This Isn’t An Extinction. It’s Suicide.

Media 34 Comments

Just think* – this week in boardrooms across the industry, media executives are meeting with media experts to hash out yet another strategy, and yet more innovations to address their falling fortunes, every last one of them invested in the unshakable belief that the internet is burying them because it’s faster – as though the only difference between shit and sunshine is the speed at which they travel.

The Edwards mess is the most recent and visible, but hardly unique, example of the mainstream media’s hear no evil/see no evil approach to newsgathering. How many other stories has the MSM missed, denied or avoided? From Rathergate to Reverend Wright to the success of the surge, the pattern is the same: MSM stalls, shuffles its collective feet, and doggedly ignores information for as long as possible until they can no longer do so with a straight face. The fact that these stories without exception work to the detriment of Democrats is apparently a grand coincidence.
And the notion that they are upholding some “journalistic standard” is rendered absurd. Edwards’ story wasn’t important on Thursday, but it was on Friday because he confessed? No, the level of proof changed, but the story’s relevance did not. If it wasn’t worthy of investigation before the ABC interview then it was unworthy of mention afterwards. Their explanation for their editorial decision-making is no more credible than . . . well than Edwards himself.

Related – Howard Kurtz.
And Stephen Green agrees – “If you treat a Republican one way and a Democrat another and it isn’t liberal bias — then what is it? A Sulzberger family suicide pact?”

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 46 Comments

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Sunday night classical music show, here are Les Dissonances performing the Allegro from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major, K.525, also known as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (or as we call it here in the SDA LNR studios: A Little Late Nite Music), at the Fontainbleau Theater (2005, 5:47, and the flirt at 3:00 is delightful too).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

From Kosovo To South Ossetia

Radioactive 70 Comments

James Joyner;

I say that even though I was deeply torn on the question of backing Kosovo independence at the time, calling it “a classic case of the logical dictates of Realpolitik clashing with our moral positioning and building soft power equity.” What’s done is done at this point: Kosovo is independent. Indeed, the very essence of Pandora’s box is that, once opened, it can’t be closed again.
But Russia warned us then that “it will set a dangerous precedent for secessionist movements across the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya and Georgia.”

More from Richard Fernandez and Tigerhawk.
(Related links welcome in the comments.)

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Political Animal 34 Comments

You know they cringed just having to write about this at the CBC;

The company developing oilsands in Saskatchewan’s northwest says it’s found four times more oil than it had estimated a year ago.
Oilsands Quest says it’s located as much as 6.5 billion barrels on property it’s exploring along the northern Alberta-Saskatchewan border. Most of the property is on the Saskatchewan side of the border.

(Previous – A friendly reminder for Stephane Dion.)
On a related note;

Red-hot Saskatchewan will grow at a 4.2 per cent clip, while Manitoba’s economy will expand by 3.6 per cent in 2008, the Conference Board estimated. Their results are being driven by high oil and gas prices and soaring demand for those provinces’ grain crops.
“Attention this year has shifted away from Alberta to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as high prices for nearly all of their natural resources will make them the two fastest-growing economies in Canada,” said Glen Hodgson, the Conference Board of Canada’s chief economist.

I know I’ve said this before, but let me do so again – Thank you, Ed Stelmach!

Now, If Edwards Was A Republican With A Love Child In An Airport Washroom

Media 44 Comments

Bumped.
Update – Edwards confesses, mainstream media credibility takes another beating at the hands of the National Enquirer.
I repeat – this isn’t an extinction. It’s suicide.

That would be different…

So there you have it. Despite the pictures, the child support and the birth certificate with a blank by the father’s name, the story does not meet the newspaper’s standards.

And they wonder why newspaper stocks are falling?
Related – some threats are more newsworthy than others…

“I can only speculate as to why the media would remove the threat against Bush in these accounts. Is it because it is harder to portray Obama as the victim when he isn’t the only one threatened, or just harder to sell the meme that the offender is probably a murderous racist when he threatens a white president as well?”

“By choosing Albert Speer”

Little Known Facts 19 Comments

… the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China’s leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.
Speer’s commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father’s plan for “Germania,” the name Adolf Hitler selected for the Berlin that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a mighty central axis.

Via Mick Hartley.

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