Category Archives: Media

Everything about the mainstream media.

The Club

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Jon Stewart – the former TV host, not the former Twin Cities blogger – has a few words for the media – and they’re mighty close to the words I have for them, as luck would have it.

Stewart calls them narcissists.  I’ll stick with “whiners”:

Amanpour pushed back against Stewart’s suggestion, saying journalists react to Trump’s attacks this way because it’s “hard for us to be dispassionate when words from the White House are aggressive against us.”

“You’re not used to it,” Stewart replied, saying journalists should keep in mind the other struggling communities in U.S. before making the fight all about themselves.

“Think of the communities of color, think of Muslims, think of the black community. When journalists rise to this outrage of ‘How dare you say that about us,’ think of the lives that they’ve been leading under this and what they’ve been put under,” he said.

The problem with the media in recent years is their mission has morphed to “Afflicting those who are comfortable afflicting the media, and comforting those who comfort the media’s afflictors”.

That Moment When…

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….you see it in black and white:  Big Left’s “elites” really, really don’t understand the Constitution, federalism, checks and balances…representative republican government.

There are times the idea of complete national divorce – preferably peaceful – sounds almost dreamy.

Layers And Layers Of Gatekeepers

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NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sen. Grassley’s referral of Julie Swetnick and her “teenage rape gang” story to the FBI:

 

Mr. Todd: Isn’t it your job to figure that out?

Perhaps – radical thought, here – before you run the story?

Poll-Proof

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Jim Geraghty writes in NRO about how the blue Tsunami might in fact be a leaky diaper.

The whole piece is worth a read – but this bit in particular caught my attention, vis-a-vis polling and dire-sounding media coverage:

Folks on the right get used to hearing that they’re going to lose, how the Democrats have all the advantages, and they develop the ability to just keep plugging away in a tough environment. GOP grassroots activists are used to bad news, critical coverage, and ominous poll results. They’ve seen their candidates give amazing debate performances and then watch the coverage declare the Democrat the big winner. They’re used to having their attack ads denounced as vicious and unfair while the Democratic candidate’s ads are merely “hard-hitting” or “tough.” They’re used to seeing unflattering photos of candidates on the front page, comments taken out of context, fact-checkers that get the facts wrong, headlines that leave the wrong impression, and glowing editorial-page endorsements of the opposition. They’re used to having their yard signs stolen.

And they get up every morning and knock on doors and make the calls and participate in get-out-the-vote efforts anyway.

Of course, this rings true for Minnesota Republicans; if you didn’t get used to ignoring Dave Schultz and mocking the Minnesota Poll, you’d never get out of bed…

It’s That Time Of Year Again

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It’s that time of election season when everyone who, for any reason or no reason at all decides not to vote Republican will get their Warhol – mandated 15 minutes of fame.

Is it a “gun owner” “resisting tthe NRA? Is it an evangelical congregation where a few members have broken with conservatism?

Or is it a republican “Leader” with impeccable moderate credentials of whom nobody has heard for 10 years, loudly and theatrically leaving the party?

Belly up to the media bar!

In the article, the “X Republican”, Randy Johnson, says he has retained his same conservative principles. So I did a little digging – and it turns out that with “Conservative principles”like Randy Johnson’s, why would anyone need the Minnesota DFL? One of his great “achievements”on the Hennepin county board was inflicting Target Field on the voters.

The only faster way to become a household name (for 15 minutes) is to be an exceptionally obscure “Republican” with an outlandish view on something. For 15 minutes, you will be more famous than Justin Bieber.

Glad we could settle that.

The Twin Cities Media Won’t Cover This…

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…I don’t suspect – but I will:

The governor’s race is inside “Statistical Noise” levels.   Ditto Housley and Smith.   (Klobuchar is shown nine up over Newberger, which is closer than other polls as well).

Last week, an NBC/Marist poll claimed Walz and Smith were pulling away – this being the same poll that showed Tim Pawlenty and Lori Swanson winning the gubernatorial primaries in landslides.   Was that a media/Democrat attempt to “bandwagon” Republicans into staying home?

