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.
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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.
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Earlier this year, I suggested that hypocrisy may not be a sufficient standard for outing someone as gay and that even hypocrites had a right to privacy, unless that hypocrisy had a tangible negative effect on public policy. Not everyone in the comments agreed with me.
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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.
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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.
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Even since the hit film Jaws, summer has been the favored time for the release of some kind of fear-based blockbuster film. This time, the honor goes to NBC News that has produced a masterpiece of propagandistic fear-mongering, complete with an ominous soundtrack worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
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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.
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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.
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Dan Froomkin writes:
Sometimes people ask me: Why do smart, elite journalists quote people who they know are lying, or being moronically stupid, but not call what they say lies and stupidities? Why do they engage in split-the-difference false equivalence in political coverage that leaves readers terribly uninformed about what’s really going on?
It is hard to imagine that Fox News only began operations in 1996, such has been its impact in shaping the political climate in the US, and not in a good way. There has been a lot of buzz recently about a paper published by Bruce Bartlett where he argues that Fox News has created a separate world for its viewers that is increasingly disconnected from the actual world and as a result is hurting the Republican party that has become joined at the hip to it.
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