When horse lips go in, and Snausages come out

...the machine ain’t making iPods. (Now with scary, after-post update)**

Or, what is the sound of one doofus snarking.

This time it’s John Tierney, from inside the Shield Wall of the NYT Pay-to-play Universe, so I will ‘umbly transcribe the pertinent bits of his gold-leaf-flocked leaden prose that I read off of actual dead tree remnants slipped out from underneath the sleeping, drooly face of a Starbuckaneer deep in the arms of Morpheus.

And explain why Tierney is an idiot.

It’s also why there is no link, but the article in entitled “Where Cronies Dwell” and begins thus...

“Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying "cronyism" and calling for "mainstream" values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers?”

OK, so far, so good.

David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, analyzed the political affiliations of the faculty at 18 elite journalism and law schools. By checking all the party registrations he could find, he concluded that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.

Oops. Forgot to mention that Horowitz is not a conservative so much as he is a Aparat with the NeoComIntern and has all the morals, style and objectivity of the love child of a Skinnerian and a Moonie.
…

Some academics argue that their political ideologies don't affect the way they teach, which to me is proof of how detached they've become from reality in their monocultures. This claim is especially dubious if you're training lawyers and journalists to deal with controversial public policies.

I realize, from experience at six newspapers, that most journalists try not to impose their prejudices on their work. When I did stories whose facts challenged liberal orthodoxies, editors were glad to run them. When liberal reporters wrote stories, they tried to present the conservative perspective.

The problem isn't so much the stories that appear as the ones that no one thinks to do. Journalists naturally tend to pursue questions that interest them. So when you have a press corps that's heavily Democratic - more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists - they tend to do stories that reflect Democrats' interests.
…

From this point on, Teirney is making a fairly straightforward, Black Box argument for judging journalism and journalists. That what they choose to focus on – and not focus on – is so tightly integrated into the stories they choose and how they shade them, that a press corps tutored by Dems will march forever in that direction, even if the arc of their bias is hard-to-impossible to detect to the unepiphanied eye.

He cites as an example a story about an armored car heist and how he heroically leaped into the nest of blind, liberal vipers to suggest that more government regulation was not the answer, or even the story.

It’s kinda clever in a Swift Boating, Rovian fashion. I mean, arguing that the press is too tilted to the Left in strange and invisible ways that are only revealed by wearing special, Horowitzian glasses has a certain “Are you fucking kidding me!” grandeur that might momentarily stun the average little-bus four-year-old.

It’s like arguing that the biggest problem with Paris Hilton is her Goody Two-Shoes persona.

** That despite her over-the-top slatterness, thanks to the immeasurable-to-the-point-of-being-quanta predilections of the screenwriters on her show (many of whom, one might presume, graduated from the same Parochial School Creative Typing Classes) she actually projects in some pellucidly ethereal way a Sandy Duncanness that, while undetectable, is hard at work nibbling away at your subconscious.

That what she really needs is to star in a Tijuana Donkey Act-based Reality Show to balance out her subliminally delivered Sister Mary Margarethood.

This is really the crux of Tierney’s argument.

The problems with his “reasoning” are so manifold and conspicuous -– and I have such little time and stomach given my other grading duties for red-penning and letter-grading this piffle –- that I’ll keep it simple. Newtonian. Forget the subatomic nuance of the Pundit With the X-Ray Eyes!

Just look at the world as it is.

For starters let's remember that the GOP actually brags that they now have their own media. They turn Vaseline-spined housepets like Strongarm Williams into outright whores by paying them off, or just cut out the middleman entirely and hire semi-retired gay male hookers to sit up straight (pun intended) and lob softballs at the President.

Where, is the “Liberal” equivalent of this?

Show me the Socialist Brit Hume or the Commie Wolf Blitzer. Show me the IWW television news network that pumps pro-worker, pro-Green, pro-Choice agiprop 24/7.

And where are the Screaming 100-point Times Roman headlines that attended the outing of Manwhore Jeff Gannon? An event that would have registered as a solid, city-levelling 8.7 on the Richter Scale had it happened on Clinton’s watch was burned and buried and hustled off stage so fucking fast that the only place it got any serious play was in the hands of jesters like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart.

Explain to me why rational, intelligent Liberal people who really just want real news have to glean it from the Daily Show and the BBC as if we were stranded in East Berlin, trying to pick up VOA on a crystal radio set.

Show me the early, extensive and ongoing coverage of the Downing Street Memo. Not the grudging, half-asses, half-hearted, dragged-kicking-and-screaming-to-the-party writing that the MSM doled out after the blogs practically set their hair on fire. This was and is solid evidence of fraud and treason by the White House in matters of War and Peace and Life and Death...that shot from being considered traitorous to even whisper suggetively of right on down the line to non-newsworthy “backwards looking” stuff without ever stopping at Widely Reported Outrage.

Show me a liberal thumb on the scales there.

Show me the daily blood-in-the-water, gotcha drumbeat from the Left to match the baying hounds that hunted Bill Clinton for seven years.

