Even the New York Times has realized that Republicans are nuts

The curse of the American media is that the major ones refrain from calling out stupid statements by major politicians for the nonsense they are but instead treat them as one side of a debate to be counter-balanced by an opposing view, leaving the impression that the truth lies somewhere in between. But we have entered a stage in politics where Republicans are making flat-out wrong statements that are simply not even debatable.
[Read more…]

What to expect from Stephen Colbert’s new show

Tonight at 11:35pm is when Stephen Colbert begins his new career as a late night talk show host. From what we can see, he is not aiming to revolutionize the format but keep it broadly similar to what been done before, the new wrinkle being that his guests would cover a wider range than just celebrities from the entertainment world, also encompassing politicians, writers, scientists, and other people of interest.
[Read more…]

Jorge Ramos’s side of the story

Jorge Ramos is the well-known news anchor on the Spanish language channels Univision and Fusion who was thrown out of a press conference with Donald Trump for asking questions about his immigration plans. Some commentators have criticized Ramos for not waiting his turn to be asked and said that he was being rude by ‘jumping the queue’, so to speak. Others have gone even further and cheered Trump’s action, seeing it as demonstrating Trump’s toughness and symbolic of how Trump would throw people out of the country.
[Read more…]

Smoking and Morton Downey, Jr.

Before Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative media outrage machine was led by abrasive talk show host Morton Downey, Jr., whose programs were a combination of Limbaugh politics and Jerry Springer format, where he would have on political guests who would be goaded to attack each other and create shouting matches, with Downey attacking the liberals and liberal views in the harshest terms. The studio audience would be raucous and conservative audiences loved it.
[Read more…]

To bleep or not to bleep

On broadcast TV and radio, certain words are bleeped out due to rules about decency. NPR’s Nina Totenberg makes some good points about this practice. She says that the news media (including NPR), too often cowed by in-house lawyers, sometimes goes too far and ‘cleanses’ the news. She says that it should be acceptable to quote people accurately or at least sufficiently accurately so that the informed listener knows exactly what was said.
[Read more…]

Is this the best propaganda they can do?

I wrote on Sunday about the article that appeared in the Sunday Times two days ago that made sensational allegations that Edward Snowden’s cache of documents had had their encryption broken by the Russian and Chinese governments and this had revealed the identities of British MI6 secret service agents who then had to be withdrawn from the field for their safety.
[Read more…]

A fundamental and shameful principle of western journalism

Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of how journalists in establishment western media collude with their governments to spread propaganda against those whom the government perceives as its enemies, using as its favorite tactic information given to the media by officials who hide behind anonymity so that when their lies are exposed, they escape accountability.
[Read more…]