The “I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Does” Department — the annual RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Awards were recently announced and among the winners were CBS Evening News With Katie Couric for best national newscast and Boston’s WHDH (Channel 7, NBC) for its 11:00 p.m. newscast. Either the RTNDA has a great sense of humor or a very poor grasp of the term “Excellence In Journalism”….or standards have gone WAAAAAY downhill.
The “Did I Say That?” Department — Writing at 3QuarksDaily recently, Morgan Meis came clean and admitted his complete and utter hatred for journalist/author/trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell. Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Malcolm Gladwell heard about it and got in touch with him. A couple of days later, Meis had to eat a little crow and publicly apologize, proving once again you should never say anything about someone on the Internet that you wouldn’t say to that same person face-to-face (or under oath in a court of law).
The “One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter” Department — The mainstream media pretty well underplayed the story that the Bush Administration celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday the other day by finally removing him from their list of Most Wanted Terrorists. So the questionto the Bushies is: what changed?
The “But How Are We Going To Put That On The Big Map?” Department — the recently-demised Saint Tim Russert usually gets the credit for popularizing the “Red State vs Blue State” meme with his live analysis (not to mention his little whiteboard) during the 2000 Presidential Election; even though all three major networks had been using red and blue to distinguish between the two political parties on their election coverage maps for years (NBC has been using their big light-up map since 1976), after that evening the red = Republican/blue= Democrat identification set itself in stone like the donkey and elephant symbols years before. Now, politcal pollster John Zogby has come up with a new metaphor to help keep us divided into two polarized, intractable camps: he says we should think of ourselves as either “Spring-Forward” voters or “Fall-Back” voters. While the clock metaphor is cute, what he’s saying is that some Americans have been able to prosper in spite of George Bush’s best attempts to destroy the economy (okay, that’s my editorializing) even in places that typically vote conservatively and these “Spring-Forwarders” may be far more amenable to a Democratic message this year than in elections past. Meanwhile, the people who have “fallen back” are more likely than ever to vote for the Republican triple-play of God, guns, and old white guys. So maybe the networks can come up with some kind of graphic of a clock set either to 11:00 or 1:00 depending on which group wins a state…or something…
July 10th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Bill Gates is a Prick.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I imagine he is. Don’t know where he fits in this post, though.