Posts Tagged ‘media’

My latest for the examiner The Pauline Kaels of NPR:

“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,”

It appears he also missed the Twin City tea party meeting I covered in December where the panel of tea party leaders from the area said this:

The suggestion was to avoid social issues, the tea party is a movement based on fiscal responsibility and constitutional authority. The only approach to social issues if any would be constitutional insomuch as the Federal Government spending on items not authorized constitutionally or on 10th amendment grounds.

The whole NPR story is a minefield for the left.

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.

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?

Well actually his opinion piece is actually titled titled:

Wisconsin governor is waging jihad against unions

And the piece starts so:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) jihad against public employee unions is about 30 years late and likely to make Republicans even less popular with voters, who endorse collective bargaining rights for public employees — professionals for whom they have abiding respect.

But but I thought Jihad was an internal struggle and we in the west totally islamophobic if we suggest otherwise? Let me give Mr. Melman a clue. This is Jihad:

This is not

I await to see Melman’s reaction when the next Islamic act of “internal struggle” takes place.

Update: I didn’t have to wait long

German officials said shots were fired “near or on” a bus carrying US soldiers Wednesday, killing at least two people.

An airport spokesman said shooting took place in front of Terminal 2 of what is continental Europe’s second-biggest hub

and the people involved?

The German police arrested a 21-year-old man from Kosovo on suspicion of involvement in the shooting.

Well of course this man must be involved in the Republican Party in Wisconsin, after all that’s where Jihad is taking place, right Mark Melman?

Or maybe its the return of the Flemish Menace?