I don’t have much news for Fox News, but Shep Smith does appear to be the cream of the crop at that nest of vipers.
Seen on Facebook.
Category: Media
Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle Is Worse Than I Thought
Due diligence, what due diligence?
I’ve always thought of her as a partisan hack, but it turns out that it’s worse than that. She is yet another bit of Koch brothers bought and paid for AstroTurf:
Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/ The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.
There is a line between being a hack, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.
If you hire someone while they are paid agents of an entity that they cover, you are making the integrity of your news organization a joke.
I have made the same argument about NPR’s religion reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who interestingly enough is the sister of the multi-millionaire owner of MCardle’s employer The Atlantic, David Bradley. (The world is weird that way)
There are some good people at The Atlantic, but even before these revelations, it was clear that giving McArdle a megaphone was a blight on the magazine.
So, Jon Stewart’s S-Word Unbleeped Was a One-Off
Roll George Carlin (NSFW)
It appears that “Sh%$ unbleeped will not be a regular part of the lexicon for The Daily Show:
“The Daily Show” is not changing its standards concerning which words it will bleep and which it won’t, though it might have seemed that way Wednesday night.
………
Comedy Central executives emphasized that the decision to leave the words in affected only the initial late-night showing of “The Daily Show” and the ones run later at night. All the words were cut from repeats run during daytime hours Thursday.
A spokesman for the network, Steve Albani, said in an e-mail comment:
“Occasionally we allow certain language to go unbleeped on the show during its late-night premiere and encore. When we do, we have an alternate, bleeped version which runs during the daytime in its encore time slots, which receive a broader audience.”
The decision to allow the language this time had mostly to do with the substance of the comedy piece, another Comedy Central executive said, and did not signal a change in the network’s overall approach to what it will permit to be said uncensored on the show.
I am unclear as to why people are so frightened by a simple 1 syllable word, particularly on cable.
But you cannot say “Chaos ullsh%$ Mounting” without that word.
stewart
Remember last night when I said Jon Stewart was dropping the S-word without it being bleeped?
Well, you can see it here, Chaos on Bullsh%$ Mountain:
Truth be told, this is the most polemic I’ve ever seen him, but that’s got to leave a mark!
What the F%$#
OK, I was just watching The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart said sh%$.
This wouldn’t be unusual, except for the fact that they didn’t bleep him.
They didn’t bleep him a lot, and they didn’t bleep Pink in her song.
When did the word sh%$ stop being bleeped on Comedy Central?
Punk’d
Former Miss America, That Explains It
Well, it looks like the Gretchen Carlson got punked by an aspiring COMEDIAN:
Fox News host Gretchen Carlson cut an interview short on Monday morning after her guest, a so-called “former Obama supporter” and recent college graduate, didn’t seem to comprehend her questions or his reason for being on the show.
While it’s not clear what was going on with the man, identified as Max Rice, he didn’t seem to understand how television interviews work, offered insincere answers to Carlson’s questions, and even awkwardly hit on her.
“Hello Miss USA,” he said after being introduced. “It’s an honor. I wish I could see you.”
“Miss America, but close enough,” she corrected him.
“Miss America,” Rice said. “Miss Universe in my book, in my book.”
“Now, tell me your story,” Carlson prompted. “You believed in the hope and change of President Obama until you voted for him. Now, tell me the next…”
“Oh, I was a huge Obama supporter in 2008,” he replied. “I met him in third grade. I met him when I was little. What’s your question?”
“And why now are you supporting Mitt Romney?” she asked.
“Why am I supporting Mitt Romney? Well, it’s actually a funny story,” he began. “I lost a basketball game to a friend of mine… he’s a huge supporter of this show.”
Several seconds of silence followed. “Okay, so it sounds like you’re not being very serious about…” Carlson began.
“Oh, I’m also disappointed in the direction Obama has taken this nation,” Rice injected. “I will be casting my ballot for Mitt Romney.”
………
“They were just casting a part in a show,” Rice told the progressive website RawStory.com. “The first thing that shocked me is that they were that desperate to find someone that fit that category. What they were seeking is someone who voted for Obama in 2008, then somewhere in the last four years got disenfranchised and now is a huge Romney supporter. But I feel like anyone who fits that mold would also dis Romney at the same time. So, they just couldn’t find anyone. They’re in New York City, so they had to go find a kid in Chicago.”
