Posts Tagged ‘Media Watch’

Roundup of Senate Debate Coverage

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Here’s a roundup of coverage of the Texas Senate candidate debate I liveblogged on Friday:

  • Tom Benning at the Dallas Morning News also live-blogged the debate. His write-up is more coherent but less comprehensive or colorful than my own.
  • KERA has some more extended quotes from the debate.
  • The Texas Tribune/Houston Chronicle piece. I think Tom Leppert was admonishing the media more than the candidates.
  • “Dewhurst plays Pinata.”
  • The Ft. Worth Star Telegram story.
  • Big Jolly ranked the debate Leppert, Dewhurst, Cruz, James. He notices the pauses before Dewhurst’s answers, but doesn’t seem to notice the ones in the middle of them, the rambling nature of his answers, or the times he looked absolutely lost in mid-argument. I’m sure Tea Party activists across the state will also take exception to his defense of Dewhurst for not attending “every podunk forum.”
  • Eric Erickson over at RedState (someone far more critical of Dewhurst than myself) had no problem with Cruz’s attacks.
  • Fellow RedStater Susan Cloud liked Leppert the best, and thought Cruz’s “hyper-aggressive attacks” harmed him.
  • Pondering Penguin liked Cruz, who she’s endorsed.
  • WFAA grades the debate:

  • I’ve been looking to see if someone uploaded the debate to YouTube, but so far all I’ve been able to find is Craig James’ closing statement:

  • Twitter feed for the #belodebate. Keep scrolling if you want to read them all…
  • There’s some chatter on Twitter that Cruz’s comment that the Dallas Morning News had “retracted” the story about Cruz hiding the date his father fled from Cuba was wrong. Well, here’s what Robnert T. Garrett said in the DMN: “CLARIFICATION: On some occasions since 2005, Ted Cruz has publicly mentioned the date of his father’s departure from Cuba and even the fact he fought on the same side as Fidel Castro. However, in the past two months, the newspaper found no instances in which he offered audiences any clues that his father was a pre-Castro exile.” That sounds pretty darn close to a retraction to me, even if they didn’t use the word “retraction.”
  • Keith Olbermann’s Appeal Becomes Ever More Selective

    Friday, March 30th, 2012

    How bad do you have to suck to be fired and replaced with Eliot Spitzer?

    Evidently you have to suck as bad as Keith Olbermann. He went from CNN to MSNBC to Current TV (whose audience ratings clock in slightly higher than a rounding error), where he was just fired and replaced with Client 9. To continue the pattern of moving to ever-smaller markets, I guess he’ll next have to host the SUNY Stony Brook Revolutionary Hour of Power on cable access.

    I don’t usually spend my time and attention attacking the likes of Olbermann, Bill Maher, Paul Krugman, etc., simply because doing so takes time and attention that could be used describing the many failures of the Obama agenda, and the incompetence, corruption, and cronyism of both the Obama Administration and Democratic officeholders in general. But sometimes your shotgun is in the shop, and you need to restock the barrel with pike…

    So Keith Olbermann is out of a job. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are up by as much as 60%. So how’s that war against conservative media working out for you, liberals?

    (Subject line hat tip for the hopefully tiny number of you who need it…)

    LinkSwarm for March 27, 2012

    Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

    News! in tiny, bite-sized portions!

  • Kay Bailey Hutchison tries to walk back her comments, unsuccessfully. She says she opposes abortion, but supports taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. That’s like saying you support the Second Amendment, but also support the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. You can believe one or the other, but not both at the same time.
  • Hey, how about sending some of that military surplus to the Mexican border?
  • Even The New York Times has noticed the absurdity of the Obama Administration’s position on ObamaCare: “The Justice Department is essentially arguing that the penalty is not a tax, except when the government says it is one.”
  • “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” The new Europe will be Judenfrei.
  • Escape from North Korea.
  • Thanks to Muslim pressure, SUNY Stony Brook will no longer celebrate Good Friday, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, or Passover.
  • Speaking of New York, here’s another case of insider looting at a Brooklyn hospital. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Still no signs of Global Warming.
  • Texas Senate Race Update for March 23, 2012

    Friday, March 23rd, 2012

    Wednesday night I finally got a chance to interview Craig James, so I hope to have the video of that up next week (though I have to warn you in advance that the technical quality is not as good as it could be, as the location (the Rudy’s on south 360) was less than ideal for filming, sound-wise). I also hope (if he has the time) to post an email mini-interview with Ted Cruz specifically focused on the Supreme Court taking up the ObamaCare case.

