Taste of the old medicine

The media attention is wearing thin on former Daily Egyptian editor Michael Brenner: "I'm so sick of being crucified when I am the victim of this whole thing, I'm really getting worn out talking to the media."

Welcome to the party, Mikey, welcome to the party.

And here, put this salt in your wounds

I don't know how HuffingtonPost trash can get spread around on real "News" sites, but it's there so it's a valid target. While people are still going around collecting the floating bodies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes the opportunity to blame it on Republicans.

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

Hey Bobby, even Clinton didn't support Kyoto. If joining something that forces us to sterilize our output while letting China crap up the skies is your idea of progress, that might explain why your party can't win an election.

Forget for the moment that now is not the time to bring in politics, hurricanes were hitting just as hard and just as often before humans ever lit the first match.

Jayson Blair 2.0 said to be unstable and crashes

Another journalist tries to make stuff up, this time about a soldier going to Iraq leaving his daughter behind. The fabricator said from his grandparent's basement "Who's going to want to hire me after this?"

Oh, boo hoo! Don't worry, kid. "ABC wants to fly him to New York City. So do NBC and CBS. CNN has called, too, he said."

From the Dan Rather Finishing School of Denial comes Editor in Chief Zack Creglow; "We don't know if he (Brenner) is guilty or not" Thank you, Mr. Cregloooooow.

NOW there is too much coverage

As you may know, NBC and other MSM journalists have criticized Fox News for covering the Natalee Holloway saga. Now Matt Drudge is reporting that NBC may be thrown off the island for "unethical newsgathering". They shot video of Urine van derSlut in jail.

How bad is that when a banana republic kicks you out for being unethical? NBC's side of it:

'NBCNEWS is closely monitoring the situation in Aruba. Our legal representative participated in tonight's court proceedings. We respect the court's order and therefore we will not broadcast the videotape of Joran van derSloot from inside the prison tonight. However, NBC News did, in fact, have permission to be inside the prison

Permission? From who? Seeing that Aruba doesn't even tell you what happens in court, I doubt they had permission to poke around the prison.

As the official media referee, I'm throwing NBC out of the Holloway commentary game. I don't want to hear a single cross word from an NBC employee talking about how another network is covering the story.

What liberal media?

Would any reporters like to take a moment away from tearing up Pat Robertson on their front page to mention how heinous it was when former presidential advisor George Stephanopolis suggested we assassinate Saddam Hussein?

NY Times gets schooled on bias

Roger Pielke, a Colorady State University professor who quit Bush's global warming team, says the Times "mischaracterized" his views.

"The reference to my perspective and to the reasons I resigned from the committee are mischaracterized and erroneous in the New York Times article,"

"I was very disappointed that the New York Times so badly mischaracterized my perspective, but fortunately we now have blogs so that errors can be corrected, and I've posted my response there,"

In a fantasy email to The OmbudsGod, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. replied "We'd have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky blogs!"

Hey Professor Pielke, welcome to the party!

The agony of defeat

President of CNN, Jonathan Klein told the New York Times:

"It's easy and it's brainless," Mr. Klein said in a telephone interview, explaining why cable news outlets have gravitated to [Natalee Holloway]. "They're looking for an ongoing drama" along the lines of the NBC crime show "Law & Order," he said, adding "Except 'Law & Order' doesn't do the same plot every night."

Jon, if you hadn't run 10 stand-ups a day from the Cindy Sheehan vigil, you might have a speck of credibility on this subject, but you did, and you don't.

These comments wouldn't have anything to do with the whole CNN lineup (combined) being unable to beat the ratings of a single O'Reilly Factor, would it? Ouch.

Sheehanigans at the LA Times

Pat Morrison editorializes for the LA Times, I'm going to have to break this one down one stream-of-consciousness at a time:

WHO DIED AND left Cindy Sheehan in charge? We put her in charge the press, the politicians, the people. We put her in charge not just of her own message and her mission, which is all she had asked for, but we cranked up her voice to equal volume with the man she's calling out: POTUS himself, George W. Bush.

Let me get this straight... We, the people, "cranked up her voice" equal to the President of the United States? Huh. What edition of the LA Times do I run? Because I've got some immigration and UN corruption stories I'd like to run.

