Under the Hammer

I have a lot of respect for Sarah Palin. She was put in an impossible position by Sen. John McCain in 2008, and she survived.

I see somewhat similar situations on the local level all the time. Good, honest people decide to run for office and don't understand what could happen when their words appear in print, and then they get themselves in all kinds of trouble.

Palin was the governor of Alaska, but I would imagine the difference between being governor of Alaska and running for vice president on a national ticket is greater than someone who has never spoken to a reporter running for the Greensboro City Council.

Right now the biggest endorsement for Palin comes from the left. There is just no one the left hates like Palin. It really wouldn't make that much difference except for the fact that the left includes the mainstream media, or as Palin accurately refers to them, the "lamestream media."

The mainstream media cannot stand Palin. Their level of hatred for her is off the charts.

The New York Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote a piece in The New York Times Sunday Magazine about just how horrible Palin is, and he tries to justify the media's treatment of her. But that's not all. On Sunday, The New York Times' editorial page ran a piece making fun of the way Palin talks.

The New York Times' writers think most of the people in this country talk funny because most of us don't talk like New Yorkers. But it is so provincial to make fun of a candidate because of the way she talks. You would expect a little better from The New York Times. Next maybe they will make fun of David Cameron because he sounds like a butler, or Nicolas Sarkozy because he sounds like the waiter at their favorite restaurant. These people need to get out of New York more frequently.

One thing about Keller, he is honest in his assessment of the mainstream media and Palin. Keller wrote, "If the 2012 election were held in the newsrooms of America and pitted Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, I doubt Palin would get 10 percent of the vote. However tempting the newsworthy havoc of a Palin presidency, I'm pretty sure most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea."

So someone who writes that about Palin is the same person who is supposed to be making certain that the articles written about her in The New York Times are fair and unbiased. Fat chance. There is no way that Keller, or for that matter the reporters who work for him, can be fair and unbiased about Palin. His contempt for her goes to the bone. But he cannot understand why Palin doesn't treat the mainstream media with any respect.

By comparison the mainstream media loves Republican Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, and so does Obama.

The New York Times' front-page headline about Huntsman: "For 2012 Candidate, China Job May Well Be a Useful Detour." Huntsman was appointed by Obama to be ambassador to China. So being the president's personal representative to the largest country in the world is a useful detour when that is the same president you plan to run against? It's an odd thought.

Huntsman was part of the Obama administration. He worked for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. He wrote memos recommending more government involvement in private industry and trade.

The article about Huntsman wasn't all glowing though. The New York Times did find a flaw: "voters who may view him as too moderate."

"Too moderate." Does that term make any sense? It only makes sense when you consider that the politically correct New York Times can't call him "too liberal" because liberal is now a dirty word. In the world of the mainstream media, conservatives are conservative and liberals are moderates.

So The New York Times and other liberal mainstream media outlets are in love with Huntsman. Why? Because he is one of them. If he weren't one of them he wouldn't have accepted a job with the Obama administration.

He gets along with Obama, and the news media desperately wants to do everything in it power to keep Obama in the White House.

It says it all that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has endorsed Huntsman as much as he can. As Reid said, he doesn't have a vote in the Republican primary, but if he did, he'd vote for Huntsman over Mitt Romney.

It appears the Republicans in Raleigh may be earning the moniker "the stupid party" one more time.

In redistricting for the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, the Republicans cut the number of commissioners to nine, which is good, but then they decided the commissioners could draw their own districts. There are seven Democratic commissioners and four Republicans. Does anyone think that Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston is not going to draw districts that favor Democrats? If there is any way for Alston to draw districts that all have a Democratic majority, he will do it.

The Republicans in Raleigh could have drawn districts to give Republicans a chance, but President Pro Tem of the Senate Phil Berger, who represents much of Guilford County in the legislature, chose not to. Berger met with Alston and Democratic Guilford County Commissioner Kirk Perkins before making the decision to let the commissioners draw their own districts. If he had met with Republican Commissioners Billy Yow, Mike Winstead and Bill Bencini, he might have made a different decision.

If the Republicans don't draw the state House and state Senate districts to benefit Republicans, they are making a huge mistake. It is the way the game is played, and the reason that elections right after the census are so important.

The people of the State of North Carolina elected a Republican majority to the state House and state Senate because they want Republicans to run the state, not because they want the Democrats to continue to run the state as they have for the past 112 or so years.

The rules now favor the Republicans, but only if the Republicans are smart enough use those rules to their advantage. In Guilford County the Republicans did not. Statewide they had better be prepared to play ball.

NBC cut "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance for a patriotic puff piece that ran to start the US Open. The viewers didn't take kindly to it and NBC apologized. It's not surprising that NBC would do it.

The mainstream media is far to the left of the population. The mainstream media may not be as far left as academia, but then again they might be farther left. If you are ever at an event where the Pledge of Allegiance is recited, like a City Council or Board of Commissioners meeting, take a look at the reporters who are there and see how many lips are moving. It won't be many.

