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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Maybe we're reading

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

Labels: media, Republicans, television

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

If only the Chief Justice subscribed to the New York Post

Did you cringe when Chief Justice John Roberts murdered the Presidential oath of office when swearing in Barack Obama? If only he were a New York Post subscriber, he could have brought it as a cheat sheet:

Who says newspapers aren't important anymore?

technorati: inauguration, Obama, oath of office

Labels: media, newspapers, Obama, Republicans

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Today's hoax: fake pundit not really a 'McCain adviser'

A person(a) named Martin Eisenstadt was behind the assertion that Sarah Palin didn't know whether Africa was a continent or a country, people have reported this week. Now it turns out that "Martin Eisenstadt," his blog, his supposed status as adviser to McCain, and his "Harding Institute" are all an elaborate hoax played out for months. Among the media outlets that were taken in by various postings and press releases made by "Eisenstadt" -- actually the creation of two filmmakers -- were Mother Jones, the LA Times, the New Republic, and most recently with the fake Palin story, MSNBC.

My favorite bit of the story is that the filmmakers based his name on the notion that "all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names."

I read much of the article to Cris, who said, "It isn't very funny."

I said, "It's meta-funny -- it's making fun of the whole superstructure of blogs, pundits, opinionators and so forth who form a sort of mulch that feeds the news cycle." (I thought I was clever for coining a neologism, but "opinionator" turns out already to be in common use.)

technorati: fakes, hoaxes, Martin Eisenstadt

Labels: hoaxes, media