  • Ted Cruz picks up the endorsement of the Republican Liberty Caucus.
  • Cruz also got a generally fair and balanced piece on his arguing of cases before the Supreme Court by Kate Alexander in the Austin-American Statesman. Of all the MSM reporters covering the race, so far I’d say she’s doing the best job, something I never thought I would say about someone at the Statesman…
  • He also appeared on the Mark Levin Show.
  • He also produced a TV ad that offers a subset of last week’s radio ad:

  • National Journal says the Cruz ad buy on Fox News is $222,000.
  • Craig James joins the chorus of those complaining about Dewhurst ducking debates.
  • And the one upcoming debate Dewhurst is not ducking? Turns out one of the hosts is backing a Dewhurst SuperPac That’s some might fine objective journalism you’ve got going on there, Lou…
  • Big Jolly is impressed with Dewhurst and Tom Leppert’s campaigns.
  • Leppert campaigned in Longview.
  • Leppert appeared on the “Dr. Carol Show” (I’m assuming it’s this one, which seems to be out of Austin, and not the “Holistic Veterinarian”):

  • Craig James gets a Texas Monthly profile. It’s an interesting piece.
  • The Houston Chronicle‘s Joe Holley also speaks with James.
  • Glenn Addison campaigns in Lubbock.
  • The Wall Street Journal offers up a surprisingly bland and insight-free snapshot of the race. Like the mashed potatoes on your cafeteria tray, it’s strictly filler.
  • Paul Sadler, Addie Dainell Allen and Grady Yarbrough all appeared at a debate in Dallas, the details of which, alas, are hidden behind the Dallas Morning News paywall. But where was Sean Hubbard?
  • LinkSwarm for March 20, 2012

    Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

    Had a busy day working and keeping track of contractors laying sod in my back yard, so here’s another LinkSwarm:

  • Two ads, one saying people should reject Catholicism, one saying they should reject Islam. Guess which one The New York Times refused to run.
  • “General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, the head of President Obama’s Jobs Board, plans to vote for Mitt Romney.”
  • The decline in culture at Goldman Sachs: “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”
  • “It appears that when he’s not busy killing un-born babies, he might like to jerk off while watching little boys play baseball”.
  • Sarah Hoyt on the myth of the war against women: “War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females. War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education…If this is war it is war on men…If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world.”
  • As Matt Dowling notes, it’s not a war on women, it’s a war on big government.
  • From Ace comes word that Nurse Bloomberg has outlawed food donations to the homeless that’s too high in fat and salt. If you put this in a Saturday Night Live parody, people would criticize it as too unbelievable…
  • In shocking news, liberal writer Froma Harrop, who appears to have spent all her life in and around New York City, isn’t worried about high gas prices. Imagine my shock. And if that name sounds familiar, there’s a reason:
  • Up Real Soon Now: Hopefully an interview with another major Texas Senate candidate…

    Perhaps the Least Insightful Obituary of Andrew Breitbart You’ll Read Today

    Thursday, March 1st, 2012

    I’m sure you’ve already read about Andrew Breitbart dying at the stupifyingly young age of 43 in a dozen places now. And despite Dwight suggesting that I’d have a lively discussion going, I’m not sure I have anything to say that hasn’t been before, and better, by far more famous bloggers than myself. I never met the man, but by all accounts he was a whirlwind of activity. And just as he created a blogging empire (Big Government, Big Hollywood, etc.) almost out of thin air, he wore a dizzying array of hats: reporter, agent provocateur, entrepreneur, blogger, media potentate, editor, and perhaps the greatest Internet Troll of all time. He perfected the “aggressive” in passive aggressive, both uncovering the malfeasance of the left, as well as baiting them with just enough rope to let them hang themselves.