Sheehan, who just knows that she's against the war because her boy died there and she doesn't want that to happen to anyone else

Wait a minute, is that all she knows? I thought she knew Bush was a murderer who should be tried at the Hague for war crimes, and that America has been slaughtering and conquering for over 200 years, and that Israel should get out of "Palestine", and that the whole war was only to make Bush and his friends rich. Don't underestimate what Sheehan knows, she's a real smartee.

Sheehan gets quizzed about strategic policy as if she were on the Council on Foreign Relations, and she gets ridiculed when she founders.

That might be because she thinks she has all the answers but hasn't thought any of them through. Is it not fair to press her on what should be done if not the current course of action? Hmmm?

She's treated the way the interrogators ought to be treating the likes of Pat Robertson when he says we should save ourselves some bucks on another war by just assassinating the president of Venezuela

Pat Robertson was on the front page of my newspaper today. He was on every news channel last night. He garners 2,160 articles in Google News. Now, Cindy Sheehan has 12,900 articles in Google News but most of those are supporting her fatwa against the President. So tell me how Pat Robertson is somehow getting off easy?

Some Fox talk show host let himself in for a hernia, straining to knit Sheehan into a sinister geo-conspiracy: "I can't help but notice that Cindy Sheehan is from Vacaville, Calif., very close to UC Davis, very close to UC Berkeley, reasonably close to UC Santa Cruz, where I believe that a lot of those WTO protesters came from."

"Some Fox talk show host"? You didn't by chance get a name, did you? Does this fleeting recollection pass for sourcing at the LA Times now?

Cindy Sheehan's was a voice we had not heard.

That Bush is a murderer and should be tried for war crimes? Nah, I hear that voice every time I pick up the LA Times.

MainStreamMedia batting 000

MSM can't get Fox News off Natalee Holloway, they can't get Cindy Sheehan to be respected by the public, heck, they can't even make the "Real Estate Bubble" a reality. New home purchases are at a record high after months of trying to scare the country into a recession they can turn around and blame Bush for.

Do you miss the old days when there was one ring of media to rule them all?

Welcome to the party, Wall Street!

The CEO of Institutional Shareholder Services says the New York Times has an "accusatory agenda" and is ignoring facts.

In other news: water is wet and razors are sharp!

Righteous indignation of media

David Adams talks about his Natalee Holloway story in the St. Pete Times. Note to David: The best way to start an interview is probably not to... uh... get caught up in some verbal concoction.

The last time I got such a big response was in the days before email and the Internet. I wrote a story about Hurricane Andrew for a British newspaper, a first person account of what you do when a hurricane hits your house, and I wrote that I evacuated my house with my wife and we left the cat behind. And I got so many outraged letters about "how I could do such a thing?" As it turned out, by the way, my wife did take the cat at the last minute, after I filed my story.

Let me just see if I have this straight. You were writing a story about what to do when a hurricane hits your house, but it was before a hurricane hit your house? No. You were writing the story while you were evacuating and the facts changed in the minutes between turning in the story and leaving the house? Wait. You wrote that you had evacuated your house, but you obviously hadn't because if you had, you would have known your wife grabbed the cat on the way out. Aren't you not supposed to write about things that haven't happened yet?

Let me put it in a way a journalist will understand: what did you know about the cat and the hurricane, David, and when did you know it?

At issue here is that he wrote about how there is too much coverage of Natalee Holloway and that is benefiting Fox News.

I have had emails from somebody at "Good Morning America," somebody at ABC, somebody at CBS, somebody at NBC, and several other print journalists, all saying, "way to go." There is a great deal of disquiet among both print and broadcast media about the way this story is being handled.

This wouldn't be the same Good Morning America, ABC, CBS, and NBC that covered Terry Schiavo ad nauseam, would it? It wouldn't be the same Good Morning America, ABC, CBS, and NBC that did back to back stories on the "Runaway Bride" would it? It wouldn't be the same Good Morning America, ABC, CBS, and NBC that does 3 stories a day on Cindy Sheehan, would it?

What exactly is the difference?

And what is so bad about covering a defenseless young girl who was probably murdered at the hands of a privileged son of a politico in a corrupt country? What happened to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?