Jernalism!

[KingRoyal]

Has the notion of Old Timey finally drifted to the point where now the 1960s are viewed as being a bunch of backwoods peasants who didn't have the printing press?

[Upthorn]

That artist's style definitely looks more 60's than 50's to me, though obviously that's not exactly a carbon dating.

The irony, of course, being that carbon dating is generally only accurate to within 70 years in either direction.

[Brantly B.]

Has the notion of Old Timey finally drifted to the point where now the 1960s are viewed as being a bunch of backwoods peasants who didn't have the printing press?

You can't convince me that most people in 2021 aren't like that.

[Mongrel]

That artist's style definitely looks more 60's than 50's to me, though obviously that's not exactly a carbon dating.

The irony, of course, being that carbon dating is generally only accurate to within 70 years in either direction.

;)

[Thad]

[KingRoyal]

Someone on Twitter remarked that only a handful of people actually want the US to stay in Afghanistan but that they're all work for the press corp

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

Credit where it's due: good on CNN for taking some time in its 9/11 coverage to remember the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi.

A Sikh man’s murder at a gas station revealed another tragedy of 9/11

[Thad]

Real headline: "Tuesday night was, weirdly, a very good night for Larry Elder's political future"

No points for guessing the byline.

It somehow gets even dumber than that, as Cillizza's thesis is that Elder outperformed his polls. He didn't; Cillizza just doesn't understand how to read polls. The reason Elder has a higher percentage of the vote than he had in the polls is that polls include the percentage of people who chose "none of the above", whereas election results do not include the percentage of people who didn't vote for any candidate.

[Thad]

With Woodward's new book coming out and provoking a lot of the usual criticism, somebody pointed me toward this article from 2013: Regrettable: The troubling things I learned when I re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi

tl;dr Woodward retold his sources' stories in a way that presented the facts correctly but fundamentally misinterpreted how those sources felt about Belushi.

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

[...]

Granted, I wasn’t working from the same notes and transcripts as Woodward. People’s memories change. Stories evolve over 20 years of telling. Surely there were people who were mad at Belushi in 1983 who prefer to look back on him fondly today. And if it were one or two people disputing Woodward’s characterizations, you might chalk it up to rose-tinted glasses. You might do the same if it were nine or 10 people. But when it’s practically everyone, when person after person sits down across from you and remembers, specifically, as Blair Brown did, this is what Woodward mischaracterized and this is really what happened, a pretty clear pattern begins to emerge.

Another thing I keep coming back to, every time the Woodward book release cycle plays out, is the Daily Show episode where Stewart interviewed Woodward and Bernstein. He asked them what happened to journalism, why the press doesn't hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds the way they did in the Watergate era.

Bernstein responded that journalists today are too concerned with access; they're worried about criticizing politicians too scathingly, because then those politicians might not want to talk to them anymore.

I remember sitting and watching that interview and thinking "Wow, there is absolutely no way he doesn't realize he's talking about the guy sitting next to him."

[Mongrel]

[nosimpleway]

It's Britney, baka

[Friday]

Another thing I keep coming back to, every time the Woodward book release cycle plays out, is the Daily Show episode where Stewart interviewed Woodward and Bernstein. He asked them what happened to journalism, why the press doesn't hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds the way they did in the Watergate era.

Bernstein responded that journalists today are too concerned with access; they're worried about criticizing politicians too scathingly, because then those politicians might not want to talk to them anymore.

Yeah something that strikes me is that Nixon did an illegal, immoral thing and got absolutely destroyed by it, and Trump did 10,000 illegal, immoral things and continues to grift right now. And could still become President again.

Something has happened in those 47 years. I know it's easy to look back and say "things used to be different" when really they weren't, or were just superficially different on the surface.

But, uh. Something is different in our media and politics.

[Thad]

Yeah something that strikes me is that Nixon did an illegal, immoral thing and got absolutely destroyed by it, and Trump did 10,000 illegal, immoral things and continues to grift right now. And could still become President again.

Something has happened in those 47 years. I know it's easy to look back and say "things used to be different" when really they weren't, or were just superficially different on the surface.

But, uh. Something is different in our media and politics.

Well, there was that Roger Ailes guy who said the (((liberal media))) was to blame for Nixon's downfall, and decided he was going to start a conservative media to counterbalance it and make sure that never happened again. I think that might have had something to do with it.

But while Fox News and talk radio are the biggest answers to "what happened?" they're not the whole story. Never mind Bush or Trump; look what Reagan got away with, before Fox News existed or Rush Limbaugh went national. Iran-Contra was a far more serious breach than Watergate, and pretty much everybody got away with it and Reagan is still generally a well-regarded president, not just by conservatives but most independents and moderates too. So while Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, et al have done a tremendous amount of damage, we were already in real trouble before that.

[Mongrel]

"Reagan Happened" is in fact part of that story in and of itself.

I think the majority of it is "we let rich people off the mat because America's national ethos is to celebrate disparity and then they bought the government back again".

Which links into an argument that these depths are not as entirely unprecedented in US history as they might seem. Go back before 1900, or even WWII, and there's some pretty massive scandals under some of the republic's more ignominious presidents (and even some under the more decent ones too). Then, as now, the media were often complicit, for the same reasons they are now: They're owned by the rich who are using them to further their own interests.

[mharr]

If people just understood that all they gotta do for a full explanation is type "george carlin" into any computer and hit the videos tab.

[Mongrel]

Am I odd for thinking that George is actually starting to get a bit dated in some respects?

I mean comedy dies the quickest of all forms of entertainment.

[mharr]

Well sure, that's a common side effect of being dead and buried. I haven't seen anyone since outline the collapse of the great experiment so clearly for a general audience.

[Thad]

And speaking of evil men who have misused purported news media to poison our politics:

Pat Robertson steps down as host of ‘The 700 Club’

[Mongrel]

Interesting.