During the darkest days of communism, Romanians had something to brighten their oppressed existence—illicit American movie parties.
Under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, the Eastern European country had very little contact with the West. But thanks to Teodor Zamfir who was willing to smuggle VHS tapes, and his translator Ilina Nistor who dubbed them, over 3000 movies made it over to Romania between 1985 and 1989. Millions of lives were changed and uplifted as a result.
New York Times arts reporter Jennifer Schuessler wrote about an odd controversy in the poetry world -- a white poet, discouraged by multiple rejections, found success when he submitted under a Chinese-sounding pseudonym, even gaining a place in a "Best American Poetry" anthology and causing embarrassment to the editor and rancor among other poets for his "reactionary" use of "yellowface." Schuessler's account assumed the inherent righteousness of the angry liberal, multi-cultural position of hostility toward poet Michael Derrick Hudson.
Atheist, Democrat, professor and social critic—that’s Camille Paglia. But in a recent interview with Salon, she had some choice words for the liberal media.
In a discussion about Jon Stewart and his influence on the media, Paglia declared, “At what point will liberals wake up to realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long?”
A few days ago, we shined a light on Univision’s Fernando Espuelas. His on-air response, on the Univision America radio network, was quite interesting, to say the very least.
Espuelas devoted his entire show (two hours broadcast from coast-to-coast!) to denouncing nameless, faceless “right-wing media organizations” and “Latinito” sell-outs who had the audacity to offer any critique of his broadcast, his network, or the ideology he attempts to sell his audience.
This past Nov. 28, legendary Mexican comedian Roberto Gómez Bolaños, creator and protagonist of several television comedy series enjoyed for decades throughout the Spanish-speaking world, died at age 85.
As to be expected, Univision, the leading Spanish-language television network in the United States, featured the news of Gómez Bolaños, better known as “Chespirito”, prominently as the lead story of its flagship newscast that day. But Chespirito’s passing wasn’t only the lead story on Nov. 28. It was the ONLY story during the entire Noticiero Univision broadcast, not only on the day of his passing, but on Nov. 29 and Nov. 30 as well.
Jorge Ramos casts a large shadow over Univision’s news operations, and is still held in high regard as a journalist among his peers and the audience he serves, notwithstanding recent exhortations to colleagues to drop the pretense of neutrality. Univision’s nationally syndicated radio operation - on the other hand - is dominated by a fiery leftist demagogue with no journalistic pretense, and no desire to pretend to be interested in offering a balanced argument to his audience.
Meet Fernando Espuelas (which means “spurs” and is, I must confess, one of the cooler names in radio). His show is carried daily by Univision America radio in several of the nation’s top Hispanic media markets.
It takes a special man to cram so much wrong into a mere 342 words. Or an Old Grey Lady.
The New York Times’ utterly ridiculous Editorial Board recently as one addressed Title II Internet regulatory Reclassification and Network Neutrality - and they did so in utterly ridiculous fashion.
They either have absolutely no idea what any of this is - or they are lying through their printing presses.
Ronan Farrow is at it again. On the August 14 edition of Ronan Farrow Daily, MSNBC’s favorite Hillary Clinton prodigy tried to blame the outfitting of local police departments with military-style gear, as exemplified in the police reaction to the recent racially charged protests in Ferguson, Missouri, on evil “defense contractors.” He asked his guest Radley Balko, author Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces “how much of” the militarization of police “is due to defense contractors profiting off of this ability legislatively of the Defense Department to purchase to the point of surplus?”
Earlier Balko explained that President Reagan “off the cuff, instructed the Pentagon to start making surplus military equipment available to police departments across the country.” He added it was not until the 1990's, and the institution of section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act that the “transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition” to local police forces to aid in fighting the War on Drugs became official policy. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]
International human trafficking is a lucrative, exploitative, and deadly criminal enterprise, often operated by ruthless drug cartels who don’t mind branching out into sex trafficking. So it was a little shocking that Jose Diaz-Balart gave a platform to a fellow journalists who evinced some sympathy for the plight of the smugglers.
On the August 14 edition of his eponymous MSNBC program, Diaz-Balart hosted Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro, who discussed his recent interview with “a coyote, a member of an international crime syndicate set up to smuggle people across the border.” At no point, however, did Diaz-Balart protest Vaqueiro’s portrayal of the criminal as a necessary helper to “migrants who are putting their lives at risk just to get a better life here in the United States.” [See transcript below. Click here for MP3 audio]
MSNBC did its best to hype the “really tight race” facing Republican incumbent and possible 2016 candidate Governor Scott Walker on the August 13 edition of The Daily Rundown. Guest host Chris Cillizza teased a segment on the Wisconsin Republican’s re-election twice in the first half hour of his 9 a.m. show, boasting “a look at Scott Walker's biggest fight yet” and the “tough road to re-election ahead of him.” MSNBC even featured the clip on their website, with the title “Scott Walker starts to scramble for November.”
The overblown segment was barely over one minute long, in which Cillizza began the discussion by asking NBC news political reporter Carrie Dann, “How much trouble is Scott Walker in?” Based on the tone of The Washington Post reporter, the fact that the Wisconsin governor celebrated his nomination with “a big rally last night,” even though “no one thought he wasn't going to be the Republican nominee” was a bad sign. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]
On the August 11 edition of CNN Newsroom, Brooke Baldwin invited fellow CNN host Don Lemon and former NYPD detective Gil Alba on the show to discuss the latest reports of unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting of an unarmed African-American teen. While the policeman bluntly stated that “there should never be rioting,” Lemon seemed to excuse the behavior, arguing that “when people are put in dire situations, you don't know how they are going to react.”
Alba argued that “when you have the riots, it kind of ruins anybody's having -- you know, trying to help out with this.” The looting allows for a few opportunistic people to use discourse for their own personal gain, and to destroy “their own community” instead of confronting the real “relationship between the police and the community.” The CNN Newsroom anchor remained unmoved and adhered to his position. [See vidoe below. Click here for MP3 audio]
On the August 11 edition of Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning show aired a clip from Obama’s interview with Thomas Friedman that was transcribed in print in the August 9 edition of The New York Times. In the video, Friedman asked the president to comment on “the biggest difference between Democrats and Republicans.” According to Obama, the Democratic “consensus” is “a pretty common sense mainstream consensus” while the Republican consensus is based in “wacky ideological nonsense.”
That’s a heck of a way to reach across the aisle and work for bipartisan agreement on the nation’s pressing issues. Of course, the president’s partisan rhetoric has not been picked up by the Big Three broadcast networks. For its part, MSNBC only devoted 2 minutes and 18 seconds to the clip, 38 seconds of which was just a tease before a commercial break. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]