    I doubt we shall see his like again.

    LinkSwarm For February 15, 2012

    Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

    Time for another roundup of this and that:

  • Media Matters is a paranoid interest group that works as an extension of the Democratic Party, and which many liberal journalists take their marching orders from. In other news, pro-wrestling is fake.
  • Mark Steyn on Obama as Henry VIII.
  • Harry Reid and the Democratic caucus totally support Obama’s war on Catholicism.
  • A goodly percentage of Notre Dame’s professors have rendered their judgment on Obama’s war on Catholicism: Unaccapetable.
  • Your tears, Rahm. Let me taste them.
  • Texas ranks top in exporting yet again, with exports bringing in more than $249.8 billion in 2011, up 20.7% from $206.9 billion in 2010.
  • Is the redistricting fight all about Lloyd Dogget? So black and Hispanic interest groups are fighting a long, drawn-out court battle to protect a single white incumbent.
  • I got that story from Must Read Texas, which seems like a veritable firehose of Texas news and links.
  • To support its welfare state, Denmark travels quite a way down the road to serfdom: “A suspected terrorist has more legal protection than the ordinary Danish taxpayer.”
  • Bin Laden gave up on jihad. Maybe.
  • Iowahawk takes aim at a certain Clint Eastwood commercial.
  • Clayton Cramer: A lot more people use guns to defend themselves than you think. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • Holly Hansen breaks radio silence to note skulduggery in Round Rock ISD. And here’s Part 2.
  • Some Marin County residents are fighting George Lucas’ plans to expand film-making facilities. Because California is just doing so well it can afford to alienate job creators.
  • Jim Schutze on the New Black Panther Party

    Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

    I must admit that I have not kept up with the doings of the New Black Panther Party. I knew of the Philadelphia voter intimidation case, and involvement in the various corrupt practices the likes of ACORN and their ilk get up to (voter fraud, etc.). And it doesn’t surprise me that the New Black Panther Party might be pretty weird, since the original Black Panthers were quite weird themselves. (Search for “Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, bullwhip”…but not while at work or eating.)

    But I didn’t realize just how weird until I read this Jim Schutze piece. (Schutze was the source for this critical look at Tom Leppert’s term as mayor of Dallas.) It turns out that Dallas City Council member John Wiley Price has a protege named Aaron McCarthy (aka Aaron Michael) that Price wanted placed on the “homeland security advisory committee” (“whatever the hell that’s supposed to be” says Schutze). And it turns out that Aaron McCarthy is a member of the New Black Panther Party.

    And what is it the NBPP believes? Well, hold on to your hats for this quote from NBPP leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad, speaking at a protest in Baltimore, Maryland, February 19, 1994: “Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor. … It’s that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew.”

    Wow. Even by the very low standards of Black Nationalist rhetoric, that’s a pretty breathtaking dose of Julius Streicher by way of H. Rap Brown antisemitism. If I put that in some of my fiction, an editor would reject it as being an unbelievable caricature. Hell, I think Al Sharpton would send that back to his speechwriter as being beneath even his standards of subtlety and tact.

    But wait! There’s more where that came from! Take a look at this fine, grade-A rant from King Samir Shabazz, head of the NBBP Philadelphia chapter:

    I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it. We didn’t come out here to play today. There’s too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men. … What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!

    You might think these are just some made-up quotes from a random weekly alternative newspaper. (And I would agree that anything that appears in The Dallas Observer should be taken with a grain of salt unless verified elsewhere.) But no, those quotes are directly from the leftist-friendly and conservative-hostile Southern Poverty Law Center, and you can be pretty sure they’re not just whistling Dixie.

    While these are particularly virulent quotes, how many times has the media just decided to ignore the latest racist or antisemitic rants from the black community? (Here’s one from today of a black radio host refusing to shake the hands of a black GOP candidate because he doesn’t want her “whiteness” to rub off on him.) How many times has the MSM passed on reporting on corruption and cronyism in the black political community out of political correctness, or because black America is such a reliable vote farm for the Democratic Party?

    It doesn’t fit the narrative.

