"Today's gossip is tomorrow's headline." — Walter Winchell
I got an e-mail from Ira Glass last week. I found that odd, because I don’t believe I’ve ever received an e-mail from the host of the popular NPR show This American Life. It was a mea culpa. They had discovered that one of their most popular shows had contained numerous fabrications, and he wrote to apologize. The week’s hour long episode was called “Retraction.” I heard most of it and found it a telling metaphor for modern liberalism’s tenuous relationship with the truth.
Since I was born and raised in LA and now live in the Chicago area I’ve made it a habit every morning to visit the LA Times website to see what’s going on in my hometown, and most importantly see what’s going with my hometown sports teams. But I’m not doing that anymore. I got an e-mail a couple weeks back from the LA Times saying they were soon going to be charging for their online content.
(Yesterday, documents purporting to be confidential strategy memos from The Heartland Institute, a national think tank and major player in the controversy over claims of an impending anthropogenic global warming (now climate change) crisis, were published by The Huffington Post and throughout much of the progressive-left blogosphere. The following is Heartland's statement about the stolen and fraudulent documents.)Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from…
You may have seen the link on our Newswire, ‘Daily Show’ Brilliantly Exposes President of ‘Civility Project’ Who Smeared Tea Partiers as ‘Terrorists’. This is what Rush Limbaugh has creatively come to call a random act of journalism, and it’s brilliantly executed and hilarious. In a media dominated by lefty progressive liberals, it’s a rare thing when they call their own side out on their inconsistencies or flagrant distortions. When this happens, conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, constitutionalists (have I left anyone out), everyone who cares…
The Penn State University football scandal has been ugly in a variety of ways, but not all of them are immediately obvious. In particular, the mainstream press, so proud of its progressive views on most moral matters, showed the puritanical streak they always reveal when a person widely believed to be of good moral character can be knocked down and branded a hypocrite. The media coverage in this case displayed the classic American journalism tactic of conveying salacious stories under cover of moral indignation. This…
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” — Through the Looking Glass (1872) Evidently, the SPJ agrees with Humpty: The Society of Professional Journalists voted this week to impose even more political correctness when they passed a resolution to urge…
It’s not often that a respected publication runs an article title such as “To Hell with You People.” But that’s what’s happened at National Review. Jonah Goldberg has had it with the absolute hypocrisy of the left-wing, progressive-liberal media, which is nearly the entirety of the mainstream media. As Goldberg says in the very first sentence (and with which I agree), he is more than exhausted from talking about liberal media bias. But some of this bias is so brazen, so breathtaking in its mendacity,…
Political rhetoric in the United States has always been feverish and low on scruples. That’s the nature of democracies. Yet there has arisen a new atmosphere in the past decade, and it is not a result of right-wing talk radio. It is instead a legacy of the 1960s New Left, which held that purity of purpose justifies any tactic short of murder.
By Lars Walker All right, I’ll come clean. Sam Karnick wore me down, and I have to admit it. I am a Lutheran. And that, at least according to Joshua Green at The Atlantic, would seem to be pretty fringey stuff. Definitely outside the realm of respectable opinion in today’s world. (Which must be a surprise to all those Garrison Keillor fans.) Or… maybe I’m not a Lutheran at all, really. If you were to speak to an official of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod,…
At First Things, David Mills explains the harm of false prophets, and he recommends the traditional Christian way of thinking about the end times: In being directed to reflect on the end of history, we are being directed to reflect on the men and women we ought to be. . . . The world will still try to make such reflections look weird and uncool, but how weird and uncool can it possibly be to be a saint? Recommended: “Families and False Prophets”
By Mike Gray History isn’t what it used to be: Did you hear that ripping sound? Two liberal icons known by their silly stage names — Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X — have just been torn down from their sanctified perches thanks to a pair of massively researched but finally damning new biographies. Both men, it turns out, were at pains to take on phony identities. Each hid his homosexuality, each was racist, each took pains to manufacture favorable coverage, each was driven by petty…
by Warren Moore A few days ago, we discussed the struggles over the amount of “Christian content” in the film Soul Surfer, currently chugging along in the marketplace despite generally hostile reviews. Interestingly, the movie seems to be doing just fine with audiences, with an 85% audience approval rating. However, at sixseeds.tv, Timothy Dalrymple examines the discrepancy between critical/elite opinions and the Christian audience. Asking why Christian movies get slagged by the critics, he moves beyond the pat answers pretty quickly and comes up with…
By Mike Gray Of course, there was a very real conspiracy behind The History Channel’s decision to dump the miniseries [The Kennedys]. It doesn’t take Glenn Beck’s blackboard to connect those dots. But after watching The Kennedys, I am completely at a loss to figure out why anyone seriously found the material objectionable. The broadcast broke no new ground. Likely, the keepers of the fictional Camelot flame simply didn’t want another reminder of the vast disconnect between calculated and conjured myth in the wake of…
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