This week Joe Klein wrote a post that did not attempt to hide his disdain for his critics. While he showed a willingness to outline his reporting process and address concerns raised in his comments, he did so in an extremely defensive, thin-skinned and condescending tone. He also made the following memorably clueless assertion: “Tell me where I’ve been misled by my sources.” His commenters quickly pointed out his factually challenged reporting on the FISA debate.  Read more 

I posted on it last night.

Today, both Susie Madrak and Digby join the fun.

We’re ahead of the curve, folks!

Examination at The Root of the perceptions and personas of Oprah and Obama, and how unrealistic stereotypes and expectations—and meeting them and molding yourself to fit them—provide very fragile and shaky foundations for trust.  Read more 

Feministe has the new cover of TNR. Unbelievable.

No, I take it back. Perfectly believable. Just infuriating.

You can contact TNR’s editors at letters@tnr.com.

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe—-what you or I might call "reality"—-but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one’s hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!"   Read more 

Marc Rudov, sexist wanker. Not that this is news.

followed by some push back:

CLICK the pic to the left to find yourself magically transported to a page hosting my latest MTV Street Team ’08 video, which was shot in Eugene, Oregon at a Martin Luther King Jr rally and march on January 21, 2008.

All shooting, editing, and sleeplessness by Nezua.  Read more 

(MSNBC) Facebook chooses Huckabee, so far

Giuliani 5%

Thompson 4%

Huckabee 22%

McCain 15%

Romney 11%

Paul 43%

About 5,500 responded.



Note: The candidate ordering isn’t alphabetical and seeing how Paul is at the bottom it is almost in order of corporate preference.

Just for reference, they don’t have a post about Dems polling only “Most Presidential”, which I’m not sure what that means. Facebook: Obama most presidential

Let’s have a Free for all post. Jeralyn is ticked off, because a judge punishing a reporter who broke the law wants her to do a public interest story as penance. Is this wrong? A bad idea? Why, or why not? Lambert reminds us that B and C (blog) listers aren’t really “journalists.” Is that a good thing, in light of this case? Meanwhile, journalism is becoming more and more akin to state sanctioned observation and data mining. Again- we want to protect these people?  Read more 

I’ve been reading Paul Starr’s “Freedom’s Power”, and while I have a ways to go yet, one thing has already struck me forcibly - the rise of the authoritarian right was aided by media consolidation.  Read more 

JON MAKES US LAUGH as always, and yet there is a tone conveyed in these jokes that imply that there is too much attention on this “offhanded remark uttered by an elderly man on the radio,” as Jon calls it. That Imus is not the entirety or end-all be-all of RACISM, and yet we all paying sooooo much attention to his “gaffe.”

This minimizing by the non-targeted of the claims of the targeted reminds me of certain complaints of hidden speech rules that I am sometimes told are so hard (and unnecessary) for the White to navigate.  Read more 

The Grey One has some interesting things to say about Imus, and what Imus represents, and I’ve got a slightly different take on it.  Read more 

The depressing future of “news.”

Which brings me back to sex with horses. The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year’s most read article.

What’s more, four more of the year’s 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don’t publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.

So much so, a case can be made that the articles on horse sex are the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history.  Read more 

Lindsey proves her worth, once again, if only there were a Democrat with connections to Money who would listen. Here’s the important part:

I tried to explain this as delicately and clearly as I could: A-list polemicists are popular because they say things you don’t hear on television. The blogosphere isn’t just “The Situation Room” with swear words, it’s a space for writers to explore ideas that are outside the bounds of mainstream discourse.

If you hire these larger-than-life personalities to blog for John Edwards, they’ll have to stop espousing many of the radical policy positions and unconventional values that made them popular in the first place.  Read more 

One more and I’m out. Really. His Lordship the Grey One asks:

I’m not really quite sure who qualifies as “people who run campaigns,” but over the past few years I’ve had several people tell me that it’s part of the accepted rulebook that low level congressional and campaign staffers aren’t subject to the same kind of scrutiny - either by journalists or political operatives - that high level people and actual politicians are. There is a recognition, or was, that barring egregious criminal conduct or similar young people in relatively unimportant positions aren’t really “newsmakers” and therefore can’t really make news. Obviously blogging and the internet generally has made a mess of what were traditionally understood public and private spaces, but I’m still not sure why anyone working on a campaign is subject to the type of scrutiny which they were previously largely immune from.

