Archive for the ‘media’ Category

“It’s a half minute news story”

Posted: March 9, 2011 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
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thus Sayith Carl Bernstein Watching Morning Joe, because of the resignation the NPR statement and the current fight was forced to cover the story. Yet although they played the key segments (stressing it was “edited” and that is was O’Keefe’s group while not mentioning that O’Keefe wasn’t in the video, nor mentioning the 2nd NPR person in the videos) the topic was instantly about how much of a non story this was, how unimportant it is and why we shouldn’t care.

Thus the show is able to say: “Yes we covered it.”, without giving it any credence.

Alas for them they had Cokie Roberts and her husband scheduled so it was impossible to not touch on it again. Again it was called a distraction, Cokie stressed how the small stations would suffer without federal funding and how much separation there is from the actual journalism and the exects.

This tells me that they can’t ignore it. The trap was the crank call against Walker. Morning Joe and the MSM went long on it, the media ate it up. Because they did and because it was Walker is still in the news. it became impossible to totally ignore it.

This is going to undermine democrats in the senate big time which already had problems:

In November, the same week that George Soros declared war on Fox News by giving $1 million to Media Matters, NPR announced it had accepted a $1.8 million grant from Soros’s Open Society Foundations for a 50-state local reporting initiative.

The grant, coming so close to Williams’s firing, stuck in conservatives’ craw.

“When NPR receives million-dollar gifts from Mr. Soros, it is an insult to taxpayers when other organizations, such as MoveOn.org demand that Congress ‘save NPR and PBS’ by guaranteeing ‘permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling,’ as the liberal interest group did last month,” DeMint wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

The increased scrutiny is certainly not going to be healthy for them.

Update: Vivian Schiller just resigned. Apparently this is no longer a half minute new story. Over to you Carl.

Update 2: That half minute keeps getting longer and longer doesn’t it? Ron Schiller is now out of Aspen too, and apparently Vivian didn’t resign, she was fired.

If you want to know what is actually happening in Wisconsin…

Posted: March 4, 2011 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
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You need to be reading Ann Althouse these days.

And don’t miss this exchange on Bloggerheads TV

Watch the whole exchange, this particular quote is spot on:

There is no comparison between the rhetoric of the tea party and the rhetoric of these protesters. This is 100 times worse, I mean you have to look around to find anything amongst the tea parties maybe you know maybe there’s some guy with a sign that’s over the top but basically its all over the place here.

Listen to the different between her and Tim Noah he makes general assertions on the tea party based on a single visit to a single rally. Ann has been to multiple Tea Party Rallies and has covered the Wisconsin protests in-depth. Who’s opinion would you trust more?

Boy when IowaHawk gets serious

Posted: March 3, 2011 by datechguy in media
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he is devastating:

To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.

Perhaps the most striking thing in these numbers is the within-state gap between white and minority students. Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.

The Statistics are here from the NAEP standardized tests and they make a fool of Krugman and the Economist articles.

Just a reminder, Teachers in Texas don’t have collective bargaining rights.

In the old days it was always known that Jesters had the wisdom in the court, apparently it is still true today.

Am I actually seeing Morning Joe reporting on the media difference?

Posted: March 3, 2011 by datechguy in blogs, media, opinion/news
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The difference in Wisconsin coverage that is, why yes, Politico wrote about the double standard concerning “signs”:

“The mainstream media’s professed concern with uncivil engages only when it is practiced by conservatives,” asserted the Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin.

And conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who has made her blog something of a clearinghouse of alleged union misdeeds, boasts she is doing “the reporting the tea party-bashing national media won’t do on the rabid outbreak of progressive incivility and violence at Big Labor protests across the country.”

and Morning Joe is talking about the double standard in the Wisconsin coverage.

They are not touching on the PHYSICAL stuff, nor did they show any extended clip with the union folks actually saying what they are saying but they did do a whole segment on the double standard and objected loudly to it.

It’s interesting to note they Politico didn’t embed any of the actual video, and Morning Joe didn’t play any of the audio.

This is very revealing, this means that the video and audio can’t be hidden, it means that it has spread on social networking sites and blog and getting out there. It means that Politico, forced to cover the story has decided to make it one about the media double standard. (a very valid story) instead of what the Unions and their supports are actually doing.

Even funnier is their defense of the media pointing to a single blog post at the NYT online:

In fact, the New York Times’ Michael Shear did write a blog post about the Wisconsin GOP’s slickly produced video, calling it “striking” for its juxtaposition of incendiary rhetoric from union protestors with liberal accusations about angry conservative rhetoric.

As I mentioned before, look at the actions to see what is happening, this story and Morning Joe’s coverage of it tells you an awful lot about who is actually winning this debate.

Update: It’s worth noting that they only touched on this in the 6 a.m. hour then dropped it like a hot potato.

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