A statement today by employees at liberal media watchdog Media Matters who are trying to form a union: "The actions of Media Matters executives have placed employees in the impossible position of continuing to produce content espousing pro-labor values for an employer who is challenging our right to unionize."
Earlier this evening, New York Times political editor Carolyn Ryan started hinting that something big would be coming out in Monday's edition.
The liberal Media Matters has done its inevitable grunt work of detailing Fox News personalities' involvement in this year's election, and finds that more than 30 of them have supported the GOP and its candidates. Who coulda guessed?
Like it is barely even about how Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and is the son of Malcolm X! Most of the movie is just clips of cable news people talking about the election and Obama's first few months in office. But the highlight is surely this all-time classic of unintended consequences:
Since getting this tip earlier I've tried to to examine this objectively from every possible angle, but frankly there is no other conclusion that can be drawn other than this: This is just plain creepy.
Liberal media watchdog Media Matters has revealed its true colors. In an email blast just now touting the "most inane punditry of 2008," MM offers this option: "Barnes: Obama 'not strong on national security' because he opposed war 'when the entire world believed' Obama had WMD." THEY MEANT 'SADDAM' BUT THEY WROTE 'OBAMA.' When will Media Matters stop being so racist?
For years, one man controlled all the news: Matt Drudge, nutty conservative weather-obsessed Miami queen blogger. He "broke" the Monica Lewinsky thing, sort of, and then for nearly ten years his website drove news narratives and pushed stories to the forefront. Even as recently as the primary season, some years past his peak influence, Drudge helped destroy the Clinton campaign with relentless Obama-boosting. Then, of course, he had to switch back to being a straight-up GOP hack. We'd say he just boosted Obama because he felt McCain would beat the Illinois Senator, but the fact is, his visceral hatred for the Clintons probably drove him just as much as anything else. Since the conventions, though, he's been an embarrassment. He highlights completely misleading bullshit and can't get anyone but the dumbest of bloggers to pick up on his pet stories. As Eric Bohlert notes in Media Matters today, Drudge has become so divorced from reality that even the serious press people who've religiously trusted his instincts since the Clinton days can't square his headlines with reality. His cherry-picked poll results are plainly ridiculous, last week's Drudge-touted "McCain Comeback" never even pretended to materialize, and he's completely, completely missed, by design, the major narratives of the last month of the campaign: Palin's national meltdown, the increasingly crazed McCain rallies, and Obama's fundraising and ground advantages. Instead we get... Biden on Botox, a little ACORN, and feeble attempts at finding crazy liberals attacking McCain supporters. They all work like a charm on the Conservative Blogosphere, but back in the good old days, that was just the first step toward mainstream discussion. Now, no one gives a shit. Maybe after the election Drudge will buckle down, like Fox, and provide the voice of the embattled opposition. But a conservative crack-up and the apparent disillusion of the tacit MSM/right-wing noise machine cooperative venture is not great news for Matt. And it's a long time until the next hurricane season.
The 24 hour news cycle affects everyone differently, and horribly. A television reporter in Hong Kong has resigned after he was caught committing self-love on the top tier of a double decker bus. Former Asia Television journo Chiu Yu Kit admitted to the act in court, but explained that he was merely trying to "ease his stress" when an off-duty cop caught sight of him standing up on a seat facing the window and taking in the local color while taking care of himself.
We're stocking up on bottled water and canned goods around Defamer HQ today, where even our shameless pop-culture pathologies can't process devastating reports that the venerable Associated Press is launching a standalone entertainment news organization. The equally tormented Nikki Finke, whose giddiness at yesterday's fall of PageSix.com was mitigated only slightly by the firings it would require, crashed back to Earth today with an internal memo clearly foreshadowing — via a Q&A with new "Director of Entertainment Content" Daniel Becker — the violent demise of newsgathering as we know it:
Eric Boehlert predicts that Fox News is basically fucked. While the liberal Media Matters senior fellow's job is to criticize and decry Fox News, that network's continued relevence will ensure that he keeps that job. So it is presumably with both glee and secret dismay that Boehlert presents a portrait of an epochal force in news presentation on its sad decline.
There were three separate pieces today on "watchdog" website Media Matters complaining about how badly Barack Obama has been manhandled by the press. The first piece takes aim at Good Morning America, the New York Sun and The Politico. The second impugns CNN anchor and debate moderator Suzanne Malveaux, and the third takes a long mean look at by U.S. News & World Report editor David Gergen. Hey, Media Matters, why the crush on Obama?
There have been days here at the office when news has been so slow, and we've been so desperate for an item, that we've shouted "When is Lindsay Lohan gonna fucking die already?" Apparently, we just weren't industrious enough: "A TV journalist in India desperate for a story tried to persuade a depressed businessman to kill himself and his family on camera. But Punjabi police intervened in time to stop the man and his three daughters from drinking poison. Now the journalist with a local news channel, known only as Vipin, has been arrested and charged with abetting suicide." [Guardian]
Over the weekend, loud-mouth asshat and Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly pulled what sort of looked like a Don Imus—but was really much worse. It seems that O'Reilly's most recent encounters with the black community have left him seriously impressed with how much progress they've made since he last checked in with them in the 70s. Concert-goers at that Anita Baker concert were well-dressed! And dinner in Harlem with the Reverend Al Sharpton? O'Reilly said on his radio show that it was "like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense that people were sitting there, they were ordering and having fun and there wasn't any kind of craziness at all!"