Oh yes you do.  Read more 

Krist on a kracker. Not that this will surprise you, gentle reader. But still, it’s a little shocking to see it out there for all to behold. Turn off your TVs, cancel your subscriptions to cable and print propaganda organs. How many times do I have to ask you? You really feel good that your hard earned slave wages that are taxed to drop bombs on innocent brown people living atop of oil wages go to pay for this man’s salary and antidemocratic projects? Jeebus I’m glad I can’t say I’m doing that.

Shorter Chris: “What have you done for me lately?”

Chris is right. They can’t control us, and we can’t “prove” that we bring them a specific, monetarily valuable benefit. OTOH, $300 million isn’t a drop in the bucket, and without that there wouldn’t be the Congress there is today. I think that’s a lowball number as well- how can one quantify all the activism, awareness and media exposure blogs brought to fore during the last three election cycles? That’s worth hundreds of millions to be sure.

There is only one answer to the “Maria Leavy” problem.

Unioninze.

When bloggers get serious about this, and give each other and their communities what they deserve for their efforts, we won’t have to, as Chris puts it, “ironically” pay the consulting class that is the very embodiment of the problem we’re trying to fix. Democratic leaders will always listen to money first, followed closely by media. We say we are the “new” media, it’s time to act like it. Particularly because we have the potential to be the money and the media.  Read more 

You will enjoy this. A lot. It occurs to me, serious and unfunny person that I am, that it makes a lot of sense for our side, and those Powers That Be in the Party in particular, reach out to media professionals. This is a slick, catchy, easy to remember, low cost, funny way of making a point. Surely only the most dour and constipated with religion and “moral values” would fail to laugh. You can read more about the people who made it here.

Hat tip to reader Peggy Ann. Luv ya, kitten!

Part the First. Xan notes:

Hamilton and Baker are backed by a 40-person media team operating out of a public relations firm and a hot-selling paperback edition of their report.

Their dawn-to-dark parade of interviews, in which they always appear as a pair to underscore their bipartisanship, will culminate with a run of the Sunday morning talk shows.

“We’ve been spinning like a top,” Baker said Thursday, ushered into a paneled conference room with 14 news reporters at Edelman, a Chicago-based public relations firm that has detailed 40 members of its 200-person Washington office to manage the media blitz.

Question: How’s that working out, media team? Can you make people not see the egg on your face, as Bush essentially has told you and every one of your members in the chatter rooms, “I don’t give a shit?”  Read more 

Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital and the Mays family score a major media coup . Now that hedge funds are monitoring the blogosphere for key memes against which to trade it only makes sense that the private equity firms should lend a hand by financing the new new consolidation of media. Since behavioral finance is the now dominant paradigm, and sentiment analysis now the rage, why not maximize by creating a perfect black box? You.  Read more 

Given the nature of mass media in the USA is democracy possible in a Nash Equilibrium ?

In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that citizens are mobilized by or learn from presidential advertisements, but strong evidence that they are persuaded by them. This research supports the contention that political communication is best conceived of as propaganda rather than a vehicle to enhance democratic accountability. We find that campaign advertisements are able to persuade voters to support one candidate over another.  Read more 

Something Lambert said about fundamentals got me thinking.
You ever been in one of those fourth and go with six yards between you and glory?Just enough to keep the blitz honest.
You run through your check list – The struggle ahead is steep and stark.  Read more 

So Universal is now herding the sheep toward the gate. In a move that has proved questionable, Universal has signed a deal with YouTube for distribution of content while simultaneously launching an attack against its competitors – oligarchs of the world unite!  Read more 

I was just saying, and stories like this only prove my point further. Wake up, Dems. Make media reform a priority, or forever fight an uphill battle with no armor or weapons.

 Read more