Our Media

Atrios: Fiddling

As Herbert says, it's weird how disconnected the media is from the reality of the unemployment situation. It's not that there's no coverage, of course, but overall there's little sense of the economic reality for so many people. The double whammy of the recession and foreclosure crisis has caused immense pain.

Atrios: On The Other Hand

The WaPo does have an article on the plight of the extremely rich.

Hard times for them, you see.

Atrios: Jackass

I don't know how the subject of Kanye came up. It's certainly possible Obama brought it up himself. The other possibility is, of course, that he was asked to comment on the subject due to some sort of connection between the two. I wonder what that could be.

DougJ: Comment of the day

From Swampland commenter Kevin Lyda on ObamaKanyeJackAssGate:

Also, I’d like to repeat an earlier question, why was Obama even asked about Kayne’s outburst? Does every black public figure have to apologize for the misbehavior of any black celebrity? Is this some heretofore unwritten job title?

Eventually folks might start to think that’s pretty racist. So either you folks will stop adding such job titles or you’ll add such job titles to non-black public figures. Suddenly Hillary Clinton will have to answer for Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton’s transgressions. Gordon Brown will have to apologize for Russell Brand and Hugh Grant. John Bohner will have to apologize for Nick Nolte and Sean Penn?

Maybe you guys can have a little tick off box in your notebooks for, “Do you support/condemn [newsmaker of your ethnic group] for doing [bad thing]?”

Of course it would just be easier if black public figures just began all speeches or interviews by condemning some other black people who did something dumb. That would save you the effort of asking…

DougJ: Narcissism

It always amuses me when our pundits accuse others of being self-absorbed. Bobo:

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

Every moment of every round table on every Sunday morning show is one big self-celebration. I wish I could say that these celebrations were routinely interrupted by intelligent analysis, but that isn’t true.

At some level, our entire elite media functions as a strange satire: residents of Bethesda and Georgetown telling flyover country viewers about how real Americans think, millionaires telling middle-classers they need to sacrifice more, narcissists complaining about self-celebration….

Update. And, yes, how do you write this column without mentioning “Mission Accomplished”?

Update update. More generally, it’s ludicrous to claim that our civilization has been humble in anything like the recent past. Whether it’s Francis Fukuyama claiming that the west has ended history, George Wallace declaring white Americans “the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,”, or the fact that perhaps the most iconic image in the world is God giving a white guy a high five, the western world is one self-loving place and has been for quite some time.

Aravosis: More on the Teabaggers claiming they had 2m people when they actually had tens of thousands

From Eric Boehlert at Media Matters:

It turns out that's what kicked off the right-wing blogosphere's comically inept misinformation campaign last weekend to try to swell the size of Saturday's anti-Obama protest in the nation's capital, to jack the crowd size up to the wildly inflated -- and erroneous -- number of 2 million people.

Nice try....

Why the shamelessness? Sadly, members of the GOP Noise Machine are acutely aware there is no downside to just lying 24/7. Malkin knows that no TV producers are going to deny her an on-air spot because she purposefully spread the patently phony claim that 2 million people gathered in Washington, D.C. (i.e. that the city's population quadrupled overnight). The Beltway press rarely holds the Noise Machine accountable, so of course they're going to just keep lying (what's the downside?), since it's obvious they don't really care about facts to begin with.