news media
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2006A while ago, I defined Compulsive Centrist Disorder:
Complusive Centrist Disorder has always bothered me because a certain policy or view will mysteriously be labelled 'centrist' regardless of where it actually falls on the political spectrum, and suddenly it will be far more respectable than other policies. It's intellectual cowardice and laziness of a high order....
In this case, you might actually think my proposal is the best policy. However, the problem with Compulsive Centrist Disorder is that it short-circuits any discussion, since the compromise is automatically assumed to be a good…
mikethemadbiologist | November 30, 2006Well, she did have an article published in the New York Press about illegal advertising in New York City. Go read.
mikethemadbiologist | November 29, 2006There was a time when think tanks on occasion actually thought. Not so, at the conservative Hoover Institute, where Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer slimed Pelosi, claiming she had to explain why her family's vineyard does not use union employees. Schweizer claimed Pelosi was a hypocrite.
Two things to note:
1) Pelosi pays better wages than the union vineyards.
2) By law, Pelosi is not allowed to even suggest to her workers that they organize. She can only negotiate with a union once it is formed.
When confronted with this by a TV news station, Schweizer refused to return phone…
mikethemadbiologist | November 27, 2006To avoid possible brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Sebastian Mallaby's columns only be read using the StupidVu 9000
Someone needs to tell Bush that when I wrote a post titled "Democrats Crush GOP; Bush Declares 'Mandate'", I was joking. Now that El Jefe Maximo has psychologically disinvested from the Iraqi Occupation, he has decided that the message the American electorate sent in the 2006 elections was "You've done such a great job with foreign policy, FEMA, and the budget deficit, we would really like you to screw up Social Security."
Really, Bush is once again, after…
mikethemadbiologist | November 26, 2006As a part of the Carnival of the Liberals, I wrote a post about our failing political discourse. Here's something related from the archives.
In an excellent post on news reporting, Thoughts from Kansas writes (italics mine):
The same thing is a major part of the ongoing creationism battles. A good reporter with a background in science would not feel obliged to go to a scientist and get a quote to balance a story about creationists. Nor would such a reporter feel obliged to troll the waters for some bottom-feeding creationist to "balance" some claim about actual science.
But that's what many…
mikethemadbiologist | November 17, 2006CNN describes Nancy Pelosi as "damaged goods", and she hasn't even had her chance to screw up the country yet. Digby sums it up nicely:
There are no honeymoons for Democrats. Remember that. And "moral authority" is about haircuts and Hollywood, not torture and illegal wars. It is not merely a fight against the Republicans or a fight over politics and policy. It is a non-stop battle with the press to cover events with seriousness and responsiblity. For some reason, when Democrats are in power the press corps immediately goes from being merely shallow to insufferable, sophomoric assholes....…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2006Matt Taibbi on politics in the era of television:
The thing that people should be concerned about isn't that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It's the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is…
mikethemadbiologist | November 12, 2006Usually, I add good weekend posts to my weekend roundup, but Glenn Greenwald's post about the soulessness of the Mainstream Media Mandarins is so good, it deserves some special Mad Biologist commentary. Greenwald writes about how the Punditocracy has completely misread Sen. Russ Feingold because they are unable to comprehend how any politician could act on principle or belief (italics mine):
Beltway pundits and the leaders of the Beltway political and consulting classes all, in unison, immediately began casting aspersions on Feingold's motives and laughed away -- really never considered --…
mikethemadbiologist | October 29, 2006Billmon has a superb post on the failures of journalism due to Compulsive Centrist Disorder:
But no one in the corporate media, to my knowledge, has even come close to putting an accurate lead on the story -- which would look something like this:
Faced with the likely loss of one if not both houses of Congress, the Republican Party has embarked on a massive, last-ditch effort to smear Democratic challengers in competitive districts across the country.
The resulting campaign has completely demolished whatever minor restraints remained on the use of lies and distortions in political attack ads…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2006PBS' Frontline has made their special "The Lost in Iraq" available on line. This is TV that makes you smarter, not dumber. Check it out.
mikethemadbiologist | September 28, 2006...a Jewish grandmother. Barbara Boxer did a wonderful job of preventing the standard Fox 'News' modus operandi of ending an interview of a Democrat with a Republican talking point. Like you're ever going to get the last word in against a Jewish grandmother....
