanket denial, the paper cited "a source close to the woman" and "one bombshell e-mail message" to support what it called a "shocking allegation -- if proven true."
"I'm going to have a basic cheddar cheese burger, medium well, with mustard. . . . You got a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that?" -- Barack Obama, May 5, 2009
"The reaction proved one thing I already knew: The cult of personality surrounding Obama is real. And many of the cultists are demented, dangerous or both." -- William Jacobson, May 8, 2009
The point was not that Obama likes Dijon mustard -- I do, too, as does the man who named it "DijonGate" -- but rather that MSNBC and other major media are no longer in the news business. They're doing public relations for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.
What was the purpose of Obama and Joe Biden going to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va.? It was a photo-op, to show O and Joe bein' Regular Guys, standin' in line, eatin' some burgers.
Obviously, reporters didn't think "Dijon mustard" fit the narrative the White House wanted, and so they fudged the quote -- and NBC even edited its own video -- to omit the offensive French phrase. Jacobson pointed this out, and it was like showing a Rorshach inkblot to Charles Manson.
Obama Mustard Attack Becomes Full-Blown Right-Wing Talking Point -- Huffington Post
Ivy League Professor Wingnut Pens Masterpiece About Dijon Mustard -- Wonkette
Dijon Derangement Syndrome: Conservative media attack Obama for burger order -- Media Matters
Why was the reaction so hideously overblown? Gateway Pundit, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and others were just doing the same thing they did with John Kerry's ill-fated wind-surfing vacation or any number of other incidents in which prominent Democrats act in ways that conflict with their populist rhetoric.
A burger at Ray's Hell-Burger costs $6.95, so lunch at the Arlington restaurant isn't exactly the value menu at Mickey D's. If the White House believed they could show Obama as a Regular Guy by having him eat at a place where the burgers are seven bucks, maybe they need to work on their definition of populism.
Jacobson's posts, however, pointed out how news organizations were actively involved in the image-shaping function of the Obama P.R. machine. It would be like learning that Fox News provided the "Mission Accomplished" banner at Bush's famous 2003 aircraft-carrier event.
Exposure of the media role in the Obama phenomenon is what the Left fears most because, at some level, they understand that if the press were ever to report honestly on what the Democrats are doing, the game would change. So the Obama cultists, accustomed to only fawning coverage of their Leader, react with fury when the fawning coverage is demonstrated to be dishonest.
Obama's high level of public support is largely a product of his positive image the media have crafted. "DijonGate" exposed how this image-making role is played. And therefore William Jacobson is denounced as a "wing-nut" pushing "right-wing talking points."
Of course, there are no "left-wing talking points," and if you dare suggest that Media Matters and Huffington Post are participating in an orchestrated propaganda effort -- perhaps organized by Astroturf king David Axelrod -- this only proves you are a "wing nut."
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! My second 'Lanche this weekend. I suspect Professor Reynolds was watching what I was watching -- Ross Douthat doing "Q&A" on C-SPAN -- and thought to himself, "If I don't hit him now, there'll be another raving manic e-mail at 4 a.m."
Damned callow pretentious Harvard boy prattling on about Chesterton and Christopher Lasch and skinny-dipping with Buckley . . . well, never mind all that now. The raven's calling your name, Douthat!
UPDATE II:Paco quotes . . . Lionel Trilling? What the hell? Has everybody gone all Douthat on me? "As Jeanne Kirkpatrick once said to Daniel Patrick Moynihan . . . ."
Barack Obama dildo. And what would Jeanne Kirkpatrick have to say about that, huh?
In June 2008, Washington, D.C., Judge Zoe Bush committed Kwanzaa Diggs to juvenile detention after Diggs was convicted of robbery.
By April 24, 2009, Diggs was back on the streets. Specifically, he was in the 900 block of Barnaby Street, SE. He had been shot multiple times, and two other teenage victims were also shot.
This is not only a failure of the D.C. city government, but also a failure of the media to ask the kinds of questions, and tell the kinds of stories, that King is asking and telling.
Dear God, what has happened to journalism in America? Is it any wonder that people hate "the media" so much? Here you've got the case of a 17-year-old shot dead, two others wounded, a crime that indicates a systemic failure of local government, and the local paper is too busy covering pandas at the zoo?
John Kerry can't fix this problem. Some editors need to be fired, and some reporters need to be reminded that their job is to cover the freaking news. When somebody gets shot to death, that's news.
