“What if it were… Malia and Sasha pinned down with morters coming in… wouldn’t we be asking different questions?”
Put Eric Bolling’s snuff-porn fapping aside, do these rhetorical questions have any relevancy at all? This is our free and unfettered media hard at work.
I thought at first this job posting at Twitter had to be a joke:
Media – Head of News and Journalism (SF or NY)
Full-Time — New York City, NY
Twitter is playing an integral role in the evolution of the news industry — both as a tool for reporters and newsrooms and as a way for consumers to find news in real-time. Twitter has already changed the way news breaks and provided journalists new ways to connect with their readers. We are looking for a seasoned leader to shape and drive the next growth phase of Twitter’s partnership with the news industry. We believe Twitter is a valuable complement to the great work already being done and want to find ways for Twitter to help ensure the industry’s success.
You will be responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks. You should have a strong vision for the broad potential of Twitter and news, while also being able to rigorously manage and scale the news team’s daily impact.
You will be also Twitter’s representative to the News industry. You will manage Twitter’s partnerships with newsrooms in the United States as well its relationships with journalists. You will be responsible for representing Twitter at industry events.
You must have deep experience leading teams in reporting, editing or managing journalists, as well as a strong record of executing strategic partnerships. (This role will report to Head of Media)
But if it is, then the Guardian UK fell for it.
The thing is, I think that The Guardian’s enthusiasm–while infectious in that reserved, British-style–might actually be well-placed. The updates that have come through Twitter on newsworthy events like the Boston Bombing were timely and uncannily accurate; crowd sourcing huge public events like that give you a very accurate picture. Twitter as a communications platform is unrivaled for real-time information.
And before you laugh at the thought of news in 140-character bites, consider how that limitation would force you as a reporter to not embellish who, what, where, when. Why and how? Well, maybe that becomes a link to a more in-depth piece. But by its very limited nature, Twitter should remove the editorial from news reporting.
The problem is, and will always be, about the credibility of the news sources. But that is the problem with the MSM, too. CNN has crashed and burned so many times with bad reporting that few people turn to them any longer. The challenge with Twitter for news junkies is going to be the same challenge with using Yelp: who do you believe?
I love that Congressman Lynch will not let the GOP forget that they cut funding for the Embassies.
But isn’t it remarkable that Chris Wallace thinks that fact is getting off-track?
This is sort of the perfect moment as the courtesan press’ stupid #nerdprom is starting in Washington DC to remind us about the dangers of a co-opted media.
Look, the Geico Gecko is cute, I get that. But he is a corporate mascot for a major insurance company. He’s not a newsmaker, he’s a brand. Real reporters–even if they do not appear on screen with the cute little CGI beastie–do not interview marketing mascots. It is just not done.
That is called advertising. NBC just had one of their reporters on a news show interview a corporate brand, and so the thin line between editorial, news, infotainment, and yes, marketing just got even more blurry. This is a huge error in judgement for NBC.
As for Chelsea, she’s young, but she should know better. I could write the whole thing off as more grasping grifting from the Clintons, but I think this probably came down from above and she didn’t know better than to say no.
What’s really sad is that NBC News would not allow Chelsea Clinton to appear in a video advocating for marriage equality, but hell yeah, talk to one of our Sponsors’ brand mascots gets a green light.
(HuffPo via Scissorhead Mike Flugennock)
Oh, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
Last night was such a s***-show for the MSM, and unbelievably the best news reporting on the dramatic attacks in Boston was coming from the merging of old technology–Police Scanners–and social media on Twitter.
The Tweets from on-the-ground people in Boston, Watertown, Cambridge were timely and highly accurate. There was a journalism professor and a bunch of his students and/or colleagues who happened to be in the area and they set up a makeshift newsroom in someone’s apartment, and out-performed CNN (hard to believe, I know) just by literally looking at what was going on outside on their street, and following the scanners. They would decrypt some of the more arcane police codes and report what the police were saying to each other.
(Note that Police Scanners do not transmit in real time and also note that they do not give locations. There is no tactical information in scanners that criminals could discern to their advantage, or at least that is my understanding.)
The Bostonians were reporting facts for several hours before someone got Jake Tapper in front of a camera. It was absolutely amazing to watch my Twitter Timeline roll past with nugget after nugget of news (interspersed of course with all the robots and timed marketing tweets)
Anyway, I think last night citizen journalists were media heroes, and Twitter shined bright. It was completely unexpected and pretty marvelous to watch.
