Category: Business

“Al Qaeda is … planning new attacks on the US…. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups … have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war.” — Steve Emerson, May 31, 2001…

NPR blacklisted Emerson in 1998, bowing to a pressure campaign by Muslim extremists who falsely libeled him as an anti-Muslim bigot. It was an outrageous charge: He always stresses that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding. Nevertheless, NPR officials – including its national news editor – explicitly vowed to keep Emerson off the air. ”You have my promise he won’t be used again,” producer Ellen Silva wrote to Ali Abunimah of the American Arab Action Network. ”It is NPR policy.”

I had a similar experience with the PBS News Hour show – they interviewed me on-camera for a story on child support reform in California, a process that I was intimately involved in. I explained that the structural reorganization contemplated by the legislature was unlikely to produce results, since the basic problem was that the State of California demanded unrealistically large percentages of income from child support obligors, mainly fathers. I ended up in the cutting-room floor, and they went to Washington for a second opinion agreeing with the other side. Our tax dollars support this sort of spinning, of course. (Jacoby story linked by InstaPundit.)

This is a lovely article, posted on Slashdot:

You can smell the aroma of panic wafting from the federal courtroom in Los Angeles where some major TV producers filed suit against SonicblueInc. The California company makes Replay TV, a digital video recorder with features that may delight consumers but terrify broadcasters. For instance, the latest version of Replay TV can let the viewer skip over TV commercials without a glance. Moreover, the device allows users to send copies of favorite shows over the Internet.

There’s already a site in Taiwan where you can download any movie you want, practically, for a dollar Movie88.com. But free is better.

Q&A Flashback with David Murray on National Review Online

Kathryn Jean Lopez: No child has ever been harmed by strangers contaminating candy on Halloween? Even if no kid ever got hurt, does it hurt to have the warnings, and to have hospitals voluntarily checking candy every Oct. 31?

David Murray: A study of national criminal data back to 1958 found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering, almost all of which were fraudulent or mistaken. There have been three reported cases of children dying from tainted candy. The first case involved parents trying to cover up after their child ate the father’s stash of heroin. The second case involved a father intentionally poisoning his son then blaming it on tainted candy. The third case involved a child who suffered a fatal seizure while trick-or-treating. She suffered from a congenital heart condition and no evidence of tampering was ever found. Although her parents immediately notified the authorities about their daughter’s heart condition, the media ran shocking news reports of yet another incident of poisoned Halloween candy.

In praise of A &amp L Daily, this (by way of Charles Murtaugh):

On one level, Arts & Letters Daily operates simply as a Web site providing links to other Web sites, a system that’s also used for spreading information about everything from movies to hotel accommodations. But that’s only the format. The content makes Arts & Letters Daily unique in cultural history. It’s an engrossing magazine that only the Web could have spawned — cheap, fast, smart and full of surprises.

It’s a unique site, and worth a daily read.

This is the op-ed that got Bernie Goldberg ostracized by his colleagues at CBS News.

Networks Need a Reality Check
A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
BY BERNARD GOLDBERG
Wednesday, January 2, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 1996. You can order Mr. Goldberg’s book, “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.)

There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news, and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers simply don’t trust us. And for good reason.

The old argument that the networks and other “media elites” have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No, we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to most reporters.

It’s funny how upset the left are about this book. I tried to buy it from a hippie bookstore the other day, only to be told it wasn’t available yet, and the outrage in Eric Alterman’s piece about it in The Nation is palpable.

The next time our media elite want to trash the President for not being sufficiently book-learned, he can tell them about the last book he read:

President Bush waves as he walks out of the White House in Washington, headed for Portland, Maine, where he is focusing on border and harbor security, Friday, Jan. 25, 2002. Slung beneath Bush’s right arm as he walked to Marine One is the book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News, by former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, which accuses television news executives of tilting liberal in how they report the news. (AP Photo/J.Scott Applewhite)

I found this on InstyBandit.