Archive for the ‘media’ Category

A smart move by NYU on Nir Rosen

Posted: February 16, 2011 by datechguy in internet/free speech, media, middle east
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As you might have heard something horrible happened to Lara Logan in Egypt.

Lara Logan was attacked and sexually assaulted last Friday in Cairo’s Tahrir Square while filming a piece for “60 Minutes.”

The CBS report has the following details:

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently home recovering.

Ace of spades expressed outrage:

…if I am not weary of a barbaric desert nomad culture of rape and outrage while carrying around a ton of chip-on-the-shoulder arrogance-hiding-profound-insecurity about it all.

Nir Rosen of NYU and the far left former embedded reporter for the Taliban decided that this was a good time to vent his spleen against this “war monger”

The initial tweet by Rosen stated, “Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.” From this tweet he went further, writing that he would have been amused if Anderson Cooper had also been sexually assaulted.

“Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too,” wrote Rosen.

The two comments gave way to more. Rosen called Logan a “war monger” and expressed doubt that she was actually assaulted.

“Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger” wrote Rosen.

“Look, she was probably groped like thousands of other women, which is still wrong, but if it was worse than [sic] I’m sorry.”

Usually when someone from the far left says something disgusting it is ignored expect by us on the right like the National Review :

But let’s just remember one thing going forward: Nir Rosen believed this was the right moment to let the world know that he “ran out of sympathy for her” and that we should “remember her role as a major war monger” and that we “have to find humor in the small things.”

Jim didn’t expect much from NYU on this but this time they acted:

From Karen J. Greenberg, Executive Director, Center on Law and Security

Nir Rosen is always provocative, but he crossed the line yesterday with his comments about Lara Logan. I am deeply distressed by what he wrote about Ms. Logan and strongly denounce his comments. They were cruel and insensitive and completely unacceptable. Mr. Rosen tells me that he misunderstood the severity of the attack on her in Cairo. He has apologized, withdrawn his remarks, and submitted his resignation as a fellow, which I have accepted. However, this in no way compensates for the harm his comments have inflicted. We are all horrified by what happened to Ms. Logan, and our thoughts are with her during this difficult time.

Why did NYU decide to act when Jim didn’t think they would? I’d like to think it is because they don’t like this kind of thing from their folks, however I suspect it is because Nir made one mistake, his choice of targets. Logan is a member not of the right or of Fox news but of the MSM, CBS to be exact.

The media will tolerate an awful lot of stuff if thrown against someone of the right, but if you go after one of their own (and until and unless she goes to Fox News she will be considered on of their own) they will object loudly. Thus NYU does the right thing and the smart thing and Nir Rosen is gone.

If you are a fan of Rosen I wouldn’t feel too sorry, it won’t be long before the media moves on and Mr. Rosen is once again teaching our youth on the evils of America.

So let me get this straight

Posted: February 9, 2011 by datechguy in media
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Huffington post sold for $315 million after having investors kick in $36 million and none of the 4000 people who write for it get paid?

That’s 351 million not counting any revenue that the site has generated. If you paid the 4000 folks in question 10k each for the time they put in over 5 years that still leaves 311 million. Subtract the investor money of 36 mil and you have 250 mill subtract say half for taxes and you have 125 mil and say another 25 mil for expenses and Arianna still pockets 20 mil a year over five years plus the revenue generated.

Yet the 4,000 got not a cent. The 40 mil that would be necessary to give them a piece of the pie is not to be. So all of you on the left who provided free content so Arianna could cash out big time now get to do the same thing so AOL can cash out big time. Is that what you signed on for?

Hey its a free country if you guys want to put out all that work so Huffington can get richer that’s totally up to you, but this is one version of Money for nothing that hasn’t been banned.

Then again if you look at Hotair it’s not about the money, it’s about the re-election:

Arianna Huffington, who got $315 million in a sale of Huffington Post to AOL as well as complete control of AOL’s content. She has plans for that power, Sargent reports at the Washington Post. She hopes to turn AOL into a center of “citizen journalism” in advance of the 2012 elections:

Or to put it another way, not only did Arianna get a big payday, but by using it to re-elect The One™ she and her friends are counting on, if successful a great payback on the back of the American Taxpayer for every liberal cause out there.  And that payout won’t be millions, it will be billions!

Update; Irony thy name is AOL via glenn AOL stock values falls $315 million since feb 1st

Just to put the AOL think in perspective

Posted: February 7, 2011 by datechguy in blogger for hire, blogs, business, DaTechGuy on DaRadio, internet/free speech, media
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Stacy McCain does the match on AOL and points out something interesting about the money in the AOL deal:

What it means, I suspect, is that the Left is willing to “invest” in liberal media ventures that are supposedly for-profit but which, in fact, lose money. Because, after all, whose money is being invested? Not theirs.

Five words: Government employee union pension funds.

That, I suggest, explains this whole deal. Private investors are now selling their AOL shares, while managers of pension funds for AFSCME, SEIU and other unions are buying AOL stock, thus providing the investment capital necessary to fund expansion of the Left’s online media presence in advance of Obama’s re-election campaign.

