Category: Media

— Doubting Thomas has declared himself president of the Omphalos Fan Club:

General Richard “Beef-n-Curry” Bennett
Not only did GEN Bennett win an amazing 10 Congressional Medals of Honor as an infantry officer in Vietnam, he also invented the light bulb, pocket pizza, space travel, the video game TRON, and the French language. As you recall, GEN Bennett was the young Captain in the Battle of Dak To who ordered a napalm strike on the infamous VC-run “Number Ten” Noodle Shop, which subsequently saved 5,000 people from getting a stomach ache and the shits. He also participated in Operation Buddy Hackett, which was a CIA campaign to root out irony in the Mekong Delta in 1969.

It’s very fine piece of work, and we should all encourage Tommy to take all his meds everyday.

— I heard Wm. McGowan on the radio today, pitching his book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism. He discussed the made-up anti-Arab backlash that was supposed to have swept the nation in the wake of Sept. 11, a fine example of the liberal media suffusing their reporting with wish-fulfillment. Here’s a description of the book from his web site:

McGowan subjects the journalism of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other prestigious news organizations to careful analysis in showing how the quest for “diversity” has influenced not only editorial policy but news gathering itself. The diversity that has seized hold of the nation’s newsrooms does not value true diversity of opinion, he maintains, but instead promotes one-sided reporting-by-the-numbers.

The message seems to be similar to that of Bernard Goldberg’s Bias, and I hope it’s better-supported. There’s nothing worse than a weak argument for the correct point of view.

— InstaPundit put some e-mail on his site that he got from “hot-shot blogger Rebecca Blood,” author of a forthcoming book on weblogs. Here’s the part that proves she’s an idiot wannabe:

I’m interested in how many readers I have. cookies would be the most accurate way oftracking that, but without using cookies the standard measure that most closely correlates to that metric is unique IPs …even considering the inaccuracies involved (as noted by scalzi), I feel this is the most reliable measure available (at least comparable to the circulation figures used by print publications).

Neither Blood nor the source she cites – some idiot named Scalzi – understand the relationship between IP addresses and people on the web. IP addresses are not only assigned dynamically most of the time (Blood and Scalzi sound like they heard about that), but they’re hidden from the net, or aggregated, behind NAT boxes and firewalls. Every time somebody where I work visits a web site outside the company Intranet, they use the same IP address, because we have a firewall. All big companies have firewalls and NAT boxes, and most schools an universties. These people are lame beyond measure, and they’re writing books about the frickin’ web? Jesus H. Christ – it’s probably all about Goth grrrls and raving. Gag me with a spoon.

— In yet another article on blogging, Brendan Nyhan reports that a WaPo reporter is trying to get her critics fired:

But after suffering through increasingly harsh criticism of her coverage of Clinton, Schmidt apparently snapped after receiving the emails, as MWO first reported (the story was then picked up by Jason Cherkis in the Washington City Paper).
According to both Rentschler and the associate, she researched the domain names the emails were sent from and forwarded their emails to their employers.

You know you’re getting to them when they resort to this kind of behavior, which can be very effective with some employers.

— If you agree that Emmanuelle Richard has the Froggiest Blog, you should go to .:: BLOGGUEUR ::. Qui aura le meilleur blog? Vous?, click on [VOTER] in the first category (Meilleur Blog,) and then select “Naughty Bytes“. Voting is a sacred duty, and she’s Matt Welch’s old lady and the world’s most famous Emmanuelle.

— Fairly honest assessment of journalistic fear and loathing:

Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:
Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.
Welcome to the world of Borg Journalism. Resistance is futile: journalism is being assimilated.

At least this journalist knows what he’s talking about.

— Pope VodkaPundit’s blog is down today:

My host pulled the plug without warning, without explaination. I had to contact them — and wait an hour — to learn their puny servers can’t handle Moveable Type’s perl script.

Let me recommend Os Tyler’s NothingSpecial.com for your blog-hosting needs. Os keeps his system software up-to-date, it’s reliable and affordable, and it runs Movable Type with all features enabled better than the other two ISPs I’ve used. NothingSpecial also hosts most of the better blogs, including Layne, Welch, and Emmanuelle.

Update: The Vodkaman is back on-line – the VLWC can’t keep a good man down.

— If Beavis and Butthead had a media watch column, it would look like this: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap. How dumb do you have to be to fall for an April Fool’s prank? Dumb enough to suspend Jeff Jacoby for writing a patriotic column; dumb enough to publish Ellen Goodman; dumb enough to insult James Lileks for writing too much. In other words, dumb as the Boston Globe, and gracelessly insane.

It turns out the little prick doesn’t like letters to the Editor correcting his mistakes, for some strange reason:

We in the glamorous media business have mixed feelings about the men, women and, yes, children who write in to express their views.

Beam’s whole anti-blog screed was a recycled version of this column, in fact.

— CNN.com – CNN And TIME Magazine Announce Top Winners Of Fifth Annual “Journalist Award”

“At Time and CNN, we’re delighted to offer this prestigious award to the brightest journalist,” said Adi Ignatius, Editor of Time, of Jerry Pournelle, the #1 winner. ” We have long wanted to honor Jerry Pournelle in this way, as his contribution to the society has been enormous.”

See this web site for details.

— In response to my remarks on her article on Russell Yates, Cathy Young says:

I’ve seen some conflicting reports on how much time Andrea Yates was spending
alone with the kids just before the murders; there was some mention of the
fact that a decision had been made to increase that time and have Russell
Yates’s mother come in somewhat later than she had been coming in previously.

One might also argue that when we’re talking about a mentally ill woman with
suicidal tendencies being alone with five children, an hour a day is an
extended period of time — extended enough, certainly, for major trouble to
happen. It would have been bad enough if Yates had slit her own throat in
the children’s presence.

She also mentions some hate-mail from fathers’ rights folks who express themselves abusively. Many in that movement are their own worst enemies. Dianna Thompson, director the ACFC, wrote a longish letter to the Boston Globe critical of Cathy’s piece, blaming Andrea’s doctor for not reporting her to child protective services as a danger to the children:

It is also important to note that the professionals to whom Russell Yates
took his wife, have a legally mandated duty to report any potential threat
to the children, to child protective services. As they did not do so, it can
only be assumed that there was no imminent danger evident. Why then,
is the media holding Russell Yates to a higher standard than that of
trained professionals?

It’s hard to predict the behavior of crazy people in any specific way, however — that’s what it means to be crazy — but you certainly wouldn’t HIRE somebody with a full-blown psychosis to look after your children, would you? That’s the point. As bad as public school and day care are, at least they don’t routinely murder their charges.