As Kathy Shaidle writes, "Establishment baffled, shocked, outraged", by the winner of a Canadian history magazine's poll of the Worst Canadians in History.

Here's one part-time resident of the Great White North who won't be too surprised, though.

Pretty amazing color footage of "Galloping Gertie", the Narrows Tacoma Bridge disaster of 1940:

It makes a dramatic companion piece to these more placid color still photos from the first half of the 20th century.

Reuters: "News Corp board OKs deal to buy Dow Jones: source":

News Corp's (NWSa.N) board of directors has approved a deal to buy Dow Jones & Co Inc (DJ.N) for $5 billion, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

The board met on Tuesday to consider its $60 per share offer.

Or as the Journal itself puts it:

A century of Bancroft-family ownership at Dow Jones & Co. is over.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. sealed a $5 billion agreement to purchase the publisher of The Wall Street Journal after three months of drama in the controlling family and public debate about journalistic values.

Maybe that explains why this synergistic partnership is being formed concurrently in the lefthand side of the news world.

Update: And away we go!

Though many journalists impose their views regularly in biased political coverage, and last year the New York Times publisher made clear his left-wing world view, on Tuesday night the broadcast networks framed Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal around what agenda the “controversial” Murdoch will “impose.” That matches the “fear” expressed in online journalism forums and media magazines about Murdoch's “conservative” agenda. Leading into pro and con soundbites, CBS's Kelly Wallace described Murdoch as “a conservative who put his imprint on the New York Post and brought topless women to the Sun in London. His critics say he may not impose tabloid on the Journal, but will impose his point of view.”

No word yet though on whether or not Maria Bartiromo will be the newspaper's first Page Three girl (in traditional Journal woodcut illustration style, of course).

More: The Journal itself weighs in, via its editorial page:

Editorial independence enhances the prospects for business success. The more credible a publication is, especially one that specializes in financial and economic reporting, the more readers and advertisers it is likely to have. We like to think our readers buy the Journal because of the credibility built over a century, and we believe this is the heart of the "value proposition" that Mr. Murdoch is willing to pay $5 billion to purchase. No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin.

There are nonetheless critics, especially in the journalism world, who claim this is precisely what Mr. Murdoch will proceed to do. And they have certainly had a merry time bashing him and the Journal these past few months. Some of these voices, however, are commercial or ideological competitors who have their own interest in undermining the Journal's credibility.

Both the New York Times and the Financial Times have been especially aggressive in assailing the potential News Corp. purchase of the Journal. These also happen to be the two publications that Mr. Murdoch has explicitly said he might invest more to compete against. Readers can judge if the tears these papers and their writers claim to shed for the Journal's future are real, or of the crocodile variety.

The nastiest attacks have come from our friends on the political left. They can't decide whose views they hate most--ours, or Mr. Murdoch's. We're especially amused by those who say Mr. Murdoch might tug us to the political left. Don't count on it. More than one liberal commentator has actually rejoiced at the takeover bid, on the perverse grounds that this will ruin the Journal's news coverage, which in turn will reduce the audience for the editorial page. Don't count on that either.

In early 2006, we linked to Daniel Henninger's piece on James Frey:

Oprah Winfrey has thrown her support behind memoirist James Frey, whose Number One bestseller, "A Million Little Pieces"--a vivid recollection of his drug and alcohol addictions, crimes against humanity and recovery--turns out on a sliding scale to run from false to faulty. Mr. Frey's literally incredible life was exposed recently by a Web site, the Smoking Gun. Respondeth Oprah, and legions of Mr. Frey's readers: Who cares?

Ms. Winfrey said, "The underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me." Many of the some 1,900 Frey messengers to Oprah's Web site also voted for redemption over factual accuracy.

In an age when controversies are a dime a dozen, this one is worth thinking about. Some have said the publisher should have made clear the memoir was fictionalized. But people don't want that. As with reality TV shows, people now enter into these new kinds of experiences with the conceit that it's somehow true or real, and when they find out later the truth was staged, they don't care. If you think this doesn't compute, tough. That, so to speak, is current reality.

Still, criticism has rained down on Mr. Frey, publisher Doubleday and Oprah for choosing falsity over fact. Most of this comes from authors or teachers of writing defending what they think are utilitarian distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. One might expect that most people would similarly support the primacy of facts in a book making claims to factuality, as Mr. Frey's did. The recent, wide denunciation of Korean stem-cell faker Hwang Woo Suk derives from the centuries-old belief that improving the human condition works better in a world run on facts rather than tall tales.

Eventually, Oprah very publicly tossed Frey overboard on her show, which Nan Talese, his publisher at Doubleday, describes here, and in a clip that's currently being highlighted by Matt Drudge:

"And at the end of it she pulled James aside and said, 'I know it was rough, but it's just business.'"

Jeff Jarvis reminds television news departments that car chases are not news:

Let’s hope that one result of the crash of two news helicopters chasing the cops chasing a bad guy is that local TV — and cable — news give up their addiction to this nonstory. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

TV news loves its own clichés and habits; it likes the sameness and predictability. TV news is OCD: This is how we always cover cities digging out from snowstorms and shoppers mobbing malls on the day after Christmas and cops chasing criminals — and, of course, any fire bigger than a Bic’s flame. There’s no news in any of this. It’s the opposite of news, for we know exactly what will happen. News is what we don’t know. But we know how these chases end.

And we know what will happen with TV news and helicopters: They’ll keep doing it. See earlier journalism-review fretting about chopper chases in 2006, 2003, 2002 and 1997 — and, of course, after the O.J. Simpson chase in 1994. It will never change.

I grew up watching WPVI, Philadelphia's ABC affiliate; their daily Action News broadcasts were amongst the first of the local news shows to adopt the policy of "If It Bleeds, It Leeds", and they've spent the last 35 years or so opening their nightly news broadcasts with lurid murders, muggings and car chases. (They even had their own helicopter crash last year.)

If you type "WPVI" into YouTube's search engine and poke around, you'll see that a popular past-time amongst the more tech savvy WPVI fans in Philly is parodying the Action News opening theme by mashing it up and splicing in even more grotesque shots of car crashes, hit and runs, and other video horrors. At least it's more honest than the real Action News intro, which shows Philadelphia at its finest, in contrast to the daily debauchery actually reported in the body of the show.

There's another reason why television news should abandon their helicopters: if TV news anchors are going to preach the evils of, as Tim Blair calls it, glowball worming, shouldn't they begin to phase out their own gas-guzzling--not to mention potentially lethal--helicopters? If jetting out to a vacation amongst hundreds of fellow tourists in a single plane equals "binge flying" then what's the purpose of TV news 'copters, other than to generate ratings? As Jarvis writes above, it's the opposite of news.

Update: Further thoughts from Michael Mannske, who compares the way the elite media covers the outside world, versus how it circles the wagons when a story involves one of their own.

Dean Barnett introduces "the Nancy Boyda Award". Besides Boyda herself, here are two prime candidates for her namesake trophy.

Update: More from Michael Barone.

More from the memory hole, as Michael Chapman of CNSNews.com interviews Humberto Fontova, author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him:

Cybercast News Service: What do you consider to be some of Guevara's greatest crimes or offenses that people today should know about?

Humberto Fontova: He was the chief executioner. He performed for the Cuban revolution what Heinrich Himmler performed for the Nazis. Everything Che Guevara did was directed by Fidel Castro. Early on, when they were in the mountains, Castro realized that Che seemed to relish executing little farm boys. There were executions carried out, carried out in the mountains, of so-called informers. I interviewed many people who witnessed those executions. There was no due process.

Che Guevara wrote a letter to his father in 1957 and to his abandoned wife. In the letter to her, he wrote, "I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." Then, to his father, "I really like killing." The man was a clinical sadist, whereas Fidel Castro you could describe as a psychopath in that the murders did not affect him one way or the other. It was a means to an end - the consolidation of his one-man rule. Che has a famous quote, where he wrote, a revolutionary has to become "a cold killing machine." The thing was, Che Guevara was anything but cold. He was a warm killing machine. He relished the slaughter.

And Hollywood can't stop making movies idolizing him, which helps to place this recent essay by Jonah Goldberg into context.

28690 Philip Johnson Glass House Opens In New Canaan...
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James Panero of The New Criterion and Benjamin Ivry of Commentary use the occasion of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Cannan being opened to the public to remind us what a piece of work the late architect was.

Amongst his links, Panero includes Hilton Kramer's essay on Johnson from the September 1995 Commentary. Here's but a sample:

I was reminded of a conversation I had with Marga Barr in the last year of her life. I was then working with her on the preparation of a "Chronicle" of Alfred Barr's career [as art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art] for publication in the New Criterion. (It was published under the title, "Our Campaigns," in a special issue of the magazine in the summer of 1987.)

On one of the mornings we had set for a meeting in her apartment, the New York Times published Johnson's proposed designs for the rehabilitation of the Times Square-42nd Street area. I found them even more wretched than some of the awful things he had already built, and I was eager to know what Marga thought of them. In recounting to me the story of Alfred's career, she had had frequent occasion to speak of Johnson, and she always did so with fond affection-for the record, so to speak. That morning I asked if she had seen the paper, and she rather glumly acknowledged that she had. I then asked what she thought of the kind of buildings Johnson had lately been designing-and hastened to add that she was under no obligation to discuss the subject if she preferred not to. In responding to difficult questions, Marga had a way of turning away for a few moments while she composed her thoughts and then facing her interlocutor with a very determined look. This is what she did that morning as she said to me: "I feel about Philip today the way I would feel about a beloved son who had gone into a life of crime."

If you're unfamiliar with the endless twists and turns contained within the background of the man who brought modern architecture to America, definitely read the whole thing.

Anne Applebaum's piece on Johnson's decade spent flirting with National Socialism--even as it was kicking his favorite achitects out the door--is also well worth your time.

Update: Video added; the articles in the above hyperlinks make for quite an interesting counterpoint.

As Ronald Reagan liked to say, those are the scariest words in the English language. Thomas Sowell writes that Bob Novak would agree:

Parents who want to counteract politically correct commencement speeches — often after four years of politically correct indoctrination on campus — might include among the things they give their graduate a new book titled The Prince of Darkness by columnist Robert Novak.

This book gives Novak’s eyewitness accounts of the numerous Washington politicians and bureaucrats he has dealt with as a journalist for more than half a century.

There is no way you can come away from this book thinking that there is something nobler about “public service,” as it actually exists, rather than the pretty picture painted by those who want to puff themselves up as members of a high-toned profession.

Even those of us who never had any grand illusions about politicians can come away from this book shedding any remaining illusions we might have had about some of our political heroes in both parties.

Novak covers not only what they said and did in public but also what they said and did in private — and why. He turns over a lot of rocks and shows what has been crawling underneath.

Novak became a Washington journalist back in the days of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. But neither they nor the political leaders of today escape his unsentimental scrutiny.

Most of these big political figures turn out to be very petty, self-centered, spiteful, shallow, deceitful, and incompetent. Novak spells it out in eyewitness detail from behind the scenes.

Nor does he let the media off the hook, including himself. Novak notes how often his own judgments and predictions proved to be wide of the mark, and how his drinking and other shortcomings led to bad results for himself and those around him.

This is history as it happened, without spin or an agenda.

As Sowell writes, you can get "a lot of enlightenment from a prince of darkness."

John Podhoretz writes:

Only hours after Ingmar Bergman's death was announced, his fellow existentialist filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died. Kind of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day, if you think bummer movie directors are analogous to the Founding Fathers.

Antonioni's Blowup was one of the touchstone films of the 1960s zeitgeist (Andrew Sarris dubbed it 1966's "movie of the year"). Its proto-postmodern ending paved the way for the "what is reality" movies of the late 1990s (The Matrix, Dark City, and eXistenZ). The film boosted the career of the Yardbirds during the brief period when both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck were in the band, and made David Hemmings, cast as the film's photographer protagonist, a sixties superstar--not to mention inspiring Austin Powers' civilian identity.

In the New York Post, David French writes:

For more than 25 years, conservative writers have been telling anyone who would listen that our higher education system was broken - that indoctrination was trumping education and our kids were throwing away their tuition dollars propping up vicious relics of the '60s and supporting universities that were increasingly repressive. These words, coming from such luminaries as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Charles Kors and David Horowitz, persuaded much of the conservative chattering class that something was wrong. But mainstream Americans seemed unconcerned, with their own (often fond) college memories drowning out even the most eloquent cries for reform.

Enter Ward Churchill.

French writes that Churchill was "the tipping point":

That will be Ward Churchill's lasting legacy. He was the tipping point. Now, it's not just leading conservatives who view the academy as an out-of-control, disconnected bastion of petulant entitlement. In a recent Zogby poll, 58 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that political bias of professors is a "serious problem." Even more, 65 percent, viewed non-tenured professors as more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

These are not isolated findings. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found that 58.4 percent of Americans had only some or no confidence in our colleges and that 82 percent want to modify or eliminate tenure.

Related thoughts from Stanley Kurtz.

In a post titled, "An Ideology of Hate", John Hinderaker writes:

Chief Justice John Roberts, in my view the most extravagantly qualified Supreme Court nominee in my lifetime, had a "benign idiopathic seizure" today. He's fine, but might be placed on anti-seizure medication since he also had one in 1993. This is how the prominent liberal web site Wonkette covered the news:

Chief Justice John Roberts has died in his summer home in Maine. No, not really, but we know you have your fingers crossed.

A lot of them did, too.

And that's hot on the heels of this laugh-riot Wonkette moment from last week.

Where have you gone Boba Fett? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you!

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post, who has a new book due out this fall called Nanny State, writes:

Nanny State recently received a short review from the trade publication Publishers Weekly. It was unfriendly. I came away with the feeling that the reviewer hadn’t actually read the book. (I won’t bore you with the specifics.) But then again, who knows, perhaps the review was deserved.

As this is my first book, though, I decided to investigate other Publisher Weekly reviews on Amazon.com. Did a negative review effect sales? Did the reviewer typically betray a ideological position as this one had? This curiosity led to non-scientific stroll around Amazon.com and a discovery. One that Tammy Bruce had already noted. (Update: And Dr. Helen.) I work in mainstream media. Though I’m not someone who buys into the widespread liberal media meme, the one-sidedness of the PW reviews was inescapable. After all, a provocative or combative political book can be well written and worth reading even if you disagree with the central thesis. I’ve reviewed books for almost a decade. I know this can happen.

Yet…

Read on.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

"Old Creepy Ads" definitely lives up to its name.

And speaking of Lileks on acid, it sounds like James could use some antacid, after his recent trip to Alaska:

On a cruise ship you’re either heading towards cake or coming from cake. I did not know it was possible to eat so much. There were meals between meals. There were meals in the middle of meals. You could pass out in the main cafeteria with a room-service menu on your chest and they’d wake you at daybreak, pry open your mouth and pour a rich, nutritious slurry of eggs and French toast down your throat. By the end of the cruise you had to grease the doorframe of your cabin to get out. Every so often you tottered to the window to see whales, and you usually did, although most of the time it was your reflection.

More reflections at Bleat HQ.

Building on our recent Tech Central Station article, several concurrent posts here (such as this one) have attempted to document the birth of the paranoid style (to coin a phrase) on the left.

Dr. Sanity takes things into the present day, such as this recent quote uttered by one of the leading candidates in the presidential race.

Meanwhile, as Barbara Boxer finds Gaia in the mists of Greenland, Mark Steyn reprints a 2002 article that asks when will this trend will conclude?

Update: Related thoughts on "John Edwards' Paranoid Solipsism" from Betsy Newmark. And Dean Barnett's thoughts on the American left and Iraq dovetail remarkably well with the above posts.

This just in from the New York Times: Nerd culture discovered; Asians, other minorities hardest hit.

Update: The International Herald-Tribune, a spin-off of the New York Times, undertakes their own Noam Chomsky-style research on nerd linguistical patterns.

More: Jerome J. Schmitt adds: "In sum, I believe that this article and study reveal a lot more about the racial bigotry and monomania of the NY Times and swaths of the liberal arts and social sciences than it does about nerds."

