Archive for the 'Media matters' Category

The candidate for thee, but not for me

In an amusing article that compiles examples of American and European media hysteria about Obama’s world tour (think Madonna and the Beatles, only bigger), Denis Boyles makes an interesting point about the European fixation with an Obama (read:  black) Presidency:
Anyway, the gist: Europeans really really want Obama to be the next U.S. president, just as [...]

Because I’m better than the New York Times

The Times may have refused to publish McCain’s Iraq editorial (afraid, no doubt, that publishing it would cast a shadow on Obama’s purported wisdom), but I have no such fear.  Here’s, courtesy of the Drudge Report, is the op-ed McCain wrote — and it’s an op-ed that any reasonable, non-partisan newspaper would have freely printed:
In [...]

How limousine liberals view starvation

Starvation, sadly, regularly stalks the African continent.  This religiously prophetic website, in its famine page, tracks those trends and provides truly horrible images, one of which I reproduce here (from Somalia):

In the great country of America, however, hunger has a different face:

I do not post the above picture to be mean to the voluminous ladies [...]

What prisoner swap?

I’ve been moving around the internet a bit looking at stories about the way in which Israel turned a brutal, mass murderer over in exchange for two bodies.  What’s fascinating is that the stories keep calling it a “prisoner swap,” as if there’s parity in the exchange.  Prisoner swap, after all, implies that Israel gave [...]

All the news that’s fit to print *UPDATED*

Palestinians and Hezbollah are wildly celebrating the release of a great Lebanese hero, Samir Kuntar, from Israeli prison.  Their excitement matches that felt in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was finally released.  Nelson Mandela, of course, was a principled man who spoke up against apartheid and was imprisoned for exercising his freedom of speech against [...]

It gets ever harder to take the press seriously *UPDATED*

The press continues to shape public perceptions, but people are starting to wise up to the fact that the press often has no idea what it’s doing (especially when it comes to military matters) and that it either outright lies or misrepresents through omission.  The Confederate Yankee just found a photographic example in which the [...]

Quick! Someone tell the American voters about this news from Iraq.

The story is amazing and the source — the normally anti-American Spiegel (a German magazine) — is equally amazing.  According to this story, things in Baghdad are going really well, and the citizens have a renewed sense of well-being and purpose:
There is an unexpected air of normalcy prevailing in Baghdad these days, with consumption flourishing [...]

It’s not the story; it’s the story about the story

Honest Reporting captured the first spin that the BBC put on the terrible story of the latest massacre in Israel (a Palestinian versus Israelis, of course) — and, as always, it was Israel who was spun as the brutal aggressor.  Orwell clearly understood something in the British psyche when he wrote 1984 — or, more [...]

Must-hear podcast

If you haven’t already heard it, please listen to Dennis Prager’s June 26th interview with Dick Morris about Morris’ new book Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies … Are Scamming Us … and What to Do About It.  You can find [...]

Not what you expect from NPR

From 1987 through 2003, I listened to NPR with religious fervor.  It was my church.  Everything I knew, I knew from NPR.  In 2003, I discovered the internet and began following up on stories I heard on NPR.  I learned for the first time that NPR had not only an anti-Israel bias — one that [...]

AP tries for clever, but comes up with stupid

There has been speculation lately from those with little us to occupy their brains about whether the snazzy red loafers that adorn the Pope’s feet are Prada.  It turns out that they not.  Never say that the modern media isn’t heavy on the investigative reporting, right?
This inordinately silly story would not be noteworthy were nit [...]

Damned lies and statistics

This sounds dreadful — until you read this, and discover that it’s not dreadful, it’s profoundly dishonest.  And it’s the dishonesty that’s the true horror.
Have past elections been characterized by such terrible dishonesty?  I wonder if these lies, damn lies and statistics were always out there tainting the flow of information, and we simply didn’t [...]

Ah, these linguistic subtleties!

Did you know that a rocket could break a truce?  I didn’t.  Being neither a scientist nor a weapons expert, nor a member of the MSM, I kind of thought that, absent human intervention, rockets would just lie around inert.  It’s just always seemed to me that, for a rocket to fly through the air [...]

Separating principles from personal preferences

One of the things I’ve always admired about Harry Truman is the fact that he was able to separate principles from personal preferences.  He was a racist who integrated the American military and an antisemite who was among the first to recognize the State of Israel.
I keep thinking of Truman when I see the American [...]

Friends of Obama

I highly (really highly) recommend that you read Paul Kengor’s piece in today’s American Thinker, Return of the Dupes and the Anti-Anti-Communists. In it, he describes a struggle I remember well from the 1970s (when I became politically aware during the end of the Vietnam era) through the 1990s (during which time I was [...]

WaPo editor finally figures out that the Left lied, not Bush

There is an absolutely staggering editorial in today’s Washington Post — it admits that, John Rockefeller’s “official” indictment to the contrary, Bush did not lie. If anything, Rockefeller, in his official Senate Intelligence Committee report is lying by reaching conclusions at odds with his own evidence:
Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you [...]

Obama, apparently, is running with no opposition

One would think that, now that the candidates for both parties are known, both of their vice-presidential choices would be the issue. How naive I am. In media-land, there’s really only one party running for the White House — the Democrats and some sort of vaguely known, but not really worrisome, opposition.  Or [...]

Inevitability

Remember a year and a half ago when the MSM, directly and indirectly, assured us that Hillary’s candidacy was inevitable?

One study, two spins (with one attacking abstinence)

The CDC did a study about teen sexuality. Here’s how The Telegraph, a leading British news paper spun it:
American teenagers are having less sex, doing fewer drugs and drinking less alcohol than those who grew up in the 1990s, according to a new study.
Amid growing concern about teenage behaviour in Britain, the report by [...]

The Obamatian Church

In keeping with the halo the media has placed on Obama, not to mention his own sense of spiritual destiny, PoliSat has written a post and put together a video envisioning the Church of Our Lord Barack Obama — with a hat tip at the end to yours truly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8plz0Qks4o

Sphere: Related Content

Brave? Yes. Unique? No.

If you stop at the first paragraph of this AP article, you might think that Teddy Kennedy is the only person on earth who has ever faced a cancer surgery as daunting as the one he underwent (emphasis mine):
Bravery in the face of cancer? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has given it new meaning. Few things [...]

Do you think Reuters is trying to tell us something?

Talk about subliminal advertising:

It’s not only the photo of Obama’s uplifted face, surrounded by a halo, it’s the juxtaposition with the text:
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama waits to speak in Aberdeen, South Dakota May 31, 2008. Obama said on Saturday he quit his Chicago church in the aftermath of inflammatory sermons that could become [...]

Saturday funnies

When I’m at work, I act like a professional.  Even if I had ever lost my temper on the job, though, my moment of rage would have quickly vanished.  If you’re someone a little unclear on professionalism, though, with a blue mouth, and you work in the news business, you might find yourself captured on [...]

Those Obama lies

I’ve blogged at length about Obama’s approach to lies.  Unlike Hillary, who just works herself into a frenzy of denial, Obama has an incremental approach.  He just keeps leaking out pieces of the truth.  By the time he’s fully exposed himself as a liar, the compliant, short-memoried media has long forgotten what the whole thing [...]

Heroes and helpless ones *UPDATED*

I don’t know how it is that I never got around to watching it before, but last night marked the first time I ever saw that classic 1941 movie Sergeant York. It’s a biopic, starring Gary Cooper as the eponymous Sergeant York, who was the most decorated hero of World War I. Unlike [...]