Category: Media

— According to O’Reilly Press’ David Sims:

I find webloggers bright and interesting folks, and I tend to agree with them much of the time. But they’re hardly representative: like me, they lean toward the geeky and they lean toward the left.

Tech bloggers live in their own, carefully crafted little delusion.

— mostly for what they didn’t do: sneering anti-Bush rants.

— Bias author Bernard Goldberg bites back at Frank Rich and his other critics in this interview in the New York Press

And here’s the bulletin: the people I’m calling liberals aren’t real liberals. Real liberals are people I personally admire. I admire people who put it on the line for something they believe in. Lliberals in our history, in the 1960s for instance, put their lives on the line. I admire that.

He calls them “liberals of convenience” in the book.

Goldberg delves into the motivations for Frank Rich’s tawdry hit-piece against him as well.

— This statement by Nick Denton, and his search for Gentle Soul Blogs silenced by ruffians of the right has The Sarges hoppin’ mad:

People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.

And it should. Not only does Denton display a massive arrogance about the delicacy of left wingers that flies in the face of your garden-variety WTO protest, he also displays an equally massive ignorance of the history of Web Logging. The first weblogs were run by people who didn’t have a political axe to grind, like Tim Berhners-Lee, and the first with political content were started by people like yours truly who are right-of-center, small-l libertarians. People like Searls and Hourihan didn’t stumble across web logging until it was already an advanced art, and in Hourihan’s case their contributions have been greatly exaggerated.

And as far as the hate-mail from “fundamentalists” goes, I have some from feminists that would curl Denton’s hair, but even that’s not as scary as the drive-by shootings they’ve done to people like Erin Pizzey who undermine left-feminist orthodoxy. Some people just can’t help being silly.

— Do it now, and don’t make him practice the degrading art of salesmanship again (KEN LAYNE)

If you’d be interested in a signed copy for … I don’t know, 15 or 20 bucks, and if you’d be willing to pay for it with PayPal, send an e-mail to [email protected] with YES in the subject line. I’ll add up the response in a few days, and then I’ll buy an appropriate amount from my publisher. As soon as they arrive, I’ll announce it, and then I will finally achieve my lifelong goal: selling mail-order crap.

I haven’t read the book myself, but I have had the pleasure of meeting Ken, which gives me the right to attest that he’s a gentleman and a scholar, a smart and witty lad, one very accomplished in the arts of dissipation and therefore worthy of your patronage.

— 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.

— Matt, Ken, Bill, and The Doctor raise a burning question:

Is the San Francisco Chronicle the worst newspaper in the world?

It’s not for nothing that we call this paper “The Comical.” With columnists such as Jon Carroll, Joan Ryan, and Stephanie Salter, and an editorial page editor, John Diaz, who considers it his god-given right to alter the meaning of letters to the editor by careful cutting, it’s hard to imagine a worse paper, but there is one that comes to mind: The Comical before it took over the Examiner. That’s right, it’s better than it used to be, and on the plus side they print Debra Saunders, the token libertarian, the political coverage by Matier and Ross and Greg Lucas (though they don’t give Lucas the billing he deserves), and lifestyle columns by Adair Lara, perhaps the last honest liberal in the Bay Area. Scott Winokur is a very good local news reporter, but at the Examiner he was a columnist, a status that he didn’t get at the Comical due to their all-skirts, all-the-time policy on editorial page columns. If they ditched Diaz and reassigned a few writers, it would almost be worth reading.

The San Jose Mercury News, however, is on a fast downward spiral. They’ve adopted the Edward Scissorhands approach to letters to the ed lately, and their editorial page gets worse with each passing day. Jacobs used to keep them on an even keel, but since she left, the editorial pages seem like the same sort of battling narcissists you get from Ryan and Salter an the Com. One day last week, the right side of the two-page editorial section was devoted entirely to Marie Cocco and Ellen Goodman, arguably the two most vacuous columnists in the business, and the only ones with the ability to make me nostalgic for Molly Ivins.

Give them another six months, and the Murky will be the clear champion at the bottom of the cesspool.

— Sarge isn’t real impressed with Nick Denton (Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing: March 10, 2002 – March 16, 2002 Archives):

Certain animals, when threatened, will puff themselves up in attempt to ward off predators with an impressive display of size accompanied by ominous growlings or other such threatening noises. Nick Denton is such an animal.

Read Sarge’s piece in full and you’ll see why. I have to agree with him.

Update: One of the great conceits of the left is their belief in their superior intelligence; you know a book title beginning with “Stupid…” has to come from a lefty like Michael Moore, and one ending with “… is a big fat idiot” has to come from a lefty like Al Franken. They’re overcompensating for the fact that higher-income, better-educated, and older people tend toward a more conservative point of view than others. The net result of all this sneering, attack-politics is a cheapening of political dialog.

Nick’s search for intelligent liberals on the web is going to be hard road, as is the search for intelligent liberals off the web. Oh, they exist all right — Ken Layne and Matt Welch are classical liberals, and they’re awfully bright — but the left establishment has turned so introverted and anti-American since Clinton that it turns against the classical liberal voice, with its insistence on reason, in its never-ending quest for ideological purity.

Liberals aren’t afraid to post their opinions on the web because of the Freepers, who will pretty well leave them alone, as much as the PC Police, but it’s not PC to admit it.