Taking Jon Stewart seriously

See Taranto, Best of the Web, "Rally to Restore Authority":

The "sanity" for which Stewart claims to long is the authority of the old mainstream media--their ability to set the boundaries of newsworthiness and respectable debate, claiming to be above politics while actually skewing leftward--though not so far or so intensely leftward as, say, MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann.

Stewart mimics this authority by insisting that he is nonpartisan and nonideological. In truth, he is no more above politics than were Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather. But he's clever enough to know that a Ratheresque assertion of authority would make him look ridiculous. So instead he makes an appeal to antiauthority, escaping scrutiny by insisting he's just a comedian. "If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to," he smirked at Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire," back in 2004.

The kind of "sanity" for which Stewart claims to be nostalgic is a thing of the past. Its last redoubt is National Public Radio, which by firing Juan Williams has made itself look more like the Radio Moscow of a half century ago than the CBS.

Not that anyone should take Stewart seriously, but others do. Also, he did a good number on Olbermann once.

To New Yorker readers

A repost, from the usually laconic* Glenn Reynolds (I liked the whole thing, plus I'm trying to drive some traffic his way):

ILYA SOMIN: Errors In Jane Mayer’s New Yorker Article Attacking the Kochs.

The thing to understand is, this article isn’t about the Kochs at all. It’s about preparing a narrative for the New Yorker’s readers about why Obama has failed. It’s not because they were rubes who voted for an underprepared, under-skilled candidate who then proceeded to alienate the electorate. It’s because Obama was beaten by a right-wing billionaires’ conspiracy so vast as to defy understanding. That’s all. Relax, New Yorker readers. No need to feel bad about yourself for being overwhelmed with hope-and-change fever and voting stupidly. It’s not your fault. It never is!

Heh, as some people say. (Here's my earlier take on the same hit piece, this one referencing Reason's "Hit & Run".)

* in any one post.

The eco-terrorist and the silence of the greens

James Taranto, "Best of the Web":

James Lee's Awakening

From the always-excellent Taranto, an even more excellent than usual piece on the latest eco-loon cum terrorist, and the curious silence, so far, from the usual lefty suspects on any connection between their "shockingly irresponsible", extremist rhetoric and the sad spectacle at the Discovery Channel yesterday.  To be contrasted with the media's repeated attempts to create links between any violent incident and, say, the Tea Party. And contrasted too with the "nothing to see here" approach of Jesse Walker, for example, at Reason's "hit & run" -- who may well be making a partially commendable effort to restrain from making partisan hay from the tragedy, but sometimes you have to whack a biased media over the head to get their attention, and this just puts them back to sleep.

The New Yorker as supermarket tabloid: the Koch hit

Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

The Official Koch Industries Reply to The New Yorker Hit Piece

The  New Yorker piece has been getting extra attention because of some departures at CATO recently, which Koch helps fund. As Gillespie, at the link above, points out, what stands out here is just the remarkably slimy tone, from what was supposed to be -- what once was, certainly -- a high-toned magazine.

Maybe the National Enquirer will do a matching piece on George Soros.

Piling on

From Best of the Web, Aug 23/10 (I can't resist either):

An Atrocious Sentence, but No Crime
This almost seems unsporting, but we can't resist. From a New York Times editorial on the Justice Department's decision to drop its investigation of Tom DeLay:

Mr. DeLay, the Texas Republican who had been the House majority leader, crowed that he had been "found innocent." But many of Mr. DeLay's actions remain legal only because lawmakers have chosen not to criminalize them.

By the same logic, the New York Times editorialists are not in the dock only because "criminal stupidity" is a figure of speech and not an actual law.

