Media

Big deal: In the name of openness, the CIA is releasing records of the abuses we already knew about in the 1970s. Well, if you really want openness, how about honesty about the abuses of the 21st century?

How about an honest accounting of the torture, secret prisons, domestic spying, eavesdropping, wiretapping and other invasions of privacy that have become routine business by our national intelligence community? They have only become public to the extent that they have been leaked.

Naive? I'm sure many will say so. After all, these folks will argue, the nation's vicious enemies do not play by such rules and the United States can only protect the way of life we hold so precious by matching brutality with brutality.

But what's naive is that argument.   Read more...

When I wrote on this site in support of a Gore-Obama ticket I received a number of hate notes against Barack Obama.

They all made reference to Obama's middle name or the lie that a 6-year-old Barack studied at a school that was friendly to terrorists.

Recently on "Hannity and Colmes," Ann Coulter, who called Sept. 11 widows "harpies" who were not unhappy their husbands died on that day, offered the latest smear against Obama.

It was Rupert Murdoch's Fox News that also "reported" the lie about Obama's childhood.

Last night Chris Matthews demeaned the legacy of NBC and the reputation of MSNBC by giving Ann Coulter a full hour, including a discussion of whether or not she should publicly call for John Edwards's death.  Read more...

I don’t usually write about stuff that affects my clients, but today I have to get something off my chest.

This is not on behalf of my client (Newscorp), so what I say right now is not in any way, shape or form reflective of any position they may take.

In this day and age, with the approval ratings of the Congress, I think it is absolutely insane for any member of Congress to advocate taking the remote control away from the public. I don’t care if it is in defense of children. (And yes, I have a small child.)

We are the undisputed world leader in entertainment. If you go to any other country in the world, they first look at our stuff before they turn on their stuff.

You know why? Because government has stayed the hell out of it.  Read more...

Vice President Cheney is not the only one. In fact, rare is the official, particularly the elected one, who embraces unfettered media access to the way he or she conducts the public's business. Not so rare is the official who holds the media and its reporters in contempt.

It's not hard to understand. Having one's foot held to the fire by brilliant reporting like the current Washington Post series on Cheney or the Walter Reed exposés is an altogether unpleasant experience, and the knee-jerk reaction to such stories is to blame the messengers, meaning the media, for such exceptional journalism.  Read more...

Soon, CIA Director Michael Hayden will release documents that describe major misdeeds of the CIA in darker days, after General Antonio Taguba went public in The New Yorker with charges of an Abu Ghraib cover-up.

A great and noble debate will begin in America. Revelations about past and current misdeeds will bring into focus what went wrong in the Iraq war, and why opponents of these policies are voices of American patriotism.

In a recent show Tucker Carlson and a “pundit” ridiculed and demeaned Al Gore. Rather than discussing the profound points he was making in his new book The Assault on Reason, they engaged in cheap ad hominem attacks on Gore as “over the top” and “rage-filled.” Read more...

Jesse Unruh, legendary Speaker of the California Assembly, once famously said: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

And that’s true. But it doesn’t mean that everybody has to give milk. Some people, in fact, shouldn’t give milk, including priests, nuns, convicted felons — and journalists!

But, clearly, that feeling’s not universal. Upon researching candidate financial reports, MSNBC discovered that 144 journalists — most with the knowledge and blessing of their media bosses — had actually made campaign contributions: 125 to Democrats; 17 to Republicans; and 2 to candidates of both parties.

Uh-oh, here comes that old chestnut about “the liberal media” again! But, the point here is not whether the media is liberal or conservative. The point is: Journalists should not be writing campaign checks to anybody. Period. Read more...

More of today's random thoughts (which really means I didn't have anything I wanted to write about):

I wonder if those sickeningly sweet Romney family blogs can be read safely by diabetics. Or, for that matter, anyone with a gag reflex.

Or can the insider accounts of Rudy Giuliani balance things out?

Do any of the presidential candidates have tattoos? If so, what do they say? Do any of the Romney kids? If they did, they'd probably say "Mom."

With so many companies trying to save money vis-a-vis layoffs, I can't help but wonder why they need a chairman, a CEO, COO, CFO. I mean, what do those guys all do, anyway?

And I've been meaning to mention this: Forget whether Fox News is "Fair and Balanced" — the Democrats and their liberal supporters who want to boycott that network's debates are way out in, uh, left field. I don't know how to say this, folks, but speech in this country is supposed to be free.

Although after this column, people may want to reconsider that.

Some random thoughts:

The uproar over passport backlogs misses the point: Not only are our leaders trying to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to get into this country, now they want to make it tougher for CITIZENS to get in.

If the importance of party affiliation continues to decline, would a Richardson-Tancredo ticket be tough to beat?

It was nice to see that video about a new campaign song, featuring candidate Bill Clinton and his wife. Oh. Was that a mistake?  Read more...

Move over, network TV. Step aside, major dailies. Talk radio — beware. Cable news is taking over. And the Web ain’t far behind.

No doubt about it, cable news is in. The recent issue of Adweek had an interesting survey about where Americans get their news on politics. The days of the major newspapers, Walter Cronkite-style anchors, and radio personalities dominating political news are over.

When asked “Where do you get most of your political information?” cable TV leads with 30 percent, followed by network TV with 22 percent, the Web at 19 percent and print media at 17 percent. Network radio is way down at 5 percent. Read more...

It doesn’t really matter that Democrats won back control of Congress; most Americans still prefer Republican ideals. Or, as Brit Hume pronounced on election night 2006, “from what we could see from all the polling and everything else, it remains a conservative country.” Oh, yeah?

That’s the conventional wisdom we hear from the mainstream media. And now we know it’s absolute bunk. A new study by Media Matters for America and the Campaign for America’s Future shows that on most issues, across the board, Americans are true-blue liberals ... and much more liberal than most members of Congress. Read more...