FYI: how news was, and is, and will be

[classicman]

Yeh - better keep quiet Digr, they're lookin to get money FROM you!

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Wait a minute. I'm Christian, historically, one of the most persecuted religions on earth, ever. WHERE'S MAH CHECK?!

Of the 19 or so major religions, it certainly is ONE of the most persecuted, right up there with the other 18 or so.

[Happy Monkey]

Definitely in the top hundred at least.

[Shawnee123]

Poor x-tians. Lions eatin' 'em up and all.

I would totally seek compensation from the lions, if I were you!

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Of the 19 or so major religions, it certainly is ONE of the most persecuted, right up there with the other 18 or so.

Nice. Made me chuckle out loud.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by classicman

Yeh - better keep quiet Digr, they're lookin to get money FROM you!

Yeah, well, they can wish in one hand and shit in the other and watch which one fills up first.

I was making a joke. I ain't asking for (or taking) shit from nobody. I ain't EVER, and I ain't starting now.

[classicman]

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Poor x-tians. Lions eatin' 'em up and all.

I would totally seek compensation from the lions, if I were you!

.375 H&H solids make fine lion cartridges, if you just settle for revenge.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by TheDaVinciChode

Beyond that, they had no honest claim to that land. They didn't take it through means of a declaration of war, followed through with enough military might to take the land... They were handed it . . .

Sounds to me like you missed a war, then: 1948. By your thinking, that territory has indeed been legitimized through having been shot over. Five countries invaded Israel that week, in initial aggregate strength of about 25,000, later reinforced. And they lost.

Coupla paras here that explain why Israel was motivated to take all of Jerusalem in '67 -- one could hardly imagine them doing anything else, what with the situation between 1949 and 1967.

1948 Arab-Israeli War -- a bit more depth.

[classicman]

When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal. If they came from West Point or engineering school, this wouldn't be the case.

Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press. True, participants in the online clubhouse appear to hail chiefly from the media's self-identified left wing. But its founder, Ezra Klein, is a prominent writer for the Washington Post. Mr. Klein shut down JournoList last month—a wise decision.

It's thanks to Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website that we know something about JournoList, though the emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Mr. Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, the Daily Caller disclosed a series of JournoList musings by David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.

This week, Mr. Carlson produced a series of JournoList emails from April 2008, when Barack Obama's presidential bid was in serious jeopardy. Videos of the antiwhite, anti-American sermons of his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had surfaced, first on ABC and then other networks.


JournoList contributors discussed strategies to aid Mr. Obama by deflecting the controversy. They went public with a letter criticizing an ABC interview of Mr. Obama that dwelled on his association with Mr. Wright. Then, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent proposed attacking Mr. Obama's critics as racists. He wrote:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. . . . This makes them 'sputter' with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

No one on JournoList endorsed the Ackerman plan. But rather than object on ethical grounds, they voiced concern that the strategy would fail or possibly backfire.

Link

I don't know that this type of thing went on in the past. I mean in such an organized way. Instead of reporting, it almost seems as though they chose who they were supporting and helped that candidate as they saw fit.

Yes, this is an opinion piece.

[TheMercenary]

The general Left-wing media biased is well established, which is one of the reasons that Right-wing radio and TV has become so popular IMHO.

[classicman]

CNN Host Calls for Crackdown on 'Bloggers' in Wake of Sherrod Incident: 'Something’s Going to Have to be Done Legally'

Should there be a "gatekeeper" regulating internet bloggers? In the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod incident, that's what CNN promoted on July 23.

Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the "mixed blessing of the internet," and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet.

"There are so many great things that the internet does and has to offer, but at the same time, Kyra, as you know, there is this dark side," Roberts said. "Imagine what would have happened if we hadn't taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said."

But Phillips replied that the mainstream media "can't always do that."

"There's going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable," Phillips said. "How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they're actually given credibility, which is crazy. They're a bunch of cowards, they're just people seeking attention."

Phillips demanded to know what Andrew Keen thought needed to be done. Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture," who suggested that there needs to be an internet "gatekeeper," had been interviewed by Roberts and quoted in the segment.

"Well what Andrew talked about with me was this idea of a gatekeeper but there are huge first amendment rights that come into play here - freedom of speech and all that. And he said the people who need to be the gatekeepers are the media to check into these stories," said Roberts.

Phillips wanted to go even further, asking if "there's going to come a point where something's going to have to be done legally" about anonymous bloggers.