Earlier this year, “Fox & Friends” aired a nearly-four-minute video about President Obama’s first term, drawing the ire of critics who say it looked, felt and sounded like a political attack ad.
I am very amused.
Additionally, I actually learned something here.
It always seemed to me that there was a “fish out of water” aspect to Ms. Carlson that seemed familiar, and now I get it.
It’s the Phyllis George all over again.
One final note, see Max Rice’s speech as president of his senior high school class. It’s prize
For those of you who don’t remember Ms. George, she was a sportscaster for a number of years with CBS sports after winning the 1971 Miss America pageant.
She had the broadcasting thing down, but she was always a bit off.
In particular I remember her wondering on air why they kept talking about a big NFL trade rumor.
She knew broadcasting, but she just didn’t get sports, or at least Football.
Carlson is the same way. She is thoroughly competent at presenting herself on camera, but she simply does not get news.
h/t cz
I Love British Nastiness
When the BBC game show Have I Got News for You had a politician ditch them for the 3rd time, they replaced him with a tub of lard.
H/t Paul Krugment.
My Heart Bleeds Borscht
TV stations are required under federal law to provide their lowest rates to candidates, but this does not apply to Super PACs:
To make his closing argument to Iowa voters on the day of the Jan. 3 caucuses, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spent $1,000 to air a minute- long television ad during one of the Des Moines market’s top- rated morning news programs.
That same airtime on CBS affiliate KCCI-TV was in demand by a super-political action committee helping Romney, and Restore Our Future paid a 50 percent premium to place its commercial.
Come September and October, when Romney and President Barack Obama, House and Senate candidates and dozens of outside political groups will be demanding ad space, super-PACs can expect stations to begin charging what Democratic media consultant Peter Fenn calls “super-gouge rates” of as much as four times what candidates pay.
“Stations are rabid for this money,” said Kip Cassino, research director of Borrell Associates, which tracks the television industry and is based in Williamsburg, Virginia. “The super-PACs are like a kid with money burning a hole in their pocket.”
While I am not a fan of the TV industry, I am still amused gouging the Super PACS and their rich pig backers.
Today’s Civil Rights Heroes
No, this is not intentional, just very apropos!
The Muppets. Seriously:
The Jim Henson Company has celebrated and embraced diversity and inclusiveness for over fifty years and we have notified Chick-Fil-A that we do not wish to partner with them on any future endeavors. Lisa Henson, our CEO is personally a strong supporter of gay marriage and has directed us to donate the payment we received from Chick-Fil-A to GLAAD. (http://www.glaad.org/)
You know, it’s a never a good idea to f%$# with the Muppets. When you f%$# with the (what the hell is Gonzo anyway?) you get the horns.
H/t Think Progress.
Speaking Of the Stupid Burning
Rush Limbaugh is claiming that the latest Batman movie is a Democratic plot, because the villain is named Bane. (As in Rmoney’s Bain).
Ummm Bane has been a fixture in the Batman universe for how many decades? (The Answer is almost 2)
Adventures in Journamalism
The CJR discovers that the the news media repeatedly uncritically quote anti-worker lobbyists to demonstrate things like the fictitious worker shortage:
Two weeks ago The New York Times wheeled out that old chestnut of Great Recession-era economic reporting: Companies can’t find workers, despite high unemployment.
………
But what really sends the BS meter into the red zone is when you learn that the anecdotes are populated with business people with ties to lobbying groups that news organizations, for whatever reason, fail to disclose.
Take one of the Times’s main anecdotes, Drew Greenblatt, who owns a small manufacturing firm in Baltimore called Marlin Steel Wire and who gets his picture in the Times. This was his third NYT hit in three months. Here are Mr. Greenblatt’s other press hits in June: The NBC Nightly News, PBS Newshour (twice), NPR’s Morning Edition, The Hamilton Spectator. So far this year he’s also been on CNN Newsroom and Fox Business (four times), and in the Financial Times, Reuters, and the Associated Press, plus a number of smaller publications. Two years ago, Greenblatt and his company were the focus of a flattering 2,300 word Atlantic profile and a couple of WaPo profiles in 2001 and 2007. This guy is like the Greg Packer of small manufacturers.
………
Undisclosed in any of these stories is the fact that Greenblatt is an executive-committee member of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers, the powerful DC trade lobby. NAM not only pushes Congress for anti-labor policies (like banning picketing), it lobbies for government-funded workforce training programs (“to be led by the business community,” naturally).