Belvedere notes that this is not an issue for the left:

Profit doesn’t mean much to the Committed Left — not if you mean the word in it’s classical sense [OED: ‘financial gains’]. Oh sure, they need money to fund their various schemes, but the Manic Progressives are always willing to sacrifice dollars for propaganda [see: MSNBC]. Besides, if they play it right, they can always funnel some taxpayer dollars into funding their schemes.

Broadcasting their lies relentlessly until they get absorbed by enough of the masses is a tactic the Leftists have employed successfully for a century now.

The daytime range of my radio show, looks pretty good for ads doesn't it?

I did the math, If I sold every second of every moment of ads for my radio show for one year that comes up to $64,800. If the liberals were to be believed about some giant conservative conspiracy I would have already had the Koch Brothers buying the entire time to support my radio show and blogging for an entire year.

Alas that is not the case, every day I’m going door to door pitching the show, extolling the range of the radio station, the strength of my guest and the appeal of my show to a growing audience, doing my best to make the sale and pay the mortgage.

The “interests” I’m beholden to are Basement Technologies of Western Mass., Aaron Pallet, Putnam Street lanes. and every other advertiser who buys time on my show. Each of them offer valuable services or produces to my listeners and buy ads on my show to attract customers. Yet ironically the left would paint me because I’m a person of the right as beholding to rich interests while at the same time they are paid millions for a product that doesn’t justify its value.

The world is a weird place.

The president who stood by our side

Posted: February 5, 2011 by datechguy in internet/free speech, media, opinion/news, personal
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At the time Ronald Reagan was elected I was a democrat who was a hawk on defense.

My greatest influence was a professor Ed Thomas. He had a great love of history and of original documents. He used to say about Ronald Reagan. “I’m afraid of Ronald Reagan”. He seemed to think that Reagan would turn the cold war into a hot one. I was more worried about his economic policies myself

Hindsight is 2020 and looking back now it seems clear that such a worry was unfounded but at the time a lot of people didn’t know what would come. The best experts thought the Soviets were a lot stronger than they were. Reagan had a better grasp of both the international and the economic situation than others did.

It took me a long time to figure this out. It wasn’t until the late 80’s and early 90’s that I understood just how great Reagan was.

Yesterday on the phones of talk radio , seminar callers armed with Media Matters Talking points were spinning Reagan on both National shows (such as Rush) and on local shows (Howie Carr) with a “why do conservatives love Reagan when he did xyz” trying to paint him as “not conservative”.

Their attempts to co-op the memory of Reagan are understandable, they have been unable to change our memory of the Reagan years and have also not managed to make us forget what they thought of him, to wit:

It should never be forgotten that the Left hated Reagan just as lustily as they hated George W. Bush, and with some of the same venomous affectations, such as the reductio ad Hitlerum. The key difference is that in Reagan’s years there was no Internet with which to magnify these derangements, and the 24-hour cable-news cycle was in its infancy. But the signs were certainly abundant. In 1982, the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London held a vote for the most hated people of all time, with the result being: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula. Democratic congressman William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was trying to replace “the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” A desperate Jimmy Carter charged that Reagan was engaging in “stirrings of hate” in the 1980 campaign. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (now a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.” In The Nation, Alan Wolfe wrote: “The United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”

And in discussing Reagan’s greatest acknowledged achievement — ending the Cold War — liberals conveniently omit that they opposed him at every turn. Who can forget the relentless scorn heaped on Reagan for the “evil empire” speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative? Historian Henry Steele Commager said the “evil empire” speech “was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” “What is the world to think,” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote, “when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?”

Or as Jonah Goldberg puts it the only good conservative is a dead one.

While the encomiums to Reagan & Co. are welcome, the reality is that very little has changed. As we saw in the wake of the Tucson shootings, so much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present. It’s an old game. For instance, in 1980, quirky New Republic writer Henry Fairlie wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he lamented the rise of Reagan, “the most radical activist of them all.” The title of his essay: “If Reagan Only Were Another Coolidge . . . ”

Even then, the only good conservative was a dead conservative.

Goldberg is spot on. It is a simple attempt to use Reagan to hit the conservatives of today.

I would suggest skipping the tributes from liberals for they come from the same sentiment as this scene from Braveheart (script via corkey.net):

Robert: Does anyone know his politics?

Craig: No, but his weight with the commoners can unbalance everything. The Balliols will kiss his arse so we must.

The American people honor Reagan’s memory so the left which hates him and always has hated him must too or at least seem to honor him. Ignore them and instead concentrate on one like this from No Sheeples here.

Ronald Reagan was a great president, perhaps the greatest in my lifetime, I wish I appreciated him more when he was in power.

Update: Interesting Palin/Reagan note from Byron York

Lee Edwards, a Reagan biographer and fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was in the audience and took note of the fact that Palin was speaking to a strongly conservative group at the Ranch Center. She likely wouldn’t be invited to speak to a more general audience at the Reagan Library, Edwards said, “because she’s not a member of the establishment, and they’re not comfortable with her.”

“The irony,” Edwards continued, “is that neither was Reagan.”

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