She hands the Republicans, and the sycophant access journalists who cover them, their asses.
Category: Journalism
It’s Called Journalism
Rick Sanchez has John Ensign on, when he bloviates about terrorism, and he quizzes him on his own little scandal, where he paid off the husband and children of his mistress, and Sanchez asks him about how he appears to have encouraged the illegal lobbying activities by former aide:
It’s Called Doing Your Homework
And Rachael Maddow, with the aid of a John Waters film, shows how the Teabaggers chose the name because they simply did not do the research on what the term meant in the first place, and not something that Maddow and Ana Marie Cox invented out of thin air, but was actually a cultural/sexual reference of long standing. (or squatting, see pic)
Wanker of the Day
Tim Fernholz.
He goes goes after Matt Taibbi on his latest article, which I called a jem, and Taibbi responds, basically blowing him out of the water, and acknowledging one minor error, confusing diplomat James Rubin, and Robert Rubin’s son Jamie Rubin, though only by calling the latter a diplomat, Jamie Rubin’s role in assembling the Obama financial team is correctly depicted.
If you want the short version, I would suggest that you review Felix Salmon’s take on this tête-à-tête, and Salmon’s take is the same as Taibbi’s: that Fernholz’s criticisms are largely conjured out of hysteria:
In other words, it’s worth cross-checking everything that Fernholz says against what Taibbi actually writes, because often Taibbi simply doesn’t say what Fernholz implies that he says.
All the schadenfreude over Fernholz’s attack on Taibbi is particularly weird since they seem to actually agree with each other. Here’s how Fernholz concludes….
….
This is quite astonishing. Fernholz is basically saying that Taibbi is right, and that not only is he right but that he will now and henceforth utterly overshadow anyone else who’s criticizing the Obama administration from the left. At the same time, however, despite Taibbi’s astonishing ability to encapsulate and personify the entire group of people who criticize the administration, he’s not even going to manage to “make a dent”, because he’s not going about his job in an evenhanded J-school manner.
Major wankerdom.
Matt Taibbi is clearly polemical writer, but he gets his facts right, and he does describe the truly sad state of affairs that is the Rubin/Summers/Geithner economic axis upon which the Obama administration spins.
But Jon Stewart is Still a F%$#ing Genius
Here he is showing that Glenn Beck is misleading his viewers on gold because he’s paid by gold companies:
I Was Wrong About John Stewart
When I said, or inferred, that Jon Stewart was the only real journalist on cable who did interviews that revealed things from their subjects.
There’s also Stephen Colbert, who is a f$#@ing genius…True dat, see his interview with Matt Taibbi:
This is What an Interview is Supposed To Be
Rachael Maddow, does her homework, has the bigot’s books in front of her, and tears him to bits when he lies.
It’s a well spent 17:56.
This rarely happens on the network shows, Jon Stewart excepted.*
It’s interviews like this that have me skipping Keith to make time for Rachael when I have a busy evening.
*Which raises the obvious question: Why the F%$# should we have to rely on a comedian for competently done interviews?
While I Take a Utilitarian View on IP Law…..
I tend to see it as a public interest law (i.e to promote the progress of science and useful arts) at its core, and not property law, there are still people who should be busted for violating the exclusive licensing agreements associated with this.
Case in point, the Hartford Courant, which has taken to using articles from the smaller local papers without attribution:
Newspaper editors and reporters across the state are noticing a new trend: their local coverage is being copied daily by the Hartford Courant.
In most cases The Courant has been attributing the reporting to the newspapers being copied, which include the Journal Inquirer, The Bristol Press, The Herald of New Britain, the Register-Citizen of Torrington, and the Waterbury Republican-American.
In some cases The Courant appears to have lifted information from the other papers in its entirety without any attribution. But either way, editors say, the Courant is using for free and making money from a product other papers pay to produce, and they want it to stop.
It appears that someone at the Courant has taken it to a high enough level that the Journal Inquirer has sued them for plagiarism, which means that the Courant is not taking stories and writing them up, but taking stories and pasting them up.
If they had been accused of just taking the stories, it would be under a separate bit of case law, it involved Hearst and wire service stories during WWI, but I could not Google it, so this is unbelievably lame.
Signs of the Apocalypse, Media Conspiracy Edition
The apocalypse part is that Matt Taibbi is agreeing with Sarah Palin on whether or not the media is out to get her.
He goes meta, of course, because, he is both a good writer and a smart one, and notes that the media always has its chosen targets, and that this wankitude (Gore, Dean, etc.) is thoroughly bipartisan.:
I would, however, like to point out a few things, none of which really involve taking sides in this particular cat-fight. In no particular order:
1) The political media has always taken it upon itself to make decisions about who is and who is not qualified to be taken seriously as candidates for higher office. Without even talking about whether they do this more or less to Republicans or Democrats, I can testify that I witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in the primary battles within the Democratic Party. It has always been true that the press corps has drawn upon internalized professional biases, high-school-style groupthink and the urging of insider wonks to separate candidates into “serious” and “unserious” groups before the shots even start to be fired.
….
2) When that does happen, when the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.
…
3) So Sarah Palin is now in that category of politician whom reporters feel safe in attacking.
It’s a good read, and highly accurate.
Why Does No One Ever Quote Bob Herbert?
Lord knows, I rarely, if ever, quote him, and his mist recent column in the New York Times deserves notice.
His basic point is that there is no recovery for most of the country, even as “Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.”
Herbert writes about this stuff a lot, and he’s treated like a red-haired stepchild, he rarely gets quoted in the blogosphere, either pro or con.
