Let’s take Mr. Peabody’s WABAC (Wayback) Machine to the not-too-distant past of September 2006, when George Bush II and John Kerry were just entering the final sprint of the presidential campaign. Dan Rather, the most well-known and well-respected television anchor…
Remember Joe Isuzu. For those not watching TV in the late 80’s, Joe Isuzu was the insincere, slimy, greasy-haired, double-talking fictional spokesperson for the Isuzu line of cars and trucks. Played to obsequious perfection by David Leisure, Joe Isuzu used…
Over the weekend, Yahoo’s home page linked to an article titled “The Middle Class in America is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove It.” on Yahoo! Finance. The article originally appeared in “The Business Insider,” and was written…
I’m guessing that most house dogs allowed to lollygag around the living rooms of middle class households have been neutered or spayed. Left without sex, the highest sensual pleasure of house dogs would likely be when someone rubs them on…
Here’s one day in the life of this observer of mass media: Yesterday afternoon: Read the latest issue of Nation magazine to find a wonderful article in which Christian Parenti proposes that the Obama Administration kickstart the move to cleaner…
In a blog entry of February 28, I said that the mainstream media was paying too much attention to the Tea Party movement. I stated rather bluntly that at that point, the impact of the Tea Party was zero. This…
In his opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times, Ross Douthat blames the racist and anti-immigrant views of some rural whites on the admissions policies of eight elite colleges. In a masterpiece of specious reasoning and selective fact reporting, Harvard-educated…
Most book review sections approach summer as if it were a time to turn off the brain and wallow in escapist plots and fantasy characters. Summer reading, we are told again and again, should focus on light, easy-to-digest genre fiction…
Here’s a multiple choice question that would fit into any SAT or GRE test: Which one of these verbal miscues does not belong? Sarah Palin confuses the California city of Eureka with Eureka College in Illinois. David Vitter, Senator from…
I know I’m not the first to point out the proclivity of the mass media to turn discussions of important issues into fights between people. Instead of discussing the issues in a rational way or seeking to sift the truth…
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