Tonight
Virtually Speaking | April 24 | 9pm eastern | Susie Madrak and Culture of Truth. Tune in to find out what’s on their minds. Listen live and later here
Archive | Media
New York Times discovers ALEC
The horse is out of the barn and halfway across the valley, but better late than never for a story in a “newspaper of record.” More here.
Virtually Speaking tonight
Cliff Schecter & Jay Ackroyd VS Sundays tonight 6p pac/9pm east listen live tonight, and later.
‘Foolish decisions’
By Odd Man Out
That’s what US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said regarding the U.S. soldiers — “young people” — who chose to be photographed with the body parts of slain Afghani insurgents. You know what those darned kids are like. They procrastinate when term papers are due. They get drunk and moon old ladies. They kill people and pose with their mangled corpses.
Yes Men’s fake BofA site is back
The activist satirists wrote that “…We at Bank of America are launching a forum in which you, the American taxpayer, can prepare for the time that you own us.” At first, Google blacklisted the site as a “phishing scam.” More here.
Tonight
Thursday, April 12 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific | Jay visits with Glenn Carle, 23 year veteran of the Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency and author of The Interrogator, in which Glenn tells the story of one of the most secret and sensitive CIA interrogations during the US War on Terror. (Click through to a truly chilling video.) Follow @JayAckroyd. Listen live and later on BTR.
Mittens is on to us
Ah yes, the infamous left wing conspiracy, and that librul media! I don’t blame Mittens for getting upset.Think of all those damned media socialists like Sean Hannity, Joe Scarborough, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Ingraham, Fred Hiatt, Matt Drudge, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, William Kristol, Phyllis Schlafly, Brit Hume, S.E. Cupp, Howard Kurtz, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, George Will, Kathleen Parker, Neil Cavuto, Michael Medved, Dana Loesch, Dennis Miller, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, the recently deceased Andrew Breitbart, Erick Erickson, Mike Allen, Tom Donahue, Ann Coulter, Paul Gigot, and John Stossel – oh, I can’t go on.
Every single time you turn on the TV or radio, it’s just another damned communist hippie.
And all those extreme librul organizations that fund their subversive propaganda: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Adolph Coors Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heartland Institute, or the Manhattan Institute.
Speaking to a right wing radio host Tuesday, likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney repurposed a phrase from Hillary Clinton, citing a “vast left wing conspiracy” brewing in the media and liberal advocacy organizations to derail his campaign.
Romney was making an appearance on Breitbart TV and was asked by host Larry O’Connor whether he was ready to take on “the media and these nonprofits groups that are working together.”
“There will be an effort by the quote vast left wing conspiracy to work together to put out their message and to attack me,” Romney said in response. “They’re going to do everything they can to divert from the message people care about, which is a growing economy that creates more jobs and rising incomes. That’s what people care about.”
Romney’s choice of words echoes Clinton’s assertion in 1998 that a “vast right wing conspiracy” was behind the sexual harassment charges her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was facing at the time.
“I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this – they have popped up in other settings,” Clinton, now the U.S. secretary of state, said on NBC’s “Today” in 1998. “This is – the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
Romney said dealing with journalists, many of whom he said were biased, was a perpetual problem for Republicans.
“Many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding and I know that’s an uphill battle we fight with the media generally,” Romney said, before praising O’Connor for offering a conservative voice.
VS tonight
Tuesday, April 17 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking Tuesdays |Avedon Carol and Vast Left dissect breaking news and crazy liberalism. Plus the latest from the Z Files. Follow @Avedon_Says @VastLeft Listen live and later on BTR
Demolition job on climate science
By Huffington Post. Wow, this one’s a doozy. Oh, and by the way, guys, congrats on your Pulitzer!
What it takes to win Pulitzers, most of the time, is big budgets, smart reporters, and weighty topics of national import. But most of the stories that shape our national debates, and thereby our future, are nothing like this sort of award bait. Most of those stories are more like “NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency,” a short piece in the Huffington Post last week.
This article recycled a press release announcing that a bunch of former NASA employees, including some astronauts and scientists but no climate experts, had taken issue with the agency over its work on global warming. Findings that “man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated,” the retirees charged. The article — written not by one of HuffPo’s famously uncompensated bloggers, but by its science editor, David Freeman — didn’t offer a single fact in rebuttal of the letter. But at the end, it asked: “What do you think? Is NASA pushing ‘unsettled science’ on global warming?”
It was a ludicrous postscript, one that abdicated the very purpose of science coverage. Journalists who specialize in science are our proxies to help us figure out what’s trustworthy in realms where we lack detailed expertise ourselves and don’t have time to acquire it. Asking for opinions online can be entertaining — but the climate debate isn’t the same thing as, say, weighing in on whether “The Hunger Games” movie did justice to the book.
Recognizing the boneheadedness of its move, and responding tosearing criticism from folks like Grist’s David Roberts, HuffPo soon withdrew its query. It turned out that, in fact, the editors already had their own answer. They disagreed with the letter-signers! They do have a “reality meter” on this subject; it must’ve just been switched off during the preparation of the original post.
We’ve removed the question because HuffPost is not agnostic on the matter. Along with the overwhelming majority of the scientific community (including 98% of working climate scientists), we recognize that climate change is real and agree with the agencies and experts who are concerned about the role of carbon dioxide.
This was the right thing to do, and it placated the critics. “Let’s all move on,” Roberts wrote.
I’m afraid I’m not quite ready to do that — because this little dustup offers precious insight into a much more significant and widespread phenomenon in climate coverage. The NASA letter is a perfect case study in what press critic Jay Rosen has called “verification in reverse.”
Here’s Rosen, with whom I chatted about this issue on Friday (here’s afull transcript):
Verification is taking something that might be true, and trying to nail it down with facts. In reverse verification you take something that’s been nailed down and try to introduce doubt about it. “Was Obama born in the United States?” is the clearest example. The phenomenon of “verification in reverse” poses a special problem for journalists. On the one hand, they are supposed to report what people are saying. They are supposed to bring us the news of controversies, protests, disagreements. “Conflict makes news,” and all that. On the other hand, verification is their business. If they cannot support that, they cannot support themselves or their users. They are socially useless, in fact, if they cannot stand up for verification.
Rosen’s “verification in reverse” helps us understand the game that’s being played by climate-change denialists. They are manufacturing events that seem to play by the rules of reported journalism, yet are essentially fraudulent.
Tonight
Monday, April 16 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific |Virtually Speaking A-Z | Jay Ackroyd and Stuart Zechman continue their conversation about the present and future of liberalism in a centrist America.. Plus the weekly What Digby Says. Recorded earlier in the day. Follow @Stuart_Zechman @JayAckroyd Listen on BTR
Tonight on Virtually Speaking
Sunday, April 15 | 9 pm eastern | 6 am pacific |Virtually Speaking Sundays |digby and Joan McCarter reflect on the week. Plus the weekly Most Ridiculous Moment from Culture of Truth. Follow @JoanMcCarter @digby56 @Bobblespeak Listen live and later on BTR
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