The cliché is that famous deaths come in threes, but usually not this quickly:

Bill Walsh, the groundbreaking football coach who won three Super Bowls and perfected the ingenious schemes that became known as the West Coast offense during a Hall of Fame career with the San Francisco 49ers, has died. He was 75.

Walsh died early Monday following a long battle with leukemia, according to Stanford University, where he served as coach and athletic director.

Michael Lewis' recent book, The Blind Side documents the revolution in professional football that occurred in the 1980s, as Walsh's West Coast Offense dramatically changed the passing game, and the dominance of Lawrence Taylor had a similar impact on defense. While "L.T." was blessed with once-in-a-lifetime athletic brilliance, Walsh's strategies systematized the NFL offensive game, which is why so many of his protégés have had terrific careers themselves.

Michelle Malkin has "A pictorial pop quiz for you. Which of these is a hate crime in America?"

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens and Ace of Spades have some very much related thoughts.

"Unfortunately, disagreeing with a narrative often seems like a waste of time, because disagreeing with it doesn't make it go away."

Even if the narrative is wrong, and the facts keep changing, to paraphrase Evan Thomas.

"The only genius in cinema today", Bergman's American champion Woody Allen famously said in 1979's Manhattan, was 89.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Update: Jason Apuzzo of Libertas writes, "The chess game is over now. Bergman won it a long time ago."

Back in the 1970s, when television meant three network channels, three or four UHF channels, and PBS, I spent more than few late night hours watching Tom Synder, who sadly died yesterday of complications associated with leukemia, according to AP.

Here's Tom in better days, interviewing a struggling, up and coming rock band, still searching for that elusive big break after years on the cabaret circuit:

And here's the late Cathy Seipp's reminiscing about meeting Tom when he was still searching for his own elusive big break--but already a legend, if only his own mind.

Late in James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson writes:

The activities of the radical right, which were prominent in the years leading up to [Kennedy’s] assassination, were soon pushed into the background by the antics of the radical left. By the late 1960s, the far right’s fascination with plots concerning fluoridated water, federal aid to education, or even communism seemed quaint in comparison with the fevered doctrines put forth by the denizens of the New Left.

Charles Johnson tracks the arc of a modern day conspiracy as it's being born.

"'Hoodie hugging' and the decline of British youth culture".

Related: In America, "cities sue gangs in bid to stop violence".

Paging Mark Steyn: your next demographics-related article awaits; Amy Alkon writes that there's a new book out in--shocker!--France, by an economist/psychoanalyst and, as Amy notes, mother named Corinne Maier that's titled, No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children.

Something tells me that this book will not be widely disseminated in France's burgeoning immigrant community.

"Michael Vick has done something no politician in Washington ever accomplished", Brent Bozell writes. "The star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons has united nearly everyone against him, indicted for being at the center of a gruesome spectacle of dog-fighting and gambling."

To be fair though, I'm not sure if Yahoo's Dan Wetzel would entirely agree with Bozell on the unanimity of Vick's detractors, though.

Baldilocks notes that Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary, in his attempt to both defend the New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp and denigrate his attackers (which are now legion) apparently doesn't realize that the word "milblogger" is a portmanteau that combines of the words blogger and military:

Apparently McLeary's Ivy-honed intellect didn't help him to deduce that milbloggers=military bloggers. Nor did that "superior intellect" lead him to discover that all military officers have an undergraduate degree, at minimum, and that half of enlisted men/women have obtained the same.

He denigrates the military bloggers then has the nerve to quote Andrew Sullivan approvingly in the next sentence. :::shakes head:::

I hope that he came to my blog, saw that "101st Fighting Keyboarders" link on the top right and got fooled. What a clown.

Sounds reminiscent of the Boston Globe's Alex Beam being taken in by libertarian Bjorn Staerk 's 2002 April Fools' Day Stalin parody. Too bad that McLeary didn't stop for a moment to read Baldilock's bio page.

Update: Here's a somewhat related item regarding a veteran journalist who's definitely on the other side of the aisle from the CJR: "So That's Why Novak Hates Blogs!"

More: Dan Riehl compares CJR's coverage of Beauchamp with their thoughts on Scooter Libby:

It seems, according to CJR, what Beauchamp himself published on the web should be left alone and kept private. In the Libby case, third party letters are fair game, mock away, it would seem. Given the particulars, this goes beyond simple hypocrisy, or a double standard. It's just plain biased.

Huh--go figure.

In his new book, conservative author James Piereson speculated that the ideology of President Kennedy's assassin caused a form of cognitive dissonance amongst many members of the left that led to an increasing reliance on conspiracy theories. Liberal reporter Jake Tapper of ABC provides bipartisan confirmation of a sort, as he notes that this trend is, if anything, merely accelerating.

The Movie & TV News section of the Internet Movie Database notes "That's Infotainment!" at ABC

ABC News executive producer David Sloan has indicated that the network will be continuing to move toward the convergence of news and entertainment -- or "infotainment" as the controversial move has been branded. "My definition [of news] is limitless," he told Chicago Tribune TV writer Phil Rosenthal as he plugged next Monday's news special, Six Degrees of Martina McBride in which a group of six singers will try to connect with the country star in six steps or less. "It's a hybrid," Sloan said. "Look, ABC News is looking for new ways of interacting and engaging with the viewer. This represents that effort." A different sort of "hybrid," he noted, will be evident in the forthcoming six-week run of iCaught, using amateur videos posted on the Internet.

Since truth is relative according to liberal postmodernism, "Storytelling" really seems to be the flavor of week.

Finally: Just in time for Christmas, 2019 arrives.

"Gay artist burns $60,000 Koran to protest homophobic hate".

I'm withholding judgment until I read Newsweek's take.

Update: James Taranto writes:

There's an obvious point to be made here about the incoherence of political correctness, which demands both affirmation of homosexuality and indulgence of Islamic fundamentalism, which anathematizes homosexuality.

Instead, though, let's just point out that if you are an advocate of tolerance and open-mindedness, conducting a book burning at best sends mixed signals.

Indeed.^TM

Back in late 2001, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Any time you start to doubt yourself, and wonder if you're fit for the big leagues of American thought and opinion, you can just read The Times and be thankful that the standards of the big leagues aren't so high.

Flashforward six years; technologies change but the song remains the same: the baseline quality control standards for acceptable video punditry has now been set by NBC...err ABC...

"Krauthammer: Obama Is The New Tom Hagen".

As Tom Wolfe famously wrote in Hooking Up:

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point, the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside--quite purposely--were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets, or as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

This process, namely the relearning--following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero--seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.

Of course, some areas are more zero than others, and thus will need just a bit more of a nudge to start the process. Cinnamon Stillwell dares San Francisco Chronicle readers to boldly go where no hippie has gone before: "Rethinking the Summer of Love".

Having not yet seen the new Simpsons movie, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on the TV series in general. Here's a sample:

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay on the death of “youth culture.” The Simpsons would be a good example of what I’m getting at. I started watching the show when I was in college. It was denounced as an example of cultural rot amongst the young — particularly when Bart, not Homer, was the star of the show. While I’m sure that its viewership skews youngish, it’s not really a show for young people anymore. In much the same way that South Park’s most public fans seem to be middle-aged and Family Guy is aimed at an even older demographic. The Simpsons, on the air for nearly two decades, demonstrates how the once hard-and-fast line between the young and edgy and the conventional and staid has been if not completely erased than largely redrawn.

That's actually a topic that Jonah touched upon a few years ago, to very good effect. He noted back in 2003 that The Simpsons and numerous other TV shows which date back to the 1990s are still on the air:

But the networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood. But I think a better sign is the absolute explosion in sexuality. I think by now most readers understand I'm not particularly Comstockish about sex, so I hope this won't be taken simply as the lament of a typical culture vulture. But the reliance on sex jokes on TV is really astounding. Because there's still an ever-thinning veneer of taboo to sex, jokes about it still have a chance at working. But the desperation of writers comes across in how deep, i.e. low, they have to dig. It reminds me of a Simpsons episode that takes place in the near future; Marge says to Homer, "Fox turned into a hardcore porn channel so gradually I didn't even notice."

Anyway, my last bit of evidence is purely anecdotal. I speak to college kids on occasion. And whenever I do, I tend to make references to TV shows and movies because, well, I'm me and that's what I do. At this point you would think that my references would be lost on many of them — and theirs on me. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What's also interesting is that these kids are quoting the same movies that my buddies and I quote, which might be a function of the fact that young men today would rather re-watch, say, Stripes or Roadhouse, than invest time in My Wife and Kids or some other drek. In effect, kids today are living off the entertainment capital of the previous generation.

That's even more true in music, as Live Earth, the celebrity encomium to America's former vice president demonstrated:

Andy Williams didn’t play at Woodstock. He was 41 that summer.

Ray Charles, then 38, wasn’t invited either.

And at age 52, Dean Martin certainly wasn’t.

So what were and Jon Bon Jovi at 45, Madonna at 48, and ex-Pink Floyd Roger Waters, 63, doing headlining a rock concert? None of their top hits were within a decade of the “Live Earth” concert. Williams, Charles and Martin each had released his signature recording within a few years of Woodstock.

In fact, Pink Floyd’s hit — “The Wall” — is as contemporary today as “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” was in 1969.

One reason “Live Earth” was dead last in the TV ratings is the music was irrelevant to the target audience. In fact, music itself is rather irrelevant. what with Video games and You Tube getting more action. There is a reason MTV shows so few videos: Nobody watches them.

The other reason is that Woodstock was not organized by Hubert Humphrey, the immediate past vice president of the United States at the time.

Live Earth? Well …

These trends demonstrate the enormous transition our media is undergoing. Relics of the days of Mass Media linger on, simply because of the name recognition they built up prior to the Internet's fracturing of the overculture. And examples such as the Simpsons movie and even older chestnuts being endlessly recycled will be occurring for quite sometime, as dinosaur media hope to stave off extinction for another day.

In "Racial Divide", Dan Wetzel gives us a snapshot of Michael Vick's day from hell:

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Imagine the outrage if this were RJ Reynolds or General Motors getting a column killed on the state of its industry, instead of the L.A. Times:

The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today's Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment. Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed, apparently by associate editor John Montorio. Goldstein's offense was to propose that the Times follow the lead of the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday (which distributed 2.9 million free Prince CDs) and partner with older artists to give away music in the paper. He argued it could help make the Times website a destination for fans and reduce the need for front page ads (which the editor of the Times himself calls a huge mistake.) Seems reasonable enough for a column, and Goldstein was on the Spring Street Committee that was tasked with coming up with innovative ideas:

It’s time we embraced change instead of always worrying if some brash new idea — like giving away music — would tarnish our sober minded image.

Still, the piece was spiked on high after sailing through the desk. The banned column fell into our hands and runs in full after the jump:

Read the rest--given the sorry states of both the recording and newspaper industries, Prince's synergistic marketing strategy is certainly worth experimenting with. And if the L.A. Times thinks they they can keep their remaining readers snowed into not believing that their industry is in trouble, that speaks volumes about what their management thinks of their subscribers.

But then, that shouldn't be entirely surprising at this point.

James Panero's post on the New Criterion's Armavirumque blog brings new meaning to the phrase "Culture of Death":

The other day I remarked on hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen's loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art--"The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," Damien Hirst's work featuring a dead shark floating in a formaldehyde vitrine. Rumor has it that MoMA and the Met both went fishing for the shark. Now the Met will have the honor of bestowing unearned respectability on Cohen's costly purchase ($8 million from Charles Saatchi in 2004).

By the way, if you want to know the disgusting details about how this work is maintained, read Carol Vogel's story here. (the answer is injections of formaldehyde.) What is not explained in this article, of course, is how Vogel maintains her job as a critic after REPEATEDLY shilling for Hirst and his rich collectors (the answer is injections of formaldehyde). [Ouch!--Ed]

Now in other news, we learn that Damien Hirst has recently wrapped up his latest exhibition at White Cube Gallery in London. This was the show featuring Hirst’s diamond-encrusted human skull, called “For the Love of God,” which sported approximately $20 million in jewels and retailed for about $100 million. Even without factoring in the sale of the skull (did it sell? Does Cohen have it on reserve?), Hirst’s exhibition took in $265 million in sales--if reports are to be believed. Such numbers puts Hirst in league with the marketplace for modern masters.

Hirst is a conceptual artist for the art of conspicuous consumption. Hirst’s work exhibits none of the traditional indicators of artistic value. It is not original (take for example his “spin” and “dot” paintings, based on children’s toys and pop art). Nor is it masterly (his work is crafted by an army of assistants whom Hirst openly describes as better painters than he is).

Hirst’s work is, quite deliberately, worthless beyond its material content. But through a conceptual sleight of hand, he has already earned himself a footnote in the history of art, not to mention a pile of cash.

In other words, David Lynch meets Thomas Kinkaid.

James Taranto asks us to imagine "if top aides to President Bush ordered the FBI to produce damaging but false information about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Now that would be a scandal:

And that is what is happening in New York state, as the New York Post reports:

Gov. [Eliot] Spitzer suspended a top aide and reassigned another yesterday after Attorney General Andrew Cuomo released a bombshell report concluding they conspired with the State Police to damage Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno by cooking up a plot claiming he misused state aircraft.

Spitzer, who had recently insisted that neither his staff nor the State Police had acted improperly, said communications director Darren Dopp was suspended without pay for an "indefinite period" of at least 30 days.

William Howard, the governor's assistant secretary for homeland security, will be reassigned to a position outside of the governor's staff.

Cuomo's report also recommended disciplinary action be considered against acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton, but none was taken.

The scathing, 53-page report detailed a months-long scheme in which Dopp, Howard, and Felton--at times with the partial knowledge of Spitzer chief of staff Richard Baum--used the State Police to gather and create misleading and inaccurate records on Bruno's use of state aircraft to travel from Albany to Manhattan in hopes of showing he was using the flights strictly for political purposes, a possibly illegal action. . . .

The report confirmed a week's worth of investigative stories in The Post beginning July 5 that found aides to Spitzer, including Dopp, used the State Police as, in effect, a spy agency as part of a broad conspiracy aimed at destroying Bruno.

For what it's worth, Spitzer is a Democrat and Bruno is a Republican. The New York Times, in covering the report, described Spitzer as " a former prosecutor who came into office less than seven months ago with a reputation for integrity and who promised to bring a new ethical climate to Albany."

The ethical climate he brought to Albany is new, all right. But if he had an undeserved "reputation for integrity" before becoming governor, perhaps that is because of the friendly coverage he received from such news organizations as the Times. The Post's scoop and its consequences are an object lesson in the importance of an independent press in holding public officials accountable.

On the other hand, the fawning pre-election coverage of Spitzer and stories such as this don't exactly build confidence in the typical big city MSM newspaper as an "independent" press.

Update: John Podhoretz writes that there's no middle ground: "In the past two days, the governor of New York either a) saved his political career or b) committed political suicide." At the risk of sounding terminally cynical, my money's on the former.

Power Line quotes a a long email from William Katz, whom they describe as having had "a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show".

At the Power Line site, he has a marvelous fantasy of Alfred Hitchcock pitching Rear Window to what he calls a modern "fetus in a three-piece suit" studio executive:

Now, clearly, that meeting never took place, but it's a slightly overdrawn version of meetings that do take place every day in today's Hollywood. They reflect the problem that I call TMCG –- too many college graduates, of whom, I freely admit, I'm one. The industry dare not speak its name, and it's rarely, if ever, discussed in these terms. But everyone knows the problem: To a large degree, Hollywood, in its executive ranks, has replaced talent with education, and what you get is the scene described above, where all the life, the emotion, the entertainment value of a story is ripped out, replaced with analysis and more analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not saying that higher education automatically makes someone a bad filmmaker. There are wonderful artists who've had fine educations. Richard D. Zanuck went to Stanford. The late Jack Lemmon held a Harvard degree. But young people, in particular, are very much affected by the way they're taught to think in college –- and that approach has nothing to do with making movies.