"There has to be some point where there's some accountability. And companies, especially in the media have to stop giving these anonymous bloggers credit," she said.

Roberts responded that anonymous blogging might benefit from "checks and balances."

"If you're in a place like Iran or North Korea or something like that, anonymous blogging is the only way you could ever get your point of view out without being searched down and thrown in jail or worse," said Roberts. "But when it comes to a society like ours, an open society, do there have to be some checks and balances, not national, but maybe website to website on who comments on things?"

CNN's two regulation-happy reporters, think the Sherrod situation can help bring attention to the "necessity" of blogging reform if she brings a defamation lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart.

According to Roberts, Sherrod has "the power now and she also has the profile to maybe bring this into a new light, so we'll see where this goes."

Read more

And exactly who is gonna do this? WTF? 1st amendment ring a bell?

[Lamplighter]

A start will be when everyone that is interested in politics
recognizes the face and name of Andrew Breitbart,
and rejects whatever he says or does in the future.

He puked on his own reputation.

[gvidas]

David Foster Wallace, "Host"

The whole article is gold, but here are two of my favorite passages:

More or less on the heels of the Fairness Doctrine's repeal came the West Coast and then national syndication of The Rush Limbaugh Show through Mr. McLaughlin's EFM Media. Limbaugh is the third great progenitor of today's political talk radio partly because he's a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show's blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators. But he was also the first great promulgator of the Mainstream Media's Liberal Bias idea. This turned out to be a brilliantly effective rhetorical move, since the MMLB concept functioned simultaneously as a standard around which Rush's audience could rally, as an articulation of the need for right-wing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a mechanism by which any criticism or refutation of conservative ideas could be dismissed (either as biased or as the product of indoctrination by biased media). Boiled way down, the MMLB thesis is able both to exploit and to perpetuate many conservatives' dissatisfaction with extant media sources—and it's this dissatisfaction that cements political talk radio's large and loyal audience.

CONTAINS EDITORIAL ELEMENTS It should be conceded that there is at least one real and refreshing journalistic advantage that bloggers, fringe-cable newsmen, and most talk-radio hosts have over the mainstream media: they are neither the friends nor the peers of the public officials they cover. Why this is an advantage involves an issue that tends to get obscured by the endless fight over whether there's actually a "liberal bias" in the "elite" mainstream press. Whether one buys the bias thing or not, it is clear that leading media figures are part of a very different social and economic class than most of their audiences. See, e.g., a snippet of Eric Alterman's recent What Liberal Media?:

This is why the really potent partisan label for the NYT/Time/network—level press is not "liberal media" but "elite media"—because the label's true. And talk radio is very deliberately not part of this elite media. With the exception of Limbaugh and maybe Hannity, these hosts are not stars, or millionaires, or sophisticates. And a large part of their on-air persona is that they are of and for their audience—the Little Guy—and against corrupt, incompetent pols and their "spokesholes," against smooth-talking lawyers and PC whiners and idiot bureaucrats, against illegal aliens clogging our highways and emergency rooms, paroled sex offenders living among us, punitive vehicle taxes, and stupid, self-righteous, agenda-laden laws against public smoking, SUV emissions, gun ownership, the right to watch the Nick Berg decapitation video over and over in slow motion, etc. In other words, the talk host's persona and appeal are deeply, totally populist, and if it's all somewhat fake—if John Kobylt can shift a little too easily from the apoplectic Little Guy of his segments to the smooth corporate shill of his live reads—then that's just life in the big city.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

A start will be when everyone that is interested in politics
recognizes the face and name of Andrew Breitbart,
and rejects whatever he says or does in the future.

He puked on his own reputation.

I think he served a great purpose in his posting as dishonest as it was on the face of it. His Big Government website is fantastic. Hard to argue with the facts. The idea that anyone who disagrees with the mainstream left-wing media which generally dominates and has dominated the news for years now has now resorted to calling anyone who disagrees with the socialist agenda as "racist". Now we even have the left-wing moguls calling the whole of Fox News a "racist" news organization, even Joe Blow Hard Biden disagrees with that assessment and said it was a false notion. Most importantly we have seen how important it is to certain organizations to continue to play the race card in an effort to legitimize their existence rather than address the important issues that effect certain ethnic groups in our modern society. It is hard to call "the man" racist when "the man" is now a black president. I fully support an open discussion of the issues concerning race in America, but sooner or later you have to stop blaming the white man for all your ills as much as you need to stop blaming Bush for the failures of a Democratically controlled Congress...