I’m not sure why this is.
Stewart and Colbert on Dobbs
The perfect thing for a Friday evening.
Props to Stephen for the Highlander call out:
Hannity Admits that He is Jon Stewart’s Bitch
It appears that Jon Stewart is a super-being who is capable of doing things that violate the basic laws of this world, because he just forced Sean Hannity to admit that they were lying with the videos that he posted. (earlier post on this)
Sparta!!!!!!
H/t Pressing Issues
[Title changed after publication when I came up with a better one]
[Youtube taken down, replaced with a new one. Fox is apparently going after liberals who post clips from Fox with takedown notices.]
What the F$#@ is Up With This?
OK, I don’t generally follow the comings and goings of newspaper personnel, though I do read Romenesko, a kind of gossip central for the news gathering biz.
So, when there was sudden and abrupt bloodletting at the Moonie Washington Times, fired senior editorial staff, including the right wing hack John Solomon, I figured that this is simply an artifact of some bizarre family thing with the Moon Family, patriarch Sun Myung Moon will be 90 in January, and there was some sort of weird family thing.
After all, many family owned businesses are dysfunctional family owned businesses, and without a board of directors, any institution under private ownership can pretty do whatever they want.
Well, so I snickered, and then moved on, until I read that armed security guards had been stationed on the 3rd floor, where senior management works, and that staff had been told that they could not use the elevators.
When you are using armed guards to keep out editorial staff, it’s odd.
There are rumors that the paper will be shut down, though considering the nature of its management, they could be constructing a giant statue of papa Moon out of Brie cheese too.
It’s Called Lipstick on a Pig, and It is Illegal
McClatchy, just finished an investigation of some of Goldman Sachs’ behavior, and the lede says it all:
In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
You know, being a bit more optimistic in public than being in private is a fuzzy line. This ain’t it.
Later in the article, it is discussed how Goldman, and hedge fund operator John Paulson, bought billions in Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on mortgage backed bonds to profit on the collapse.
Note that Paulson is in a different boat from Goldman, because he didn’t sell those bonds in the first place, but once again it shows how the lessons of the South Sea Bubble, which led to the Marine Insurance Act of 1746 have been forgotton and so it is no longer required that people who buy insurance, including swaps, must have a material interest in the underlying asset.
H/t Atrios.
Signs of the Apocalypse: Wall Street Journal Edition
There it is in black and white, on the opinion page of the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal, a we have an article that calls out the Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News for lack of journalistic integrity:
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America’s disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News’s lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.
The author, Thomas Frank, had better hope that Rupert Murdoch does not read the OP/ED page of his flagship newspaper.
Luckily for Mr. Frank, I’d give 2 to 1 odds that he doesn’t.
Newspaper Circulation Craters
What is going on is that their customers are dying off, and the next generation is just not interested in paying for bad journalism.
So newspaper circulation fell by 10.6% over the past year.
The first time that I saw footage of the protests at GW Bush’s inauguration in 2001 was in Fahrenheit 911.
The MSM was doing bizarre camera shots that were determined to hide it all, and the print media did the same.
For anyone who is at all web savvy, why read the New York Times when the Times of London, or BBC, or Guardian does a better job?
There are a number of problems, such as corporate slant in the news (GE/NBC), but the biggest problem is that newspapers are being managed by people who do not believe in newspapers, but rather by people who are little more than chop shop operators.
This is, as I have said before, you saw this in rail in the 1960s and 1970s, when the companies running railroads decided that it was a dying industry, and so cut people, cut maintenance, cut modernization, and cut infrastructure, and in so doing, they very nearly killed it off.
The news industry has become corporate owned, and acceded to the demands of Wall Street by digesting itself to generate the requisite profit margins, and now, there is very little left by way of quality product for people to want to buy.
Just Read Froomkin
Shoot Me, I Agree with Fred Hiatt
With the exception of the Wall Street Journal editorial, I can think of no OP/ED section in the country that contains more ignorance, flat out lies, and sociopathic ideation than that of the Washington Post.
That being said, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the Post is right when they argue against additional aid to bolster housing prices.
Here is the money quote:
The financial crisis was partly the result of years of government-encouraged over-investment in residential real estate. When will the federal government start working on an exit strategy and a new, more rational housing policy — one in which individual homeownership occupies a central, but less heavily subsidized, position?
I would note that they were big into Bush’s “Ownership Society”, which included a lot of government subsidies for home ownership, so it is not unreasonable to think that the reason that they oppose current measures, and supported old measures, is because IOKIYAR* is a way of life for these folks.
*It’s OK If You Are a Republican.
Jon Stewart is a F%$#ing Genius, He Should Get a Nobel Edition
Seriously, Jon Stewart may be the only Journalist in the United States.
As he properly notes, “Democrats couldn’t get laid in a house whose sole purpose is for free sex with legislators on finance committees.”
H/t AMERICAblog
Update on Fed/Bloomberg Case
The case, which the Federal Reserve appealed, is about whether or not the central bank should release the names of non-banks that have borrowed from it.
The Fed wants the names kept secret, and lost in the lower court, and now Bloomberg wants the names released pending appeal:
Details about the borrowers and their collateral are “central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression,” attorneys for Bloomberg said in the suit.
The Freedom of Information Act obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the public. The Bloomberg suit didn’t seek money damages.
The interesting bit here is that the Fed is appealing on the basis of damage, which means that they appear to be ceding their prior claim that they aren’t really a part of the government, and hence are subject to FOIA requests.