The Duke of Wellington reportedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The movies of today were written in the classrooms of Princeton. But it's highly unlikely that a 2007 Princeton graduate would imagine anyone singin' in the rain. He'd take a cab. And by the way, Mr. Kelly, the umbrella is held over the head, to keep us dry.

Mitchell Parish was one of our greatest lyricists -- "Star Dust," "Moonlight Serenade," "The Stars Fell on Alabama." Some years ago he was honored in New York. He came out before the concert began and spoke to members of the audience. He said, "When you hear my lyrics, don't analyze them, feel them." It's wonderful advice for anyone in entertainment, but not the kind of advice you get in English 101. "Hollywood," David Lean, the British director of "Lawrence of Arabia," said, "forgot how to tell stories." It forgot because Hollywood forgot how to feel. When Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the airport in "Casablanca," we feel it, we don't analyze it.

And how would "Casablanca" fare in today's Hollywood? Not too long ago a local reporter sent out the script of the movie, under a different title.

Almost no one recognized it.

The TMCG problem has another effect. It separates Hollywood from its audience. A talent agency head boasted that half his interns come from Ivy League schools. Well, that's wonderful, and I'm sure they're good, intelligent young people. But I've seen that, too often, they don't think of themselves as the audience. The audience is "those people out there."

And here's what studio executives are selling them!

To be fair though, there's at least one contrarian at Cornell--his take on AMC's new Mad Men mini-series sounds remarkably like my own.

And so as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "Aloha, 5 O'clock Charlie!" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Update: "Chutch Faces Firing Squad at CU Today". But how long before he's sitting in for Olbermann?

Thomas Sowell asks, "Is America Today the France of Yesterday?"

Pacifism became vogue among the intelligentsia and spread into educational institutions. As early as 1932, Winston Churchill said: "France, though armed to the teeth, is pacifist to the core."

It was morally paralyzed. [As was pre-Churchillian-England during the same period--Ed]

History may be interesting but it is the present and the future that pose the crucial question: Is America today the France of yesterday?

We know that Iran is moving swiftly toward nuclear weapons while the United Nations is moving slowly -- or not at all -- toward doing anything to stop them.

It is a sign of our irresponsible Utopianism that anyone would even expect the UN to do anything that would make any real difference.

Not only the history of the UN, but the history of the League of Nations before it, demonstrates again and again that going to such places is a way for weak-kneed leaders of democracies to look like they are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing.

The Iranian leaders are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And, like Hitler, they don't think we have the guts to stop them.

Incidentally, Hitler made some of the best anti-war statements of the 1930s. He knew that this was what the Western democracies wanted to hear -- and that it would keep them morally paralyzed while he continued building up his military machine to attack them.

Iranian leaders today make only the most token and transparent claims that they are building "peaceful" nuclear facilities -- in one of the biggest oil-producing countries in the world, which has no need for nuclear power to generate electricity.

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and its international terrorist allies will be a worst threat than Hitler ever was. But, before that happens, the big question is: Are we France? Are we morally paralyzed, perhaps fatally?

The dog that didn't bark during last night's debate may help to answer that question.

Update: Speaking of France in the 1930s, here's an ominous modern parallel.

Great moments in headlines: "Flying Saucer Designed for Greener Air Travel".

This will not make Ed Straker happy at all.

Manolo for the Men's Izzy asks the question about the 2008 election: "There’s a lot of buzz about whether America is willing to elect a black president, but should we be willing to elect a president who wears black suits?"

A New York Times article on the New Republic's "Scott Thomas" gets a significant touch up. Scroll down to Allahpundit's update of this post by Bryan Preston on Hot Air.

Update: Charles Johnson wonders:

Is the Times correcting a mistake, or trying to run interference for the New Republic? It’s long past the point where I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the former.

Certainly, the Times invariably assumes the absolute worst of its ideological enemies. They shouldn't too surprised when others assume the worst about them.

More: Unlike the fires in the basement of Oceania's Ministry of Information, the Web's Memory Hole apparently has a little-known do-over button:

And just like that, after a few hours of complaining from conservatives, the “near certainty” quote is magically restored to the Times piece. No explanation whatsoever. Is it simply case of which side is embarrassing the Times most acutely at any given moment? If Foer comes back with an indignant, outraged post about the Times misquoting him, will it disappear again?

The day's still young!

Mickey Kaus asks, "Historic Historic CNN YouTube Debate--Hello, Florida! Am I crazy or did Barack Obama just get suckered into saying that as President within a year he'd personally meet with Fidel Castro?"

And don't miss Joe Biden's firm embrace of the Second Ammendment, spotted by Ryan Sager:

Biden's obnoxious response when he insulted the gun owner toward the end as being nuts. It wasn't so much a personal gaffe as a moment that projected an ugly image of the Democratic Party as out of touch with rural voters and gun owners — big problems the party has been trying to overcome. He got a huge cheer from the audience, but that just compounded the problem.

Ryan adds, "the Giuliani camp notes there was, as predicted, no mention of 'Islamic terrorists'".

Maybe the candidates simply didn't want to get sued.

Two recent articles of mine set the wayback machine to the early 1960s:

In TCS Daily, I have a longish profile and interview with James Piereson regarding his new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson's look at the tremendous cultural shock that 1963-era liberals underwent when they couldn't process the ideology of JFK's assasssin.

Over at Pajamas Media, I have a review of the new AMC miniseries series Mad Men, which, according to a calender show on screen, is set in March 1960, just as the race between Kennedy and Nixon was getting underway.

Knot up a skinny tie, don your mohair suit and Weejuns, pop on some Sinatra or Miles' Kind of Blue, and check them out!

In response to the claims of pseudonymous soldier/journalist/possible fabulist "Scott Thomas", Bob Owens has two simple questions for The New Republic "that any journalism student should have been able to answer before publishing a similar story":

When did the verbal assault take place on the badly-burned woman at FOB Falcon?

What was the name and location of the combat outpost where a mass grave was discovered?

If the New Republic cannot or will not specifically answer these quite reasonable and very basic journalistic questions, then we will be forced to ask the magazine's senior editors and its publisher far more probing questions in the near future.

Such as those asked by Blackfive's "Uncle Jimbo."

Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk notes that tomorrow could be a big day for everyone's favorite dimestore Indian:

In February we reported on the academic campaign mobilized to defend faux-Indian "Ethnic Studies" professor Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill, as the regents of Colorado University deliberated on whether to fire him for "research misconduct," including lack of academic qualification, plagiarism and misrepresentation about his Indian ancestry, his military service, his Weathermen activities.

The wheels of academic justice grind slowly, and the regents will announce their decision tomorrow, July 24th. Churchill's fans will turn out in force (they hope) to protest what they expect to be a thumbs-down on Churchill's continued employment at Colorado U.

The pressure on Colorado University to dump Churchill is enormous; but it seems safe to say that the majority of it is coming from outside the university, not within it--so it's entirely possible Churchill could keep his job with little more than a slap on the wrist. And as Judith notes, "the case of Phil Mitchell makes clear that free speech is for me but not for thee."

Fun with glowball worming T-shirts.

The man who photographed numerous hit films ranging from the hippy-kitsch Easy Rider to the surprisingly libertarian Ghostbusters was 74:

Laszlo Kovacs, one of Hollywood's most influential and respected directors of photography, died Saturday night in his sleep. He was 74.

Kovacs lensed the landmark cinematic achievement "Easy Rider" and compiled about 60 credits including "Five Easy Pieces," "Shampoo," "Paper Moon," "New York, New York," "What's Up, Doc," "Ghostbusters," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "Miss Congeniality."

The Hungary-born cinematographer also carried during his career a remarkable story of courage that occurred 50 years ago during his country's revolution.

Kovacs was born and raised on a farm in Hungary when that country was isolated from the Western world, first by the Nazi occupation and later during the Cold War. Kovacs was in his final year of school in Budapest when a revolt against the Communist regime started on the city streets.

He and his lifelong friend Vilmos Zsigmond made the daring decision to document the event for its historic significance. To do this, they borrowed film and a camera from their school, hid the camera in a paper bag with a hole for the lens and recorded the conflict.

The pair then embarked on a dangerous journey during which they carried 30,000 feet of documentary film across the border into Austria. They entered the U.S. as political refugees in 1957.

Their historic film was featured in a CBS documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite.

Kovacks sounds like he would have been an ideal choice to shoot Total Eclipse, the one film that Hollywood will never make.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Rasmussen has conducted a series of polls on consumer attitudes on the media, and the results show a widespread conclusion that the American media has a liberal bias. Not only do the major networks have a bias, according to the American news consumer, but so do most of the major newspapers and cable-news outlets.

Is the New York Times shocked by this report? Of course it is.

Finally: two decades after CNN's Bernie Shaw unwittingly nuked Michael Dukakis' campaign with a single query, Pajamas Media dares to ask the candidates the tough questions once again.

Update: Steve Green drunkblogs the debate so you don' t have to (watch the debate I mean; feel free to drink and blog up a storm!) here.

In "1980s Redux: Hillary Clinton and Industrial Policy", James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report writes:

Quick quiz: What does Hillary Clinton think is a "great organizing principle" for the American economy? Increasing our standard of living? Maximizing economic growth and economic freedom, maybe? Putting a chicken in every pot, perhaps? Nope, none of those. In a speech to the Chicago Economic Club last spring, she suggested that climate change would be a cool concept to organize an economy around.

And if government is going to make climate change or energy independence or whatever an explicit "organizing principle" for an economy, it means a return to a once edgy concept from the 1980s: industrial policy—government favor and aid to certain "strategic" industries, whether through subsidies or trade barriers—in pursuit of some national goal. Democrats used to be all hot over this as their "big idea" to counter Reaganomics.

John Kenneth Galbraith is still dead, and his top down economic policies, which date from the era of Andy Williams, should be relagated to the Branson oldies circuit alongside him.

That's Teh Grai Laidee's key to being stocked in the nation's libaries.

Update: "Shock: Ann Coulter Hired At The New York Times!"

Kesher Talk keeps score: "Thomas Lipscomb - 0, Milbloggers - 1"

Nonetheless, when Robert Fisk declares, “The bloggers are winning", it's a sure sign not to get cocky.

Mark Steyn's Song of the Week is The Doors' "Light My Fire", which Mark notes was covered by everybody, back in the day:

It set the summer on fire four decades back. The single was edited down to under three minutes, but the disk jockeys played the original seven-minute album track anyway, from the Doors' eponymous album The Doors. And within a few years it was established as one of those iconic long-form works - "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Stairway To Heaven", "A Day In The Life", "Like A Rolling Stone", etc - that are regarded as the acme of rock. The crude formula seems to be: Length + psychedelic lyric = art. "Light My Fire" comes in at big hit sound 35 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of all time, and places similarly on other lists of all-time blockbusters. But "Light My Fire" can't be confined to the long-form psychedelia category. For one thing, unlike "Bohemian Rhapsody", it's one of the most "covered" songs of the last 40 years. Once upon a time, that was the natural expectation of a song: it would have seemed extraordinarily reductive to say, okay, some guy's already sung "It Had To Be You" or "The Way You Look Tonight", we better find something else to do. Yet, in an age of singer-songwriters, the idea of a song being particular to one artist became an iron law and deviations therefrom were regarded as "covers", the very term indicating something less than an authentic experience. "Light My Fire" must rank as one of the most covered covers of the rock era, and oddly enough it was taken up by the same kind of singers who, a decade earlier, would have been singing standards: the easy listening crowd, the MOR set, the Europop VIP loungers. Who does "Light My Fire"? Everybody. Jose Feliciano. Astrud Gilberto. Jack Jones. Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Trini Lopez, Nancy Sinatra, Al Green, Minnie Riperton, Helmut Zacharias, Etta James, Woody Herman, Mae West, Johnny Mathis, Charo, Horst Jankowski, Edmundo Ros and his Orchestra, Ted Heath and his Orchestra, the Enoch Light Singers, the Burbank Philharmonic... As Mitteleuropean groovers like to say, "Gekommen auf baby, beleuchten sie mein feuer!"

My favorite "cool" version is by Julie London, who's so blase about the whole business you get the feeling you could be rubbing sticks together all night and never get anywhere near to lighting her fire, notwithstanding the orchestral nudges she's getting from the flutes and bongos. And my favorite live version is not the Doors in Boston but Shirley Bassey at the Royal Albert Hall in London a few years ago. Dame Shirl first sang it on her album Something back in 1970, and, while I'm not saying that inside every iconic psychedelic rock track is a faintly camp easy-listening classic trying to break out, for a select few of them that's certainly the case.

Unlike the Summer of Love, the very early days of Blogcritics were only five years ago, not forty. But as I wrote back in August of 2002, in Out of the Cool, Stephanie Stein Crease’s 2002 biography of Gil Evans, she notes that the opening riff from Gil Evans’ “Jambangle” from his 1957 album, Gil Evans & Ten, was the basisfor the chord changes for “Light My Fire”. Once you hear Evans’ song, it’s unmistakable, and you can hear the first 60 seconds here.

Maybe in a way, it kind of makes sense for someone more traditional like Julie London to cover “Light My Fire”, if only to complete the circle.

I hope to have my own review of James Pierson's Camelot and the Cultural Revoltion online in the next week or so. In the meantime, Fred Siegel has a great write-up of the book's central thesis in Opinion Journal, and concludes:

Mr. Piereson's own argument is persuasive and well-presented, but liberalism was never as reasonable as he assumes. The irrationalism that exploded later in the 1960s had been a component of left-wing ideology well before. Herbert Croly, the liberal founder of the New Republic magazine, was drawn to mysticism. In the 1950s ex-Marxists fell over themselves in praise of Wilhelm Reich and "orgone box," hoping that sexual therapy might replace Marxist theory as the toga of the enlightened. And in the very early 1960s a veritable cult of Castro, informed by Franz Fanon's writings on the cleansing virtues of violence, emerged among intellectuals searching for an alternative to middle-class conventions.

It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened. Depending on the temper of the time, such virtue and knowledge can derive disproportionately from scientism or mysticism--or it can mix large dollops of both.

In the latest issue of City Journal, Myron Magnet extends those concepts from the mid-1960s to the present, with an emphasis on today's liberals' reaction to the Duke non-rape case, which Newsweek's Evan Thomas recently unwittingly crystalized down to a single sentence: "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong".

Magnet explains how such a mindset can occur amongst seemingly sophisticated elites:

Part of what a university should teach is the critical reasoning power to analyze situations like these, with claims and counterclaims, and determine what actually happened. But the last few decades’ transformation of the academic worldview unfitted Duke administrators and faculty from making such a judgment. Like the scientists Swift’s Gulliver met in the kingdom of Laputa, they have one eye that looks inward at themselves and one eye that peers outward toward the farthest heavens, leaving no organ to perceive the reality right in front of their noses—the reality that, as George Orwell says, takes a constant struggle to see through the fog of orthodoxy.

Even for the clear-sighted, that reality takes an effort to discern, because we see the world not in an unmediated way but through the prism of our culture (and even of our class or subgroup), which can both clarify and distort. In the act of observing, we also interpret and judge, according to the terms of our culture’s values, morals, and manners. Our power of reason has limits, so that we have to depend on aid from education, tradition, belief, on what Edmund Burke called “prejudice”—again, all products of culture, built up from the inherited wisdom and experience and sometimes superstition of mankind.

Critical reason’s task is to peer through the cultural web in which we are enmeshed to perceive clearly the reality that actually exists, including the man-made reality of the social order, whose terms give our lives meaning. We have to question our culturally created assumptions to clear away attitudinizing or propaganda or superstitious prejudice. But the professors sidestep this challenge, simplifying and flattening these complex truths about culture and consciousness. They reach the false conclusion that all descriptions of society and our nature are not just colored or refracted by our cultural assumptions but are mere propaganda, aimed at convincing others that the world is as our class or subgroup wishes it to be. Moreover, since the profs believe that not just the social order but also what we take to be “human nature” is man-made, whoever wins the propaganda battle gets to mold society and human nature—human reality itself—into the shape he chooses.

