Latest Blogs

Despite retailers' move back toward 'Merry Christmas,' journalists are three times as likely to offer 'Happy Holidays.'

This one caught me quite off guard: a major American magazine recognizing that all of the problems in the Middle East can’t be tied directly to the never-ending standoff between Israel and the Palestinians. This was even more shocking given the recent suggestions by the Baker-Hamilton commission that the problems in Iraq would be lessened by a resolution of this seemingly extraneous conflict.Yet…

That great American ambassador and lovely lady Jeane Kirkpatrick has left us, but her passing also causes us to remember her strategic sense and moral clarity. She came to national prominence in Reaganite circles in 1979 with her marvelous Commentary magazine essay on “Dictatorship and Double Standards.” It argued that traditional authoritarian autocracies were both more susceptible to…

Yesterday Howie, one of my co-bloggers at The Jawa Report conducted what he describes as a "simple test" for mainstream media bias against reporting positive news from Iraq. Howie posted about three separate stories from Iraq, one positive, one mostly positive, and one negative, then tracked the amount of play each story got in the MSM via Google's news search function.

In a column published last night, Eric Boehlert does an excellent job of showing why David Brock's Media Matters should be regarded as the alimentary canal of punditry; on one end it's good at regurgitation, and on the other, the finalized product is consistently something better flushed. In Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns, Boehlert dishonestly addresses the continuing Associated…

Today's starters:Media: Court hearings on FCC's reinvigorated anti-profanity policy will be televised, meaning the argument over naughty words on TV will be shown on TV. The Christian Science Monitor damns conservative milblogger Bill Roggio with faint praise (Bill, and Karl at PW respond). Patterico ponders copyrights today, wondering who would own the rights to an answering machine message…

The Pentagon announced that all four major branches of the military met or exceeded their recruiting goals for the month on November. Normally the media glosses over these stories and relegates them to the rarely read deep recesses of the B section. That is unless the news can be used to embed a story within a story – the sort that poisons the main message with a carefully crafted sub-context…