Show me the plucky, lefty investigative reporting that is combing through every old Bush girlfriend and rubbing gelt under the noses of everyone he ever shared a bong with.

Where is the Main Stream Media calling Falwell and Roberson and Dobson lying socipoaths instead of bending over backwards to avoid any murmur of negativity because they tote Bibles and drawl their bigoted nightmares for the benefit of the Republican Party?

When did the Main Stream Media go postal on Creationism: calling it out as the superstitious drivel that it is instead of giving it equal time and coverage with Actual Science?

Show me a Main Stream Media that has been anything but bellycrawlingly deferential during the entire reign of Bush II. A president who shits his pants when a lone Irish reporter dares to ask Himself one or two direct questions because he has grown so used to the fact that the icons of the American press fight among themselves over the privilege of being his personal ottoman. A Main Stream Media that never operated courageously or rigorously for five minutes at a stretch during the Age of Bush, and only starting holding Scotty Dog McClellan to account for his most outrageous bullshit once the Bush Wang that was being jammed up their asses actually started poking out of their mouths slathered with the their own feces and the corn Cheney had fed them two days before.

Where are the regular press conferences that we got when Clinton was President?

Where are the sharp questions during the few press events that remain?

Where is the press calling Bush out over his Potemkin Town Hall strategy every time he takes to the road to try to hawk more snake oil to the rubes?

Show me the Liberal Press equivalent of Fox’s early “Fox Rock” live broadcasts from post-conquered Iraq.

The problem is simple, and Tierney is no small part of it.

Democrats want to be right and want reasoned argument from both sides…and Republicans want to win, whatever the cost.

The Right simply does not believe in objectivity any more than their Fundy drones believe in Reality. They believe in a rip-and-read style of “reporting” that is nothing more than Pravda-style regurgitation of the Parti Line. So when Dear Leader announces that 5+5=55, the trained circus seals on Right automatically and obediently bark that message out at 1,000 decibels.

That, by the standards of a thug like Horowitz, is “objective”.

And when someone with second-grand math skills goes up to the chalkboard, does the arithmetic and shows that to be objectively untrue, that, by Tierney’s “Black Box” standard, is somehow left-leaning.

The GOP has created its own Media Disneyworld, entirely controlled by party loyalists who look at “The Truth” the same way a crack whore looks at cold turkey; it might be tactically advantageous to put down the pipe and straighten up for a job interview or to convince Mom that you’re not a lying thief long enough to boost her stereo. The GOP use a dollop of truth as a garnish when they try to market their bilge past the hinterland of the Feebleminded Faithful, but it is never, ever the Main Course.

If the facts don’t serve the Dogma, fuck the facts.

If only a lie works to advance policy, then they lie.

Instead of anything resembling journalism we now have two Marketing Firms trying to sell the same poison to the public under two different labels: The GOP Pravda Press who sell pure, distilled Toxic Tang via Fox and Rush and CNN, and the boneless MSM who sell you the diluted version by just slapping “both sides of the story” up and then abandoning their audience to confusion and "Who knows?" shrugging by abdicating their analytical role.

No, sorry, when one side of the story if a lie and one is not, giving them both equal time and not drawing any distinction between them serves only the lie.

In the end, the only people practicing advocacy journalism are the Right. And when say “advocacy”, I of course mean slanted, lying, sliming, utterly uncritical cheerleading of every fleck of verbal diarrhea that slides out of the Administration’s mouth. What we have seen is a cancer-gone-metastasized growth curve among the Brit Humes and Chris Matthews of the world, while over at PBS the Right dutifully counts every comment or report that might be interpreted as “critical” of the Administration as Left-wing, regardless of its factual basis.

Tierney can use any goofy metric he likes to play the game of equal-an-opposite bias. The tired overarching GOP lie that the middle ground between mendacity and honesty is objectivity.

Bullshit.

The only measure that counts for gauging the fairness of the press is the same one that has always been true:

"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

And by that measure, the American media is either a wholly captive Right Wing Bullshit Delivery System, or a hollowed out, Runaway-Bride hawking sideshow barker desperately trying to keep us from seeing what’s behind the curtain.

But it can by no means be considered rigorous, crusading or courageous -- much less Lefty –- and I don’t give a shit which way it’s Journalism 101 professor voted.


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** Scarily prescient After Post Update from Yahoo News:

Fox Cancels 'The Simple Life'
By JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment Writer
6 minutes ago

"The Simple Life" is over — at least on Fox. The network said Wednesday it has canceled the Paris Hilton-Nicole Richie reality series after the show's two stars no longer proved compatible.

The feuding ex-friends will not return for a fourth season, even though the network had picked up the options on their contracts.

Fox said its midseason schedule didn't have a time slot for the show.

"We did not see a place for `The Simple Life' on our schedule this season," the network said in a statement.
...

Us Weekly first reported the show's cancellation. When reached for comment, Hilton didn't sound as though she expected the show to return.
...

To which I can only add...Don't fuck with me.

Apparently I've got skills.