Tag: media

Quote of the Day – What Agenda? Edition

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From Michael Crichton’s 1/28/2005 American Enterprise Institute speech, starting at 1:07:

Michael Crichton: I gave a talk to the Press Club in ’93 in which I told them that they were out of the quality revolution, that they were in desperate trouble. But they didn’t care then and they probably don’t care now. I operate on the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. I don’t think they ever have been. When did yellow journalism start? Almost at the beginning of American newspapers. And I don’t see any reason for them to change. The great dictum of journalism is “simplify and exaggerate,” which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.

I do believe there will come a time, and it may come quite soon, when because of the internet people will be willing to spend a lot of money for verified information.

(Audience member): The New York Times this week in the Science section reported that ice shelves are melting, and I guess that I’m willing to believe that’s not true, but I find it hard to believe that the reporter, the editors, the scientists quoted are either independently or in collusion advancing an anti-, er, pro-, sorry about that, global-warming agenda.

Crichton: Work on that.

The whole thing runs about 85 minutes. Good speech.

Quote of the Day – Outsourcing and Offshoring

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This is an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s recent column, Who’s ‘Politicizing’ Benghazi? at NRO. It’s a rather long one:

…the State Department outsourced security for the Benghazi consulate to Blue Mountain, a Welsh firm that hires ex-British and -Commonwealth special forces, among the toughest hombres on the planet. The company’s very name comes from the poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand,” whose words famously adorn the regimental headquarters of Britain’s Special Air Service in Hereford. Unfortunately, the one-year contract for consulate security was only $387,413 — or less than the cost of deploying a single U.S. soldier overseas. On that budget, you can’t really afford to fly in a lot of crack SAS killing machines, and have to make do with the neighborhood talent pool. So who’s available? Blue Mountain hired five members of the Benghazi branch of the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade and equipped them with handcuffs and batons. A baton is very useful when someone is firing an RPG at you, at least if you play a little baseball. There were supposed to be four men heavily armed with handcuffs on duty that night, but, the date of September 11 having no particular significance in the Muslim world, only two guards were actually on shift.

Let’s pause right there, and “politicize” a little more. Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing.

Eric Sevareid – Last of the True Journalists

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I’ve quoted several times from one of Eric Sevareid‘s books, Conversations with Eric Sevareid: Interviews with Notable Americans. It’s an interesting book that followed his short-lived interview program of the same name.

A reader sent me an email this evening with the link to this YouTube clip of Eric’s farewell address, “Just to contrast how far we’ve fallen.”

I think he’s right.

From November 30, 1977:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHGHm8iPeUY?rel=0]
Pullquote:

A friend and teacher of the late Walter Lippmann described the role of the professional reporter and observer of the news in this manner: “We make it our business,” he said, “to find out what is going on under the surface and beyond the horizon; to infer, to deduce, to imagine and to guess what is going on inside, and what this meant yesterday and what it could mean tomorrow. In this way we do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do, but has not the time or the interest to do it for himself. This is our job. It is no mean calling. We have a right to be proud of it and to be glad it is our work.”

 In the end, of course, it is not ones employers or colleagues that sustain one quite so much as a listening public, when it be so minded. And I have found it applies only one consistent test, not agreement with one on substance, but the perception of honesty and fair intent. There is, in the American people, a tough, undiminished instinct for what is fair. Rightly or wrongly, I have the feeling that I have passed that test. I shall wear this like a medal.

How far they have fallen, indeed.

Agenda? What Agenda?

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Pat Caddell on media bias and the 2012 election.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brDZJA8j-8c&w=560&h=315]
Full transcript available at AIM.ORG

Pullquote:

When we see what happened this week in Libya—and when I said I was more frightened than I’ve ever been, this is true, because I think it’s one thing that, as they did in 2008, when the mainstream press, the mainstream media and all the press, jumped on the Obama bandwagon and made it a moral commitment on their part to help him get elected in a way that has never happened, whatever the biases in the past. To give you an example of the difference, I’ll just shortly tell you this: In 1980, when [Jimmy] Carter was running for reelection, the press—even though 80% of them, after the election, reporters said they voted for Carter over [Ronald] Reagan, or 70% percent of them, a very high percentage—they believed, so much, that the Carter campaign and the Carter White House had abused the Rose Garden against [Ted] Kennedy that they made a commitment, as they discussed, that they would not serve as the attack dogs on Reagan for the Carter White House because they thought it was unfair and they weren’t to be manipulated. I totally disagree with their analysis, but that was when you actually had a press corps. Whatever their own personal feelings, they made judgments that were, “We’re not going to be manipulated.” This press corps serves at the pleasure of this White House and President, led by people like Ezra Klein and JournoList, where they plot the stories together.

Pat, Pat, Pat.

You poor racist….

Bitter Clingers

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Following up on the media’s salivation over Mitt Romney’s “bitter clinger” moment, let’s review the two statements, shall we?

Obama, in a closed-door fundraiser, surrounded by what he believed to be like-minded people said:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Romney, at a closed-door fundraiser, surrounded by what he believed to be like-minded people said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49, 4— he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich.

I mean, that’s what they sell ever four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is to convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.

So in essence the first guy said “There’s this large group of people who don’t trust the government to save them, and instead cling to religion and/or guns,” and the second guy said “There’s this large group of people who are dependent on government, and won’t be weened off of it.”

And you know what? Both of ’em are RIGHT.

The question now is “how many in the middle can be swayed?”

Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition

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The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press. — Mark Steyn: An act of war, not a movie protest

Haven’t You Heard?

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Quote of the day, from Tam:

You know, you expect it from MSNBC, but from the national network shows down to the local news programs, the Party Convention-related blurbs this morning have all had an air of

“Now that the Nazis in Tampa have finished their cross-burning, put women back in purdah, and shoved grandma onto an ice floe, let’s see what the Real Americans are doing in Charlotte. Bob, over to you; do you have any official sense yet on how much more the Real Americans care about the little guy than the Nazis do, or are they saving that for a surprise?“

Well, Barry still hasn’t lost his core constituency: The American media.

But, but George Stephanopoulos says there’s no bias in the media!

And by all means, read the rest of Tam’s post, which would be a QotD in and of itself.