I’m so tired of listening to the media tell me breathlessly about arrests for the bombing in Boston. I urge you to bookmark the FBI website, as they are the ultimate authority on when something newsworthy happens.
Oh, whatever you do: turn off CNN. Historically, they have been wrong on everything. They broadcast rumour and wheel out poor, old, confused, dimwitted Wolf Blitzer to speculate. Just turn it off.
Politico’s Dylan Byers wants to know what is taking the Boston Bombing investigation sooooo long:
It’s been more than 24 hours since the explosions in Boston. But while new details emerge by the hour, the question on so many people’s minds remains unanswered: Who did it?
For many journalists I’ve spoken with today, this ignorance is tortuous. The identification of the attacker(s) and the reasons for the attack will likely have enormous political (and potentially geoplitical [sic]) ramifications, which will vary greatly depending on whether the attacker(s) is domestic or foreign, acting alone or as part of an organization. We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.
Yes, sonny-boy, it is all about you and winning the morning. And besides, I thought Politico’s stock-in-trade was having national conversations about something, and having no idea what it is about.
Jeebus, some people!
For the love of all things journalistic, was does this hottentot have a column and so many worthy bloggers do not?
“Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortion doctor, is on trial for a lurid series of lurid crimes at his clinic.”
“…You’d think that a lurid crime touching an issue of major national importance would be covered everywhere.”
Really? Lurid was her Word-of-the-Day Calendar today?
As always, Thers has the definitive reaction. God loves Whiskey Fire most. Go read his post, it is definitive McArdle snark.
…on the Sunday Talkies, I always get the impression that she just woke up from a three-day Mai Tai binge and just starts rambling to the pink elephant:
Now, when it is so obvious that she is contradicting herself within minutes that freakin’ Chuck Todd notices it, how can it be that she will have a dinner invite with all the other pontificating poltroons before the week is out?
It just boggles the mind.
(Also/too: what the hell is up with her hair?)
Berlusconi can order new trials now?
(H/T: The Charm School Dropout)
…of why we are calling it Tiger Beat on the Potamac (Thanks, Charlie!):
“Last year’s It Boy [Paul Ryan] of the graying Republican Party has been bigfooted by the GOP’s new twin heartthrobs, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky.”
(TBOTP)
On the one hand, less Jennifer Rubin is a good thing.
On the other hand, less Jason Wilson is a bad thing.
But the proverbial tree falling in the woods: will anyone notice the absence of The World’s Worst Writer® Richard Cohen?
(WaPo)
Pictures of these panelists should be on the walls of the local post offices around the country, but to my mind This Week With a Greek Dwarf wins the prize:
- NBC’s “Meet the Press”:
- Cardinal Francis George
- Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
- Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)
- roundtable with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, former Gov. Frank Keating (R-OK), author and former Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D-MD) and Republican strategist Ana Navarro
- ABC’s “This Week”:
- Speaker Boehner
- roundtable with ABC News’ George Will, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), NPR’s Audie Cornish, ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina
- foreign policy roundtable with Will, former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Bush administration National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright (USMC, Ret.)
- Sunday spotlight” segment with ABC News’ Bob Woodruff
- CBS’s “Face the Nation”:
- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
- Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
- RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
- foreign policy roundtable with Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, AEI’s Danielle Pletka, The Atlantic’s David Rohde and The New York Times’ David Sanger
This is your free and unfettered press, fellow citizens.
They ran it multiple times, and apologized for it. Sincerely, no doubt.
Luke Russert is exhibit A for the reason nepotism needs to be routed out in all of its forms; some J-school graduate was deprived of his rightful career for Timmeh’s foof son to opine on the networks. L’il Luke might also be the best proof yet that there is no guarantee that Evolution progresses.
Aw, man, frozen teevee dinner heir and bow-tie aficionado Tucker Carlson cannot get a break. There he was trying to get his first Breitbartian notch on his belt at his vanity publishing project The Daily Caller and he thought he scooped the world with the Senator Menendez-hooker story, and now the hooker on his tape recording has recanted her story.
It’s not like in the old days when sex tourism could bring down the powerful and mighty, eh Rushbo?
–NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA); RGA Chairman Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA); roundtable with former Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN), Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, NPR’s Steve Inskeep, CNBC host Maria Bartiromo and CNBC’s Jim Cramer
And this is why NBC renewed Dancin’ Dave’s contract. Cherish our free and unfettered press, people.
NEW YORK (AP) — David Gregory has re-upped as host of “Meet the Press.”
NBC News shared no details, but described the new deal as “a long-term commitment.”
“What a great vote of confidence from NBC,” a pleased-looking Gregory said Thursday. He said his first four years in the moderator’s chair have passed quickly.
“In some ways, it feels like we’re just getting started,” he said. [Ed. Sweet Jeebus!]
But was Grandpa Walnuts’ contract renewed, too?
…but the White House Correspondents Association (the MSM press) is in a royal snit that they were not allowed to tag along with Barack Obama on his recent golf weekend:
“Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend,” said Fox News correspondent Ed Henry, the organization’s president. “There is a very simple but important principle we will continue to fight for today and in the days ahead: transparency.”
Transparency. Yeah. Because no doubt, The Kenyan was talking about Benghazi (“BENGHAZI!!!”) with Tiger Woods.
(BuzzFeed)
Regular readers know that our sometimes mantra, “Both Sides Don’t” is generally ignored; the pontificating poltroons in our courtesan press continue to belch up false equivalences to try to appear non-biased.
Our pal Driftglass has long said that the punditry lie of Both Sides Do It is the essential lie that lets all the other pundit lies exist, and we agree. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, any criticism of the Right immediately triggers a reflexive, “yes, but the Democrats…” and the topic shifts. The thing is that they are never equivalents and usually not even related. It’s like trying to pay your bar tab by handing over your dry-cleaning ticket. But I digress.
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks us, “Has the mainstream media finally had enough?,” and he postulates that maybe they have, reluctantly and bitterly started to reach the conclusion that the GOP is both rudderless and off the rails:
“It seems to me that something has happened over the past three months: the nonpartisan media has finally started to internalize the idea that the modern Republican Party has gone off the rails. Their leaders can’t control their backbenchers. They throw pointless temper tantrums about everything President Obama proposes. They have no serious ideas of their own aside from wanting to keep taxes low on the rich. They’re serially obsessed with a few hobby horses — Fast & Furious! Obamacare! Benghazi! — that no one else cares about. Their fundraising is controlled by scam artists. They’re rudderless and consumed with infighting. They’re demographically doomed.”
OK, that is sort of the conventional wisdom of Lefty Blogostan, what else have you got?
Recently, though, my sense is that this has shifted a bit. The framing of even straight new reports feels just a little bit jaded, as if veteran reporters just can’t bring themselves to pretend one more time that climate change is a hoax, Benghazi is a scandal, and federal spending is spiraling out of control. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the same old shrieking over the same old issues is really newsworthy.
Question: Am I just imagining this? Or has there really been a small but noticeable shift in the tone of recent reporting?
It’s a worthy question: are Drum’s Spidey-senses tingling?
My sense is that the MSM print media is just sort of sticking its metaphorical toe in the water of actually reporting, but I suspect that it won’t last. The electronic media (Dancing with the Gregory, This Week with a Greek Dwarf, etc.) have not even tried to break the surface of Villager foolishness.
I mean, just look at the top 3 Sunday Talkies line-up:
-NBC’s “Meet the Press”: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) and retired Space Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly; roundtable with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
–ABC’s “This Week”: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI); White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; roundtable with ABC News’ George Will, Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-TX), former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, former Romney 2012 campaign senior strategist Stuart Stevens; “Sunday Spotlight” segment with author and Johns Hopkins Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery Dr. Ben Carson (“America the Beautiful”)
–CBS’s “Face the Nation”: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; former Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) and Mayor Cory Booker (D-Newark); Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl; defense and foreign policy roundtable with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Foreign Policy Magazine’s Tom Ricks and CBS News’ Margaret Brennan; political roundtable with Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter and CBS News’ John Dickerson
It’s not encouraging that so many pundits who have been proven demonstrably wrong continue to bloviate their conventional (incorrect) wisdom, week after week, month after month, year after year. There is no consequence for these people to be wrong on issue after issue. Next week, Walnuts will be on another Sunday Talkie.
In related news, a comet exploded over Russia indicating the end of the dinosaur era. Let’s hope Grandpa Walnuts gets the message.