Am I the only journalist on the planet who's ever seen Teacher's Pet? Clark Gable plays a tough, cynical newspaper editor, and Doris Day plays a journalism professor. The Gable character disdains the professor's lofty pretensions about the "civic duty" of a newspaper. The turning point of the story is where Gable takes a stabbing death and turns it into a really great human-interest story.
Murder is news. Rape, robbery and drug busts are also news. And guess what? Crime coverage, if done right, sells papers. If the Washington Post can't be bothered to cover a shooting that leaves one teenager dead and two others wounded, what the hell is the point of publishing a newspaper?
Good cops-and-courts reporting used to be a staple of American journalism. Was such coverage sometimes lurid and sensationalist? Sure. But it sells newspapers. The problem is that too many people in our newsrooms for the past several decades have failed to understand that they're in a business, the object of which is to sell the product and make a profit.
The pretentious Doris Day professor types have triumphed over the cynical Clark Gable types. We've got plenty of pundits to lecture us about "fine-grained local coverage," but good luck getting a Harvard magna cum laude to go out and cover the freaking news.
The newspaper industry is dying, and Kwanzaa Diggs is still dead.
UPDATE: The Associated Press can't be bothered with Kwanzaa Diggs and the collapse of the juvenile justice system in our nation's capital. But the five-year anniversary of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts? 2,700 words!
Honestly, I think that everybody involved would be happier if we just established once and for all that the Watergate scandal was a disaster for the newspaper industry; it encouraged an entire generation of reporters to go out there and try to change American society, instead of simply documenting it.
Nail on the head, Moe. All The President's Men solidified this idea of journalism that "makes a difference" in the heads of a generation of journalists. It not only encouraged a lot of what is called "Pulitzer bait" -- the five-part series -- but it generally attracted to the business a lot of liberal do-gooders who thought of themselves as superior to their readers.
Last year, there was a certain news story that caused Ace of Spades to erupt in fury: "Stop telling me what to think!" (I wish I could find that post, because it was good.) Nobody wants to do the straight-ahead Joe Friday "just-the-facts-ma'am" news story, because there is no prestige in that kind of basic reporting.
It is no surprise, really, that the great scandals of American journalism -- Stephen Glass in 1998 and Jayson Blair in 2003 -- occurred about 30 years after Watergate, by which time the starry-eyed liberal do-gooders who entered the business in the 1970s had become editors and journalism professors.
Turned on the TV in my home office, hoping to watch Michelle Malkin on the Glenn Beck show, but the old portable TV my kids hooked up doesn't get Fox News.
So I switched over to MSNBC just to try to get an update on the non-Carrie Prejean nude news -- just in time for "Hardball" with Chris Matthews.
He completely sucks, doesn't he? I remember for years how the liberal bloggers were always ranting about the wretched awfulness of "Tweetie" Matthews. I didn't get it, because I never watched his show. (I'm not a big TV watcher, period.)
I'd occasionally be switching channels, catch small doses of Matthews and not really think about it But . . . OMG!
To try to sit in a room where the TV is tuned to "Hardball" for a full freaking hour! Now I get what the liberal bloggers were complaining about. The man seems congenitally incapable of framing any argument except in the most superficially stereotypical terms.
Chris Matthews is to coherent discourse what Johnny Rotten is to fine jazz -- which is to say, he's never even attempted it. What is so annoying about Matthews is his utter lack of curiosity. He doesn't ask questions in search of information, and he routinely mischaracterizes the scope of any controversy.
Matthews begins an interview with an antagonist -- a guest who represents the "other side" -- by expressing the most ludicrously pejorative caricature of the antagonist's position. So, before the guest can begin to engage, he must first clear away this misleading distortion. Then, predictably, while the guest is attempting to clarify his own position, Matthews interrupts with some sarcastic idiocy.
He's a much worse TV interviewer than either Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, and I'm not a great admirer of either of those guys. The whole point of having a guest do a TV interview is to hear what the guest has to say, but Matthews is infinitely more interested in hearing his own voice than in letting the audience hear his guests.
At least when Hannity starts the bully-boy routine on a liberal guest -- hectoring and interrupting -- it's entertaining in a pro-wrestling sort of way. O'Reilly has his own trademark brand of obnoxiousness, but it is arguably entertaining obnoxious.
What's the difference? Hannity comes out of a talk-radio background, and O'Reilly has been doing TV all his life. Both of them are professional broadcasters, who have some basic concept that they are on TV to attract and engage an audience.
Matthews, by contrast, is a lifelong Democratic Party hack, who got hired for TV as a "political analyst" and parlayed that (via the DC schmooze circuit) into his anchor role. But because he was hired for his politics, he didn't have to be any good at the audience-attraction part of the job, and never bothered to learn it.
