Sapere Aude!

Jon Stewart on Dumbing It Down

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Gretchen Carlson Dumbs Down
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Jon Stewart Interviews Lou "Dumbass" Dobbs

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Exclusive - Lou Dobbs Extended Interview Pt. 1
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You can check out the rest of the interview here.  I often ask myself the same question Stewart poses to Dobbs: Why the sudden burst of outrage now that a Democrat administration is in power when the previous Republican administration clearly did things that were improper?

OMG! Obama Tries to Be Polite to People From a Different Culture!!!

Drudge Report headlines crack me up. 

It must me he's showing weakness!!!!!!  We're all doomed!  Now the Japs are gonna attack!!!!

Watchdog Media and Party Politics

 Number: Views of “Watchdog” Press Change with President - Pew Research Center.

The belief that the press should keep political leaders from doing things that should not be done often depends on who those political leaders are, or more specifically, which party controls the White House. Currently, in the midst of the Obama administration, two-thirds of Republicans (65%) support the so-called "watchdog role" for the press, compared with 55% of Democrats. But last year, while Bush was still in office, only 44% of Republicans felt it was good that press criticism keeps political leaders honest, and Democrats were much more pro watchdog (71% supported press criticism). This partisan pattern has existed since the question was first asked by Pew Research in 1985. Throughout the Bush administration, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to support the press's watchdog role. During the Clinton years, Republicans were the strongest proponents of press criticism, and during Reagan and Bush Sr., it was again the Democrats. Political independents express far less change in opinion. Two-thirds of independents currently favor the watchdog role for the press, little changed from 1985 or any time in between.

Seems like people, generally speaking, have a hard time being consistent.

Fox News isn't even pretending anymore | Salon

Fox News isn't even pretending anymore | Salon.  From the article:

In theory, the national news media function in a free market of ideas: a self-regulating, relentless quest for what the old Superman comics called “Truth, Justice, and the American way.” (Actually, Clark Kent’s newspaper-reporter disguise strikes contemporary audiences as a sentimental anachronism. Today, he’d be a rogue cop or a CIA operative.)

In practice, Washington political journalism has become a subdivision of the entertainment industry: its best-known practitioners are second- and third-tier TV stars, and news itself a form of politicized “infotainment.” Even lowly print reporters and pundits can greatly improve their incomes by appearing on programs like “Hardball” and copping an attitude.

Chasing audiences and advertising dollars, corporate media seek to tell target demographics the kinds of stories those audiences want to hear. Nobody who watched CNN cover Michael Jackson’s death 24/7, for example, could imagine otherwise. For weeks at a time, only BBC America provided a halfway reliable window on the outside world — a hell of a note.

The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”

Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.”

“Obama Triples Budget Deficit to $1.4 Trillion,” reads a typical headline on the Fox Web site. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office projected the fiscal 2009 deficit at $1.2 trillion before Obama took office. Media Matters for America has compiled an encyclopedic list of similar absurdities.

“Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”

Fox News has successfully promoted the ideology of being "fair and balanced" among conservatives and the right-wing.  But, nobody in their right mind would think that the pundits on Fox News do justice to their political opposition or that simply including a few "liberals" on the network constitutes anything close to impartial or critical journalism.  We'd be better off describing that network as "unfair and unbalanced."  We'd do well to head Hannah Arendt's suggestion that market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment" ("The Crisis in Culture").

Jon Stewart Rips CNN a New One For Failing to be Jounralists

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CNN Leaves It There
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Conservatizing the Bible

This conservatizing the Bible thing has got to be a joke, right?  If it's not then it's really, really sad.  I grew up holding the view that the King James Version of the Bible was a divinely inspired translation of the original Hebrew and Greek texts.  I don't those that view anymore.  In fact, I'm more inclined these days to think that something like the conservative Bible project has been instrumental in shaping what we know call the Bible in the sense that people's political, historical, cultural contexts influences how the Bible was put together.  But, if I did still hold that view of the Bible, the Conservative Bible Project would still bother me.

Glenn Beck Blames Minority For Social Ills

Studies keep showing that religious belief is doing pretty well. It seems like increasing secularization of society is more of a myth an a reality.

Is Broder Claiming What I Think He's Saying?

David S. Broder on Obama's approach to governing:

The progressives believed that the cure lay in applying the new wisdom of the social sciences to the art of government, an approach in which facts would heal the clash of ideologies and narrow constituencies.

Obama -- a highly intelligent product of elite universities -- is far from the first Democratic president to subscribe to this approach. Jimmy Carter, and especially Bill Clinton, attempted to govern this way. But Obama has made it even more explicit, regularly proclaiming his determination to rely on rational analysis, rather than narrow decisions, on everything from missile defense to Afghanistan -- and all the big issues at home.

Is he actually criticizing Obama for attempting to approach governing in a rational manner here?  Is he criticizing Obama for not making narrow decisions and just sticking to them?

Fox News Producer Caught Manufactoring Dissent

Fox News Producer Caught Rallying 9/12 Protest Crowd In Behind-The-Scenes Video.

A Fox News Channel producer has been caught in a behind-the-scenes video rallying the crowd during last weekend's 9/12 protest in Washington.

The Huffington Post has confirmed that the woman in the below video — seen raising her arms to rally the crowd behind Griff Jenkins, who was reporting from the scene for Fox News — is Fox News producer Heidi Noonan.

"The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined," Bryan Boughton, Fox News Channel Washington Bureau Chief told the Huffington Post.

You'd think that a new producer no matter how inexperienced would know it's wrong to manufacture dissent.