Letters to the Editor
L.W.M.
Published Letters: 5810 Editor's Choice: 5
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The Star
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, the star is a designation of your letter as an editor's choice. It's also a way to filter out letters the editor did not single out (like ones that use the word "ho"). Look up at the top of the page when reading letters. See that star with the button next to it. I am unfamiliar with the mechanism and criteria of the ranking, but that much I deduced.
Kevin Drum has an interesting post on the topic of the media. He does not name Nora, but I think his comments about Matthews tar her equally.
THE WORST OF THE WORST....It occurs to me that I owe you all an explanation of why, earlier today, I chose Nancy Grace and Chris Matthews as our most loathsome media stars, with a bonus honorable mention for the collective id of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. So here it is.
Basically, I figure that although the general phenomenon of right-wing spewing has done serious damage over the past couple of decades, individual wingnut frothers like O'Reilly and Limbaugh, for all their loathsomeness, have limited influence these days. They draw most of their viewers from the ranks of true believers, so their tirades probably change very few minds. Their audience already agrees with them.
But that's not true of my three choices. Matthews' audience is probably mostly liberal and centrist liberal, and he convinces them that liberal politics is an idiotic clown show. Nancy Grace pulls in all types and turns them into slavering lynch mobs convinced that amendments 4 through 8 of the constitution are mere obsolete technicalities. And the WSJ editorial page is read mostly by business people who initially tend toward the right, but are then converted by the WSJ's patented brew of smarminess and intellectual dishonesty into full-time Hillary-hating, supply-side idolizing, worker-loathing zombie shock troops for movement conservatism.
Of these, by the way, the WSJ editorial page is by far the worst. I'm convinced it's done more real damage to the liberal cause than any other single source of the past quarter century. There's probably a good book in that story somewhere.
Anyway, that's that. I just thought I should probably explain myself.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_04/011134.php
Also worth a look:
General Odom's Six Brutal Truths About Iraq
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00146
Not for the squeamish or the Kool-aid drinkers.
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I'm glad you repeated this
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Even Colin Powell knew: "You break it. You buy it."
-- Michael Harold
Even I echoed it earlier, but I may not have been clear about the fact that we just have to accept it that blood will run.
Odom says this:
Truth No. 3: The theory that "we broke it and therefore we own it," with all the moral baggage it implies, is simply untrue because it is not within U.S. power to "fix it."
The president’s cheerleaders in the run-up to the war now use this theory to rationalize our continued presence in Iraq, and in that way avoid admitting that they share the guilt for the crime of breaking Iraq in the first place.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00146
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Purists
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]"We should not be striving to replace right-wing propaganda with progressive propaganda. We should be striving to replace bad reporting with good reporting."
Think Progress is an advocacy site. And who made you the boss of me?
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casual...
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you want to do something important and useful, go here and hassle these guys.
http://newsbusters.org/
Getting in a huff about TP's gentle "spin" is beyond picking nits. It's positively anal.
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That should read:
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]TP's "gentle counter-spin".
If it is "troublesome" for you, remain on the fence, the neutral, casual observer "above the fray".
Just don't complain to us when your balls start to ache.
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Casual Observer and Zack
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm just a Cranky Observer. I have read plenty of TP stuff and noticed a little "edge" or "snark" and even some "gentle counterspin" but usually only in the headline or lede. If you get down to the nitty gritty and substance of the piece, it's usually a better piece of reportage than most. Think Progress and their "reporting" or "advocacy" or whatever you want to call it is not the problem here. Independents and centrists and "non-partisans" will disagree with me. They will claim that if the press just does it's job, the government will behave and we can all go back to watching sports or American Idol and other more important pursuits and the world will take care of itself, like before, when we were kids and our parents read the news and handed us the funny papers. That's fine, they are free to fool themselves into thinking that, but from my perspective, that's not the way it ever worked and it never will and only a fool would expect it to today. The state and the law (and now the corporate mass media) are instruments of oppression employed by the ruling class for their own benefit.
We will always have to keep one eye on the press watching the government, and the other eye on the government, no matter which party is in power. I would say more closely with the modern day Republicans than Democrats, and Independents being purists always above the fray never make up their minds and try to stay out of it, or become like McCain, the biggest flip flopper in history. This view of mine, the social conflict theory, which relies heavily on Marx, is the best theoretical framework I have found to understand politics, power, corruption and crime, and in that sense, althouugh I am not a Marxist, it can be said I view these processes from a Marxian perspective, which is probably why I only see red stars and not yellow ones.