From these assumptions flows academe’s well-known mania for unmasking Western civilization (including its literature and art) as a machine for oppressing the nonwhite, non-rich, and non-male. This worldview—which grants its adherents a sense of superiority over their supposedly racist and sexist fellow men and also a belief in their own special power to remake the world by their words—appears so self-evident on campus as to be impervious to such realities as accelerating black success, for example, or the crowding out of male students by female ones on college campuses themselves.

Needless to say, don't miss either man's essay.

Related: "The Kennedy Mythtique….and college snobbery…"

"The minority party has decided we have to get to 60 votes on almost everything we vote on of substance," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "That's not the way this place is supposed to work."

Gee, and that's so unlike the previous five years, or even during the brief Jeffords-era when Tom Daschle was in charge.

Like a latter-day Marshall McLuhan (or maybe George Lois), Gerard Vanderleun does a bang-up job deconstructing Esquire's new John Edwards cover.

I'd actually read Esquire and even the new Men's Vogue magazine if there seemed to be a hint of balance in them. I was a big fan of the wonderfully haughty and elitist M Magazine in the 1980s, and I wrote about Esquire's very early days in the 1930s in the last issue of Classic Style magazine, (article not online, alas), and I'd love to see a return to those sorts of magazines. But today's PG-13-rated men's mags are little more than either Playboy with the girls' naughty bits hidden, or exercises in political correctness. Or both. For periodicals aimed at the mass market, they've done a thorough job of alienating half their buying audience, even as they wonder why their circulation figures have plummeted.

Incidentally, speaking of Edwards, Rob Port wonders if he's ever read the Constitution, or if he doesn't care what's actually contained within it.

“If there’s one beat that’s sacrosanct, it should be TV.”

--Former Philadelphia Inquier TV critic Gail Shister, via Jeff Jarvis, who adds, "Forget City Hall. It’s Regis updates we need!":

Variety sums up the sorry state of the TV critic - and makes me damned glad I’m not one anymore. Gail Shister, who lost both her column and then her TV at the Philadelphia Inquirer, went so far as to hyperbolate: “If there’s one beat that’s sacrosanct, it should be TV.” Forget City Hall. It’s Regis updates we need!

TV as we knew it is exploding and so should the critics who cover it. There is no way — no way — that one critic can perform a one-size-fits-all service anymore. TV critics, like other critics, should become moderators and catalysts of discussion and criticism in the audience. They should be discoverers of hidden gems in the vast and overwhelming world of online video. Like TV itself, they must change or die. And many are just dying.

If you haven't heard this week's Blog Week In Review interview with James Lileks, tune in for his thoughts on the future of newspaper and their columnists. As for the future of television, that's a topic that Andrew Breitbart discussed on the show a couple of weeks ago.

UPI and AP have details.

Update: Newsbusters has some thoughts on AP's coverage.

When NRO's homepage highlighted a new article by Linda Chavez in the New York Post as "The Dems take the wrong approach to poverty.", I was tempted to title this post, "News from 1933", ala James Taranto's running gag in "Best of the Web". But Chavez makes some great observations that shouldn't be dismissed away with snark:

In a nation as rich as ours, argue Obama and Edwards, one-in-ten American families living in poverty is simply unacceptable. I agree, but the numbers reveal a lot more complexity than either man is willing to acknowledge.

First, many of those living below poverty today are new immigrants, both legal and illegal. They are newcomers who lack the education and skills to attain a middle class life, at least initially. The poverty rate for non-citizens, 20 percent, is twice the national average, but it has declined substantially since 1993, when it was almost 30 percent; this despite the fact that there are many more immigrants here now, including substantially more illegal aliens.

Second, neither Obama nor Edwards addresses the issue of family breakdown and its relationship to poverty. The poor are disproportionately made up of women and their children. Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families it was only 8.3 percent.

So why aren't Obama and Edwards talking more about marriage as an antidote to poverty? From all accounts, both men have wonderful, even inspirational, marriages of their own. But many Democrats are worried they might not seem inclusive or might even be viewed as intolerant if they talk up marriage.

It's a lot easier to offer to increase government spending. My suspicion is, however, that most Americans understand that the War on Poverty won't be won by throwing their tax dollars behind more failed programs.

And speaking of 1933, Suzanne Fields makes a great suggestion:

John Edwards has finished his celebrated poverty tour, making obligatory stops in hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods in New Orleans, decrepit Delta towns in Mississippi and Arkansas, up through Appalachian backwaters and finally home to Washington.

Now he ought to sit down for a good read with "The Forgotten Man," a new book by the economist Amity Shlaes.

Tough to argue with that.

Update: Speaking of Edwards, oh to be a fly on the wall when Esquire's art department reconvenes on Monday.

Power Line receives an email from Jerusalem:

[Last month] the New York Times carried a review of a film called "Hot House" that goes inside Israeli prisons and examines the lives of Palestinian prisoners. We're not recommending the film or the review. But we do want to share our feelings with you about the beaming female face that adorns the article [below].

The film is produced by HBO. So it's presumably HBO's publicity department that was responsible for creating and distributing a glamor-style photograph of a smiling, contented-looking young woman in her twenties to promote the movie.

That female is our child's murderer.

Read the whole thing.

This fall, Kiefer Sutherland and 24 are sending a special, special thanks to all of the conservative viewers who've made the show such a Red State smash...

Rudy Giuliani uses R-rated word 15 years ago, puritanical left implodes.

It's not quite Tarkenton meets Staubach, Dylan meets Lennon, Prince meets Morris Day, or an even better Minneapolis-themed metaphor that's eluding me, but James Lileks is interviewed by Pajamas' own Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss the current state of the New, New Journalism.

Tune in here--no iPod required; virtually any computer with broadband can stream an MP3 file.

Related: Maybe Brian Williams should take a listen!

Believe it or not, but when the vast majority of editors whom I've been in contact reject a proposal, they typically respond with a letter dispatched from what Florence King calls "the Republic of Nice". I forget its author, but years ago, I read a book on how to query magazine and newspaper editors that suggested paying particular attention to the odd "Rejection letter with teeth".

While I had numerous queries tossed back to me in the early days, I'm happy to say I never received a rejection letter that sounded like this. Too bad its comments aren't uttered more often in Hollywood, it would lead to infinitely better movies.

(Via Libertas.)

The New Republic's Franklin Foer offers a dissapointingly snarky response to Howard Kurtz about “Baghdad Diarist Scott Thomas", with a defense that sounds more than a little similar to Evan Thomas' infamous recent "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong" line.

But will "Scott Thomas" get his own movie made about his increasingly Walter Mitty meets Walter Duranty sounding exploits?

Update: William Kristol checks in on the latest from the New Republic and the Nation and states the obvious: "They Don't Really Support the Troops".

More: Baldilocks, a veteran herself needless to say, adds:

Odd that Foer doesn't mention that many members of the conservative blogosphere blogging this topic are actual veterans and, therefore would have some real idea--as opposed to a cinema-influenced idea--of what soldiers would or would not do.

Elsewhere, Dean Barnett adds:

In regards to the accuracy of the story, I have yet to see a single military person in any context say the story sounds accurate. Typically the progressive blogosphere has a few such people it can trot out for such occasions. To date, the usual suspects in that regard have yet to make themselves heard.

Read the rest of Dean's post, and don't miss his Weekly Standard article on "The 9/11 Generation".

Andrew Sullivan: "We have to create a social stigma..."

Update: Cassandra of Villainous Company has further thoughts on what she describes as "Social Stigma for Me, But Not for Thee".

Asked about the John Birch Society Society by the New York Times, Ron Paul responds, “Is that BAD? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well-educated and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with.”

In sharp contrast to Ron Paul channeling his inner Sterling Hayden, Rudy Giuliani sews up both the nomination and the general election in a single highly strategic endorsement. Not to mention locking in the votes of both Thomas "Big Tom" Callahan and his son Tommy.

Melanie Phillips explores "The protocols of the BBC"; Fausta writes, "it doesn't take much digging to find example after example of the BBC bias", all within the last day.

And then there's all of this from merely the last couple of weeks. I think we have the answer to ex-Beeb reporter Robin Aitkin's question from several months ago: "Can We Trust The BBC?"

And breaks up Dr. Evil's underground lair, apparently:

The news reports that the billionaire founder of Broadcom is alleged to have built a secret underground suite on the grounds of his mansion, which he is alleged to have stocked with prostitutes and drugs is a titillating rumor, and obviously bad news for the man himself and his family (I won't add to the Google hits by naming him).

But riding home from dinner tonight, it occurred to me that true or not, it is actually great news for America.

Because today when that news broke, millions of teenage boys went "an underground lair stocked with hookers, Ecstasy and blow!! I'm gonna be a tech billionaire!!" and immediately drank a Coke, sat down and cracked their textbooks.

Twenty years from now, there will be whole industries founded by those kids, and all of us will benefit.

But what will happen to Scott Evil?

(Via Pajamas HQ.)

This sounds like something that was left over from the Lucky Strike-themed debut of AMC's Mad Men yesterday: "Turns Out, Those Truth Ads Are Obnoxiously Self-Righteous Enough To Induce Smoking To Spite Them".

When my school banned smoking among students after it caused a major fire on school property, it made it seem infinitely cooler for kids to smoke, if only to stick it to The Man. (Including, as I recall, the Headmaster's daughter herself, who was caught lighting up a Marlboro or two.)

David Frum writes that "The decision by Democratic senators to quash the so-called John Doe amendment is the first truly serious error made by the new majority":

The Democrats' decision to kill the amendment in a secretive way makes clear that they understand full well the danger of their vote. Andy McCarthy explains well over at the Corner just how outrageous this vote will sound to a typical voter:

What possible good reason is there to silence people who want to tell the police they saw suspicious behavior? Under circumstances where we are under threat from covert terror networks which secretly embed themselves in our society to prepare and carry out WMD attacks? Planet earth to the Democrats: To execute such attacks, terrorists have to act suspiciously at some point. There are only a few thousand federal agents in the country. There are many more local police, but even they are relatively sparse in a country of 300 million. If we are going to stop the people trying to kill us, we need ordinary citizens on their toes. Again, this is just common sense.

But it seems that the Democratic left cannot tolerate such sense. Forced to choose between multicultural orthodoxy or national security, the Democratic left has chosen multicultural orthodoxy. Fine. Let's ram the point home. Bring this measure to a vote again and again and again. Stamp it into the national consciousness. This is midnight basketball, Dukakis in the tank, and Willie Horton all rolled into one.

Over to you, Mitch!

Update: More from Betsy Newmark.

Fresh off his interview with Capt. Ed on Blog Talk Radio, Hugh Hewitt's "Generalissimo" Duane Patterson writes:

A remarkable thing happened in the United States Senate earlier this evening, and it occurred over a rather unremarkable piece of legislation that was being debated. Conservatives, frustrated at the lack of a genuine leader of their party, may have finally found one in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell.

Read the whole thing.

Even as the the New York Times and the Huffington Post both claim that "We each have our own truth", sometimes respected publications get too carried away even by the endlessly flexible standards of postmodernism. Witness Scott Thomas, the "pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Baghdad", according to the New Republic, which published his recent article with a trifecta of victims: women, children and animals, all cruelly abused by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and all quite possibly imaginary.

Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Adnan Hajj and John Kerry could not be reached for comment. But it certainly allows the folks at the new Media Mythbusters Wiki to hit the ground running.

The Motion Picture Association of America have made their ruling, and we stand by their decision:

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

Via the G-Rated Virginia Postrel. Get your blog rated, here.

And speaking of the movies, check out my reviews of four new Hollywood-related books at Blogcritics.

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg had an interesting essay on changing attitudes regarding "the Imperial Presidency". But these fellows are taking the idea into a galaxy far, far away....

Ed Morrissey interviewed the senator (fresh off his all-nighter earlier this week) today on the good Captain's Internet radio show. Click here for an archived podcast.

Forget the recently announced remake of 1,000,000 years B.C.--especially since it will lack the essential elements for such a movie: a 1966 A.D.-era Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. Instead, here are two video clips beamed back from the dinosaur world of the past:

"Sen. John Kerry said during a C-Span appearance that fears of a bloodbath after the US withdrawal from Vietnam never materialized. He says he's met survivors of the "reeducation camps" who are thriving in modern Vietnam. An award-winning investigation by the Orange County Register concludes that at least 165,000 people perished in the camps."

Meanwhile, Dan Rather claims "I’m big on personal responsibility". Postmodern comedy gold! Who knew the man was such a performance artist?

Update: Heh:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in the Senate.

P.J. O'Rourke wouldn't argue with that.

Related: Will Collier asks, isn't it ironic, don't you think?

I was just interviewed by a camera crew, and will apparently be on the CBS Evening News tonight.

Given the history of this very blog, I hereby pause for a moment to soak in the irony.

Today's events tell me two things: One, CBS doesn't have Google. Two, this must be the slowest news day in the history of the planet, and possibly the universe.

He'll probably be discussing this with the network that brought you not only RatherGate, but Maude and Petticoat Junction as well.

CNN's Ed Henry profiles comedian Dave Chappelle:

Chappelle said he was feeling good and then asked me a question about covering the White House. “Has the president given you a nickname?” he asked.

Believe it or not, this is a frequent query because the president used to hand out nicknames to reporters like “Stretch” to a tall guy and “Super Stretch” to an even taller correspondent. But that’s sooooo 2001 — I started covering Mr. Bush in the second term so I never got one.

“Oh,” Chappelle cracked. “That’s my favorite part of the Bush presidency — the nicknames.”

Since Chappelle made international headlines in 2005 by essentially disappearing for awhile under strange circumstances — and walking away from a $50 million deal to continue his show on Comedy Central — I asked what he’s doing next.

“I want your job,” he said, explaining that it’s fun to watch reporters go back-and-forth with White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.

“Or maybe I’ll take Tony Snow’s job,” Chappelle smiled. “I think that’s a cool job.”

Wouldn't you pay money to see him to answer Helen Thomas's loony questions in his Rick James persona?

Update: The blogger behind Immodest Proposals emails in that he suggested Chappelle as press secretary a year ago, along with a variety of other proposals to spice up the routine quotidian details of the daily pressers.

John Leo observes the New York Times "Swerving Around Riots":

In 1967, Newark erupted in gunfire, looting, and arson, killing 23 people and injuring 700. But 40 years later, the New York Times still is not certain that this event should properly be called a "riot." In a news article marking the anniversary, the Times reminds us that "frightened white residents" of the 1960s opted for the word "riot," while "black activists" of the period called it a "rebellion."

In a bracing slap at readers who unthinkingly might refer to several days of riotous behavior as a "riot," the Times quotes the president of the New Jersey Historical Society, Linda Epps, who says: "there is not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived." So what would fair-minded neutral people call it today? No need to wonder. The Times tells us: "Those seeking neutrality have come to embrace the word ‘disturbance.'" I can sympathize. Unaware that they may be giving offense, many Americans and Europeans still blithely talk about "World War II," with its aggressive and wounding reference to armed conflict. On the other hand, many German activists of the period preferred the term "unjustified trampling of the Third Reich's perfectly legitimate lebensraum and population control policies." Surely it is time for a non-provocative name for this troublesome six-year disturbance. How about "the multiple disagreements and tragic misunderstandings of 1939-1945?" Or perhaps "World Woe II," so we can retain the established initials.

Reuters in particularly would probably go for that. And retaining something close to the established initials and dates is basically what this academic initiative to increase society's fracturing is subtly designed to do.

Not surprisingly for a postmodern institution, the Times wants it both ways: they want to hold themselves out as The Paper Of Record, but simultaneously claim that there isn't one record of events. Pat Moynihan's famous quote is, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts". By stating (via their choice of quotes) that "there is not one truth, and your view depends on your race, your age and where you lived", (and Jim McGreevy would add sexual orientation to that list) the Times believes that everyone is entitled to their own facts. That's an awfully strange way to run a newspaper.

At least from my point of view.