Before anyone can yell "hypocrite" at me, I am well aware of my own bad rhetorical habits. But I do this in writing. The written word and broadcasting are very different media. You can skim through the written word and turn the page any time you want, so an article you disagree with doesn't have the intrusive feeling that you get being stuck in a room with Chris Matthews on your TV. (This old 13-inch portable TV doesn't have a remote.)
With TV, however, you can't "skim." There is a temporal linearity to the TV-viewing experience, from which the viewer can only escape by changing the channel. And the ability of Chris Matthews to inspire viewers to change the channel is the most obvious explanation for MSNBC's persistently low ratings over the years.
It's not about Matthews' politics. Ed Schultz comes on right after "Hardball," and Ed rivals Keith Olbermann for obnoxious liberalism. But Ed is entertaining. He's a good interviewer who brings on the guest, asks questions, and lets the guest answer.
Matthews has been on MSNBC forever and has never attracted an audience. There is no evidence that he even has the capacity to learn how to be good on TV. If the executives at MSNBC cared anything about building an audience, they'd cancel "Hardball" immediately and negotiate a buyout of Matthews' contract.
Somewhere out there in America is a good TV newsman -- liberal in his politics, but skilled at his craft -- who is being deprived of a career opportunity because the stupid suits at MSNBC can't see what anyone with two eyes and a brain can see: Chris Matthews sucks beyond hope of redemption, and he's clogging up a perfectly good hour of cable TV time.
Troubled by the possible shuttering of his hometown paper, Sen. John Kerry reached out to the Boston Globe on Tuesday, then called for Senate hearings to address the woes of the nation's print media. . . . "America's newspapers are struggling to survive, and while there will be serious consequences in terms of the lives and financial security of the employees involved, including hundreds at the Globe, there will also be serious consequences for our democracy where diversity of opinion and strong debate are paramount," Mr. Kerry said.
Please allow me to point out that no politician ever said the first damned thing about the vital importance of saving the newspaper industry as long as I was working at a newspaper.
James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog throws less traffic than Protein Wisdom, but -- alas! -- Jeff Goldstein, Dan Collins & Co. don't have a high-end Conde Nast magazine to pay them a full-time salary to write unfunny "humor" posts:
For a Master of Disguise such as myself . . . majoring in latex masks and the slurring vowels of obscure dialects, infiltrating the Tea Parties will be a piece of pie. It will require little more than a series of message t-shirts tastefully spattered with barbecue sauce, baggy jeans, sneakers that double as orthopedic shoes, and a protest sign with at least one word defiantly misspelled, as if to say to the media, "Fuck you, MSM, only pussies adhere to that 'i' before 'e' bullshit." Please forgive the obscenities and vulgarities--it's all part of "getting into character" and feeling the role.
As much as some may be tempted to compare him to Cthulhu, Wolcott is not really interesting enough to be evil. He might be more usefully compared to Frank Rich, who became bored with writing theater criticism and decided instead to try his hand at political commentary. This seems to have inspired the imitative Wolcott, who had muddled around for decades as a media/pop-culture critic, to decide that this politics scene was the place to be.
If James Wolcott is being paid by the word, his 3,700-word screed in the June issue of Vanity Fair is the Crime of the Century.The article is presented as describing the "vicious Clinton-versus-Obama rupture at Daily Kos" and thus an analysis of "a party-wide split" among Democrats, but it's really nothing of the kind. In fact, it's nothing at all. There is no reporting and very little that could be called research. Just massive paragraph after paragraph of florid prose.
Observant readers, contemplating the fact that Wolcott's fictitious "party-wide split" failed to prevent the Democrats from carrying 53% of the popular vote in November, cannot help but conclude that Wolcott doesn't know what he's talking about. And yet he continues to collect a paycheck from Graydon Carter.
True to his belle-lettrist roots, Wolcott apparently can't be bothered to pick up a phone and call an actual source, much less trundle his corpulent ass somewhere and do any on-the-scene reporting. He expects to be admired on the basis of his self-imagined eloquence and wit, which explains why he goes to such lengths with his stereotypical portrayal of conservatives as troglodyte hicks who can't spell.
Like his marriage to Laura Jacobs, Wolcott's liberalism is incestuously convenient. Vanity Fair is basically a fashion/celebrity magazine, and the inclusion of ignorant political commentary is therefore not necessary to the magazine's stock-in-trade. Yet New York being New York, and the magazine business being the magazine business, if Vanity Fair is going to feature ignorant political commentary, you can bet that it will be ignorant liberal political commentary.
