Why you’d be wise to ignore the media as much as possible
Bookworm on Nov 19 2009 at 3:22 pm | Filed under: Media matters
This, from James Taranto, at Best of the Web:
Accountability Journalism
An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11Number of pages in document being covered:
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432Number of pages per AP reporter:
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That’s what they call accountability journalism.
Email This Post To A Friend
8 Responses to “Why you’d be wise to ignore the media as much as possible”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
To cap it off, they were untruthful if they pretended to understand the health care bill. At least that is the case if the language resembles the House version. Incomprehensible.
I have become very selective about where I get my news or analysis.
They are lying nutters. They call us wing nuts, as if we’re are nuts flying on a wing.
By the numbers and the news, it’s disheartening. The headlines have focused a good deal on the corrupt Karzai government ($20 million here $20 million there). The AP assigns 11 to fact check Palin’s book and probably 1100 to defend Obama’s book. Below the government actually owes up to $98 BILLION in corruption- somebody want to fact check that figure. If they admit to $98 Billion – what’s the real number? What this country needs is to hire some ‘repro guys’. Let them, take the cars, the houses (Congress, the Senate and the WH) and hold them until every penny is paid back. That will put a lot of people back to work and more importantly lay off the incompetents that can’t balance a ledger.
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government identified $98 billion in erroneous or fraudulent payments made during the 2009 fiscal year, up from $72 billion the previous year, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said yesterday.
The discrepancy between pages per AP reporter assigned is even more when you realize that the prose in an autobiography is much easier to read through and parse than the prose in a legislative bill.
AP cannot possibly win this pissing contest. For one thing, it’s long past the point where it is recruiting more readers than it’s losing. People like me always look at the source of a news story and if it says AP immediately discontinue reading it. I’m an old man and life’s too short to sit there deconstructing yet another amateurishly written AP pack of lies.
It’s bad enough for AP if you’re just considering all of the disgruntleds like me. But AP’s dilemma is that every day thousands more join our grumpy ranks. For every person who falls off the propaganda wagon, there’s no replacement. The yoots of America? A lost cause when it comes to consuming AP-style news. Obama-ites who are awakening at long last and coming out of their stupor? Not likely to ask for another pour of Whore Media swill.
So (gosh, I feel like Rush when I say stuff like this because I know the left so well!), AP will slowly begin printing stories here and there that are critical of Obama, waiting for it to become OK to go hammer-and-tong at The One. Its stories will be oblique at first. You won’t see “Wheels Spinning Off Obama Potemkin Villagemobile!” It will be more like “Administration, Suffering Unexpected Flat Tire, Says Repair May Take Longer Than Expected.”
The piling on Palin is seen for what it is for anyone with common sense: When you hysterically rail against a woman who holds no office and a news network with 1/10th the audience of the Big 3, it’s obvious that you are going to immolate yourself with the gigantic backfire you are so cluelessly creating.
I take issue with only one point you made, Charles. You are not an old man.
[...] Bookworm contributes to the conversation by comparing the efforts of the AP on fact-checking the Sen…: Number of AP reporters assigned to story: • ObamaCare bills: 2 • Palin book: [...]
I didn’t realize there was a real Sonny Berman, who had a short but productive life as a trumpeter in Woody Herman’s band. (This find was serendipity.) So Book’s Facebook name of Sunny Berman may have been inspired by a love of big band jazz.
http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/the-incomplete-sonny-berman/