Information-free bleach-drinking half-wit

Wrestling with pigs

Fighting disinformation and propaganda from Fox is a dirty unrewarding job, and the pigs' ratings go up, but someone has to do it now that Keith Olbermann is no longer knocking the big cow chip off Bill O'Reilly's shoulder.

The Democratic Party doesn't seem able fight the right anywhere outside of fundraising emails, so I'm glad at least Media Matters is stepping up to the plate.  This should be leverage to be asked by big media to speak for liberals.

Suspension of disbelief

Only possible rejoinder to Rachel Maddow: IOKIYAR!

Will she be next?

The Republican Lieberman

Lisa Murkowski (R-inheritance) will likely remain the Republican Senator from Alaska. She will now become the scold of the GOP, à la Joe Lieberman's self-appointed role in the Democratic Party. She'll appear on Olbermann and say, "Well, Keith, I have to agree with you on that." She'll vote for President Obama's next Supreme Court nominee. And the Republicans will leave her in her preferred committee assignments.

Are you kidding me?

Asymmetrical warfare

Keith Olbermann attacks Bill O'Reilly.

Bill O'Reilly attacks the business of Keith Olbermann's bosses.

MSNBC sues for peace.

Fox is ideologically aligned with O'Reilly.

MSBNC is ideologically aligned with ... profits.

There is no journalistic alignment between liberal management and liberal content that matches Fox's alignment of conservative management and conservative content.

The New York Times? Don't make me laugh. Here's the pussy-footed way the Times characterizes O'Reilly: "conservative-leaning".

Yes, I'm aware that O'Reilly characterizes himself that way, but he's obviously a full-on wingnut propagandist, and only the modern big media could sweep that fact under the tattered, bullshit-stained rug of so-called balance.

Because you're so comfortable with lying

Douglas Holmes-Eakin now claims he was joking when he baldly asserted that John McCain is responsible for the BlackBerry. This is a transparent lie. Listen to Keith Olbermann's clip. Holtz-Eakin was lying when he claimed it, and now he's lying again.

He's a liar. But McCNN won't be so uncivil as to say so.

Tool of power

Even big media apologist Howard Kurtz can't hide the obvious opinion of Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly that their role in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is to act as a propaganda tool. Fox is about O'Reilly's puerile, egotistical, bullshit form of entertainment, not about informing its audience.

It's good to see Kurtz even report this story. Of course, there are some things he does wrong. The most glaring is that he doesn't provide GE/NBC's rebuttal of O'Reilly's delusional gasbaggery until the very end of the story. I'm sure Bill himself has some investment somewhere with tendrils into Iran, so by his own logic even such a saintly one as he is killing American soldiers.

Kurtz's omissions are also glaring. He provides no background on the alleged factual error Keith Olbermann made when describing Roger Ailes as providing advice to Rudy Giuliani. Fox's non-denial denial ("If he was offering Rudy advice, you think Rudy would have done as badly as he did? No way Roger was giving him advice.") should have been counterposed against the known history of Ailes advising the Bushists.

Later, Kurtz alludes to a Kos blogger who did an ambush interview with O'Reilly. Even Olbermann criticized it. Here's the thing: O'Reilly sends his producers out all the time to ambush their prey. He's supposed to be immune to this because he's in the media? No way. We have the power now.

It has always puzzled me that Bill O's viewers can't see that everything he says needs first a sniff check for bilious bullshit - from a safe distance where you won't be overcome by fumes.

Why newspapers are dying

There are many reasons for the slow wasting away of newspapers. One that has been missed is this: Newspapers were accustomed to being the only game in town, and the market for current events has become much more segmented than their traditional model.

Oh, sure, TV came along in the 1950s and brought competition. However, at the time, TV took its news values from print. It covered stories in something approaching depth, and it had pictures to boot. Still, there were only three networks, and they were broadcasting.