So they sell a magazine by putting supermodel Giselle Bundchen naked on the cover -- with a multi-page pictorial display inside -- and use part of the resulting revenue to pay Wolcott to provide uninformative (and largely unread) filler between the ads for jewelry, cosmetics and brand-name clothing.
My search for wealthy investors to fund a magazine combining nude supermodels and conservative commentary has been unssuccessful so far. Oh, there are plenty of guys in the blogosphere who'd be happy to write conservative commentary for 20 cents a word, but nude supermodels? They would require the supervision of a trained professional journalist.
The media insiders were also asked about coverage of President Obama. Of 45 respondents, 71 percent say it has been "about right," 22 percent say it's been "too easy" and 7 percent say it has been "too tough."
So, who counts as a "media insider"?
Respondents to the Atlantic/National Journal Media Insider’s Poll: Peter Beinart, Gloria Borger, David Brooks, Carl Cannon, Tucker Carlson, Jonathan Chait, Roger Cohen, Steve Coll, Sam Donaldson, Bob Edwards, James Fallows, Howard Fineman, Frank Foer, Ron Fournier, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jeff Greenfield, Glenn Greenwald, David Gregory, Mark Halperin, Christopher Hitchens, Al Hunt, Mort Kondracke, Jim Lehrer, Ruth Marcus, Joshua Micah Marshall, Chris Matthews, Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus, John Micklethwait, Dana Milbank, Markos Moulitsas, Katherine McIntire Peters, Todd Purdum, Cokie Roberts, Eugene Robinson, Tom Shoop, Roger Simon, Scott Simon, Ray Suarez, Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, Leon Wieseltier, Juan Williams, Judy Woodruff, Fareed Zakaria.
Commenters are invited to research that list and tell me how many of those people make their living asnews reporters. (Excuse me: Glenn Greenwald? Markos Moulitsas?) Also, dig the special pleading:
The Internet has some plusses: It has widened the circle of those participating in the national debate. But it has mortally wounded the financial structure of the news business so that the cost of doing challenging, independent reporting has become all but prohibitive all over the world. It has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.
In other words, any technological development that reduces revenue to "the news business" is a bad development. Why? Because for people in "the news business," reduced revenue means that they have to economize. And since the "media insiders" are being squeezed, this is bad. Yeah, things are tough all over. Just ask Gunnery Sgt. Hartman.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- There is a "100% chance that there will be . . . an attack on U.S. soil," conservative author David Horowitz said Thursday. Horowitz made the prediction while speaking to a George Washington University student group, after being asked about the possibility of U.S.-Iranian conflict. In the event of such a terror attack against the American homeland, Horowitz predicted, there will be widespread public outrage against U.S. liberals. . . .
Having spent more than two decades in the news business, I was outraged in January when Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard said conservative bloggers don't do reporting. I'd love to do more, but the stuck-up know-it-alls at the Weekly Standard never asked, and they don't ever link me off their blog, so . . . OK, /rage.
But then Matthew Yglesias jumped in with his "nyah nyahs," prompting Malkin to demonstrate, au contraire, that conservative bloggers do report. And I know doggone well that they could do a lot more reporting, if anyone with any influence in the conservative movement had a freaking clue about the news business. But they don't, and so I'm out here shaking the tip jar at 11 at night, while some other people on fat salaries are at home in bed.
In less than six months of publication, Culture 11 burned through a stack of start-up capital rumored to be north of $1 million. . . . "I never even heard of this Culture11 site until I read that it was gone," said veteran conservative blogger Dan Riehl. "If someone wants to know why it failed, extrapolate that out to other bloggers and web surfers, that was it. Having never seen it, all I can conclude is that it really must have sucked." Charles Homan of the liberal Washington Monthly naturally pursues the theme that there is some ideological flaw in conservatism that accounts for the failure of Culture11. . . . Homan has got it all wrong. The problem at Culture11 was that personnel is policy.
Stocks slump despite stimulus -- CNN MoneyDon't you just love that "despite"? I mean, you'd think that CNN could afford to hire headline writers who knew something -- anything -- about economics, so that the headline might read:
Obamanomics causes stock slump
What almost nobody seems to realize is that we're passing 7,500 en route to 6,000. This is not temporary "profit-taking," but permanent loss-taking -- the de-capitalization of Wall Street, as the smart money pulls out of U.S. stocks before we go from very bad to much worse. And if you think the stock market is scary, just wait until the bond market comes down with the heeby-jeebies. Get ready for Weimar America, people.
If I had one word of advice, it would be: SELL. And if you asked me for two words of advice, I'd say: SELL NOW.
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