Ten goddamn minutes. Perhaps more; I’m not sure as I picked up in what sounded like the middle of the story. Blah, blah, ’bottom of the hour, human interest stories are important too.’ If they can devote over ten minutes of their oh so precious morning airtime to a fictional dog from a teevee show in the 50s they can find a 30 second slot for Edwards.

After the dog story, I heard that Hillary is trailing Obama in NH, but is wearing bunny slippers to counter act that. And that while there are only those two people running in the Democratic primaries, Huckabee is a distanct third despite his strong Iowa showing.

Fuck I hate our press  Read more 

WaPo:

The White House reached out to National Public Radio over the weekend, offering analyst Juan Williams a presidential interview to mark yesterday’s 50th anniversary of school desegregation in Little Rock.

Ellen Weiss, NPR’s vice president for news, said she “felt strongly” that “the White House shouldn’t be selecting the person.” She said NPR told Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, that “we’re grateful for the opportunity to talk to the president but we wanted to determine who did the interview.” When the White House said the offer could not be transferred to one of NPR’s program hosts, Weiss took a pass.

Yeah, if Bush wants to get tea-bagged by some cable weasel-style propaganda organ whose house Negro will give him the deference He feels He deserves, let Him go on FOX:  Read more 

Stuck in the car this morning without a disc, I was forced to endure a few minutes of NPR. They informed me that al-Sadr is “rethinking his strategy” as a result of the success of the surge.

Gotta say, it’s pretty fucking impressive that our fine media experts have such incredible powers of mindreading. I mean, the reporter who announced this never said anything about why she has this impression. No one was sourced, and I’m not entiredly sure she actually left the Green Zone to determine this. No opposing viewpoints were presented, no Iraqis asked to assess the accuracy of the statement. She didn’t say if she was fluent in Arabic or had reviewed intelligence assessments supporting her claim. Nope, none of that silly stuff that we don’t need to hear anyway. Just 15 minutes of talking time for a former Reagan official, who was never challenged or even really engaged during his diatribe, describing why we should consider the surge a great victory which will cinch peace and freedom for all Iraq forever, followed by the reporter’s contention that the surge is so strong, even al-Sadr is quaking in his boots.

Reporting: more about mindreading than we all thought!  Read more 

Nina Totenberg “covers” Pony Blow’s White House press conference today without ever once letting the phrase “obstruction of justice” pass her practiced lips.  Read more 

Jackie Whatsherface from NPR might as well have ripped her coverage from the AP wire, which is also teh suck:

With one word — “unlawful” — the only two war-crimes trials against Guantanamo detainees fell apart in a single day, marking a stunning setback to Washington’s attempts to try dozens of detainees in military court.

Now, to be fair to AP, Jackie did crank the vapidity knobs up to 11 by revising AP’s copy to read “Just one word.”

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?  Read more 

2 thoughts -

1) April consumer credit is way up, the highest since Nov, and a total surprise to everyone who should know. Nov is right before Christmas, so that is naturally a high spot. What happens in April?  Read more 

The Gonzales coverage on Morning Edition was just appalling. First, they lead with a quote from Spector. No Democrats quoted at all. That’s been a continuing pattern—you’d think that Leahy wasn’t the committee chair and that the Republicans, led by Spector, were the ones bringing Gonzales to heel.

Worse, the Republicans, as usual, are using the incompetence dodge for the framing, when the framing ought to be perjury. But you’ll never hear a peep from them about that, and NPR doesn’t mention

Then, Juan Cole Williams covers the “voter fraud” angle, note the quotes, and that’s even worse:  Read more 

This morning on Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr (sigh) framed the issue of the fired U.S. attorneys using the “Justice Department in disarray” trope. Unfortunately, the real issue, as Josh puts it, is that the administration has been using the criminal justice system to affect election outcomes. Schorr then characterized Monica Goodling taking the Fifth as “weird,” which it is, but that was all he had to say. Can’t somebody just say that the problem isn’t how the firings got explained, it’s that everybody at Justice is acting like they know that crimes have been committed? And that maybe our famously free and extremely well-paid press should be getting to the bottom of the story, instead of letting DFH bloggers like Josh Marshall (upon whom be peace) drive the story?

Then Daniel Zwerlding butchers the story of how McCain butchered his MySpace site.  Read more 

That NPR isn’t perceived as a bastion of massive and self-satisfied suckitude is a sad commentary on the state of the rest of our famously free press.

Take the coverage of the “stay the course” flap—please. I was listening to Morning Edition just now, and started yelling at the radio. Again.

Never mind the amazing but true fact that the coverage is all about the semantics; all about the words used about Iraq, not about the war itself, or even about whether the words make any kind of sense: Being so very, very meta is what makes the SCLM so very, very post-modern.

NPR just misses the “stay the course” story entirely!  Read more