“Sponsored From Around the Web”

I have little idea of the business end of this blog, leaving it in the highly capable hands of Ed Brayton, the host of Dispatches From the Culture Wars. All I know is that ads appear at various places based on arrangements with vendors and on algorithms that are based on the content that I provide and the browsing habits of the readers, so two readers reading the same page at the same time may see some ads that are the same and others that are different. [Read more…]

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston vs. Glenn Greenwald

I have written harshly in the past about NPR’s national security correspondents Tom Gjelten and Dina Temple-Raston, describing them as serving pretty much as mouthpieces for the national security state. I came across this clip from a conference at New York University in 2010 in which from the audience she posed a question regarding Anwar al-Awlaki to Glenn Greenwald who was on the panel that showed how much she is locked into the mindset of believing what the government tells her. The exchange between her and Greenwald is very revealing. [Read more…]

The Duck Dynasty flap

It is a measure of how out of touch I am with popular culture that I often learn about a media phenomenon only long after it has been around or if it goes down in flames. Sometimes the names associated with the phenomenon (Honey Boo Boo, Miley Cyrus, the Kardashians) lurk in the fringes of my consciousness because the news headlines feature them but I know next to nothing about them. [Read more…]

British government hypocrisy on display

Bloomberg news has been having a conflict with the Chinese government after it ran a series of stories about the wealth of senior Chinese government officials. In seeming retaliation for this, a British reporter for Bloomberg was not allowed to attend a press conference with British prime minister David Cameron and his Chinese counterpart in Beijing yesterday. [Read more…]