The Daily Howler Takes On The Childish American Media

[DemBones DemBones]

day after day after day, year after year after year. If, by some chance, you have not yet started reading the Howler, you can catch up, even read archives back through 1998. You can also search the site for specific topics, enabling you to prove what lies a specific media person told in a specific situation. A very useful and darkly humorous site.

Here's a quote I particularly liked from a recent Howler:

"Yes, David Petraeus is a Jet all the way—has been all through the past year. But then, this is the way our childish “press corps” has scripted our news in the past fifteen years. Like children playing with dolls in a doll-house, they decide that some of the dolls are straight-shooters—and that some of the dolls are very big liars. As E. R. Shipp explained long ago, everything pretty much follows from there. After the dolls get assigned their “roles” in the “drama,” the facts are re-arranged, massaged and invented to sustain the drama from there.

Yes, this is the way a child plays with dolls, sitting dreamily inside a doll-house.. And uh-oh! Although this utterly childish press corps insists on saying which dolls are “straight shooters,” their track record shows that they have little skill at making such childish assessments. Their odd selections have been rather numerous. But here are a few gruesome cases:

In 1999, for example, they decided that Gore had “a problem with the truth,” and that Bush was just a “plain-spoken” Texan. They stuck with that line in the face of all evidence—and loosed disaster on the world.

And then, three years later, these pundits just knew that a handsome general was shooting it straight when it came to Iraq. Colin Powell sat at the UN, serving a load of home-cooked bull-shit. But Powell was part of the straight-shooters club—and when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way! The Washington Post’s three liberal columnists couldn’t run fast enough to applaud Powell’s truth-telling session. “I’m Persuaded,” said the headline over Mary McGrory’s column the very next day. Next to her piece, readers found Richard Cohen, explaining how top pundits reason:"

rest of column at http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh091207.shtml

much, much more at http://www.dailyhowler.com

[NastyRiffraff]

1. One of my daily must-reads

I've read Somerby for years. He's one of the very few who has documented, in detail, what the media did to Gore in the 2000 election season.

[DemBones DemBones]

3. He really gets details that others don't and looks at

patterns of media stupidity.

I also enjoy his columns about the stupidity in education and especially in education reform. I think anyone who's taught, and cared about, students who come from disadavantaged backgrounds, would enjoy those articles.

[grasswire]

2. thank you

I had forgotten all about Daily Howler.

[DemBones DemBones]

4. Glad to be a reminder! I forget it sometimes, too,

and then I feel like the old commercials that showed someone slapping his/her head and exclaiming "I coulda had a V-8!!!"

"I coulda read the Howler!!!"

It's a good thing that you can always catch up easily on all you've missed when you've been away.