Posts Tagged ‘media’

It’s amazing what suddenly gets reported with you are worried…

Posted: March 9, 2011 by datechguy in abortion, media
Tags: , , ,

…about appearances of bias:

Conan: Finally, several of you wrote during yesterday’s show about PP, about the conflict over what percentage of the agency’s clients receive abortions. We’ve asked NPR’s heal policy correspondent Julie Rovner to join us again. Julie, always nice to have with you us.… And we heard two figures from opposing sides yesterday, 3% and 10%, who’s right?

Rovner: Well, the conflict is really that PP keeps its statistics according to the percent of those services that are provided, not according to how many people get what. So it turns out that there are – that indeed, abortions are 3% of the services provided, although – and that was what, I think, Sarah Stoesz from PP kind of misspoke when she said it was 3% of patients who come in get abortions.

It is actually a little bit closer to the 10% that Marjorie Dannenfesler suggested, because there are about 3 million patients who come in. There are about 300,000 abortions provided.

The hook, just 24 hours earlier they promoted the very same 3% figure. Quite a coincidence, or as Jill Stanek puts it:

Perhaps James O’Keefe’s release yesterday of damaging investigative videos against National Public Radio (read more here, here, and here) had nothing to do with it.

Or perhaps a desperate NPR is suddenly trying to appear more fair and balanced in the face of potentially losing $90 million in taxpayer funding.

Yup I can’t see why we would think that NPR is in damage control mode.

I guess when you are fighting for limited federal dollars, some alliances are just too expensive to worry about.

Update: Dropped an “e” in Jill’s name, corrected

My latest for the Examiner: The Pauline Kaels of NPR

Posted: March 9, 2011 by datechguy in examiner columns, internet/free speech
Tags: , ,

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.

“It’s a half minute news story”

Posted: March 9, 2011 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
Tags: , , , ,

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
Tags: , , , , ,

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?

Older Entries
Newer Entries