Maybe, maybe not.

But don’t get bandwagoned anyway.

The Bandwagon

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NBC/Marist poll shows DFL Senate Candidates leading by biblical margins in the upcoming election.

The glum picture for the GOP comes as both parties point to the state’s four competitive House races as bellwether contests in the race for control of the lower chamber. The poll finds that 53 percent of likely voters prefer a Congress controlled by Democrats after the November midterm elections, while 41 percent prefer Republicans.

Unmentioned: this same showed Lori Swanson winning the DFL primary fairly easily, and Tim Pawlenty clobbering Jeff Johnson. They were off 28 points in that matchup.

But then the point of these October polls isn’t accuracy. It’s “bandwagoning“.

Believe Accusers (Of Republicans)

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Michael Moore’s ex-wife Suing the filmmaker for allegedly squirreling away profits from movies on which they collaborated:

Earlier this month Glynn filed a lawsuit against Moore in Manhattan Supreme Court claiming that he was stiffing her on profits from their joint movie projects.

Moore’s lawyer, Kenneth Warner, wrote in court papers filed Friday that Glynn sued in order to publicize information that would have remained sealed and confidential if their case had stayed in the Michigan court.

Of course, this is not The kind of “abuse”, much less “assault”, that’s been in the news lately.

But it does, perhaps (very, very perhaps), highlight another fact that the social justice pimps would just as soon not I have us talking about; a lot of what is reported as “abuse” – and what the heck, let’s call this “alleged financial abuse”– Is actually maneuvering in court.

That court might be a court of law, or a court of public opinion, but the tactic is the same.

Open Letter To The Entire US Senate GOP Caucus

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To:  Entire US Senate GOP Caucus
From:  Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re:  A Big Lie

Senators,

Confirm Brett Kavanaugh.  Now.

The allegations against him are of a piece with nearly every leftist narrative today – utter crap.  It’s transparent BS.  Like most lefty memes – “gun violence”, the “War on Women”, the $15 minimum wage and on and on, it is largely a set of chanting points that aren’t intended to convince the intelligent.  They are intended solely to leverage the tribalist ignorance of the masses of entitled would-be elitists who make up Big Left’s voting bloc; they don’t fact check jack; they hear things on the media, and the left’s alt-media, and parrot it like the obedient little schnauzers most of them are.

Confirm Brett Kavanaugh.  Now.

Nothing reinforces a tactic like success.  If Big Left manages to scuttle Kavanaugh, you can expect every single conservative – I almost added “male” to the list, but as we saw with Sarah Palin and MIchele Bachmann, the left hates conservative women even more – will meet the same scabrous, defamatory treatment.

Every one.

Confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

And if Big Left tries to call out the schnauzers of “The #Resistance”, then yes, let’s meet them – in court if they choose wisely, at the barricades if they don’t.

But confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

If you fail to do this, you will get brutalized this November.

And you will have it coming.

Confirm Kavanaugh.  Now.

Rhetorical Questions?

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember Dan Rather, who insisted the letters showing President Bush lied about his military service were “fake but accurate?”

Remember the Cindy Sheehan, the Code Pink lady who protested at President Bush’s ranch because her son died in the war in Iraq?

Remember David Hogg, the kid who hid in the closet during the school shooting and became a national spokesman for gun control?

They were hot topics, media sensations, invited on all the news shows.  Their every utterance was treated as having absolute moral authority and cited by Democrat politicians as proof of the urgency to enact Liberal policies.  But none of those people are in the news anymore.  It’s as if they never existed.  They were used as props and discarded the moment they were no longer useful.

And now we have Christine Blasey Ford, who accuses Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers.  That’s enough to temporarily resurrect Anita Hill, the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings.  She won’t be in the limelight long.  She’s old news, too.

What is wrong with those people, that they’re willing to be exploited and later abandoned, merely to get a few seconds of attention?  Have they no pride?

