Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Q Tips


Ok, I'm still on break - notwithstanding the post below - so swing away.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

David Folkenflik responds to my comments. And, I respond to his

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121045034

madchen vapid

dogtags said...

"Marble mouthed muff" is good.

Just talk away Renee,
You won't see me hear your radio,
The empty yack talks on my
box are all the same
And you're to blame

Unknown said...

dogtags,

Nice word-smithing poetry. Walk Away Renee by Left Banke from YouTube.

madchen

beeg!peenk!fuuzy!buuny! said...

Ahh, back in yon days when I actually listened, can recall they did indeed co-opt that lil' chestnut when the Divine Ms. Mundane was about to take a sabbatical or whatever. 'Course she jus' had to come back.
kuuuuuuuuuh-ching~

npr (lowercase-feigned sensitivity; psst... ee cummings ya ain't)
always on... the crapper

larry, dfh said...

nor a Lwarence Ferlinghetti (stolen from 'Cabdrollery')

Speak Out

And a vast paranoia sweeps across the land
And America turns the attack on its Twin Towers
Into the beginning of the Third World War
The war with the Third World

And the terrorists in Washington
Are drafting all the young men

And no one speaks

And they are rousting out
All the ones with turbans
And they are flushing out
All the strange immigrants

And they are shipping all the young men
To the killing fields again

And no one speaks

And when they come to round up
All the great writers and poets and painters
The National Endowment of the Arts of Complacency
Will not speak

While all the young men
Will be killing all the young men
In the killing fields again

So now is the time for you to speak
All you lovers of liberty
All you lovers of the pursuit of happiness
All you lovers and sleepers
Deep in your private dreams

Now is the time for you to speak
O silent majority
Before they come for you


-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

biggerbox said...

Someone please shoot me before I have to listen to another episode of 'Hannah and Adam's Happy Planet Monkey Chatfest Covers Congressional Hearings!'

Apparently NPR doesn't think anyone should take Bernake's appearance before Congress seriously.

geoff said...

Biggerbox,

Maybe we should just have a big die-in on the wandering simian star. We can have Sun Myung Moon preside - he would anyway.

Truly their cheerful make-believe and chortling at the serious business of those silly senators makes one crave an early end. It's some kind of cross between Hee-Haw and Jethro Clampet making good fun of the funny money.

GRUMPY DEMO said...

Anyone know what's up with FOXNew's Juan William?

His last news report was on November 4th, with a sappy Story Core episode with his daughter ("Who could have guess that the son of a Panamain could grow up and be a sell out on FOX News?")

It's now been thirty days, I'm not complaining. I have my fingers crossed that Simple Simon Saturday does have Juan on the the FOX koffe kalch.

Here's my search link:

http://www.npr.org/search/index.php?searchinput=%22juan+williams%22&tabId=all&tabId=hoa

GRUMPY DEMO said...

Re: J Williams, I only mean NPR, don't care if he's been on FOX.

FYI, Dean Banker spanks (Worship the)Money Planet for their Morning Edition wet kiss of the Chair of the Fed:

"Morning Edition did a great effort to cover up for Ben Bernanke's responsibility for the Great Recession telling listeners that the public doesn't want to engage in the blame game."

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=12&year=2009&base_name=npr_covers_up_for_bernanke_big

larry, dfh said...

Friday A.M. on whyy's 'Radio (waste of)Times one of the guests was Jane Hamsher, and some incoherent stammering jackass counterbalance, whom I don't care to look up. Jane dealt with him like a cat with a ball of yarn, to the point where the host got all uptight and loud in her (false) denunciation of Jane, much as she did with Amy Goodman several years ago. Studip doesn't really describe whyy, maybe 'corporatist stupid', or 'status-quo stupid'.

Big Guy said...

I wrote to Scott Simon at his blog and to the NPR ombusman what's below.

Why don't you do more nvestigative and original reporting? This morning's show featured interviews and profiles with Lesli Caron, Cate Blanchett, and Gay Marshall. Caron had a radio interview with WNYC earlier in the week and Cate Blanchett's performance was gloriously reviewed by Brantley in the New York Times. Gay Marshall has been repeatedly been profiled in online cabaret magazines.

You earn over $250,000 a year and the vast majority of radio and print journalists now are free-lancers earning less than $25,000 from their work, less than 1/10th of what you earn. They do much original reporting. Why can't you?

biig!piink!fuuzy!buuny! said...

^ I amusedly imagined their reply:

"Well, Sir, I believe you have just answered your own question."

Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...

Dunno if Yuzall caught this one, in which Dean Baker upbraids the MErry folks for covering up for Bernanke and the Fed. HERE, on TAP.

Anonymous said...

U of Washington Climate Scientist Eric Steig took NPR's Richard Harris to the cleaners on the issue of (faux) "balance" that NPR bases their whole "journalism" model on.

Harris SHOULD be very embarrassed by this. This is the equivalent of Adumb Davidson being called on economic BS by Dean Baker.

NPR plays the same faux balance game that Fox news plays (albeit a little more subtly)

Eric Steig
"The problem of ‘false balance’ in reporting — the distortions that can result from trying give equal time to the two perceived sides of an issue — is well known. In an excellent editorial a few years ago, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called for a greater emphasis on truth, rather than ‘balance’. Unfortunately, this basic element of careful journalism seems to have been cast aside, especially in recent weeks.

I was both amused and stunned by the effort at ‘balance’ provided by Richard Harris’s report on NPR, in which he claimed that the peer review process was “so distorted” that neither John Christy nor Jim Hansen can get their work published. Notwithstanding the simple fact that both of these scientists publish regularly in leading journals, Harris’s attempt to present ‘both sides’ of the issue completely undermines his thesis. Christy thinks that the IPCC overstates the consequences of climate change, while Hansen thinks it understates it. If both feel the peer review process is biased against them, then it must be working rather well. This doesn’t mean they are wrong, but science is a conservative enterprise, and it is evident that neither of them has provided sufficient evidence for extraordinary claims."

Anonymous said...

Dean Baker says that NPR's covering for Bernanke "is an excellent display of the different standards of accountability in Washington and the world where most people live and work."

What he did not say is that it is also "an excellent display of the different standards of honesty and integrity in Washington and the world where most people live and work."

NPR is seriously lacking in both of the latter.

macon d said...

Good response here to Saturday's "Recession Diary" boo-hoo fest:

Sociological Images

The Boss of You said...

@macon d: I was going to post that, as well. Just reading through to see if anyone else had already done so. To the others, the discussion is also quite interesting.