The folks at NBC must have thought that people either wouldn't notice or wouldn't care. They were way wrong on both accounts.

Mornings I try to find something interesting on the radio. One day recently I was listening to Glenn Beck, who was talking about the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers. I get tired of all the yelling and carrying on by Beck and company, and it bothers me that I have listened to that show off and on for years and never have I heard who is in the studio with Beck. Maybe it's all Beck doing different voices, but I don't think so. Anyway Beck & Co. talking about the Constitution and Federalist Papers was one choice, but because what they were really doing was promoting a book, I wasn't that interested. So I switched over to National Public Radio (NPR) to see what the hot topic of the day was.

I thought NPR might be talking about the economy, the looming battle over raising the debt limit, unemployment, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, the pitiful group of Republicans who are running for president, or maybe they too were talking about the Constitution.

None of the above. The topic of discussion that morning on NPR, which I am forced to pay for with my tax dollars, was sunscreen and the method used for rating sunscreen protection.

It was enough to drive me to turn off the radio and discuss the issues of the day with my redheaded companion the final minutes of my drive to work.

The mainstream media is far to the left of the population.

snip

The folks at NBC must have thought that people either wouldn't notice or wouldn't care. They were way wrong on both accounts.

No, actually, they think they are the (uberkewl) cultural and intellectual leaders in America.

What they don't know about leading, is that you are only a leader if people follow you. Otherwise, you're just wandering off...

..and they've wandered farther than they think.

Right now the biggest endorsement for Palin comes from the left. There is just no one the left hates like Palin. It really wouldn't make that much difference except for the fact that the left includes the mainstream media, or as Palin accurately refers to them, the "lamestream media."
The mainstream media cannot stand Palin. Their level of hatred for her is off the charts.
"Media," with whatever modifier, is a terrible misnomer. TV is one medium of communication, print is another, and the Internet is a third medium of communication. Those communications media can transmit messages promoting freedom, or messages promoting tyranny. I grant that some media - movies especially - put a greater premium on production values than others, and expensive production values tend to favor least-common-denominator programming. But it is the message, rather than the medium, which is so consistently objectionable to conservatives.
So much is obvious. To what, then, should we refer instead of "the media?" I put it to you that unless you are willing (and able) to censor fiction,

The actual problem is monopoly wire service journalism.
Monopoly wire service journalism functions as "the borg" by homogenizing journalism across all media. The Associated Press is the lead example and primary suspect/target. The AP was slapped down by SCOTUS over sixty years ago as being in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Back then its mission of conserving bandwidth in the transmission of news was deemed too valuable to admit of a truly effective remedy against it. Today, as the Internet illustrates, bandwidth is dirt cheap by comparison, and the AP mission is no longer "too big to fail." The very name, "associated" press, illustrates the monopoly issue.

The First Amendment was intended to codify the freedom and independence of communication in general, journalism not excepted.
But under the AP model, journalism - while "free" as a collective, is internally homogenized. The internal enforcement of the tacit understanding that all journalists are to be considered objective suppresses all internal self-criticism of journalism. A Dan Rather "60 Minutes" piece can entirely "jump the shark" without enduring the thousandth part of the criticism which would descend on any non-ruling class middle American (whether Governor Palin or the Duke Lacrosse Team) who was merely a convenient target, guilty of no crime.. But woe betide the journalist who actually tells the truth when the rest of journalism is on a jihad against some innocent. Ostracism is inevitable and absolute.

What is now called the media used to be called collectively, The Press. That is much clearer in intent than The media.

Print journalism has been suffering financial decline for a number of years. First it was their ideological friends the unions who troubled them. Type setters, pressmen, and most egregiously, the teamsters who delivered the papers around the big cities. Each kept demanding more and striking when they didn’t get it.

When cable TV, the internet and talk radio began to compete they were in even more trouble. About the only costs they could lower were to fire some field reporters and depend on the wire service like AP and UPI for that information. TV outlets use reporters from their local affiliates for local stories but for the national and international stuff they use the wire services. They are called wire services because initially they depended on the old telegraph system to transmit reports.

What is now called the media used to be called collectively, The Press. That is much clearer in intent than The media.

True. My objection to the usage of "the press" to mean wire service journalism is twofold:

Use of "the press" to refer to journalists but not to book printers tends to suggest that journalists have a unique constitutional role under the First Amendment - whereas the rest of the Constitution rejects titles of nobility and makes everyone equal before the law. Calling journalists "the press" suggests that journalists are more equal than those who do not yet own a press.

Journalists who belong to the Borg known as the Associated Press are not independent of each other - but they presume to define "the press" exclusively as those who own or work for a journalism outlet who never compete on the basis of perspective. IOW, the requirement that journalists accept the objectivity of all other journalists homogenizes journalism - and frees journalism of any need to attempt actual objectivity by the only efficacious means, which is humility and self-examination. It frees journalism to be what journalism wants to be - irresponsible and powerful. Politicians who go along and get along with what journalism wants to be are given positive labels such as "progressive" or "moderate" or "liberal" by journalists.

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