The "professional left", Obama, and irony

There's undeniable comedy in seeing the umbrage lefties are taking at being called "professional" (there's that schadenfreude again) -- but it raises an interesting question of what exactly constitutes a "professional leftist"? Clearly left-wing politicians and their campaign staff might be so designated, but that's too obvious, and it can't be what Gibbs had in mind when using the term. "Activists", maybe? That sounds right, but still a little vague -- I mean, what do you have to do to be an "activist"? Is it just a sloppy newspaper term for any lefty with an opinion who doesn't have a job? Sort of like the way the media uses "racist" to label any righty with an opinion, regardless of whether they have a job? There's no doubt considerable truth in that, but there is one occupation that seems to fit the label "professional leftist" pretty well -- how 'bout community organizer?

Irony's a bitch.

Reporters as opinion-guides, before and after

Again from that Cabal of Unreconstructed Commies (CUC) Club of Latter-day Anti-capitalists (CLA) that goes under the name of Crooked Timber, comes some schadenfreudish delight, this time to do with the latest embarrassments emerging from that bottomless pit of "heh", the Journolist archives. Before the latest revelations by the reporters at Daily Caller, here's what John Holbo had to say about reporters as opinion-guides:

Lots of people have made the correct point that it’s silly to think reporters ... should have no opinions. But beyond that, it’s silly to think reporters should not have opinions about the dynamics of opinion-formation – opinions about how prominent crazy people and spin doctors in the public sphere affect public discourse. And it’s silly to think reporters do not have a positive duty to act on these opinions, changing up their stance to counteract the influence of perceived craziness, the better to help their readers form sensible opinions.

 After those exposures, here's what one of the exposed, Henry, had to say:

If you believe that there is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy ranged against conservatism, it must be very exciting to finally get your hands on the Top Sekrit archives of the shadowy network that you think Controls It All.

 What's with all the upper-case and misspelling, do you think? You don't suppose he's at all chagrined, do you? Maybe a little upset, even? But, I mean, wouldn't you think he'd agree with Holbo that the reporters at Daily Caller had "a positive duty to act" on their opinions, especially about the "dynamics of opinion formation"?  Especially about "how prominent crazy people and spin doctors in the public sphere affect public discourse"? And now that they've helped Henry to form "sensible opinions", wouldn't you think gratitude would be more appropriate than snark?

Epistemology and the aims of journalism

An interesting post by John Holbo at Crooked Timber, and my subsequent debate in the comments. It deals, once again, with the fallout from the Weigel affair, which has stayed far longer than its due fifteen minutes on its own merits, but which has some added importance re: the issue of media bias. (To be honest, epistemology only really arises superficially, re: the possiblity of "objective" reporting.)

The political metamorphoses of Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel, the former blogger/reporter for the Washington Post on matters conservative, has put out a long mea culpa, on Big Government, of all places. But it's a little hard to see exactly what he's saying, other than "okay, ya got me", plus some confessional stuff about hubris. There may be a kind of personal-political-change story there as well, but in his case it doesn't appear to run very deep -- it seems he began as a sort of campus conservative, but of the lite variety, meaning more style than substance:

I was more interested in covering politics than in advocating for a political stance (outside of columns I wrote for my paper and later the daily campus paper). I cared more about finding out stories first than about advocating positions — those stories would get me the jobs I wanted, not the opinions I had. And I knew that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed.

Little wonder that when he got the invite to join the cool kids, as they seemed to him, on Journolist, he didn't think twice:

I was dazzled by the sudden, immediate access I had to more than a hundred journalists and academics, mostly on the left, some without an ideology I could discern.

So Weigel's political transformation has been from campus conservative lite to something like a political chameleon, willing and happy to blend in with whatever crowd he's amongst at the moment, "trash talk" the crowd's enemies, and change color at the next cocktail party. It's a sad little arc, characteristic, I've no doubt, of many in the "journalist" tribe, and goes a fair way toward explaining the herd instincts of so much of the so-called main-stream media. They're "mostly on the left" simply because most of them have never thought any further.

How many reporters does it take to cover liberals?