What is wrong with those people who are willing to exploit and later abandon innocents who merely want a few seconds of attention?  Have they no shame?

Joe Doakes

Because it’ll be different with them…

Why Real Americans Hate The Media, Part MCMLXVIII

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Last week, it was the NYTijmes sticking Nikki Haley with her Obama-era predecessor’s Marie-Antoinette-like taste in draperies.

This week?  A hatchet job on Trump that, well, didn’t cut it:

“The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Latinos along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown,” the paper wrote.

But the Post withheld key data, mischaracterized information and lobbed an allegation of fraud at a deceased doctor without speaking to his family members, who complained publicly, HuffPost has found. The piece has been substantially altered three times, including Thursday after multiple queries from…

…from whom?

…HuffPost.

When even the Huffpo has your bias dialed in, you know it’d be time to dial it back a notch.

If you had any other frame of reference, I suppose…

What Do You Want, A Cookie?

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Liberals and apologists for Big Media hailed last week’s correction by the NYTimes of their hatchet piece against Nikki Haley as a sign that the mainstream media is, unlike the hack partisian media, “Accountable”.

You may recall the story – which debuted last Friday to yuge headlines:  State Department Spent $52,701 on Curtains for Residence of U.N. Envoy.   Buried seven columns deep was the incidental factoid that the decition to buy the draperies was taking during Obama’s term, long before Governor Haley was nominated.

The Times ran a correction – after the internet blew up in a firestorm of mockery and invective:

An earlier version of this article and headline created an unfair impression about who was responsible for the purchase in question. While Nikki R. Haley is the current ambassador to the United Nations, the decision on leasing the ambassador’s residence and purchasing the curtains was made during the Obama administration, according to current and former officials. The article should not have focused on Ms. Haley, nor should a picture of her have been used. The article and headline have now been edited to reflect those concerns, and the picture has been removed.

And yet it did focus on Haley, and the photo did run, and the entire tone did try to paint Haley as a modern-day Marie Antoinette – until they got caught peddling…

…wait for it…

…fake news.

Journalistic ethics:   the art of rationalizing a lack of ethics after you get caught.

No Mystery

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“Garage Logic” is signing off for the last time next month.

It was not mutual – Soucheray’s salary while KSTP’s have spiraled has to have been a pig in a python for the once-wealthy station – but it sounds amicable enough anyway:

It’s highly unusual for a broadcast personality to be fired, but given another month on the air. The move allows Soucheray and his staff one final opportunity to cover the Minnesota State Fair.

“It’s a sign that the station has had great respect for the show and it’s more than generous they’re allowing us to end it this way,” Soucheray said. “The usual way it happens is you are told ‘Your last show was yesterday.’ They’ve told us we can handle this any way we want.

I haven’t listened to Garage Logic in probably 10 years – the endless inside jokes grated on me.   But I always liked Soucheray and his on-air persona, and the fact that a show like that could become a local institution.   Having run the board for Soucheray a few times back in the eighties, I always thought he was a stand-up guy, especially given the rampaging egos and dubious social skills of many in the broadcast industry.

I figured “GL” was doomed eight years ago when KSTP-AM went sports.   I guess I was right, eventually…

Wrap Your Head Around This

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Check out the tone in this tweet from Monday:

That’s an American newspaper, writing about a dictator whose government is holding an American hostage – and who has strongarmed most of the formerly independent Turkish media into submission, which normally is a big deal to, y’know, America’s ruggedly independent media, as well – with a tone usually reserved for a plucky single mom saving her home from greedy corporate raiders who want to use eminent domain to build a toxic waste dispenser.

Because Trump.

Aborted In The First Trimester

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Michelle Wolf’s really awful Netflix show canceled after three months:

The move comes just a couple of weeks after BET announced it was cancelling The Rundown with Robin Thede after its first season. That cuts the number of late-night-style shows hosted by women in half, with only TBS’ Samantha Bee and Hulu’s Sarah Silverman left standing.

And with a little luck, Bee’s wretched show will be dying from apathy before too long.

