Oh, a media frenzy

Earlier this week, news media in northern California and Oregon especially were focusing on the aftermath of a mall shooting in suburban Portland, Ore. Driving through Oregon yesterday I heard some discussion about it, gathering the interesting fact (if it is a fact and not just something the reporter made up) that suburban Clackamas County is referred to locally as "Clackistan" and its denizens as "Clackistanis."

Three people including "the shooter" (and when did mainstream media begin using that term anyway, and did it come from Hollywood, from the military, from video games, or what?) died in that event, which seemed bad enough until today, when over two dozen died in a school shooting in Connecticut.

Mainstream media pushed the big red button that reads "Wall To Wall Coverage," so during my drive through eastern Oregon and over the Idaho border I heard "breaking news coverage" on NPR. And I listened to all of it, when they finally took a break and ran "Fresh Air" for an hour.

I asked myself, why listen to all that coverage which lasted, what, over three hours? I think the reason is, for once it's not drivel. Not that NPR is relatively high on the scale of broadcast drivel, which was epitomized for me this morning when I turned on the "Today" show while packing in my motel room. The hosts sat around chattering and "joking" without humor and laughing anyway, in that awful way straight people do when they have nothing to talk about but social time to fill.

So when the hours-long coverage of the school shooting came on today, it was actually a relief. Finally, something actually happened. Finally, people have stopped bullshitting for hours on end.

Of course that only lasts so long. I remember the moment on Sep. 11, 2001 when the incident had started to sink in. The moment was the point during the afternoon when, on network and cable news, the coverage acquired branding (recall the graphics reading "ATTACK ON AMERICA" and so on) and theme music which led onto and out of each news segment. And when they start the slow-mo, soft-focus montage of teddy-bear memorials, that's when you know it's really over.

At the moment I'm sitting in a McDonald's in Mountain Home, Idaho, where my order of a salad from the menu so flummoxed them that they took 10 minutes to prepare it and gave me a fried apple pie for free by way of apology. (The wi-fi works here, hooray.) They have a TV on the wall playing Fox News, where Mike Huckabee just assured gun owners that "You can't legislate prevention of events like this" because "this is not a law issue, it's a heart issue." I doubt very much he feels that way about abortion or drugs, but at least they are not showing teddy bears yet.

The mob capturing Gaddafi

This video showing a mob of militiamen abusing and dragging around a bloodied, confused and terrified Gaddafi is awful to see -- though it's probably the way we'd like every evil dictator to wind up. Contrast it to the image of Slobodan Milosevic dying quietly in his cell at the Hague, or even worse, Francisco Franco dying an old and free man.

As a document, it's not very useful. It has edits, for one thing. And the camera is constantly jostled, spun around, and shoved into people's faces. Also, I didn't see anyone in a Yankees cap.

Dear Matt Taibbi, don't be such a one-noter

The reality, of course, is that people like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely – hence the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation.

-- Matt Taibbi, writing in his Rolling Stone blog today

Yeah, but. How can anyone who mentions how far-right foamers are responding to the Occupy protests, and especially who uses words and phrases like "the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum" and "desperate" and "powder keg," fail to mention last year's Tea Party protests? That's last year, when the same words were used to describe those people?

What's different this year is the concept of "the 99%." It's inclusive of those Tea Party idiots for the most part, isn't it? I mean, not including the Koch brothers and whoever else funded the whole Tea Party thing to begin with -- you can't deny that there really were a lot of pissed-off people who felt disenfranchised. And now this year we have a whole additional bunch of people who feel disenfranchised.

If these groups really were likely to unite, that truly would be the far-right's worst nightmare, as they have been working to divide the country into warring camps since the days of Nixon -- and succeeding beautifully. However, until the two groups -- who don't resemble each other and probably think the other group literally and figuratively stinks -- actually develop a common cause other than "chanting" and "funny signs," I don't see much real threat to Limbaugh, the Kochs, etc.

Maybe we're reading

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

If only the Chief Justice subscribed to the New York Post

Did you cringe when Chief Justice John Roberts murdered the Presidential oath of office when swearing in Barack Obama? If only he were a New York Post subscriber, he could have brought it as a cheat sheet:



Who says newspapers aren't important anymore?

technorati: inauguration, Obama, oath of office

Today's hoax: fake pundit not really a 'McCain adviser'

A person(a) named Martin Eisenstadt was behind the assertion that Sarah Palin didn't know whether Africa was a continent or a country, people have reported this week. Now it turns out that "Martin Eisenstadt," his blog, his supposed status as adviser to McCain, and his "Harding Institute" are all an elaborate hoax played out for months. Among the media outlets that were taken in by various postings and press releases made by "Eisenstadt" -- actually the creation of two filmmakers -- were Mother Jones, the LA Times, the New Republic, and most recently with the fake Palin story, MSNBC.

My favorite bit of the story is that the filmmakers based his name on the notion that "all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names."

I read much of the article to Cris, who said, "It isn't very funny."

I said, "It's meta-funny -- it's making fun of the whole superstructure of blogs, pundits, opinionators and so forth who form a sort of mulch that feeds the news cycle." (I thought I was clever for coining a neologism, but "opinionator" turns out already to be in common use.)

technorati: fakes, hoaxes, Martin Eisenstadt