Media

We live in an age when the National Enquirer could win the Pulitzer Prize, while the mainstream media imitates the Enquirer. Let’s make it official. Let’s broadcast the John Edwards sex tapes, make them available to all media unedited, or at least make them pay-per-view, with profits donated to charity.

Wouldn't this be so much better than serious discussion of the crisis of sovereign debt and how to cut the budget deficit? Shoot, if we have another crash, we can worry about it then. For now, shouldn't we focus on the Edwards sex tapes?

No heart attack from digging out. That was a good thing, but there was little to do but spend the weekend mostly hunkered down inside. There were no newspapers, no delivery, but who missed them? We could read them just as easily online. And then, those of us who didn't lose power had plenty of TV to help pass the time.

As the anchors and frozen reporters repeated ad nauseam what we already knew, that it sucked outside, it would not have been much of a surprise to see a crawl at the top or bottom of the screen informing that the meeting of the Global Warming Action Group had been canceled. But the weather coverage was just one of the highlights.

Did anyone hear that giant thud on Tuesday morning? That was the collective sound of the millions of jaws dropping when they heard the news of a landmark study published by the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine that sexual abstinence education works. Note the historic nature of such a finding on social policy in this country. This wasn’t some controlled study of white folks in a tiny Midwest neighborhood where pregnant teens are forced to wear scarlet letters. No, researchers examined 662 high-risk African-Americans in the sixth and seventh grades, when hormones are running high and parents are rarely around.

You can be sure that some enterprising TV executive, somewhere, is going to take advantage of this. In about a year, the station's newscast, featuring the latest perky, sparkling anchorwoman, will open with "Here she comes, Miss Amerrrrrrica."

Cue Caressa Cameron, who follows in the long line of beauty pageant contestants who felt that looks and personality were all anyone needed to report on the tough issues of the day. Any fool can do it.

If someone had said to me 10 or 20 years ago that we might not have daily newspapers anymore, I'd have looked at them like they were crazy. Not so today, as many newspapers have gone down the drain and many others are retrenching a mile a minute. We may get to the point in the not-too-distant future when what we read every day is gone.

An Associated Press news item caught my eye yesterday that compounds the same dilemma for us old-timers who like to read with paper in our hands. According to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, his company now sells six digital copies of books for every 10 old-fashioned hard copies. While this expands part of the book-buying world (older titles), it threatens new books, which sell for $24 compared to digital books on Amazon's Kindle, which sells books for $9.99.

I forgot Chris Matthews was white until, after watching President Obama’s State of the Union last night, he said it made him forget Obama was black.

It’s just not something I think about that much. Then — oh, yes. He’s a white guy. That’s how white guys think. Like in the Lenny Bruce classic of the 1950s, “How to relax your colored friends at parties.” Talk a lot about sports and entertainment. (“That Bo Jangles — Christ, could he tap-dance!”). And always make sure you have lots of fried chicken and watermelon on hand.

Malcolm X, rest in peace, must be shaking his head with an amused smile. The contention he had with Martin Luther King Jr. was that white and black could never find common ground on this continent. Not because of racism, but because white guys are too dorky. And unlike puppies, they cannot be trained.

I don’t have much to say about Game Change, a trailer-park book not worth reading, which had nothing important to contribute to the discussion of a very important election. I will make two brief points: the lack of ethics of low-grade Democratic strategists who dish dirt after the fact, and the cheap-shotting of Elizabeth Edwards, which I find even beneath the already low standards of political chatter. Read more...

John Heilemann is often a guest on Chris Matthews’s show; on Sunday, Heilemann was the man of the half-hour for his new book Game Change (co-written with Mark Halperin). Andrea Mitchell, Kelly O’Donnell and Howard Fineman were the other panelists on the NBC show, and each of them used material from Game Change to make his or her points. “John is right” was the sentence most often heard. Read more...

If the Good Lord gave me five political wishes, one of them would be that Jacobus and her colleagues would at least add a Republican letterhead to their posts when they parrot, like Pravda once parroted Brezhnev, the talking points of their party.

Oh, my, Cheri is upset with Ed Schultz, or at least reposting the prepackaged words of paid party hacks who are upset with Ed.

MSNBC's Ed Schultz apparently doesn't believe in this whole "democracy" thing we've got going on here in the United States of America. You know — where citizens get to vote for their elected officials and the one with the most votes wins? (Please don't bore me with the "Gore won in 2000" whining. He didn't. In fact, it was his choice to go for a manual recount only in four cherry-picked Florida counties where he thought he might do best, rather than a statewide recount, because he knew Bush beat him in Florida.)