It’s not all good news: The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale also got tubed.

 

Waposplained

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It’s a pet peeve of mine; whenever someone – usually a smug little twerp who’s beein trained to think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, regardless of actual merit – starts out a soliloquy with “Actually…”, I usually want to smack them.

Hard.

So with a piece from earlier in the week from the Washington Post, by Christopher Ingraham – who is, more or less, the person I described in the first paragraph.   But he’s at the WaPo, so I repeat myself.

And, er, “actually”,the article actually takes a radical departure – revealing a bit of the truth:

The study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: “Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments,” Braga and Cook found. “Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role.” Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

This?  In the WaPo?

It seems too good to be true.  And it is exactly that, eventually.

But Ingraham thinks he’s onto something:

The results undercut the idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That catchy turn of phrase is often used by gun rights supporters to emphasize the human role in gun violence rather than the gun itself.

And this revelation that “undercuts” the absolute truism – the notion that perpetrators, not hardware, is responsible for crime (emphasis added)?

Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip J. Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun.

In other words – bigger guns are more lethal.

This is what you get from America’s most respected journalistic outlet.

No word on whether large calibers make a firearm self-animating.

Maybe that’ll be on NPR…

 

Squirrel!

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Support for stricter gun control is down sharply…

Public support for more stringent gun-control legislation has decreased significantly after surging in the wake of the February mass shooting that claimed 17 lives in Parkland, Fla., according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

The number of respondents who support “stricter gun control laws” has fallen ten percentage points after peaking at 66 percent on February 20, just six days after the Parkland massacre.

…now that the media has moved on to misrepresenting other topics.

Shot In The Dark: Today’s News Fifteen Years Ago

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Victor Davis Hanson notes something that could well become a Berg’s Law:  Republican Presidents are always “literally Hitler” until another Republiican is in office:

Once a Republican president loses an election or retires after two terms — and is followed by a liberal Democrat — his reputation hits bottom. But once a new Republican president enters office, the prior and now-powerless Republican ex-president is airbrushed into a model of statesmanship to contrast the ogre currently in the White House.

Republican presidencies are seen on a downward spiral of always becoming worse — by always redefining formerly despised presidents as at least better than their monstrous successors.

When a conservative president has the power to enact a conservative agenda, he is a media demon compared with his now-saintly Republican predecessors. Of course, in retirement, they have no power to do anything.

Such reinvention insidiously works to keep former Republican presidents quiet.

One wonders what rhetorical wonders await whomever wins the presidency after Trump…

Nick Coleman: Still A Monkey

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The other day, I linked to an excellent Strib piece about my friend Sarah Cade – a liberal, millennial, biracial, female “gun nut”.

It’s an interesting story, and one that has to be terrifying Big Left, inasmuch as millennials are more likely to be pro-gun than anti (even after a few months of  puffing up David “Boss” Hogg).

And who should sound off in his sclerotic, concussed manner than our old pal Nick “The Monkey” Coleman.

Coleman – former “big cheese”f and the only liberal columnist too dumb and expensive to be kept on at the Strib, ever – turned his rheumy, sheets-to-the-windy eye to the piece with the same even handed logic that made him every blogger’s favorite kick-toy from 2002 until…well, until he pretty much disappeared.

Well, thanks, Nick.  Your opinion is worth – well, pretty much the same as the last ten years worth of your career prospects, ever since you graduated from “Moronic Clown” to “Turbo Clown”.

It’s Satire…

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…for now.  And, truth be told, will probably always stay that way.

After years of publishing distorted headlines, slanted news articles, and heavily biased news coverage, media giant CNN announced Friday that it has decided to launch a spinoff site that focuses on real news comprised of objective facts.

Dubbed “CNN: Real,” the site is designed to bring the news media empire into the arena of publishing real news, a step away from its roots as a channel that covers entirely fabricated stories and shamelessly spins all news into liberal talking points.

Up next – a spinoff Strib that isn’t a glorified DFL PR firm.