In an essay on the hypocrisy of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine", Victor Davis Hanson writes that "There is a sort of irony in the debate over talk radio":

Of all our media, it is perhaps the most populist. A radio host requires neither a journalism degree nor political connections. He just needs sheer talent. The unforgiving market - judged by how many turn the dial to your show or call in with questions - alone adjudicates success. Liberals who profess affinity for the little guy should welcome this prairie-fire revolt against the more highbrow New York Times, CBS News or NPR.

Absolutely. Just like they've welcomed an even more populist prairie-fire revolt against Big Journalism.

(Via Beyond The News.)

In a "Best of the Web" item on the media's swarming mass attack on the Duke lacrosse players, James Taranto spots this year's equivalent of 2004’s "fake but accurate" Ra^therGate defense, from Newsweek's Evan Thomas, famous for another line regarding media groupthink from that year.

Read the whole quote, which Taranto rightly calls "damning".

Update: Jules Crittenden has some thoughts that are well worth reading on how the media's narratives impact the war in Iraq.

NOTE (3/3/08): If you're clicking in on March 3, 2008, you may be looking for this story, as the photo and story below concern an explosion from last July.

Bloomberg (the wire service, not the mayor) reports:

An explosion was reported near the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 41st Street near Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, the New York City Police Department said.

There was an underground explosion of unknown origin, possibly a manhole or transformer, said Sergeant Reginald Watkins. Officers are en route and he no additional information at this time. Watkins didn't have any information about a building collapse, deaths or injuries.

"Officials said it was not terrorism related", according to AP.

More as it comes in.

Update: Here's a CBS report:

Fire and emergency crews responded to the scene of a suspected steam explosion near Grand Central Station in Manhattan on Wednesday during the evening rush hour, officials said.

There were no initial reports of injuries, reports CBS station WCBS-TV in New York.

The New York Police Department said a steam pipe exploded, and it does not appear to be terrorism-related.

A large column of gray smoke poured from the vicinity of a building near Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building, and the air near the site was filled with ash.

The explosion occurred at 43st Street and Lexington Avenue.

Thousands of commuters evacuated the train terminal, some at a run, after workers yelled for people to get out of the building.

Witnesses reported that their buildings shook.

Photo above via the San Jose Mercury News.

Update: Pajamas has addtional links, and notes that CNN has a live internet video stream covering the event. Meanwhile, Breitbart.tv has a CNN Headline News clip titled, "Hundreds of People Running Down Third Avenue", which initially blames the explosion on a faulty transformer near the Chrysler Building. "It sounded like an earthquake"..."an enormous hole in the middle of the street"..."billowing smoke".

Update: K-Lo writes, "A Lexington Aveneu-er who was there six years ago comments: 'NYC people still remember — though you'd never know it on a normal day. but Lexington has been lined with people stopping and looking with those same faces from a few years back.'"

Last Update? Hot Air's Allahpundit channels his inner Mike Gravel and posts the perfect video metaphor of his thoughts on the story's lack of newsworthiness. From what I've read in his book, I think Drew Curtis of Fark.com probably has a similar take.

But what the heck. Since I'm in for at least a penny on this story, speaking of video, Wired's Danger Room has this impressive video clip:

And the explosion is also a reminder of something that Nicole Gelinas of City Journal noted late last month: Manhattan's physical infrastructure "desperately needs renewal".

More: Last update? Who am I kidding! Reader Peter Malloy writes in, "Ed, you seem to be the aggregator of the hour for the explosion in NYC. I thought I would pass along my eyewitness account":

I was in a conference room on the 31st floor of a building at 43rd and Lexington, with windows looking directly over the incident. At first we heard a very loud rumble. It was not an explosion per se, but a very loud protracted rumble. Our building shook and the lights flickered on and off. We went to the window to see what it was, and saw a cloud of what appeared to be smoke engulf the building nearest the incident. The smoke or whatever it was was at our height and rising. There was a palpable moment where no one said a thing but all knew for a certainty that it was the destruction of that building which could only be caused by one thing. The persistent rumbling was clearly the building falling to the ground and the mushrooming smoke and dust (vapor actually, but we did not know it then) was all too familiar. Then someone said "Lets get out of here" and we moved to the elevators and evacuated the building along with everyone else in it. It happened orderly and without panic - clearly some lessons had been learned. We exited onto Lexington Avenue, took one look south at the seeming inferno and quickly headed north. Being the cynical New Yorker that I am, I had become a little tired of the NYFD hero act. However, as what seemed like all of the east side moving uptown on foot, I could not help but be moved by the fire trucks with firefighters in it rushing south into the mess, not knowing, like the rest of us, what exactly had happened but suspecting the worst.

One person is dead and 20 injured, according to this report.

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl posts a photo of onlookers along with a key detail:

Everyone is taking video, or snapping photos with their cell phones.

I imagine they easily outnumber the journalists doing the same.

That won't make Brian Williams happy.

Update: Ron Coleman has some thoughts on Dan Riehl's post

Yes, we’re all on board — journalism is something you do, not something you "are," i.e., not a privileged caste.

Exactly. Though that's not something that a caste whose privileges are slowly ebbing wants to hear, which helps to explain all of these cranky responses to the people they now share their turf with, however reluctantly.

Fellow bleary-eyed fans of late night cable TV in the 1980s will remember the hilarious beat that show hostess Rhonda Shear put on that TV series' slogan. And after having been kept up all night by Harry Reid, Robert Byrd sounds even more bleary than usual himself.

Or as Ace puts it, "Another Former Member of Terrorist Organization Admits Al Qaeda Threat".

Don Surber adds that "Byrd is so wrapped up in pleasing the Ultra Left that he doesn’t care if Iraq becomes a failed state or not, or a sfae haven again for terrorists."

Update: For some balance from Harry and Byrd's doomsaying, Ed Morrissey notes that General David Petraeus will be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show in about an hour.

Ace notes that the "BBC Suspends Phone-In Competitions After Shows Found To Have Given Awards To Fictitious 'Callers,' Sometimes BBC Personnel". He adds, "What could possibly go wrong with a state-operated media monopoly designed to propagandize and anaesthetize its viewers?"

Indeed.^TM

I'd call it more of a case magical thinking, but as they say in the NFL, you make the call!

Back in February, I wrote:

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them? By and large, I believe the general public has come to believe that the vast majority of old media outlets lean to the left, despite the exponentially diminishing claims of objectivity. And since half the country does as well, newspapers and television have a wide audience to aim their content. So does that mean that Blogosphere complaints about the MSM are being read as mere partisan sniping?

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue.

Found via Hugh Hewitt, the Wall Street Journal writes that one element of the industry's financial pyramid is looking more than a little shaky this year:

Even as News Corp. negotiated to buy Dow Jones & Co. over the past few weeks, a grim reality was increasingly evident to executives on both sides of the discussion: The downturn in the newspaper industry is getting worse.

Last fall, newspaper executives and analysts were caught by surprise by the severity of a slump that took hold last summer. Since the beginning of this year, the rate of decline in advertising revenue has accelerated. Total print and online ad revenue was down 4.8% to $10.6 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the Newspaper Association of America, compared with its full-year decline in 2006 of 0.3%.

In the first quarter, revenue for every major ad category -- classified, national and retail advertising -- was down. The sharpest declines were for classifieds, where spending dropped 13.2% -- not so much a result of competition from the Web [Are you sure?--Ed] as of economic woes affecting certain categories of advertisers. Real-estate classifieds, until recently a bright spot for the industry, have plunged along with the property market. Auto and employment classifieds are also sinking. Financial-news outlets such as the Journal are being hurt by a slump in technology advertising.

"Right now, you've got a perfect storm," says Edward Atorino, an analyst with financial broker Benchmark Co. [Hey, that rings a bell!--Ed] He predicts total ad revenue will fall 4.3% this year. The decline will be one of the steepest in history.

And that's in a year when the Dow is flirting with 14,000. Combine this with a rampant case of BDS, and you've got a pretty good explanation as to why the average newspaper columnist sounds more than a little harried these days.

(Though I don't think we can blame an article like this solely on reduced ad revenues...)

Update: "New Poll Reflects Media’s Negative Impact on Economic Perceptions". As Virginia Postrel and Ed Morrissey have written, the media's own economics also color how they view the economy as a whole, in addition to their issues with whichever party is controlling the White House.

More: And now for news of fresh disaster: James Lileks writes that Minneapolis' "Pioneer Press Sheds More Jobs". And AP notes that "The E.W. Scripps Co. said Tuesday it will end publication of The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post on Dec. 31, when a joint operating agreement with Gannett Co. and The Cincinnati Enquirer expires."

In his nifty "D.I.Y." song from 1978, Peter Gabriel sang the praises of Do It Yourself:

When things get so big, I don't trust them at all

You want some control -- you've got to keep it small

But that was a long time ago. These days, Peter sounds much less entrepreneurial--as does one-time uber-entrepreneur Richard Branson:

Nelson Mandela celebrates his 89th birthday tomorrow in Johannesburg, launching a humanitarian campaign along with former President Jimmy Carter, ex-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other “elders” of the global village. The initiative stems from an idea by British entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel to create a world council of elders to tackle issues such as conflict, AIDS and global warming.

Peter Seeger wouldn't complain much about Gabriel and Branson's "idea", of course. But for everyone else, it's obvious that the old days of "Don't trust anybody over 30" have sure gone out the window, now that the average superstar rock musician is typically quite an elder himself.

Update: "I for one welcome our new geriatric overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blog commenter, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Metamucil caves."

In the Commentary essay (reprinted here) that inspired his new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson wrote:

There is much about Oswald and the assassination that can now never be known for certain. Of one thing, however, there can be little doubt: there would never have been any serious talk about a conspiracy if President Kennedy had been shot by a right-wing figure whose guilt was established by the same evidence as condemned Oswald. Such an event would have been readily understood in terms of then prevailing assumptions about the dangers from the Right. Kennedy’s assassin, however, bolted onto the historical stage in violation of a script that many people had assimilated as the truth about America. Instead of adjusting their thinking accordingly, they strove to account for the discordance by taking refuge in conspiracy theories.

As I've written before, this sort of paranoia was associated in the 1950s and early-60s with the fringe elements of the right, before the inability to process Oswald's ideology was one of the first key sign of a far left becoming increasingly batty.

Similarly, the overheated language of the modern left, such as Al Gore’s recent attempt to demonize his critics as “Digital Brownshirts” also begins to grow out of this mid-1960s period. “Just as the Birch Society had accused Eisenhower of being a communist”, Piereson recently told me in an interview, “by the late sixties, the liberals and leftists were accusing everyone else with being Nazis and fascists."

You can see both elements at play here:

The nation’s first Muslim congressman said Tuesday that he erred in comparing the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 to an event that led to Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power in Nazi Germany.

At an appearance before a group of atheists in Minnesota on July 8, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called Sept. 11 “the juggernaut” that led to war, tolerating torture and increased discrimination against religious minorities.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” he said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

Ellison has since issued a sort of non-apology apology for his remarks; the whole thing is very much in line with the "blurt and retreat" strategy that Steven Hayward described recently in regards to an even more prominent member of the left.

Pigs fly on the Today show regarding the US economy; the Dow briefly entered uncharted 14,000 territory today before closing at 13,971.55.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Kudlow will be saying 'I told you so' again today", and he already is.

Meanwhile, for perspective, Amity Shlaes looks back at a decade of voodoo economics at their worst, in an audio interview with Hugh Hewitt.

Redbook airbrushes minor imperfections out of its celebrity cover photos, astonished blogger blows gasket. The site is part of the Nick Denton blog empire, which isn't averse to running a little Photoshoppery themselves from time to time.

(Via Gerard Van der Leun. It's not exactly Shinders, but his post has numerous other links for your reading pleasure.)

As Jonah Goldberg wrote last year, "Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a 'respectable' conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power."

And if the media can't find such a man to interview, they'll simply invent him.

Well, I can't argue with that!

Just got back from a quick trip to L.A., watch for more in a bit.

Mark Steyn riffs on Live Earth and its dead TV ratings, before noting, "Professor Chris Rapley, head honcho of the British Antarctic Survey, turned up on the BBC to argue that population control is central to the environmental debate":

How many Englishmen, Scotsmen, Greeks or Italians are around in the year 2050 will have no measurable impact on so-called "climate change." None whatsoever. Having fewer British or Spanish babies will do nothing for the polar bear on the ice floes posing for Al Gore's next documentary. But how many British and Spanish babies are born right now — this year and next year — will certainly have an impact on what Britain and Spain are like in the year 2050. These men of "science" have not called on Niger or Somalia or Afghanistan or Yemen — where women have seven or eight babies — to have one or even six less. Presumably the Optimum Population Trust (a magnificently totalitarian-lite moniker, by the way) feels the average Somali or Afghan has a more eco-friendly carbon footprint, and thus a world with fewer English and more Yemeni will be a more "sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren."

Well, I guess Professor Guillebaud's grandchildren (assuming he has any) will eventually discover whether he was right about that. Few westerners are yet as boldly explicit in their anti-humanism, but there is a more general insouciance among these ancient European peoples as they commence, in effect, to vanish from the earth in an incremental auto-genocide: the Scots and Germans would rather weep for obscure insects on distant continents than for themselves. They agitate for a Live Earth but are indifferent to their own demise.

Europe has been indifferent to causing its own demise since about 1914, or actually, 1882, when, as Tom Wolfe has noted, Nietzsche declared that "God is dead":

The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

Hopefully their current method won't be as bloody for them--or us--as all of their previous attempts.

"Ten years ago it looked as if the royal family was on its way out; an unloved anachronism. Today which publicly funded institution looks more confident and secure: the monarchy or the BBC?"

Update: Regarding the clip above, Andrew of the Biased BBC blog writes:

Courtesy of GrauniadUnlimitedTV (I wonder how they got hold of it!), here is an unexpurgated 43 second clip of the BBC's preview trailer, including the now infamous switched around clips wrongly portraying the Queen as 'storming out' of a photo shoot...

...The silly music and the cinematic voiceover hardly speak for the BBC's confidence in the ability of their programmes to sell themselves, do they?"

I suppose one could say it's a sign of "A Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture".

In April, Tim Graham asked, "Was Team Hillary Especially Interested In Removing Imus from Cable TV?"

Today, Lisa Schiffren writes:

Most people who followed that brouhaha credited the rabble-rousing Reverend, Al Sharpton, with escalating the tensions to the point that NBC had little recourse but to capitulate and fire Imus, in our race sensitive environment. But, according to John Perazzo, that would be wrong. Perazzo makes, and documents, a credible case that none other than Herself was the force behind Imus's downfall. Why did she care about Imus in particular, considering that there are talk show hosts far to the right of him on all day?

Read the whole thing.

Update: The Imus comeback itself? Approved for takeoff!

Allah notes that "Mag busts Reuters for using fictional source in 'Sopranos' piece", whose name, according to Reuters, is the very Sopranos-like "Johnny Salami".

"Exit question: Where’s Johnny now? Exit answer: You know where. With Tommy."

Meanwhile, the headline on Howard Kurtz's latest piece sounds like he may have phoned it in from the Bada Bing: "Bikini Journalism".

At the Pajamas Institute For Advanced Blogospheric Studies, Dr. Helen answers the question, "Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own?"

Honestly, one thing I have noticed in terms of dealing with others who have different political beliefs is that the more someone espouses how “tolerant and liberal they are,” the less they seem to be able to tolerate views of those who have different views from themselves, particularly in interpersonal relationships.

Or at Antioch University, different views of footwear:

Steven Lawry — Antioch’s fifth president in 13 years — came to the college 18 months ago. He told Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education about a student who left after being assaulted because he wore Nike shoes, symbols of globalization.

This sounds like a topic Professor Manolo could ruminate at length on.

Dan Riehl writes:

Forget that his latest mockumentary Sicko was DOA, when a would be champion of Liberal and Far-Left causes like Michael Moore is reduced to a cat fight he loses with CNN and Wolf Blitzer because, well, they're obviously biased and in the pocket of the man, I think it's safe to say you have been, for all intents and purposes, politically marginalized.

