Good Golly, Miss Molly (Satire)

In a recent piece on liberal media bias, Michael Barone relayed a relevant encounter:

I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.

They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."

This quote came to mind when I read a blurb in the Arizona Conservative about Molly Ivins, a regular contributor to the liberal monthly, The Progressive:

Molly Ivins, whose column is distributed by Creators Syndicate, demanded that government lend a hand to struggling mainstream media by placing more stringent controls on Internet bloggers. "These bloggers are killing us," said Ivins. "There are no rules. Anyone can set up a blog and begin spewing opinions and misinformation. This needs to stop."

Under Ivins' plan, the government would issue a license to people authorizing them to publicly express opinions after they completed the apprenticeship. Those caught expressing opinions, either on the Internet or in letters to the editor, without a license would be fined for a first offense and jailed on subsequent offenses.......

Ivins proposed an apprenticeship-type program as a remedy. "The government should require a term of apprenticeship with a regular newspaper for anyone who wants to express his opinion in any media -- including the internet," said Ivins. "A little seasoning would go a long way toward inoculating these people against being duped by Bush and his minions." Under Ivins' plan, the government would issue a license to people authorizing them to publicly express opinions after they completed the apprenticeship. Those caught expressing opinions, either on the Internet or in letters to the editor, without a license would be fined for a first offense and jailed on subsequent offenses

I really hate it when a crappy post forces me to defend Molly Ivins. I cannot find this opinion anywhere on the net. She said something remotely similar, but not what is quoted here:

http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=3&ColumnsName=miv

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter -- nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, "Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn't be allowed to cover a presidential campaign."

I read your post of Mad Molly and what she actually said was worse. She is saying there is a difference between being a professional liar and an amateur liar. One one hand, you have to earn your stripes then turn into a deceptive partisan fraud. The blogger doesn't have these hurdles and she seems jealous.I could be coaxed into defending her if the whole of the media wasn't so fraudulent and biased.

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