(link here. By way of Oliver Willis)
mikethemadbiologist | September 26, 2006What should be the cover story of a major news magazine: the resurgence of the Taliban, or a biography of photographer Annie Leibowitz? Well, if you're the powers that be at Newsweek, you decide that the resurgence of the Taliban is more important, except for U.S. readers. We get Leibowitz.
Gutless.
A completely unrelated aside: Our Benevolent Seed Overlords want a picture of the Mad Biologist for their own nefarious purposes. So I ask you: what do you think a Mad Biologist would look like? Click here to offer your opinions.
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2006After reading PZ's post and the follow-up about Ken Miller's statements regarding atheism, I was just going to leave the subject alone. I usually find the arguments predictable, boring; there's always a lot of talking past each other. But for some reason, this particular argument over Ken Miller's remarks intrigues me. So, foolishly, I'm going to dive in. (I'm partially responding to particular claims by both sides, and also adding a few points of my own.) Here goes nuthin':
1) If you believe in a God who intervenes in history, then evolution is a theological challenge to that belief.…
mikethemadbiologist | September 10, 2006
(from here)
...we're just distorting the history of 9/11. It will help us get in good with the Bush Administration!
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2006A very good blogger I stumbled upon, olvlzl, has two great posts about the sorry state of American journalism. From the first post, an attack on the artifice of 'balance':
The most important political use of this "balance" comes in the context of news reporting and the parasitic limpets attached to it, opinion "journalism". In that context something called balance has replaced the reporting of facts*. It used to be that a reporter was required to get two independent sources to verify the truth of what their primary source had said. Now, instead, they just have to get a second opinion and…
mikethemadbiologist | September 5, 2006Brad DeLong is one of those really smart people who I would never want to be really angry at me when the facts don't support me. Why? Because he writes bits like this:
There is a certain horrifying fascination in watching the right wing's minions and useful idiots in the press attempt to attack Paul Krugman on matters of economic substance. The Mickey Kauses, the Andrew Sullivans, the Donald Luskins, the Danny Okrents--all seem unarmed men in a battle of wits, or perhaps an air assault by a circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys.
Ouch. Another pissed off expert.
mikethemadbiologist | September 2, 2006David Broder has a silly column in the Washington Post where he argues that how unjust it is that people want to dethrone New Hampshire as the second primary state (Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum have nice rebuttals of Broder). Broder's argument is truly ridiculous: what great source of wisdom flows from New Hampshire and Iowa that is absent elsewhere? But Broder's column gives me a chance to discuss a criterion which should be used to choose the early primary states.
When primary season rolls around (which now starts about two years before the general election...), there's a lot of talk about…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2006One of the more frustrating thing about a lot of mainstream media coverage of science topics like evolution or global warming is that there is a pathological need to report both sides as equal, even though the data and evidence overwhelmingly support one side. It would appear that commentary on the legal profession is not immune from this either. Glenn Greenwald writes:
This [Washington Post]Editorial, with all of its condescension and self-important open-mindedness to administration law-breaking, illustrates a common character flaw among our political and journalistic elites. In their…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2006That's right--you heard it here first: algal blooms on the Charles River in Boston. Spake Universal Hub:A blogger by the name of Mike the Mad Biologist, proving why we should get all our news from Technorati and Google Blogsearch, scoops the Globe by more than a week on the story (hmm, if a blogger posts in the Charles when nobody's around, does he still get coated in green slime?).
What's really sad is that none of the crack reporters at the Globe cared or knew that the water in the Charles River was fluorescent green for at least a week. Next time, you guys might want to check that out…
mikethemadbiologist | August 8, 2006I'm swamped with work, but I wanted to draw your attention to a few posts by Brad DeLong about the media coverage of the Iraq War. There are two very good comments about Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks' explanation for why the media wasn't more critical of the war progress when they had sufficient information to write about the problems (here and here). DeLong summarizes Ricks' mea culpa:
He assigns blame to congress because without the aircover provided by senators asking touch questions at hearings, Tom Ricks found that his editors at the Washington Post would not let him write the…