………
A couple of weeks ago, blogger Steve M. at Balloon Juice and No More Mister Nice Blog caught NPR and NBC talking to the same small businessman, Joe Olivo, about how Obama’s health care law is keeping him from hiring for his printing business. Turns out Olivo’s quite the active member of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the big right-wing, pro-corporate lobbying group that was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case against Obamacare, which is called National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. His NFIB connections, needless to say, weren’t disclosed by either broadcast. And Steve M. caught NPR going back to the well a week later, with yet another anti-Obamacare Olivo interview with no disclosure of his lobbying ties.
This is hardly the first time this has happened with Olivo.
………
Here’s how you should assume this works, because it’s how it very often does: A journalist is on deadline on a story and needs an anecdote to make it feel “real” with some color—preferably someone who will add balance and/or support the journalist’s thesis. A speed-dialed call is made to industry flacks to supply a quotable small-business person…and, voilà!
That’s the quick-and-easy way, which is how readers get political activists presented misleadingly as random businessmen.
Take incompetence, mix it with laziness, and a little nudge from their corporate task-masters, and it’s no wonder that I find that the best sources for news about America are foreign.
This Is The World’s Violin, and It’s Playing Just For You
Yes, the rat F%$# made this Ad
Republican political adman Fred Davis, the man who created Carly Fiorina’s infamous “Demon Sheep” ad, is sad because he’s caught flak for the fact that he’s a contemptible human being:
He’s not a witch.
Nor, Fred Davis wants the world to know, is he a racist.
Humbled, humiliated, saddened and chagrined, the Republican ad maker recently sagged into a chair in a noisy Las Vegas restaurant and for more than an hour talked about May 17, a date that will forever be ringed in red as one of personal infamy.
That day the New York Times published on its front page details of a proposed Davis-run campaign against President Obama, focusing on the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the president’s former pastor, “in a big, attention-arresting way.”
The intent, a do-over of sorts, was to “inflame … questions” about Obama’s character and competence. A 54-page outline, leaked to the newspaper by someone apprehensive of the plan, was very much like Davis himself: jokey, irreverent and a bit out there.
Obama was described, and demeaned, as a “metrosexual black Abraham Lincoln.” Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee for whom Davis worked, was derided as “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused” and failed to exploit the target-rich opportunity presented by the venomous Wright.
………
Two of his commercials were among the most widely noticed of the 2010 campaign: the infamous “demon sheep” ad for California’s Carly Fiorina and his meet-the-candidate spot for Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, with its indelible opening, “I’m not a witch.” Both U.S. Senate hopefuls lost their elections, though Fiorina made it through a combative primary and, hey, Davis made you look, didn’t he?
………
But when it comes to the proposed super PAC campaign, Davis insisted, it was never his intention to use race as an incitement. “I am maybe the only person in America who didn’t see that as racist,” he said of juxtaposing the president with the fiery rants of his longtime pastor, who Obama disavowed in the heat of the 2008 primary. “I saw it as an interesting fact in a guy’s upbringing and the way he’s formed his opinions.”
No, you’re not a racist, and you’re not an asshole, because your previous oeuvre has been so uniformly positive and nice.
Listen while I say this slowly: If you did not see that as racist, it is because you are not only racist, but because you are a stupid racist.
Your presentation was too racist for a Republican billionaire, OK?
You f%$# with the bull, you get the horns.
Perhaps you want some cheese with your whine?
Quote of the Day
— Bill Maher
He is referring to the fact that 14-year old Caiden Cowger’s hate filled screed against gays:
When 14 year-old boys sound exactly like you [Rush Limbaugh] do and can produce radio shows and books and speeches that sound exactly like yours, maybe you should rethink the sh%$ that’s coming out of your mouth.
Video:
H/t Cthulhu.*
*No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Stellar Parthenon BBS.†
†OK, I’ve never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans‡ would seem to mitigate against this.
‡Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.
Ewwww…
We have crossed a line that should not be crossed in society when a music video features Shia Lebeouf’s full frontal nudity.
Make it stop.
No, I did not watch the video. That way madness lies.
Damn
For years now, after their broadcasts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of the public-radio hit “Car Talk,” have been ranking the listener calls they receive on a scale from five to one, with five being the most entertaining.
