Media

OK. A week ago I commented on the nasty blog posts directed at Newsweek after their layoffs. And I got blasted from conservatives — some of the language was really not nice, guys!

Well…..after seeing the latest cover of Sarah Palin in her exercise shorts and a come-hither look, with the caption “She’s Bad News for the GOP — And for Everybody Else, Too,” I have to swallow very hard. Read more...

I am not one of the great admirers of Sarah Palin as a political leader, but fair is fair, and the Newsweek cover of Palin sexist, pure and simple.

The photo was taken as an athletic shoot, and to put it on the front page of a major weekly newsmagazine was totally out of context, biased and sexist. We have all seen pictures of President Barack Obama showing some skin in a bathing suit, but these were political paparazzi photos and were not placed on the cover of major news magazines.

I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t. When many of the Watergate defendants, some convicted criminals, got lucrative book contracts and became media stars, I wondered. Why weren’t they committing suicide or running off to New Zealand and changing their names? Since when was scandal a credential for fame and fortune? Read more...

Jon Meecham, editor of Newsweek, announced that the magazine would be laying off about a dozen positions. What did not surprise me was more news of the tough times in the publishing world; what did surprise me was the unbelievable vitriol in blog posts.

Here is a sampling of blog posts after the announcement:

If there were still any question whether Fox News might be a legitimate news operation, there is no longer. With Sunday’s sycophantic interview of Rush Limbaugh by Chris Wallace, they proved yet again that they offer little more, even on their news shows, than pure partisan propaganda.

Wallace is a great journalist. He’s earned his stripes. He prides himself on asking tough questions of anybody. Except Rush Limbaugh. In this interview, Wallace did nothing but kiss Limbaugh’s butt.

I was once formally forbidden to talk to any student or professor at the college I worked at after helping a few students organize a conference about the killings taking place in Bosnia. When I was seen talking briefly to a student in passing on the campus later, I was fired. This at a time when I had three children under the age of 8 and my wife, on the farm with the kids, was eight months pregnant with our fourth. I worked then as a temp doing odd jobs, including cleaning toilets at a local Sara Lee factory. When we finally sold our beautiful little farm in the hills of North Carolina we had lost $40,000 and were down to our last $25. But it remains the proudest moment of my working life. Writers like to be censored. It puts even the inconsequential in league with the greatest. So I know how Glenn Beck is feeling this week: proud and honorable. Everyone at Fox should feel the same.

As questions intensify about what President Barack Obama has actually accomplished, the administration has taken to the offensive by attacking Fox News.

On Thursday, the administration announced that White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg would give interviews to all of the members of the White House TV pool — CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS — except Fox News. The attempted strong-arm tactic follows a series of critical remarks by White House officials aimed at discrediting Fox News. Appearing on CNN, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said that the administration is essentially blacklisting Fox News because the president doesn't want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] be led in following Fox." Emanuel later added that Fox News “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." Translation: The American president is attempting to co-opt the national dialogue by censuring an entire news organization.

This has got to be the most ridiculous waste of everyone's time by a media that seems incapable of having a serious discussion of serious issues for serious people.

Someday this matter will find a place in the Museum of Natural History about our inability to have intelligent debates on urgent matters while engulfing ourselves in freak-show media and loony-tune television spectacles of zero importance.

Are you kidding?

Is Glenn Beck serious?

I know Glenn Beck well. I have been on his show many times (OK, he was at CNN then). I was on with him during the election season, spending hours with him on the set. And, of course, I disagree with him on practically everything.

This really was an easy call. Boot Rush off the field. Not because they are Democrats or liberals. Not because they are Barack Obama’s buddies. Heck, most of these owners are big-time Republicans. As Michael Wilbon put it: “A few are so far to the right politically they think Limbaugh is liberal.”

Nope. Pure and simple, the NFL could not stomach his racial slurs over many years. Taking on Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, lamenting the number of black players (“NFL looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips”), racial attacks against Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor — after all, ESPN fired him.