It's a trick question. First, you have to ask, as Byron York does with Sherlockian insight, why there are reporters "covering" conservatives, as Dave Weigel was supposed to do, in the first place? Answer: because conservatives are a puzzling, alien phenomenon to MSM editors/producers. Here's the money quote:

In the past several years, newspapers have assigned reporters to specifically cover conservatives, but they haven't done the same thing for liberals. It started in January 2004, when the New York times chose David Kirkpatrick to cover the conservative movement. The goal, as Times editor Bill Keller told then-ombudsman Byron Calame in 2006, was to identify "the [conservative] thinkers and the grass roots they organize" and explore "how the conservative movement works to be heard in Washington."

"We wanted to understand them," Keller said of conservatives.

So, the answer to the question about the number of reporters needed to cover liberals is zero, since there's clearly no lack of understanding of that kind of politics within the MSM. But if the question is, how many reporters do cover liberals, explicitly or tacitly, the answer must be just about all of them.

Two tales of a city

Desaib Mi, MSMedia reporter:

The violence that many predicted from the right-wing Tea Party movement finally manifested itself in full force at the site of the G8/G20 summit over the weekend, as cars were burned, stores smashed, rocks hurled by masked, black-clad Tea Party thugs. One bystander observed, "it's but a short step from carrying hate-filled signs mocking the President, who's African-American, to inciting a revolution in the streets." Many were  calling for sweeping arrests and --

What? They're not Tea Party? Are you sure?

Oh. Okay, right. Sorry. Let me try again:

The site of the G8/G20 summit was the scene of another police-state overreaction as mainly peaceful protesters tried to make a forceful, democratic case that the leaders of nations should not be allowed to meet in person. A "heavy, heavy police presence" and other security arrangements were said by many to have been highly provocative, and may have led to some possibly accidental forms of expression, such as a burning police car, or a broken window. Spokesmen for the protesters claimed that in fact the police burned their own car in an attempt to ....

The Weigel-Journolist Affair and schadenfreude

It's all over the Internets, or at least the bloggery, or at least the right side (in more ways than one) of the blogosphere -- in the wake of some leaked but highly classified emails from one David Weigel to a cozy little online club of "center to left" journalists, Weigel's lost his job and the club itself is about to be disbanded.

Awwwww. That's a little of that most widespread of guilty pleasures, schadenfreude, which I think becomes a little less guilty when you add to its Merriam-Webster definition: "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others" -- that are richly deserved. Why deserved, in this case? Well, first, because Weigel was the reporter the Washington Post had assigned to cover conservatives. Right? A guy who's a member of a lefty email club is supposed to be reporting -- objectively?! -- on conservative or right-wing issues and events?? Why wouldn't it be good riddance?

And second, there's that little business of the "journolist" itself, which was a lefty in-group consisting of many other members of the media who, in their day jobs, also purport to be more or less objective. Now, the right-wing complaining about left-wing media bias can get a bit tiresome, I'll admit, in its repetitiveness. But it's repetitive not only because the bias is so bleedingly obvious, but also because of the  irritating chutzpah constantly displayed by said biased "journalists" and editors/producers in their bare-faced denials of the bleedingly obvious. In any case, Mickey Kaus does one of the better take-downs of this little cabal (via Moe Lane):

Everybody has private notes, sources, or conversations. That doesn't mean a secret conversation among "hundreds" of influential Democratic writers doesn't potentially create problems. Groupthink might be one of them. ... Hey, and another might be the fostering of an us-vs-them mentality! Maybe even a weakness for smug rationalization. ...

PS: Julian "epistemic closure" Sanchez feels badly for Weigel, who apparently is a friend. Julian's pretty sure that Weigel isn't "any sort of liberal or progressive", but he also doesn't seem to be any sort of unbiased observer of conservatives either, which is apparently what he was hired as. E.g., some Weigel quotes (from the origin of the kerfuffle, the Daily Caller):

Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?

...

In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”

... 

Republicans? “Ratfucking [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratfuck” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratfucking tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

"Ratfucking"? Okay, that's a little weird. Biased and weird.