It's worth flashing back to how quickly Moore obtained superstardom amongst the left, by recalling his status amongst liberals in general immediately after 9/11. Moore's ascension was documented by Mark Steyn in mid-2004 at the height of liberalism's Fahrenheit 9/11-mania:

In the autumn of 2001, Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate, wrote a column bemoaning what he regarded as a silly post-9/11 trend. The Weekly Standard, the New Republic and other publications had begun giving ‘Susan Sontag Awards’ and similarly facetious honours for notably stupid anti-war commentary. Early winners included Oliver Stone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Moore, etc. Weisberg thought this unworthy of serious news magazines: ‘Stone and Moore are well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left,’ he wrote. The idea that ‘these comments represent a significant body of anti-war opinion’ was preposterous.... Put bluntly, there is no anti-war movement, intellectual or popular, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one opposes the war. According to polls, 5 per cent of the country is against it. There are pacifists and Buddhists ...Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers.’

Well, something’s changed in the last couple of years, and those left-wing stragglers are a lot less malnourished. Last weekend Michael Moore, the ‘well-known crank’ regarded with ‘considerable distaste’, had the Number One movie in North America. Okay, its weekend gross was $21 million, which sounds big, until you realise that the week before a dumb comedy called Dodgeball took $30 million without anybody even noticing. On the other hand, the business of Congress wasn’t put on hold because so many Democratic bigshots were attending the premiere of Dodgeball. That did happen with the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when the movie was over it was all five-star raves. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa urged all Americans to see the film. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, praised the film for raising ‘a lot of issues that Americans are talking about’ - i.e., is Bush in league with the bin Laden family?

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Let's see if Moore is welcome at the 2008 Democratic Convention before concluding that he's marginalized himself."

"Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice."

Update: Late-night restaurant guides to the rescue!

William Kristal explains why history will be kind to President Bush.

Right--as soon as someone can find a liberal from the New York Times or The Nation who has a favorable word for Richard Nixon, I'll believe this.

Update: Here's an article which has the audacity to claim that President Reagan, a man who, if you believe many in today's media, enjoyed universal bipartisan support in the 1980s, actually had a detractor or two during the MTV decade! Heresy I know, but still, for completeness sake, we're reposting our link to it.

Meanwhile, Power Line has some related thoughts.

Everything old is new again, as a prominent television network recycles Saturday Night Live's old "Killer Bees" routine. But these sketches were infinitely more fun when it was John Belushi in the bee suit.

Sir Antony Jay, formerly of the BBC, sounds very much like fellow former Beeb reporter Robin Aitken, whom I profiled for Tech Central Station a few months ago.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters writes:

An excerpt of the book was published by Britain’s Telegraph Sunday, and, much like Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” gave a first-hand account as to what makes a television network lean so strongly to the left.

I think I am beginning to see the answer to a question that has puzzled me for the past 40 years. The question is simple - much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of what are called the chattering classes? They are that minority characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form found in the Guardian, Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC News and Current Affairs, who constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus - though the word “liberal” would have Adam Smith rotating at maximum velocity in his grave. Let's call it "media liberalism".

It is of particular interest to me because for nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan's premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

It was (and is) essentially, though not exclusively, a graduate phenomenon. From time to time it finds an issue that strikes a chord with the broad mass of the nation, but in most respects it is wildly unrepresentative of national opinion. When the Queen Mother died the media liberal press dismissed it as an event of no particular importance, and were mortified to see the vast crowds lining the route for her funeral, and the great flood of national emotion that it released.

Although I was a card-carrying media liberal for the best part of nine years, there was nothing in my past to predispose me towards membership.

In Jay’s opinion, media members “look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed,” and “see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.”

With this in mind, when a British politician named John Profumo became involved in a sex scandal in 1963 which was believed to have led to the demise of the Conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, things changed:

[T]he emotion that gripped us all was sheer uncontrollable glee. It was a wonderful vindication of all we believed. It proved the essential rottenness of the institution.

Ever since 1963, the institutions have been the villains of the media liberals. The police, the armed services, the courts, political parties, multinational corporations - when things go wrong, they are the usual suspects. In my media liberal days our attitude to institutions varied from suspicion to hostility. From our point of view, the view from below, they were all potential threats to human freedom. Even though I worked in a great institution, I did not identify with it. To describe a colleague as anti-BBC was a term of praise.

Obviously, what James Piereson has described as "punitive liberalism" was hardly confined to American liberals or their media.

Over at Samizdata, Adriana Lukas has further thoughts on "The media ideology".

Greg Pollowitz writes that the slogan of the touristy Pennsylvania mountainous retreat takes on a whole new meaning these days.

Larry David celebrates his divorce from the environmentally and toilet-paperly obsessive Laurie David:

Now that he’s separated, Larry David is having a laugh at his wife’s expense. The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” card said he celebrated the end of his 14-year marriage to eco-activist Laurie David in a way that was sure to upset her. “After the divorce, I went home and turned all the lights on,” David told TV critics in LA. A fiercely private guy, David denied that his wife’s public war on global warming caused the split. “No, no, no, she’s been that way throughout,” he said.

I think we should follow his example and all join in the celebration tonight.

Follow the bouncing flip-flop! This Editor & Publisher piece begins with a headline that says, "'Sun-Times': Cancel That Left Turn", includes a quote from Cheryl L. Reed, the new Chicago Sun-Times editorial page editor:

In a column in Sunday's editions, Reed writes, "the word liberal carries a lot of baggage, so I'm discovering."

She added she had "no intention of driving this paper down some partisan path."

And ends with this:

Sunday, the paper introduced a new slogan for the editorial pages: "A progressive, independent voice for the city that works."

Isn't "progressive" merely the latest euphemism for what the left likes to call themselves? Or is the Chicago Sun-Times simply yet another media source that's ashamed to tell its readers its ideology...keeping it inline with the eighty-year old paradigm followed by virtually everyone in the Parliament of Clocks?

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, June 27th:

President Bush made solid gains among Hispanic voters. Hispanics gave 21 percent of their votes to Bob Dole in 1996, 35 percent to Bush in 2000, and 39 to him in 2004. That is a much larger swing toward the GOP than we saw in the electorate as a whole, and supporters of the Bush approach to issues of particular concern to Hispanics can legitimately use it to strengthen their case. But they keep claiming that Bush did even better than he did—that he got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote—and it's just not so.

National Review's Mona Charen, yesterday:

In 2004, President Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.

But hey, what's five or six percent amongst friends?

Hugh Hewitt links to this piece by AP's Larry McShane on New York's hellish summer of 1977:

Thirty years ago, as the temperatures soared and its morale plunged, New York City endured a scathing summer custom-made for tabloid headlines: A crippling July blackout, complete with arson and looting ("24 HOURS OF TERROR"); a media-savvy serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam ("NO ONE IS SAFE"); and a dysfunctional, sensational New York Yankees team ("THE BRONX ZOO").

There was more: A bitterly contested mayoral race, the lingering threat of fiscal disaster, the perception that crime was turning New York City into Dodge City (albeit with a splashier skyline). The nation's largest city was becoming a punchline, but those who resisted the urge to flee the five boroughs weren't laughing.

"There were three things that were bad for the city: First was the blackout and the looting," recalled Ed Koch, who was running to unseat incumbent Mayor Abe Beame. "Second was the fear in the city with the Son of Sam. And third was Howard Cosell's comment that the Bronx was burning."

The air of desperation eventually led to inspiration: ESPN is revisiting 1977 with its eight-part serialization of the Jonathan Mahler book "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning," while Spike Lee directed the slice of '77 life "Summer of Sam" back in 1999.

But it's not an era that inspires nostalgia.

Don't be so sure.

But for the rest of us, who don't long for New York's Death Wish/Taxi Driver days, while 1977 may have been liberal society's nadir, there were signs of optimism if you looked carefully enough:

Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the first Apples were slowing bringing the computer into the home. CompuServe had just begun offering the information on its mainframe computers to anyone who wanted to dial in with a modem and pay an hourly fee. (Doesn't "modem" sound better if you put Dr. Evil-style air quotes around the word and pause for overdramatic effect between its two syllables?)

Robert Bartley, Larry Kudlow and Jude Wanniski were rediscovering classical economics and the power of free markets, hoping to convince the next president of their power.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were rediscovering classic movie genres, helping to keep the lights on in their industry for another few decades.

Conrail, a government-formed bailout of Penn Central and a half-dozen other bankrupt northeast railroads, was quietly cleaning up the financial disaster it inherited and would eventually emerge as a profitable enterprise, saving private railroad ownership.

So chin-up, those of you who think you're currently living in the worst of all possible times. There are always tiny pockets of hope, if you know where to look.

Besides, as the man said, there's got to be a pony in there, somewhere.

We haven't seen Osama bin Laden in a while, but it certainly looks like life has been treating him well--he hasn't aged a day in six years!

"Summer of Sequels", indeed.

Hopefully it will be used for something other than a newspaper. Business Week asks, "Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?"

It's a question worth asking. This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads. At Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, according to a deposition given by James M. Asher, the company's chief legal and business development officer, losses of $330 million piled up between mid-2000 and September, 2006, better—or should I say worse?—than $1 million a week. During negotiations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's unions, the owning Block family disclosed that the paper lost $20 million in 2006. Late last year, The Boston Globe was headed for unprofitability as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And 2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: "If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I'd say you were smoking dope." Print newspapers require maintaining a costly status quo—paper, presses, trucks, and mail rooms—that, if only through rising gas prices, will only get more expensive.

WHEN, EXACTLY, do you junk something that no longer works? And which major paper should go first—not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months?

San Francisco Chronicle, I'm looking at you.

Read the whole thing, as the media's Red Queen's Race marches on. Note also though that if the Chronicle actually does go online-only, it will be for purely business reasons, I believe: San Francisco's shrinking population base and easy broadband access. There aren't enough conservatives left in SF for bias to play a significant reason for the paper's demise. While that's a testament to San Francisco's poor governance (including crime and out-of-control feral homeless), I can't fault the Chronicle for pandering its biases to its remaining audience.

Obligatory New Media Exit Question: Will going online-only save newspapers, or is it merely a rest stop on the way to 2014?

(Via NRO's Media Blog.)

In this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay gets Jeff Goldstein and Neo-Neocon's thoughts on Live Earth: "Rockstars For Whatever".

And speaking of Live Earth, Tim Blair writes that the party to fight global cooling continues!

The Weekly Standard explores "The forgotten aspects of John Scopes' famous biology textbook".

I don't know about you, but after watching this ad, there's no way I'm voting for David Dinkins in 2008.

The PR firm that represents Fretlight contacted me last month and asked if I wanted to write a review of the Fretlight guitar teaching system. When their CEO showed up with a guitar in his hands yesterday to demonstrate, I thought it would also be a great excuse to shoot some video:

You may have heard John Bolton's brief BBC interview in May, in which the sparks really flew--when confronted with a hard-left "reporter", Bolton fired back at virtually all of his assumptions. While Jack Tapper's tone is nowhere near as arch as the perpetually-sneering BBC man that Bolton sparred with, think of Hugh Hewitt's hour-long interview with Tapper as the long-form Director's Cut edition.

What ties both interviews together are the moments when each network journalist is confronted with questions about his biases, and those of his employers. Hugh was interviewed by Tapper ostensibly to discuss his new book on Mitt Romney, and Romney's Mormon faith. And to the extent that we're electing someone to wield enormous power on a world scale, I understand the media's obsession with uncovering as much as possible about that person's religious beliefs and worldview.

But elite journalists have some impressive power as well. Walter Cronkite's views on the Tet Offensive, though wrong, were enough to cause Lyndon Johnson not to run in 1968, and led to an erosion of public confidence in the Vietnam War. Dan Rather deliberately tried to influence the 2004 election with falsified documents. But while the MSM's power has faded in recent years as alternative media have helped to dilute and diversify the "parliament of clocks" monolithic nature of the MSM, as Peggy Noonan wrote after Hurricane Katrina, they can still greatly influence public opinion.

Which is why Tapper's deliberate naiveté regarding ABC anchorman Charlie Gibson is so curious. As I wrote when Leslie Stahl gave a similar response when asked about CBS's biases:

This one of these great windows on the MSM mindset moments. Stahl's attitude, a sort of voluntary self-lobotomizing of whatever reportorial skills she might otherwise be able to bring to the issues of politics and the media, dates back to the mid-century era when there were three television networks, and one or two big city newspapers. Because information resources were so expensive, and therefore, so scarce, journalists had to adopt a group public statement expressed time and again to their audiences that they were “unbiased and objective”—even as they brought to bear, en masse, a sort of bland New Deal mindset worldview (which has tilted further left as Democrat politics titled further left beginning in the late 1960s) that lingers to this day.

It's a mindset, and a public response that has been the norm for about eighty years. But in an age of information abundance, it's becoming increasingly harder to sell, as a listen to Tapper's increasingly exasperated tone demonstrates.

The L.A. Times may have used the phrase as a disgusting metaphor for their competition, but they're a much more literal concern for their Manhattan-based namesake.

New York magazine quotes a Times staffer as saying, "With maggot-y ceilings and rats falling out of the air, it's like the dark ages in this building". Somehow, I doubt Victor Davis Hanson would argue with that assessment.

If you think that Gaia is indeed "the ultimate MILF"--and not in the sense that Iowahawk likes to get his personal freak on "with that saucy pagan eco-tart" known as Mother Earth--then you just might be an "Ecosexual".

Charles Johnson spots "Malaysian Muslims Seething Over Morgan Freeman"; he links to this AFP article:

Malaysian Muslims have called for a ban on the blockbuster [define blockbuster please--Ed] movie “Evan Almighty,” saying it is offensive to their religion, state media reported Friday.

Malaysia’s influential Muslim Consumers Association (PPIM) said the comedy, which plays on the story of Noah’s ark and features actor Morgan Freeman as God, was insulting to Islam.

“The movie refers to the big flood during the time of Prophet Noah, but this has been turned into a comedy which is insulting to Islam,” Secretary-General Maamor Osman told news agency Bernama.

“Featuring a human being as God in the movie is also against Islam,” he added.

Will there be a retroactive fatwa against George Burns?

Writers in Hollywood can't seem to catch a break, Roger L. Simon notes. To my mind, clearly the biggest problem the movie industry has is its poor overall writing--movies begin shooting with scripts that clearly sound like first drafts. Or they're rewritten on the set as very expensive crews and equipment rentals pile up. And of course, the moral equivalency of the average Hollywood movie is also something that begins with its writing. Hollywood's digital effects and skills at make-believe have never been better. But its writing has never been worse.

And yet, good writing is essential to a movie. Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Dr. Strangelove, were all movies shot with medium to even low filming budgets compared with today's $100 million+ budgets, and yet we remember these films decades later because their writing is so good. But whether it's today's weak scripts or yesterday's great moments, one thing never changes: "Hollywood in Trouble: Screw The Writers (Again)", Roger writes.

Of course, it could all be academic: "Ten years from now the film and television industry as we currently know it will probably not be recognizable. A whole new way of doing business must be found."

Glenn Reynolds writes, "The Purges Begin!"

Joe Lieberman might argue that they began some time ago.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but given its name alone, AMC's new Mad Men miniseries will probably be a sanctimonious ant-capitalist mess. And yet its 1960-era Madison Avenue production design may make it fun to watch, if you can tune out the plots.

(Via TVCriticism.com, which was kind enough to include us in their Blogroll. Thanks!)

Related: While there have been numerous movies, and now a TV series about advertising, sales, and the PR world, Daniel Drezner explains "Why There Will Never Be A Reality Show About Academia".

Update: An anti-smoking episode. Ugh--who didn't see that coming?!

Jonah Goldberg links to this Daily Mail article, which claims that the BBC pulled a fast one in its coverage of Annie Leibovitz's photo shoot of the Queen:

The BBC was forced to offer a humiliating apology to the Queen over claims that she stormed out of a photo shoot.

She is said to be livid at the way documentary footage was manipulated to make it appear she had flounced out of a portrait sitting with American photographer.

The corporation has admitted that the footage of her alleged exit was in fact filmed as she arrived for the session.

Phone lines between Buckingham Palace and the BBC were said to have been "red-hot" amid fears that the corporation had turned the Queen into a laughing stock.

