25 posts tagged “mainstream media”

Some Grey Bloke has got it right with the swine ’flu: that it is the Susan Boyle of illnesses. It hasn’t done much, but everyone with an internet connection knows about it.

This has got to be one of those bad journalism moments:

Specifically, the report states (sic):

Analysts say its small-car technology can help Chrysler, known for its minivans and Hummer line. In the past five years, Fiat has been able to regain market share in Europe with its economy fuel-saving cars as well as its luxury line, Alpha Romero.

   I’m sure Chrysler would love to know it owns Hummer and have extra headaches about what to do with that brand, and do Alpha Romeros have anything to do with actor Cesar Romero?

I rather liked Craig Ferguson’s jokes at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was a shame that his fellow media colleagues didn’t know a good laugh when they heard it.
   I have found this with political humour in the United States. I have had political jokes fall well flat, and this is due to the politeness of Americans. Democrats don’t want to offend Republicans in the audience, and Republicans don’t want to offend Democrats in the audience. Net result: little laughter.
   The only times one can get a bit more extreme is in areas which are staunchly one way or another (e.g. then-Sen. Obama at the DNC and Gov. Palin at the RNC).
   He dissed The New York Times as much as Fox News, Vice-President Cheney as much as Sen. Clinton, Bill O’Reilly as much as Keith Olbermann, and he even had a go with the media in general. However, I loved his closing which was a great way to bring everyone together. Also notice that Mr Ferguson got a standing ovation.

Welcome to Brown’s Britain.
   And one copper who might give so many of the good ones at the Met a black mark.
   I know there were some difficulties with protesters and I assume the police officer’s judgement was coloured by that. One would hope, however, that the training would keep the macho bollocks in check.

I am glad to know that the murder of Adam Walsh has been confirmed as solved in the US.
   John Walsh’s press statements yesterday were carried here on network television, a nod to his global celebrity status.
   Mr Walsh turned his anger over his six-year-old son’s murder into a productive search for suspects across the US—and his efforts are credited for helping solve hundreds of cases.
   While Fox’s motives for showing Walsh’s America’s Most Wanted stem from the tabloid journalism that made it infamous in Australia, the UK and the US, the benefits of the show have outweighed the negatives considerably, in my mind. Selling it on as entertainment might be looked upon less charitably.
   I feel for this man. I do not know what emotions he went through when his son went missing, and then when young Adam’s severed head was found. I hope we never do learn those emotions first-hand. But I think we all understand loss and anger.
   Not all of us are as great as John Walsh in being able to turn that into a force for good.
   I also have to act in an un-Christian way because I find a child murderer’s actions disgusting and it is terribly hard to forgive a bastard nonce, even when it’s not my own kin upon whom such a horrible act has been committed.
   But God bless the Walsh family, for the suffering they have been through and for their positive contributions to crime-fighting.
   I hope many other families find justice.

I thought this was a good laugh, from Newsbusters. This was run at the time when the media were attacking Gov. Sarah Palin on her foreign policy experience. The writer, Tom Blumer, points out in 1992, The New York Times wrote, of then-Gov. Bill Clinton (his emphasis):

Under the pressure of a Presidential campaign, Gov. Bill Clinton has been trying to outline his own unique foreign policy, while at the same time fending off criticism from the Bush White House that he is a closet dove masquerading as a hawk and that his experience in world affairs is limited to breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. …
   As a man who has spent his entire career in state government in Arkansas, Mr. Clinton has no foreign policy record to run on or be judged against. Therefore, critics say, he has had the luxury of defining himself purely through a series of speeches. None of his ideas have had to meet the test of the real world.

   He did feel there was media bias at work. There was certainly sexism. I liked the IHOP reference more than anything else.

The Fox News folks have now joined in the Sarah Palin-bashing, which is a surprise. Some cynics who smell a rat say that the Murdoch-owned network is merely ensuring that Gov. Palin does not have a chance at another run because she alienated too many moderate Republicans. But having Republicans as friends, I know that many supported the Governor because they shared her value system, and some even said they only voted for Sen. McCain because Gov. Palin was on the ticket.
   The GOP might well be a divided party and we have seen these divisions before, with George Bush (the 41st president) who appealed too much to the moderates, and with the primaries this time around that saw former Govs. Huckabee and Romney only managing to get partial support from the party.
   Before some say that the Murdoch Press has covered this up till after the election, there does seem to have been some agreement internally to not reveal a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff till the day after on both sides. Even Newsweek is now revealing a lot and I am told its video has then-Sen. Obama swearing.
   Whatever the case, I’m not sure if it’s wise for the Murdoch Press, if it is a GOP instrument as its critics say (its boss has always denied this) to be doing something that might divide the party.
   Or, was K. R. M. always right and that it’s being ‘fair and balanced’?
   I am always concerned when one politician is vilified to this extent. I have seen it in other countries, against people on the left and on the right. It’s dangerous stuff, and contributes to revisionism.
   I might not agree with the Governor on some of her positions, her lack of humility, or even her campaigning technique, but if some things sound too much like a tall tale, then they probably are. I don’t think we have seen the last of Gov. Palin; we might indeed see, and I know there is a lot of Bush fatigue out there, John Ellis Bush or even George Prescott Bush make runs somewhere down the line.
   Democrats might hope not—or they might hope so, if this will help ensure them a victory.
   Less likely things have happened. Remember, Marvin Bush once said of his eldest brother, ‘George is the family clown,’ and that he was unlikely to run for office.
   You just never know.

In the last month, two New Zealanders were murdered—but I have to hand it to the mainstream media, especially TV3 and National Radio, for covering these without racial bias.
   Ten years ago, the Chinese ethnicity of the victims would have been made to be a big deal. Indeed, any crime involving east Asians was treated as more (negatively) newsworthy and coverage was, effectively, racist. Perhaps not surprising in the wake of the Yellow Peril speeches of the current Foreign Minister-outside-Cabinet during the 1990s.
   Statistics from the New Zealand Police have shown that crimes involving east Asians are not proportionally out of whack with the percentage of the population. It’s nothing for us to be proud of, mind.
   It has taken a while but New Zealand citizens of Chinese descent seem to be accepted by the media a bit better than in the previous century. The record is not perfect but this is a marked improvement.
   Their deaths were reported as those of New Zealanders. While the reporting of one woman’s funeral acknowledged her Chinese roots and her Buddhist religion, that was the extent of it. There was nothing made to be odd or strange.
   The tragedies are horrible—they should never have happened in the first place. In New Zealand, one is eight times more likely to be murdered today than 50 years ago. And that is a whole separate issue. However, I am glad that these two women were not made to be outsiders in a country they called home after their deaths, whatever might have happened in their lifetimes.

TV Scoop has some hints about the next series of Ashes to Ashes, to début February 2009 on BBC One: ‘We’ve just handed in episode one. It’s set in 1982, so the Falklands have just happened. We’re taking it slightly darker this time …’ Read the rest of the quotation from co-creator Ashley Pharoah at TV Scoop. This does mean the VO at the beginning of the show has to change, as Keeley Hawes currently makes a reference to 1981.
   Whatever the case, it’s going far more smoothly than the US Life on Mars—which the Los Angeles Times reported on back in early June (and this blog followed on June 5). The British press only caught up with the news this past week but it did reveal one extra tidbit that we didn’t already know: Matthew Graham said in The Guardian, ‘At the time we thought [US pilot writer and executive producer David E. Kelley] took what we said on board, but I don’t think he did in the end. I think they should go further away from us; otherwise the danger is you look like an imitation.’