The WaPo, which is the more-or-less official paper on the politics of the US, has a post up from Chris Cillizza that cites unattributed sources to explain to us that there is nothing that can be done about the feral children in the nation’s capitol voting to not allow a thumbs-up or down on the nomination of a fellow Republican for the Cabinet position of the Secretary of Defense.
But the best part? The WaPo claims that no one outside of the beltway knows who Hagel is, nor cares, and because no one knows who he is (or cares) that this is seen as safe intransigence for the GOP to have a tantrum.
So… isn’t that actually an indictment that the courtesan press has not done its job, you know, informing us rubes and turnip farmers in the hinterlands what our public servants have done? It’s pretty funny when someone like Chris Cilliza tells you that he didn’t do his own job. I’d save this column for his annual review.
(WaPo)
While it IS funny that the Washington Post fell for a parody site that claimed that Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera America news network, it is also kinda telling that even legitimate news organizations would believe that Mooselini would do anything to reclaim her fame and fortune. She has become a national punchline and a parody of herself.
After all, a grifter has to grift, the WaPo seems to understand this now.
“I just figured out how the Individual Mandate in Obamacare works.”
Does this mean that Smith finally passed his Statistics 101 class at Yale?
(BuzzFeed)
Tiger Beat on the Potomac (Thanks Charlie!) has yet another unsourced, breathless and gossipy article on how the GOP is rebranding itself via Fox:
Republicans and Fox News are moving to purge the controversial political creatures they created.
Both were damaged badly in 2012 by loud, partisan voices that stoked the base — but that scared the hell out of many voters. Now, the GOP, with its dismal image, and Fox News, with its depressed ratings in January, are scrambling to dim those voices. To wit:
- Fox ousted contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris, two of the most obnoxiously partisan figures on the network’s air.
- Karl Rove, himself sidelined by Fox after the election, has helped start a new super PAC, the Conservative Victory Fund, designed to keep controversial conservatives like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from winning Senate primaries.
- Senate GOP leaders created what amounts to a buddy system with their caucus’s most popular tea party members, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, to get their help in taming anti-establishment conservatives.
- Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been running around the country warning anyone who will listen that Republicans must quit being the “stupid party” that nominates nutty candidates.
But as in every Politico (who are fluffers for the gelatinous Roger Ailes, let us not forget), there is always the Tell:
One high-profile Republican strategist, who refused to be named in order to avoid inflaming the very segments of the party he wants to silence, said there is a deliberate effort by party leaders to “marginalize the cranks, haters and bigots — there’s a lot of underbrush that has to be cleaned out.”
…which of course is the patented way in which to marginalize cranks: refuse to have your name attached to your criticism. Boy, that’ll learn ‘em up good!
We’ve been saying this for a long time, since before the 2012 Goat Rodeo in fact: it’s not the presentation, it’s the policies, it is Republicanism itself that is the problem. Wingnuttia seems to think if they could just find the Magic Dog Whistle, they could get the rest of the country to back them. You can redesign the cereal box, but if what you are selling is Rat Poison, no one is going to buy it.
Anyway, it is an amazing fantasy of an article from Tiger Beat, full of bluster and non-attributed sources, signifying absolutely nothing. But read it and be amazed at how it sucks up to Ailes while trying to sound indie. My 7th grade journalism teacher is probably having a good laugh over it because even her charges could do better than this.
The Fox News spinning spin, and then criticizing spin makes me dizzy.
And now this news of Alaska’s part-time Governor and full-time grifter: The Price of Palin: $15 per Word Spoken During FOX Contract
From CNN, writing on Martin Luther King:
As the nation celebrates King’s national holiday Monday, a new battle has erupted over his legacy. Some conservatives are saying it’s time for them to reclaim the legacy of King, whose message of self-help, patriotism and a colorblind America, they say, was “fundamentally conservative.”
But those who marched with King and studied his work say that notion is absurd. The political class that once opposed King, they argue, is now trying to distort his message.
Pretty hard hitting stuff there, fellas. If you have no premise for your story, just make one up. I think they teach this in Punditry 101.
(ABC News)
The WSJ reports that no one in DC is dressed fashionably for the Inaugural Balls.
I’m sure that Wingnuttia knows what to wear to a formal lynching.
FAA Grounds All 787 Planes In The U.S. To Seek A Fix For Battery Issue
…and all this time I thought we had at least 788 planes.
(Hat tip: NPR via Scissorhead Skinny-D)
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