Month: March 2002

— Ken Layne has renamed me after that other Bennett, the one who had to quit smoking so he could be the Drug Czar, so now I’m going to enforce strict moral standards on everybody:

William Bennett has more on the lousy SF Chronicle, but adds that the Merc ain’t exactly the model newspaper — especially since Joanne Jacobs quit. And, as Searls notes, the pioneering Mercury News site got swallowed by Knight Ridder, leading to a very ugly, ad-heavy site. KR also ruined the Dave Barry archives.

I went to the Univ. of Texas as an undergrad when Bill was working on his doctorate in Philosophy under John Silber and playing drums in a rock band (that’s a true fact), and I’m pretty sure we aren’t the same guy. I could never get along with philosopher king Silber, for one thing; and for another, I played bass.

By the way, all the article numbers are screwed-up since I took my blog over to Sonic, so the article on the Chron and the Murk is now at this number.

— More than Zero reports on a study done by Jeff Nunberg, one of the stalwarts of National Public Radio on the use of the labels “liberal” and “conservative” near the names of well-known politicians and actors, which concludes that liberals are more often identified as such by the press.

…the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn’t surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

But a while back, PatrickRuffini counted the phrases “right-wing” and “left-wing” in the liberal press, and came up with very different results:

This disparity was even more palpable at the New York Times, where 80.2% of the left-right mentions on the national news pages since 1996 have spotlighted the right. The research also found that the more loaded and derogatory the phrase, the more likely it was to be associated with the political right. The term “conservative” outpolled “liberal” by 66-34% in New York Times news page mentions, while the aforementioned “right-wing” clocked in at 80% in a similar measure. However, the term “right-wing extremist” was used at least six times as frequently than “left-wing extremist” (at 87.4% since ’96 in the Times).

So what’s going on here? Taking the two studies together, it would appear that the liberal press spills more ink on conservative politicians than on liberals, and that it’s more likely to identify liberals than conservatives when doing so.

— This fine article by the Emmanuelle Richard Release: BLOG ALWAYS, YOU INTEREST Me is a must for reading. So light your computer and press the bond. Here’s what she says about some of the FoxBlogs:

Among the feathers courted by Fox News: a teacher of San Francisco, one impassioned of aerospace of Wyoming and Moira Breen, a mother with the hearth of the rural State of Oregon, in the North-West of the United States. This faded of 44 years data processing says itself surprised to have caused as much interest with its “humble Web log”, to have launched in November, “Inappropriate Response” (moirabreen.com ): “I have the impression that many visitors are very, very, irritated by the traditional media and take refuge near the webloggers, says it. The blogs are pivots which encourage to read, to write more and to reflect.”

Translation courtesy of Google; the original is written quite stylishly in the French language, which has something to do with Europe.