The BBC? Inventing the news? Perish the thought!

Update: Melanie Phillips writes:

If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.

Exactly.

Meanwhile, Allah adds:

They offer apologies galore for a five-second clip which suggested erroneously that the queen had stormed out of a photo shoot after being told by Annie Leibowitz to lose the tiara. Apologies for having members of Hamas on their payroll, though? Not so much, not so much.

The ultimate dark horse candidate for GOP veep in '08 emerges...

The New Criterion's Adi Sivaraman writes that it wasn't very surprising that Oriana Fallaci, "a woman who spent her life in opposition first to fascism and communism would inevitably find a bitter stench of her old nemesis in radical Islamist doctrine." But less than a year after her death, "the revision of her life’s history has already started":

Aside from a few notable exceptions, Friday’s speakers all attempted to distort Fallaci’s opposition to Islamofascism. They attempted to water it down or to distort the facts by shifting the emphasis away from an opposition to radical Islam to an opposition for human rights abuses. Christiane Amanpour, in particular, was one of the worst in this vein. She struggled desperately in front of the audience to reconcile her admiration of Fallaci as a female journalist with her personal disbelief that Fallaci could do something as un-multicultural as criticize another civilization. Amanpour, like most of the apologists, seemed to have missed the point.

Indeed.

Diane Sawyer: "You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury. And the judge said to me, 'Can, you know, can you tell the truth and be fair?' And I said, 'That's what journalists do.' And everybody in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I've ever had."

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose: John McCain finally sells out his last base of supporters.

Jim Geraghty writes:

I kinda like Brownback, and he's got some good people working for him. But man, you just cannot go after an opponent on flip-flopping when you just voted "yes", then "no" on cloture for the immigration deal in a span of about 13 minutes. You just can't.

This would be like Hillary charging that Obama has likeability and baggage issues.

Meanwhile, during a recent speech for the Republican Jewish Coalition at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Hugh Hewitt said that next year will have echoes of 1980: "2008 is going to be as closely run and as difficult . . . but for a very different reason."

Read the whole thing.

"CBS News Chief: Couric Staying Anchored".

And thus, so are CBS's ratings.

Kids! Meet the man who gave your parents the 1960s. It's not a pretty story.

Ann Althouse writes that the Bobos who used to be Gen-X who used to be Yuppies are morphing into the New Victorians.

(And no doubt, with more than a touch of the New Puritan about them, of course.)

Update: Much more from Jay Reding.

Meanwhile, this map is "guaranteed to bring fear to the heart of every thirty-something Manhattan single woman".

Charles Johnson links to this AFP report which says:

The Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a new fear — a giant badger stalking the streets by night.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was allegedly released into the area by British forces to spread panic.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but, amid the confusion and mistrust spawned by the ongoing guerrilla war, the story has spread like wildfire in the streets of the city and the villages round about.

Video of the strange beasts here.

Early in the new year, I described a Christmas-week visit my wife and I took to Xanadu William Randolph Heart's San Simeon estate. As I wrote back then:

Construction of Hearst's estate began in 1919 and continued until 1947, when Hearst was too ill to remain living on his estate; he would eventually move to Beverly Hills to be closer to his surgeons, and died in 1951.

California's not likely to part with San Simeon anytime soon, but the Guardian reports that Heart's final home can be yours for a cool $165 million.

This is interesting, though I think Ace is more likely right as to who actually made the call.

Related: "Liberal Activist Goes Cuckoo on Carlson: 'You Preppy Punk!'"

Investors' Business Daily declares Al Gore, NBC, and its parent company GE "Birds Of A Feather":

NBC and GE have other interests in hyping climate change. Let's not forget GE is the parent of NBC and stands to make a wad of cash from selling alternative energy products from wind turbines to solar panels to those compact fluorescent bulbs containing mercury.

So when Gore prances on stage to demand we stop building coal-fired plants, that's music to GE's corporate ears.

NBC's Ann Curry certainly thinks global warming is a political issue. During prime-time coverage, she almost got down on her knees to beg the jolly green giant to run for the White House.

Interviewing Gore from the site of the concert in New Jersey, Curry gushed:

"A lot of people want me to ask you tonight if you're running for president. And I know what you're answer is gonna be, believe me. I gotta ask you though. After fueling this grass-roots movement, if you become convinced that without you there will not be the political will in the White House to fight global warming to the level that is required, because the clock is ticking, would you answer the call? Would you answer the call, yes or no?"

Certainly Gore thinks global warming is a political issue, appearing earlier this year before Democrat-controlled House and Senate committees pleading for action. During his opening statement before the House, he famously said: "The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor."

After Gore's testimony, a better course of action would have been to ask for a second opinion.

When a conservative appears on talk radio, liberals cry for the Fairness Doctrine. Seventy-five free hours for Archbishop Gore's Church of Climate Change? Not a peep.

On the other hand, having tested the marketplace of ideas with a former vice president, the news anchor of Today and a few dozen wrinkly rock stars, it's significant to note that the marketplace simply yawned in response. That seems the fairest reply of all.

Jim Geraghty has some thoughts on what it should contain, with a goal towards "90 for 9": that ideally, 90 percent of conservatives should agree with nine of the ten items on the list.

(Via Jim's primary blog.)

Of course, the music industry is far from the only legacy industry treading turbulent waters. The New York Times’ bond rating is rapidly approaching junk bond levels; which means, as Thomas Lifson notes, "that many bond funds will be unable to purchase NYTCo debt, meaning that the company will have to pay sharply higher interest rates on its borrowings."

Considering the tut-tutting the Times has historicallly given Mike Milken, after he essentially created the high yield marketplace in the late '70s and early '80s, I wonder what he thinks of this.

Fox News' Roger Friedman writes that Sony is counting on a new Bruce Springsteen album this fall as its corporate savor:

For Bruce, a new album would be the first E Street Band release since "The Rising," his magnificent recording about 9/11. That album sold better than any previous Springsteen albums and picked up a number of Grammy nominations. Springsteen lost the award for best album to Norah Jones' debut, if you recall.

If you never tried it, pick up "The Rising" or download some of its amazing tracks like "Empty Sky" or "You're Missing."

The latter song, which had a serious message, could also be the theme song at Sony these days.

Quite a few people are missing — and they're not coming back. I'm told that layoffs are continuing, with several departments in publicity and marketing gutted.

When I mentioned this to a Sony higher-up the other day, the person replied: "You are the last one writing about the record business. Don't you realize it's over?"

Springteen will be 58 in September, and as his modern visage in the otherwise exceptional 30th anniversary Burn To Run DVD/CD package illustrates, looks increasingly silly in the Fonzie-style leather jackets, motorcycle boots and t-shirts of his mid-'70s heyday.

Is the recording industry truly "over" as Friedman quotes his Sony source? Historically, it's always been an industry that's been obsessed with youth and entertainment. But Don Surber writes that just like Springsteen himself, the recording industry as a whole now finds itself with a talent pool that's both increasingly shrill sounding in its emphasis on activism over entertainment, and also increasingly long in the tooth.

"Rudy Giuliani’s picks for his foreign policy team are surprisingly strong", Charles Johnson writes. "And with people like Norman Podhoretz and Martin Kramer on it, the team is guaranteed to evoke outrage and seething from leftists and radical Islamic front groups."

Tim Blair spots the Chicago Sun-Times veering left:

The tabloid that shifted toward political conservatism under the brief ownership of Rupert Murdoch more than two decades ago now says that it is “rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush’s war in Iraq."

Bob Dole--and his mid-'70s detractors--could not be reached for comment.

Update: Ralph Peters writes that fair is fair: if this has been "the Bush-Cheney War", then "it will only be fair to call the carnage after we run away the 'Reid-Pelosi Massacres'".

Why is Katie Couric like Princess Di?

"Why Is Nina Totenberg Like Judy Miller?" And why are they both like John Kerry?

The Paris Hilton/Paris Hilton connection!

Sounding like a low-budget B-movie that's coming soon to your local theater--or in this case, England: "I Married The Son Of Osama!"

Update: Maybe Osama Jr. and the new missus could facilitate Harvard's proposed negotiations with dear old dad.

In "Dead On Arrival", Jonah Goldberg writes the postmortem for Live Earth:

"If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down. Come on, mother-[bleepers]!” Madonna railed from the stage at London's Live Earth concert Saturday. “If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!”

You just can't beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire — who owns nine homes and has a “carbon footprint” nearly 100 times larger than the norm — hectoring a bunch of well-off, aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children? I suppose she could have said, “Now put your right foot in / Take your right foot out / Right foot in / Then you shake it all about…. That's what climate change is all about.”

Actually, I think the “Hokey Pokey” makes more sense.

But, hey, I don’t want to bash Live Earth, which is not to be confused with Live Aid (1985, dedicated to eradicating African famine) or Live 8 (2005, promising to relieve African nations’ debts). So with the African continent so well-fed — and debt-free! — who can blame the Celebrity Concern Industry for moving on to its next big success?

The avowed point of Live Earth was to ... can you guess? That’s right: raise awareness about global warming. Considering the energy required to put on the show, the nine Live Earth concerts doubtlessly raised more CO2 than awareness. NBC’s three-hour televised version got trounced by “Cops” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Moreover, surely most of the people who attended or tuned in already knew about global warming before they saw the video tutorial about Ed Begley Jr.’s eco-friendly home and sanctimony-powered go-cart.

Still, if fans had somehow missed the global-warming story entirely, imagine how befuddled they must have felt while listening to Dave Matthews sing the glories of cloth diapers. And, assuming they didn’t hit the mute button when Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova came to the stage, one wonders what any climate-change ingenues might have made of her remarks. The model, who nearly was killed in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami, explained that she “didn’t feel hate toward nature” because of the tsunami. “I felt nature was screaming for help.”

Maybe Petra was simply trying to fly under radar with a subversive Iowahawk reference...

Dr. Helen writes:

It seems there is a double standard in the workplace--if Katie Couric slaps her male staff for (horrors!) using a word she doesn't like, it's just cute but if the genders were reversed--watch out.

Worse--imagine if the gender and ideology were reversed. Something tells me that there'd be nothing joking about the tone if New York magazine described the same incident with the names Rush, Brit or O'Reilly plugged in, instead of Katie.

Hot on the Versace heels of Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas delivering the on-air scoop of her own affair with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa comes this story out of Chicago:

WMAQ-Ch. 5 executives on Tuesday continued to weigh what, if any, disciplinary action to take against reporter Amy Jacobson, seen on videotape in a swimsuit at the home of Craig Stebic, whose wife's disappearance Jacobson has been covering.

Officials at rival station WBBM-Ch. 2, who had been debating since Friday whether they should air the tape, aired clips on Tuesday morning and posted a report on the station's Web site after the tape's existence was reported in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

The tape appears to show Jacobson in a bikini top with a towel around her waist, as well as her children, at the Stebic home along with Stebic. Channel 2, which said the tape was shot Friday but did not say how it was acquired, also reported Stebic's sister from Iowa was present.

Stebic's wife, Lisa, 37, has been missing since April 30. The couple was in the process of divorcing and Lisa Stebic was moving to evict her husband from their Plainfield home on the day of her disappearance, the Chicago Tribune has previously reported.

The tape's existence has been the talk of Chicago's newsrooms, including Jacobson's own, where she was asked to give her version of events to WMAQ President and General Manager Larry Wert, Vice President of News Frank Whittaker and News Director Camille Edwards. "The matter's under review," Channel 5 spokeswoman Toni Falvo said Monday.

Last week, Mickey Kaus wrote that "Nobody Covers the News Like Telemundo!" But in a different kind of Red Queen's Race to the bottom, WMAQ is definitely catching up with them fast.

"If I'm using the past tense here, it's not so much because of the staff shake-up as because ever since the immigration reform debacle I've felt that McCain has virtually no shot."

Ian Murray writes, "hang on a second. Aren't we regularly told that dissent is patriotic, indeed the very essence of patriotism?" Not to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., though:

"Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

As Murray writes, "Live Earth is the gift that just keeps on giving. It seems that RFK Jr has joined the John Birch Society."

As politics comes full circle, he's far from the first member of the New Left to cross paths with the Old Right.

In a USA Today op-ed titled "Britain's war against . . . well, you know", Melanie Phillips writes that "Britain is now fighting a war it dares not name."

The Red Queen's Race marches on, as Bizzy Blog reports, "Big Three Nets’ Evening News Death Watch: Under 20 Million for the First Time Ever".

Can Live Earth-style numbers be far behind?

This freaky-deaky Reuters story is a tale of demography and polystyrene:

In the coming years though, while Japan's population may dwindle, its technology is only going to get more sophisticated. Send in the fembots!

But chances are you will: David Harsanyi of the Denver Post launches Nanny State, a blog accompanying his new book. Both keep track of "an invasive band of do-gooders who are subtly and steadily stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the inalienable right to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children."

Stop on by--before the Fairness Doctrine returns...

In his review of Jimmy Carter's already widely attacked Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid , Steve Hayward writes:

Right in the first sentence of Jimmy Carter’s new book on the Middle East there is a seemingly throwaway phrase whose significance is easily missed en route to the web of distortions that follows: “One of the major goals of my life,” Carter begins, “while in political office and since I was retired from the White House by the 1980 election…” (emphasis added). Now, it is understandable that an ex-president would seek to couch his electoral humiliation in the least wounding terms, but is it really so hard to say, “since I lost the 1980 election”?

That Jimmy Carter–man of action, seeker of solutions, prophet of peace–would describe his electoral drubbing in the passive voice points to a persistent intellectual and character trait that has been evident throughout his long career: The presumption of his own self-evident superiority. This trait has led him to think that he could not possibly have been to blame when voters rejected him in favor of a B-movie actor. As Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow once wrote, Carter behaves “as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio.”

This presumption perhaps explains why Carter, in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, can go from outrage to outrage and never feel compelled to answer arguments or acknowledge gross errors of judgment or fact. This is not a new facet of Carter’s character. One his earliest biographers, Betty Glad, noted that as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s, he “seemed to experience opposition as a personal affront and as a consequence responded to it with attacks on the integrity of those who blocked his projects. He showed a tendency to equate his political goals with the just and the right and to view his opponents as representative of some selfish or immoral interest.”

As Charles Krauthammer famously wrote in 2002, "To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil". Certainly the latter trait at least shows little sign of ending.

Life imitates TV; once again, everything old is new again!

Frank Burns of M*A*S*H: "Individuality is fine--as long as we all do it together."

Sgt. Schultz of Hogan's Heroes: "I know nothing, nuuuuthingggg!"

And for some eighties TV flashbacks, it's the return of Martha Quinn meeting Duran Duran!

Update: "Hello, Rodney Dangerfield"!

Like T-1000 in Terminator 2, the L.A. Times' hit piece on Fred Thompson begins to morph--but unlike James Cameron's seamless digital effects, this transformation is spotted by various bloggers. No wonder the Times thinks of the Blogosphere as "Informational Vermin".

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, Christopher Hitchens writes:

Make any presumption of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression "Doctors' Plot" was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors' plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers.

Further thoughts from Mark Steyn, who notes that Michael Moore must really be questioning the timing of it all.

Mister, you're a braver man than I.

Update: "Can global warming be stopped by an out-of-breath, middle-aged, super-rich narcissist in a leotard and high heels?" George Galloway was at Live Earth? Who knew!

Ouch: "I wonder how much NBC paid 'Live Earth' to come in last in the ratings?"

Sadly, this was inevitable: The Pivot goes bipartisan.

Jane Genova writes the 6,000 word New York magazine article on Katie Couric, "clearly demonstrates is that Katie is jinxed, at least in the media, and probably by the media":

Case in point: From the article, it seems that Katie perceives the backstage backbiting and leaking as something the old guard at CBS shouldn't be doing and should be above even considering. On this Katie sounds downright shoolgirlish. She's been in the world world for years. Moreover, she's been in the ultra cut-throat world of TV. In addition, that world has become a dying medium and in such environments, expect people to be on their very worst behavior. Katie would have come across as more credible and less stupid if she said, "Of course in TV you expect undercutting, blaming, even sabotage. But this turned out, at least as I saw it, as over-the-top."

