If Hillary is going to be for real at all, she will have to speak from the philosohical pov she and Bill both know. If not, she is now very much out of her element, b/c she very much had to follow her fellow contestants.

Also in this sense, we see Obama begin to answer the question of substance. Being politically media-savvy with gesture is very near the root of popular assessment of substance. With this gesture, Obama has demonstrated a clear political intent, moving to the left of Hillary (who would simply never have been the second to move, nor the first), and noticably towards Edwards.

Oo la-la.


The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos. -Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

IMO, there remain two elements of the modern news business that need sunlight and pressure:

First, and more concretely, is the process by which various news orgs find and recruit the "experts" or "representatives" for their shouting heads matches. Often the terms of debate on a given issue are defined by who exactly is selected to do the debating. Much mischief and confusion has come from repeatedly pitting a centrist/moderates against a hardline ideologue and pretending that the result is a "balanced debate".

I'm certain that the news orgs themselves will scream and cry when and if we try to shine a light on their decision-making, but the process by which the "experts" are booked deserves much more attention.

Second, and sadly harder to follow through on, is an examination of what media critic Jay Rosen calls "audience lore". That is, the (often unspoken) assumptions that media management types make about who their audience is and what they want. For example, its evidently taken as gospel among TV newsroom managers that "what people want" is taboid stuff, and that substantive discussion is a sure path to low ratings.

Similarly, I think "audience lore" plays a large part in deciding what opinions are and are not "acceptable". One need only turn on the TV in passing to see that there is literally nothing that someone like Malkin can say that will cause her to be disinvited, while left-leaning bomb-throwers are notable only for their total absence.

Do you agree that these areas need attention, and if so, do you have any suggestions about how to ratchet up the pressure?


As long as the prerequisite for that shining Paradise is ignorance, bigotry, and hate... I say the Hell with it. --Inherit the Wind

Come on, we have a vice president who told a colleague to  "F off," and supporters cheered.  Our own President mocked a woman about to be put to death, and supporters cheered.  We've all seen the video of him - the leader of the most influential country in the world - flipping off onlookers like a punk.  And supporters cheer.  They've been given permission to act out their racism and sexism and homophobia again.  Newt is back out there with his "language of the ghetto" schtick, and Pat Buchanan is on MSNBC every day whining about brown people.

But you are correct.  There is a sense that the tide is turning.  Even the most diehard of the braindead sheeple must cringe a bit when Imus' sidekick calls Hillary Clinton a bitch. The comments about the Rutgers women are not isolated, do not stand alone.  They are part of a pattern of ugliness that has gripped our national dialogue for too long.  These homophobic, racist and sexist comments have been an ongoing feature of the Imus show, as has been pointed out repeatedly.  So why now?  Why the outrage now?  I think because people are weary of it all, the same way they are weary of GWB and everything he stands for. It's not just that Imus crossed a line.  The line has been crossed over and over.  Shock jocks and reality shows and lies and distortions and senators who use words like "macaca" because they've been able to get away with it.  It's all part of the pattern this administration has created to divide us and divert us. And finally, people have had enough, in the same way they've had enough of W.

Instead, I was listening to Ed Schultz this a.m. and p.m. on WXXM-FM in Mad City.  Frankly, it was getting beyond the point until one really irate black music producer got on the air near the end and really told it.  Particularly, that whites have no interest in what black people do and say among themselves until whatever it is they say and do threatens them in some way.

Earlier, some d*ckheads got on the horn and told Schultz that blacks should stop calling each other hoes, the n-word and even stop having their own magazines and entertainment shows before they decide to attack whites for using racial slurs.  They also alleged that the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson weren't doing enough to stop the racial talk themselves, implying that their 'inaction' was close to condoning such talk and behavior.

Again, this gets back to the caller's original premise.  That whites pay no attention to what blacks do until...  Sharpton and Jackson have been doing their level best.  Everyone has.  Just because these whites couldn't or didn't see it (or it wasn't publicized in the white media), doesn't mean that such pressure, cajolings, appeals, dialogues and roundtables were not and are not occurring between the generations.  We've always seen it as a in-house struggle, something that few whites have the consciousness to comprehend--namely certain media elites and pundits who like to parse things for consumption.

Let me tell you, the idiocy today was almost too much for me to stomach.

But what brother man truly insisted was that it was all about power, especially the power of the media conglomerates to make money off such talk whether in punditry or in hip-hop music.  Too bad he didn't have enough time to really open some eyes and ears.

And perhaps, even his placement as the last caller was deliberate.  NO one seems to want to analyze what that power does, which to me is nothing less than another arm of the white supremacist power structure.  Schultz seemed sympathetic, but he needs a few go-rounds before he really gets a grip on what this means other than the usual free speech bullsh*t.

I've got another week at this place, and then I can get back online...but by that time I do, it will have been  blown over for the next public controversy.

I am damn sick and tired of the hate.  And I am sick and tired of faux liberal idiots like Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on Air America Morning who think that this episode is nothing and love to snipe at Sharpton for doing his job.

An untypical Negro

http://thisblksistaspage.wordpress.com

Shortly before Christmas last year, syndicated radio star and MSNBC host Don Imus called the book publishers Simon & Schuster "thieving Jews" (Imus in the Morning, 12/15/04), returning to the subject later in the program to offer a mock apology, saying that the phrase he used was "redundant."

Anti-Semitism is nothing new on Imus' show, which is notorious for its ethnic and sexual slurs. In 1998, for instance, Imus called Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz "that boner-nosed . . . beanie-wearing little Jew boy" (Newsday, 10/19/98).

When Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman complained about Imus' Simon & Schuster slur, describing it in a letter (12/20/04) as "an age-old anti-Semitic canard that still, unfortunately, has great currency today," Imus was defiant. "I wrote a two-word response across the face of [the letter]," Imus told listeners (1/4/05), "and sent it back to them." Besides a handful of mentions in tabloid newspapers (New York Post, 1/5/05; Boston Herald, 1/7/05) and a short UPI report (1/5/05), the Imus affair received next to no coverage.

I watch CNN these days when I go to the gym, and I can't stand it.

The truly wealthy have pitted us against each other so that we don't happen to notice that they are stealing all the money for themselves.  When the impact of global warming and the end of the oil economy hit, they will survive, we will not.  

calvinthecat

As far as the decline of Faux viewers this is a good thing but I am going to stop when the left tells me how I should think, feel, say when it comes to just about anything.  I'm really not a bad person and don't go out of my way to hurt other people.

As to those questions everywhere and everyone wants to ask me about my race.  For the rest of my life I'm going to refuse to answer.  Hey if we are all "equal" then why does it HAVE to go into everyones NSA/CIA F**ing computer dataF**ing base.

Others have documented the effect...FOX News watchers are the worst informed people in the country. They're worse informed than people that don't watch news programming at all.

Could you at least provide some kind of source or link when you spout accusations as harsh as this one?! It doesn't lend much credence to your post. Makes you look like an amateur, really.

They're [FOX viewers] worse informed than people that don't watch news programming at all.

Now who's in the game of misleading people? You're trying to imply that people who don't get any news are more informed than FOX viewers. But the paper you are talking about (http://65.109.167.118/pipa/pdf/oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf)  doesn't say anything about that. It says that people who get their news from print sources know more than people who watch FOX News. So technically, you are right: people who don't watch news programming at all are more informed than FOX viewers. But that report also says people who don't watch news programming are more informed than people who do, with the exception of PBS/NPR viewers.