NPR Check: Q Tips

Friday, September 04, 2009

Q Tips

NPR related comments welcomed.

14 comments:

Jay Schiavone said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/4/09, 9:45 AM
Jay Schiavone said...: Dean Baker points out 2 big issues culled from his drive to work this morning:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=09&year=2009&base_name=npr_still_has_not_heard_of_the
and
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=09&year=2009&base_name=unbelievable_but_true_there_ar; 9/4/09, 9:49 AM
Unknown said...: Please please please, when including links in a Blogger comment, please bracket them with standard html link tags:

(open-angle-bracket)a href="(URL goes here)"(close-angle-bracket) link text goes here (open-angle-bracket)/a(close-angle-bracket)

Just splatting a long URL into your comment without the tags ends up being unreadable, at least in some browsers.; 9/4/09, 10:13 AM
Porter Melmoth said...: As the Afghanistan Misadventure continues to go south, I'm noticing more and more that the MSM is relying on the 'NATO' label instead of 'US' as the preferred protagonist identification.

My Afghan friend, who was in the thick of things 'in theatre', says that the Americans naturally dominate and consider this 'their' enterprise, while parceling out non-military activities to the French, Italians, Germans (e.g. Old Europe). OK, that's pretty well known, but now that things ain't so hot, the media has no doubt been ordered to brand the growing failure on NATO in general, so as to soften the accountability factor. Clever, clever strategy.; 9/4/09, 10:22 AM
Porter Melmoth said...: Question: did NPR address the pervy activities of those lunatic Brackwater guards at the US embassy in Kabul?

All anybody has to do is go to Wonkette to find out what they were up to. I imagine any NPR reference to it will be tacit and freshly scrubbed of any Princeian hideousness.

Sometimes the crudest expletives are the only way to describe certain human behaviors on this planet.; 9/4/09, 10:32 AM
larry, dfh said...: Thanks Steve. I can't get the links to open, either.
Thursday PM had an all star panel discussing health care. The only one who actually had anything to say was Joe Neel. The rest: kestenbaum, liarssson, rovner were as (intentionally) clueless as could possibly be imagined. Liarssson actually talked about all the 'concession' of big pharma! But Neel got a few words in, mentioning our greater costs (actual and percentage of GDP) for health care than the Europeans, our more dismal outcome, and the totally for profit model we have. Joe Neel got it right, and it was good to hear, shame on the rest of the dolts.; 9/4/09, 10:56 AM
Porter Melmoth said...: Steve,

Could you give an actual example of how the link readout should look? Thanks.

(When it comes to this stuff, I need First Grade Level examples, as my abilities to grasp Computerology abstracts is, uh, limited!)

(Firefox seems to handle all the cut/paste without probs, in my experience...); 9/4/09, 11:11 AM
Porter Melmoth said...: Yes indeed, Liarsson's shrillness seems to be getting to orgiastic proportions. She's having the time of her life, as attack mode is more thrilling than defense mode.; 9/4/09, 11:13 AM
Unknown said...: Porter asks

"Could you give an actual example of how the link readout should look? Thanks."

Not directly; you can't easily (maybe not at all?) type an angle-bracket in a comment and have it show up in the text. However, take a look at this example.

If you want to spell out the URL, just put it as the link text, like this:

http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_a.asp

Unfortunately blogger doesn't have an easier way to include a link in a comment.; 9/4/09, 12:00 PM
Porter Melmoth said...: Thank you, sir!; 9/4/09, 1:08 PM
David Green said...: The guilt of the recently released Libyan convicted of Lockerbie bombing has always been questioned by astute observers, as have Libya ’s motives for giving this man up in relation to its re-entrance into “civilized society”—that is, society that wants to do oily business with Libya.

I will here refer to a 1998 article by Noam Chomsky, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199804--.htm, as well by a series of articles going back to at least 2000, easily searchable at www.wsws.org, The World Socialist Website, by Steve James, whose work must make him one of the most informed journalists in the world on this issue. Chomsky has been saying for years that in the one instance when Iran was indeed a likely culprit (in retaliation for having a passenger plane blown away by the U.S.S. Vincennes in 1988), our government chose to re-direct attention to Libya because of the complications of alliances during the First Gulf War.

There can be no doubt that the guilt of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi has always been validly questioned by serious observors. While British families of victims of Pan Am 103 are well aware of this, American families apparently are not—different countries, different media, perhaps.

Here is how the issue was handled, or dispensed with, by Renee Montagne and Rob Gifford on August 25th. For reasons of space, I will include only the questions. You can go to the link to see the disciplined answers:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112196340

MONTAGNE: The response from the British public was much more tempered, at least initially, before the big homecoming back in Libya . Why was that? Why are the British not as angry as the Americans?

MONTAGNE: But without going into great detail, generally speaking, what is the issue that people believe the problem - the hole is in the case?

MONTAGNE: And, of course, al-Megrahi continues to claim that he's innocent.

MONTAGNE: But then, Rob, there are many Britons that think that Megrahi is, in fact, guilty.

MONTAGNE: There are also people in Britain who are angry because they think that this release was really all about oil, not about compassion.

MONTAGNE: Rob, thanks very much.

Yes Rob, thanks for letting me put words on your mouth in order to re-affirm what decent people are truly outraged about. And yes Rob, thanks for going along with the program to acknowledge but not seriously explore the issue, and ultimately implicitly dismiss concerns about the conviction, which would indeed require “going into great detail,”—no time for such nonsense, what with concision and all. And thanks for allowing that someone who is a “middle-class middle-aged doctor” who lost a daughter might indeed not be a “crank,” as if anyone short of those characteristics would make him suspect. And thanks for re-assuring us that lots of Britons are indeed angry for the same reason that good, decent Americans are angry, including those of us working for NPR.

With arrogance like this, who needs the truth?; 9/4/09, 4:31 PM
Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...: Why does NPR always focus on the DULLEST possible music to feature in their "Arts" slots?

That guitar picker this morning was a prefect example--indeed, I was surprised they wasted him on Saturday. He was pure Inane Hansen material: technically proficient, but dull as dishwater. Ten minutes was far too much, especially when Snottie asks, accusingly, "Why don't you live here in wodenrful MURKA anymre?"; 9/5/09, 11:58 AM
Anonymous said...: This exchange between Planet Monkeys Ari Shapiro and Chris Arnold may be the dumbest I have ever heard on NPR or anywhere, for that matter:
These guys talk like valley girls:

"I mean, you know it, like, affects the psychology"

Gag me with a spoon.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112546504

SHAPIRO: Because, I guess, the fear is if people lose their jobs, or they're afraid of losing jobs, they're not going to spend money and so the economy won't bounce back as quickly.

ARNOLD: Right. I mean, you know, there's the people who actually lose their job and they just, they don't have as much money to spend. But then, you know, if people all around you are losing their jobs - your friends and people you talk to - and it, like, affects the psychology of the entire country.

So, you know, yeah, people, maybe they won't take a vacation or they won't buy a car. And that gets into what we call sort of a vicious cycle in the economy, where, you know, people are worried because the economy's bad and then the economy gets worse because people are worried and they're not spending money. So, we want to see that improve.

Also, more job-losses results in more foreclosures. And, you know, there's all these people who have been losing their homes.; 9/5/09, 4:09 PM
geoff said...: Sometimes the only avenue I have to penetrate the utter banality of these chattering natterers is to anagrammatize their names into something more sensible. For Al Shapiro and Chris Arnold I get Lo, Pariahs! and Horrid Clans!; 9/5/09, 4:28 PM