But maybe that's it: Maybe Katie is stupid. Or maybe that's part of the jinx: It rendered her stupid. Any reasonably bright person would have to know that this interview would be over-the-top harsh. Or, put another way, any person not jinxed would have laughed at Hagan for even asking as she said NO.

It's tempting to paraphrase Couric's own snark: Good morning. Katie was an airhead!

But as I wrote a few years ago, there's a reason why Tom Wolfe, who toiled for decades as a non-fiction journalist (including a stint at the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune, from which New York magazine was spun off) before focusing primarily on doorstop-thick novels, speaks almost entirely in pre-fab sound bites when interviewed. And it's largely the fear of revealing a detail or two he'd like to keep closer to his custom-tailored white double-breasted doeskin vest.

However, like Katie, most other journalists seem surprised when someone in their own industry pulls a drive-by hit on one of their own.

Burt Prelutsky writes that although he never crossed paths with the Duke during either of their long Hollywood careers, "I find myself missing him more and more as time goes by":

Sometimes I find myself missing him the most when I’m watching a modern western, and it occurs to me that the leading man would be more at home in a tutu than in chaps.

Sometimes, though, all it takes is a news item to get me wishing that Wayne was still in his prime, still making movies, and that somewhere down the line I’d get to see the big lug taking certain matters into his own capable hands.

Recently, the item that grabbed my attention was a public opinion poll that reported that 25% of young American Muslims see nothing wrong with suicide bombers in “certain circumstances.” Presumably, those would be circumstances in which only Christians and Jews were the victims. This is the same crowd that’s always complaining that they’re the victims of racial profiling.

So, do you really blame me for wishing that I could look forward to going to the local Bijou in the near future and see the Duke mopping up a bunch of these whiny punks in a movie that might be called, “Allah, Be Damned”?

But the beauty of modern Hollywood is that as life become more and more abstract due to the information age and the Internet replacing the industrialized society of the past, films keep pace with the times! Whereas in the past we could see Wayne in the role of a soldier re-enacting World War II, these days, Hollywood prefers more and more symbolism and subtext. Today's postmodern Hollywood believes its audiences aren't fully prepared for two-fisted scenes of Al Qaeda taking it on the chin in Iraq or Afghanistan. So we get movies like 2005's Stealth, of which Mark Steyn wrote:

The money shot is — stop me if this rings a vague bell — a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

And movies like this year's Transformers, where the American military fights robots from another planet--who can be any bad guy you wish them to be, or merely robots. (Or its flipside, the recent Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise remake of the War of the Worlds, whose screenwriter told a Canadian magazine that the invading Martians represented the US military.)

So, much like Spinal Tap's audience becoming more selective, it's not like Hollywood's plots are becoming narrower, they simply require more and more imagination from their audiences to work. And, hey, isn't that what movie make-believe is all about...?

Found via Hot Air, this op-ed trails off into the media's usual Bush Derangement Syndrome, but its opening is a knockout:

With Al Gore in the news for battling global warming and Al Gore 3rd in the news for getting toasted, my favorite NYPD detective recalled a story that helps explain how father and son each became a particular kind of loser.

The story was told to the detective by a Secret Service agent some years back as they worked security for a dignitary visiting New York. Such details largely consist of just standing there for as long as 12 hours and the talk turned to a day when the Secret Service agent was assigned to then-Vice President Gore.

The detective recalls the agent saying that he was outside a room where Gore was loudly berating Al 3rd for something to do with school. The agent then overheard the senior Gore say to his son something truly stunning.

"What, do you want to end up like those guys standing outside the door?"

Or as another presidential candidate was once caught say, "I don't fall down. The son of a bitch knocked me over".

John Edwards was right: there are two Americas--in this case, it's liberal elites, and those who are willing to take a bullet for them.

While waiting for Matt Drudge's breathless Katie Couric story, I came across this op-ed by Jeff Simon of The Buffalo News titled, "Katie Couric Deserves To Be Watched". There's more than a twinge of desperation in that headline, and not surprisingly, the Freepers, where I found the piece originally, can smell it. Key quote by Simon:

What people continually refuse to see is that nightly anchor is not a journalistic job as much as it is a theatrical one. It’s a role. And what we want from whoever takes the role is simplicity and reassurance. The nightly news anchor is auditioning for that moment when the country truly needs them — election nights or, most importantly, moments of national trauma when it’s their job to impart bad news in ways that keep spirits on an even keel.

Let's unpack that a bit: not everyone refuses to believe the anchorperson role is a theatrical one. And as I've also written before, I'm all-too-happy to tune out television on election night these days. The only thing interesting on those nights is seeing what sort of slick piece of high tech set design the anchor's art department comes up with to frame him in to generate a semblance of gravitas. Otherwise, the Internet is a far better place to be when election returns come tumbling in.

Finally, the idea that "The nightly news anchor is auditioning for that moment when the country truly needs them" is what has led to so much filler in the news, as Drew Curtis of Fark puts it, since the big three networks feel that they must generate a half hour of television news every night even as its ratings shrink. And there's infinitely even more filler on the 24-hour cable news channels.

So what have the network nightly news broadcasts become? Like the newspaper, largely an exercise in nostalgia, as Andrew Breitbart mentioned to me when I interviewed him last week:

I think that to a major a degree, Katie Couric and her ilk are doomed. I think that from my vantage, and I can’t speak for everyone else, but the Internet was the first nail in the nightly news coffin. But I think the TiVo and YouTube and the second and third ones. There’s almost nothing important that happens out there, that a person can’t come home and find online. That need to be in front of the television at 5:30 or 6:30 in the evening is over. Only people in their nursing homes, who are watching their television sets because that’s a lifelong habit are getting their news that way.

There so many people having a laugh at Katie Couric or Brian Williams’ expense because of the dwindling numbers but it’s a less a function of them being pathetic, as many would like to think, than the dramatic shifts in which we digest our information. There’s just almost no need for them.

I recall, on the weekend, watching shows that Stone Phillips and John Siegenthaler would put together for Dateline, which would take advantage of NBC’s vast video vault.

I look at Nightly News as a short-term nostalgia through the day’s events. It feels like those weekend shows, where they’re just taking advantage of the fact that they half hour of advertisements to sell and so it feels like a video vault filler session of the news events. And I think that the average person is looking at that half hour news hour with that sort of kitschy sensibility. It’s sort like, ‘I remember that story happening half a day ago; I saw it on CNN, I saw it again on CNN.com. Then I saw it again on the Drudge Report, and then I saw it again on Breitbart.com, or Breitbart.tv and YouTube.

So the networks are no long providing that first responder value that they used to. And it’s mildly tragic to watch how slow they’ve been to come to the realization that they, like everyone else, have to adapt to the market, and they’ve been quite slow to it.

More from Breitbart here.

Just as I finished this post, Drudge's story on Couric went up: Couric sounds like she's discovered her inner Patton, as she's "being accused of slapping an editor" after he inserted the world "sputum" into a script.

Thirty years from now, when you're sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you, "What did you do in the great television ratings wars," you won't have to say, "Well...I shoveled sputum in Manhattan".

Update: I did not have slaps with that editor!

As you'll discover if you click here and scroll through all of the posts contained within it, "The Newspeak Dictionary" has been the name of one of this site's organizational categories for a while now. And this post by "Gagdad Bob" will add many more items to its list.

(H/T: The latest edition of the "Carnival Of The Insanities", which is also well worth your time.)

Just to add more item to the Newspeak Dictionary, courtesy of the LA. Times, bloggers get yet another new name: "Informational Vermin". Add it to all of the existing epithets they've already been dubbed by their calm, enlightened betters in Old Media.

"Remember Oil for Food? Here's the story of how the U.N. propped up Pyongyang."

[Cue the "In A World" movie trailer announcer voice.]

In a world of endless Hollywood remakes of proven formulas, Charles Bronson is back! Only this time, he's Jodie Foster! Death Wish VI: The Sex Change!

[/In A World Voice off.]

Is this the sort of high quality mass media product that Andrew Keen is endorsing? Of course, it's better idea for a movie than Jodie as Leni, needless to say.

(More trailers here; and click here for some book suggestions focusing on Hollywood's better days.)

Update: Related thoughts on new media and old, from someone who's spent a fair amount of time toiling in the trenches of both the Blogosphere and Tinseltown.

Jules Crittenden writes the New York Times "should be applauded for its honesty" regarding the results of the US leaving Iraq:

An outcome that is “even bloodier and more chaotic … further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows … power grabs” is better than continuing the path of progress toward eliminating al-Qaeda, exposing and hopefully acting against Iran’s influence, training increasingly effective Iraqi troops, working with a nascent democratically elected government in its fits and starts.

Pinch wants to ensure that it really is the other guy's country--the other guy being Iran.

Cal Thomas: "Bad food at Food Lion, that was a big ABC investigation some years ago. How about bad doctrine in some of these [Islamic] schools and mosques?"

I'm sure the L.A. Times would get right on it, but they've got a big sexy affair involving the city's mayor and a local television reporter to investigate. Or not, as the case may be...

And yet, both TV news ratings and newspaper sales have cratered. Why on earth could that be?!

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! Glenn Reynolds' post also points the towards yet another example of old media getting their lunch stolen: "KiKi Munshi Meet Michael Yon".

Another Update: More on the Old Media' meltdown in a later post, as we watch Katie Couric shovel sputum in Manhattan.

At least in the ratings department, where 75 percent of America has tuned out of both shows.

Or is Live Earth simply the return of World Jump Day? Maybe, as Madonna told her audience, "If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down!”

I'd say that was the most logical statement uttered by anyone during the show, if Chris Rock hadn't been there:

U.S. comedian Chris Rock expressed the kind of disbelief shared by many on the day that Live Earth would make a lasting difference, even if he was only joking:

"I pray that this event ends global warming the same way that Live Aid ended world hunger," he said in London.

Mission Accomplished!

In any case, as Glenn Reynolds comments, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Update: Bipartisan consensus reached! Hugh Hewitt and Willie Brown concur on Live Earth and what it bodes for Gore's political future.

Another: America and England: Two nations seperated by a common disinterest in yesterday's concert.

Last summer, in the Christian Science Monitor, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

Headline in England's Daily Record today: "CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE TERRORIST TO FEAR"!

Headline via Pajamas; post at Gateway Pundit.

Incidentally, I didn't notice until now that I've spent the day digitally dissing the Goracle--while wearing a brown shirt! (Linen, monogrammed, custom-made with as high a carbon footprint as possible by Brooks Brothers, of course.)

Which is either irony or Gaia having the last laugh, depending upon how you look at it.

My wife had been dying to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel and I had been dreading it, but I finally bit the bullet and we went last night. She said afterwards that she enjoyed it more than Pirates' first sequel, but I found my original fears to be quite well-deserved.

Upon leaving the theater, I was astounded at the line going around the side of the building to see Michael Bay's new Transformers movie. Nikke Finke writes that it's definitely transforming Paramount's bottom-line:

Paramount says PG-13 Transformers made $22.5 million Friday from 4,011 North American theaters and has a new cume of $107.4 million. Box office gurus tell me that, after a record breaking Fourth Of July week opening, the DreamWorks battle of the bots should haul in $60 million this weekend for a 6 1/2-day cume of $150 million. That's 50% more gross receipts than Paramount anticipated, and 20% more than box office gurus predicted.

Naturally, in any film that's remotely pro-military, the speculation is that it's "new, refreshing, daring, and counter-culture". But to me, at least initially, as I haven't seen the movie yet, Transformers sounds much more conceptually similar to this earlier film about nothing.

It would seem to be an extremely sensible thing for reporters to be armed when covering the many hot spots of the Middle East. However, when it comes to journalists and firearms, there are two extremes: on the one hand, the New York Times refuses to allow its journalists to carry guns, because, after all, it's the other guy's country.

Meanwhile, in order to secure its kidnapped journalist's release from Palestinian kidnappers, the BBC reportedly paid out five million dollars--and one million bullets.

"Al Gore Appears On Live Earth Tokyo Stage As A Hologram". Triumph could not be reached for comment.

Much more at Hot Air, whose name describes the concert--aka, “Private Jets For Climate Change” perfectly.

And speaking of which, Newsbusters has some thoughts on the private jet-setting Jann Wenner.

Update: "Mostly Mild Weather Greets Live Earth Global Warming Concert Goers. Backstage, the Red Hot Chili Peppers get puritanically scolded (what else did they expect?) for using their red hot private jet.

More: "Whither the Gores’ war on sex, drugs, and rock and roll?"

If, as Gore once claimed, a traffic accident involving Al III was the singular moment that transformed him into the scourge of the automobile industry, I wonder if we can blame today's proceedings at Live Earth entirely on Al being dissed by Courtney Love and desperately trying to recover his leftwing pop culture streed cred. But then, this isn't the first industry that Al's been forgainst.

Related: Is this all a sign that global warming has “jumped the shark”?

Update: Indeed it has.

Burt Prelutsky has some thoughts on what the recent affair involving L.A.'s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Telemundo reporter Mirthala Salinas tells us about American attitudes towards sex:

Why, you ask, is this so important? Because it behooves us all not to supply the French with artillery with which they can mock us. Which, when you get right down to it, is the only sort of artillery the French ever actually use.

No, there is another. And it's the best piece of artillery the French ever invented.

"Forget the Aaron Burr comparison; it’s comparing my work to that of the New York Times that’s really out of line."

Is the box office for Angelina Jolie's paean to Islamofascist terrorism waning? I wouldn't say that. but I would say that its appeal is becoming more selective.

While Hollywood's moral equivalence seems like a permanent fixture, there's still a lot the filmmakers could have done to have improved the film's commercial potential and yet still maintain their radical chic credentials. A cameo by this recently deceased Middle Eastern media superstar would have done wonders for its gross.

After getting some background on Breitbart.tv for an upcoming article, I realized that its proprietor (who’s also been Matt Drudge’s Sancho Panza for over a decade) would be a perfect guest for Pajamas’ Blog Week In Review. Fortunately, Austin Bay agreed, and the result is a great, fast-moving show. If you're curious about where online journalism is headed, and why it's been eating old media's lunch for the last decade, this is the podcast for you!

(No iPod--or even iPhone--needed; virtually any computer with a broadband connection can tune in and listen.)

Extreme Mortman lists "Top Ten Reasons Ron Paul Is Not Libertarian Enough":

10. Ron Paul’s passport was issued by the U.S. government.

9. When the National Hurricane Center suggests Ron Paul take shelter, he does.

8. Ron Paul’s campaign bus has a license plate. It also uses the Interstate highway system, which has no toll booths.

7. Ron Paul’s name has too many letters.

6. Ron Paul accepts that Pluto is no longer a planet, but still says the other eight are.

5. A tie: Ron Paul’s TV picks up UHF channels.

AND

Ron Paul shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Oh wait, that’s Johnny Cash.

4. Ron Paul has yet to call either Nancy Pelosi or Abraham Lincoln a “statist.”

3. When the U.S. Postal Service raises the price of a stamp, Ron Paul goes along.

2. Ron Paul’s Social Security Number is not of his choosing.

1. Ron Paul’s water is fluoridated.

And just like that, the all-important Ralph Nader/octogenarian Bircher remnant vote flies right out the window.

James Lileks writes that "Prince’s new perfume debuts tomorrow":

It 's called “3121,” which is either some mystical secret message or his ATM PIN. It’s billed as “xquiste” and “xotic,” and it’s probably as xpensive (hah! See what I did there?) as the rest of the perfumes on the market. Americans spend $2.8 billion on fragrances per year, which seems a little low. That’s about 3,953 bottles.

There was a time when people applied cologne with a paint roller; you’d get in an elevator behind someone drenched in Giorgio, and your eyes watered like Salieri listening to something Mozart dashed off on his lunch hour. There was something so proudly corrupt about that smell. It was like the aroma given off by a bonfire of costumes worn on “Dynasty.” It went out of style, as they all do; when I was tending bar in a college joint, half the guys appeared to have exchanged their blood for Drakkar Noir, and now that’s