A horse chestnut or a newspaper or a news show?
Someone accidentally put down my address when they subscribed to the Los Angeles Times; I’ve let the Times know, and in the meantime when it arrives I just put it in my bicycle and take it to be recycled. In a few months my television will no longer be able to receive broadcast news. I have no plans to bother getting a converter. Why? The only thing I used the television for in the past other than DVDs is watching the news. But if I can only trust it to be wrong, what’s the point? All that watching the news will do is make me stupider.
Nobody is stupid enough, for example, to think that “I hope we’re doing the right thing” is the same as “We’re doing the right thing.” And if they are that stupid, I don’t want to get my news from them. Charlie Gibson’s defense would probably be that he read it in the Associated Press, but that’s my point: following these news sources makes you stupider than if you didn’t follow them.
I’ve tried very hard to maintain an increasingly unreasonable belief that mainstream media “bias” is really just a bias towards “selling papers”, but since the nomination of Sarah Palin that has been an impossible illusion. If I read Anne Kornblut in the Washington Post without filtering it through blog postings, I might actually think that Sarah Palin linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein. I’d be stupider for reading the Post than for not reading it.
Just like if I watched Charlie Gibson on ABC News, I’d be stupider for watching him than for not watching him, or reading the Associated Press I’d be stupider for reading it than for not reading it. Or reading or watching any news source that relies on the Associated Press. It has come to the point that following the news from mainstream news sources makes you stupider than not following the news.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln in one of his lower moments, the news media in either its bias or its stupidity is no more than “a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”
Nowadays they’re not even bothering to switch the words around; they’re just chopping out the ones they don’t like and adding new ones that they feel ought to be in there.
Update: holy crap. You’ve got to read the unedited version of the ABC interview. Anyone watching the edited version of the interview on ABC is stupider for having watched it than if they hadn’t watched. It’s amazing.
- Charlie Gibson’s big mistake
- “The more I look at this, the more it looks intentional. How could Gibson and the staff have blown both quotes (not just one as Anderson Cooper did on CNN)?”
- Gibson Blows the Exclusive
- “You would think that a nationally-recognized news anchor who landed the most coveted interview of the 2008 elections would have done his research to be fully prepared, so that when the interview aired, he wouldn’t look like a fumbling, pretentious ass.”
- Charlie Gibson’s Interview with Sarah Palin
- “I can’t tell if this is meant to be a preview or if it’s supposed to be the full interview because it’s shocking how she was edited mid-sentence.”
- Uh, WaPo, Saddam’s been gone for 5 years
- “Yet another stupid Palin smear arises today, on the front page of the Washington Post, no less. Anne Kornblut writes that Sarah Palin linked 9/11 to Saddam Hussein in telling troops departing to Iraq that they would be fighting the same people who attacked America. Perhaps the Washington Post hasn’t yet realized it, but Saddam and his regime have long since been dispatched to history.”
- WaPo Reporter Distorts Palin Deployment Speech
- “Unless Kornblut buried the lede, Palin said precisely nothing about Saddam Hussein or his government at all or any roll they may have had in 9/11. Kornblut simply made that up, because she wanted Palin to say that.”
- Another gaffe by the Washington Post
- “What emerges is yet another false hit-job on Governor Palin. Notwithstanding its now obvious falsity, the Post continues to crank out the same old attack, like a frog that has died but whose legs continue to kick, mindlessly.”
- WHY Did ABC Manipulate Palin Interview Footage?
- “WHY did ABC do it? This wasn’t just editing, it was manipulation. Why’d ABC do it? Why’d the Washington Post do it as well?”
- The “Palin Didn’t Know What the Bush Doctrine Is” Canard
- “News Flash for you Democrats and media types out there: About 40 years before there was a Bush Doctrine, JFK was relying on the self-defense right of preemptive attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
- ABC News Edited Out Key Parts of Sarah Palin Interview
- “That answer presented Palin as a bit too knowledgeable for the purposes of ABC News and was, of course, edited out. Palin’s answers about a nuclear Iran were carefully edited to the point where she was even edited out in mid-sentence to make it seem that Palin favored unilateral action against that country.”
- Palin Rumors
- “Yes, she has a college degree in Journalism, but I won’t hold that against her, as she seems to have found honest work as well.” “Charles Martin has established a clearinghouse for all the existing rumors about Sarah Palin, and any new ones you want to make up, if you want to try your hand at being a professional journalist like Elizabeth Bumiller.”
More media bias
- The ruling class’s unexpectedly old clothes
- I recently ran across early use of “unexpectedly” for a conservative’s strong economy, referring to the early 1981 market recovery under President Reagan.
- COVID Lessons: Journalistic Delusions and the Madness of Politicians
- COVID-19 was real. The crisis surrounding it was entirely manufactured. Everything we did took a manageable disease and turned it into a killer. And the very worst was believing a media we knew was lying.
- How many fingers, America?
- The Orwellianization of the left continues.
- Has Trump forced the media into a Kobayashi Maru?
- The Kobayashi Maru is that the media wants to be able to continue lying and be believed. People don’t distrust them because of Trump. People distrust them because they keep lying. It is a self-caused problem.
- The institutional forgetfulness of the press
- We no longer have to rely on the press as our institutional memory. The Internet has made it harder for the left to pretend the past doesn’t exist, or to say one thing here and another there.
- 34 more pages with the topic media bias, and other related pages
More presidential elections
- Nothing to fear but a brokered convention
- The reason someone smart would want a brokered convention is that it’s exciting, and it means media coverage, and even more, it means unfiltered media coverage.
- If I were running for president…
- I’d make heavy use of short videos, and I’d record everything I did with the media.
- Fighting for the American Dream
- Joe the Plumber writes about his experiences at the center of one of the most vicious smear campaigns in recent memory.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- Vote on performance, not promises
- If you’re disappointed that President Obama is the same wheeler-dealer he was when he was a Senator, take it as a lesson for future elections: vote performance and record, not promises.
- 21 more pages with the topic presidential elections, and other related pages