Even before cable, though, entertainment values oozed in. Remember weather girls? Now all news readers have to be beautiful. No more dour serious journalists. Sports segments got longer and longer. Eventually, the hard news pieces got softer to keep up, and network executives found that they could capture a lot more eyeballs with puppies and missing persons than with the arcana of the federal budget.

Still, newspapers didn't adjust their audience expectations. True, virtually all the evening papers closed, the need for them erased by the nightly news. But the big three were broadcasting to everyone, so newspapers continued to write for everyone.

The advent of cable TV news further segmented the market. It wasn't, of course, the only force. News magazines spawned celebrity gossip-zines.

Newspapers refused to give up their long lost broad audience, but cable started narrowcasting to niche audiences. Bill O'Reilly owns the delusional, ossified, egotistical gasbag segment, despite lots of competition, but even his audience is not very large. Multiplying him a hundred times (oh, god, please, NOOO!) chips a lot of eyeballs off the front page of the Boston Globe. Chris Matthews takes the blithering sexists with poor impulse control. Jon Stewart takes the kids who grew up with TV and already know it's all bullshit. Keith Olbermann wins people who want to giant slalom between news and punch lines, while Stewart is in a quick slalom.

Newspapers kept trying to be everything to everyone, and no matter how many soft features they add or news you can use they deliver about how to get your Christmas tree out the door without scratching the paint, they're still bleeding readers. They're even bleeding guys like me, and the reason is that they're in a niche market, too, but they haven't dealt with that yet.

Meanwhile, the core audience for newspapers, people like me who want deeper coverage of the news, even when there's no way to get good art, are finding less and less in them to justify the gray ink all over our hands. We want to know what actually happened yesterday. We don't want reporters striving for a scoop to pretend to know what's going to happen tomorrow or next week. We want some seasoned insight about what topics touch what other topics and the benefit of the reporter's contacts, as long as the reporter vets the quotes for bullshit and bluntly puts it in context.

Instead, newspapers are taking their news values from TV, which means they value entertainment more than information. Their medium is just not well-positioned to compete in entertainment (though the web is changing that).

True, the core readers of newspapers are not 100% of adults, not even close. But we're at least a quarter of the population, and we tend to be affluent, aware, and sometimes even influential, just the perfect eyeballs to deliver to advertisers.

And the papers are screwing that up, too, alienating us by trying to hang onto what they've already lost.

Sunday comics blogging

Too many laughs not to embed this, and belly laughs, not just small chuckles!

The whole Tom Tomorrow comic is here, and Tom's take on Keith Olbermann's hilarious segment is here, where I saw this in the first place.

Duhbya and the pundits

Two things vividly on display on MSNBC's coverage of Duhbya's state of the escalation speech:

• From the beginning, Duhbya's goal in Iraq was to stay indefinitely in order to project American power throughout the region. This is still his number one goal.
  
• The media work in almost all cases to reinforce the conventional wisdom.

Duhbya triangulated his message, not his proposals. Rachel Maddow noticed the fakery of his empty offer to "come together" with both parties in Congress. (No doubt, some damn fool Democrats will be taken in.) He only wants them for photo ops, as always. The hundred years war in the Persian Gulf is already decided. Metric tons of concrete have already been poured. Duhbya's legacy will be a permanent deadly embrace.

Chris Matthews is irritating even when he takes positions I like. His function is blithering, impassioned statement of whatever the current trend is. There is no trend he can lead from core beliefs, also no bandwagon he will not leap eagerly aboard. He will never take responsibility for his past enthusiasms, no matter how badly they have now turned out. He will sneer at "mission accomplished" despite his drooling cheerleading for it. TV is ephemeral. So are Matthews's opinions. He expects us not to notice.

Where Matthews brings spittle and blather to his comments, Tim Russert tries to bring gravitas. But it's the kind of gravitas you might find in the Frasier Crane character at your own local bar - puffed up, self-serving, egotistical, and empty, but not nearly as funny as Kelsey Grammer.

Brian Williams is just an empty suit.

It's a wonder Keith Olbermann doesn't go nuts, surrounded by so many boneheads.