    An Example Of What’s Wrong With Journalism These Days

    Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

    This Houston Chronicle piece by Joe Holley is an example of why so many people are dissatisfied with the job the legacy media is doing of reporting events.

    In covering the American Jewish Committee/World Affairs Council of Houston senate candidate forum on foreign policy I mentioned previously, we have a news story that is demonstrably deficient in several areas:

  • You get told who wasn’t there (Craig James, Paul Sadler, and Lt. Governor Chupacabra), and even how many of each flavor were there (“six Republicans, three Democrats and one Libertarian”), but the article itself only lists five of those ten. That would be the very first “W” of the “Five Ws and an H,” assuming they still teach that at journalism school. (Maybe they’re replaced it with another class on “Reporting Social Justice.”)
  • However, because I’m so Old School, I actually went out and got a list of who attended the forum from the AJC: Republicans Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Glenn Addison, Lela Pittinger, Charles Holcomb, and Ben Gambini (yes, an actual Ben Gambini sighting!), Democrats Daniel Boone and Jason Gibson, Libertarian Jon Roland, and independent candidate Mike Champion. So it turns out that even the summary of candidate affiliations was wrong.
  • In an article on a foreign policy forum that runs just shy of 500 words, a grand total of 96 of them actually dealt with the candidate’s foreign policy views, and even those are essentially free of concrete information. Let’s repost those parts in their entirety:

    Cruz also said that “President Obama has been the most anti-Israel president this nation has ever seen.”

    [snip]

    Leppert emphasized his experience as an international businessman familiar with issues of currency and international trade.

    [snip]

    Cruz and Leppert were the only two candidates who were able to respond with practiced ease to a series of sophisticated questions dealing with world affairs, ranging from Israel’s response to the Iranian nuclear threat to whether the United States should help bail out faltering European economies. Most of the others on the stage seemed unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues.

    That’s it. That’s the extent of coverage of the candidates’ foreign policy views in a forum dedicated to that very subject. We are no wiser as to what any candidate thinks of our troops levels in Afghanistan, what our relations with Pakistan should be, whether we should help topple the Assad regime in Syria, how to counter an increasingly bold China, or whether we should use military force to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Were those topics covered? We don’t know, as Holley and the Chronicle do not deign to tell us.

  • Instead of giving the candidates’ actual views, Holley merely gives us his dismissive analysis of eight of the ten candidates, telling us they are “unfamiliar with even the most basic foreign-policy issues” without bothering to provide a single example of this ignorance.
  • The rest of the piece consists of horse race analysis, noting Dewhurst’s absence, audience attendance figures, and an interview with a random forum attendee. All of which would have been fine in a longer piece.
  • Joe Holley and/or his editor have missed a chance to actually inform their readers. I have a hard time thinking of a blogger who couldn’t have done a better job.

    LinkSwarm for January 12, 2012

    Thursday, January 12th, 2012

    I had a maid service come clean my house in advance of a family event I’m hosting this weekend. It’s amazing the difference between “Bachelor Clean” and “Clean Clean.” It’s almost as big as the difference between “Obama Smart” and “Actually Smart”…

  • Micheal Totten could use your help. He does good work, and I still need to review The Road to Fatima Gate. I donated, and so has insta.
  • Rick Perry tears into “Big Government Conservatism.”
  • Comptroller Susan Combs denies a wind farm subsidy. Personally I’d end all “green subsidies.” Let the market pick energy winners and losers, not government.
  • Free Pepper Spray for women being handed out in Austin. (Hat tip: Stuff From Hsoi)
  • Why it’s uneconomical to manufacture anything in the UK:

    If we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things.

    (Hat tip: Slashdot)

  • The difference between Obama’s vision of America and Republicans’.
  • After blowing over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, Obama’s green energy crony capitalism favorites are asking the bankruptcy judge to let them pay bonuses to remaining employees. And that’s on top of the hefty bonuses they paid executives right before declaring bankruptcy. Your tax dollars at work…

  • Obama is not so popular in Florida.
  • The New York Times, in its infinite genius, sends a vegetarian to review steakhouses and BBQ joints in Kansas City. That’s some mighty fine reporting there, Lou. (Hat tip: Dwight)