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John Tierney, who has taken over the retiring William Safire’s op-ed slot in The New York Times, weighs in today with a http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/opinion/20tierney.html column comparing golf to other Pleistocene interests of men. A self-confessed golf-hater, Tierney spends his 800 words ringing through a series of "men are from Mars" cliches. His sole insight, from a round of playing disc (or Frisbee) golf? Men like to look down on a savannah-like landscape and shoot something at it.
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller drew headlines for the odd practice of writing a letter to the editor of his own Book Review. (It's almost like writing a letter to himself.) He's highly offended that anyone would suggest he doesn't have a passion for tough reporting on liberals. (Earth to Keller: how about that little Air America scandal?) The actual letter from today's paper is here.
A.P. reporter Nedra Pickler was probably assigned to write a simple, short story regarding the President of the United States biking in Crawford with the Champion cyclist of the world, Lance Armstrong. Still, in a short 408 word essay, Pickler managed to insert the standard Bush-bash line. Earth-shattering? No. Unexpected? Not at all. Petty? Indeed.
When they’re not outright telling us what to think, the AP sometimes points out the tediously banal and attempts to use that to influence public opinion. Take today’s John Roberts-bashing piece called, “Roberts' Writings Reveal Strong Views.”
While some cable TV hosts are making their living off the Natalee Holloway case this summer, Bob Costas is having none of it.
Costas, hired by CNN as an occasional fill-in on "Larry King Live," refused to anchor Thursday's show because it was primarily about the Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba. Chris Pixley filled in at the last minute.
But beyond her small physical stature, it is Ratner's smallness of mind that renders her unbearable. Most of the talk centered on Cindy Sheehan, with Ratner predictably arguing that W should meet with her.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, on Friday night's Countdown, smeared the Media Research Center (MRC), the parent of NewsBusters, as “a scam” and claimed, in awarding MRC President Brent Bozell the “worser” slot in his nightly “worst person” gimmick, that “the only person distorting as usual is Bozell.” Olbermann was defending himself “against the charge of wacky guy” Bozell who “accused me of distortion for having said that Rush Limbaugh had said on air, quote, 'Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real.'” Olbermann proceeded to slam Limbaugh as the “Worst Person in the World” for supposedly denying the quote, alleging: "Like your career, Rush. You're finished, credibility spent."While Olbermann zeroed in on Bozell, the MRC's critiques of him appeared in an August 18 NewsBusters posting (with video) that I wrote which was reprinted in the MRC's CyberAlert. I never suggested that Limbaugh did not utter the sentence sequence quoted by Olbermann, but that he distorted Limbaugh's point that the media see both Sheehan and Burkett as "an opportunity" to exploit and that "it doesn't matter what the specifics of Cindy Sheehan's case are." Olbermann had snidely claimed, "I guess she made up that dead-son-in-Iraq business" -- a ridiculous interpretation of some jumbled words. Video: Windows Media or RealPlayer. Full transcript follows:
On Thursday night's 11pm EDT The Situation with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter recommended that President Bush meet with Cindy Sheehan, calling him "stubborn" for not doing so already, and contended that what the current "anti-war movement" wants from Bush is for him to be the "public mourner-in-chief" and to be "more publicly responsive to the suffering."
Washington Post foreign affairs reporter Robin Wright has no sense of humor -- at least when it comes to a conservative daring to make any kind of joke related to women in the workplace, even a little girl. Saying “I don't know whether they were quips,” on Friday's Washington Week on PBS, Wright proceeded to act offended as she made clear that “as a woman” she was “struck” by how, in the Reagan-era memos written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, he “questioned whether it was a good thing for a woman to go back later in life to law school” and he dubbed, as a “little huckster,” a Girl Scout who wanted to sell some cookies” to President Reagan. The humor-challenged Wright arrogantly judged: "I have to say, you know, one case of this is one thing, but to see this repeatedly was really striking, as a woman, to me." Host Alan Murray pointed out that Roberts' asides were “jokes” and, as noted in an earlier NewsBusters posting by me about the Post's deliberate distortion of his quip in a story headlined “Roberts Resisted Women's Rights,” his remark about homemakers becoming lawyers was a slap not at women but at how there are too many lawyers. NBC's Pete Williams, however, chimed in with how “the President of NOW said his views are, quote, 'neanderthal.'"
Charles Jaco (whom older people might remember as "C.D. Jaco" from his days as a reporter for NBC and CNN) goes a little berserk in attacking bloggers on the Romenesko Letters page. It's one thing to protest the idea that the press isn't positive enough on Iraq, but he lost me when he started mocking conservatives' lack of "opposable thumbs," not to mention the crackpot Nazi smear at the end:
Politicians and automakers say a car that can reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away.
Thankfully, most U.S. citizens are no longer dependent upon propagandists at the Abu Ghraib Daily (aka the New York Times), or
Cindy Sheehan may no longer be in Crawford, Texas, but Katie Couric thinks any number of MoveOn.org protesters will do just as well. In an interview on today's edition of the Today show with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, she asked the former Republican congressman why President Bush can't just meet with the protesters camped outside his ranch: "Do you think that the President should have met with Cindy Sheehan, and what about the other protesters who are still there? Should he now meet with them?"