It’s an archival system that will soon be put to use.After 35 years of weekly broadcasts and some 12,500 calls, the wisecracking brothers announced on Friday that they are retiring. “As of October, we’re not going to be recording any more new shows,” Tom, 74, wrote in a CarTalk.com column written with Ray, 63, who added, “We’ve decided that it’s time to stop and smell the cappuccino.”NPR, formerly called National Public Radio, will keep the show going by cobbling together the best of the old segments — the “fives,” so to speak. The producers think that most listeners won’t notice or care that the show is dated. Nonetheless, the announcement on Friday saddened fans of the pair, also known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, whose freewheeling chat show — ostensibly about cars — has been a weekend tradition for decades.
I’m bumming.
How to Write a Sincere Apology
I’m not sure that I’m particularly good at this sort of thing, but actor Jason Alexander is, and he shows himself to be a mensch in the process:
So, I would like to say – I now get it. And to the extent that these jokes made anyone feel even more isolated or misunderstood or just plain hurt – please know that was not my intention, at all or ever. I hope we will someday live in a society where we are so accepting of each other that we can all laugh at jokes like these and know that there is no malice or diminishment intended.
But we are not there yet.
So, I can only apologize and I do. In comedy, timing is everything. And when a group of people are still fighting so hard for understanding, acceptance, dignity and essential rights – the time for some kinds of laughs has not yet come. I hope my realization brings some comfort.
Go read the rest.
Seen on Facebook
The source is Progressive Libertarianism/
Why Newspapers are Dying
Because their owners are draining them dry. First, it was the Bancroft family and the Wall Street Journal, and now it’s the Ochs-Sulzberger family the management and the New York Times:
About $11 million of [former NY Times CEO] Robinson’s exit package was from her pension and retirement plan. Another roughly $7 million consisted of her yearly compensation and awards, and stock options she was entitled to after her years at the Times. But she also received a $4.5 million consulting contract, a kind of gratuitous bonus that didn’t look or smell right to anyone who was toiling on Eighth Avenue and worrying over pensions in danger of being frozen in ongoing labor negotiations. That payout has since become the centerpiece of rancorous disputes between the Newspaper Guild of New York, the newsroom’s union, and management. The intense discussions are still in progress as of this writing, hung up on a suggestion made by the Guild to redesign the Times’ pension system.
In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., when newspapers have flailed under new digital realities, the New York Times Company has shrunk dramatically. Once it was a wide-ranging media empire of newspapers and TV stations and websites, and even a baseball team, that was worth almost $7 billion; today it’s essentially two struggling newspapers and a much-reduced web company, all worth less than $1 billion (for comparison, consider that the Internet music company Pandora is valued at almost $2 billion). Despite the shrinkage, the company has retained essentially the same top-heavy management, which it has kept well compensated. Even though the paper froze executives’ pensions in 2009, as it is threatening to do with union employees, the company created two loopholes, called the Restoration Plan and the Supplemental Executive Savings Plan, which allowed certain high-earning executives to take money out anyway. As a result, Janet Robinson received an additional lump-sum payment of over half a million dollars upon exiting the Times.
And the family wants to re-institute their $20+ million dividends.
Newspapers have a problem, and it’s largely Craigslist eating their lunch on classified ads.
Cutting reporting staff to make a crappier product won’t fix this in the long term, though it might get those damn dividends flowing for the nest few years.
This is the Best Take on the Cover Yet
Pass the Popcorn…
Pass the Popcorn
It looks like former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky is writing a tell-all memoir about his experiences with the Bush and Obama administration:
From December 2008 until March 2011, Barofsky was the Special Inspector General charged with oversight of TARP, working to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of the $700 billion allocated for the bailouts. From the start he was in constant conflict with the officials at the Treasury Department in charge of the bailouts who were in thrall to the interests of the big banks and steadfastly failed to hold them accountable, even as they disregarded major job losses caused by the auto bailouts and failed to help struggling homeowners. Barofsky recounts how his reports of a wave of criminal mortgage fraud and other abuses being perpetrated against homeowners in connection with programs that the Treasury itself set up were ignored time and again.
Barofsky offers detailed accounts of the behind-the-scenes conflicts and his struggles with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Bush appointed “TARP Czar” Neel Kashkari and his successor, the Obama appointed Herb Allison, and others. His revelations show in stark detail just how captured by Wall Street our political system is; why the banks have not been held accountable; and how the failure to enact effective regulation has put the country in danger of an even bigger crisis in the future.
I can’t imagine that either Obama or Geithner are happy about this.