Guilt By Dissociation

For years now I've been preaching fire and brimstone when it comes to the dangers of trusting the press to do the job of law enforcement or allowing it to do the job of the courts. While I admit to not always being successful, I generally try very hard to take a deep breath and think twice before buying wholesale into the immediate media narrative whenever a story breaks or even as it develops. The reason for this is simple: In the middle of a feeding frenzy blood gets everywhere, nobody can tell what's what, important details get lost, and the animal mentality can completely block out rational thought. What you then get is, well, Richard Jewell.

Remember him? You should. You should remember him solely as a hero who saved lives in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta back in 1996, but thanks to the media's rush to judgment and the public that let them get away with it for far too long without asking questions, you probably know him as a guy who was falsely accused of causing the Olympic Park bombing. Or worse, you don't even know about the correction the press was forced to choke on or the bullshit hand-wringing and soul-searching that followed it and you still think Richard Jewell was the man who killed one person and injured more than a hundred others in an act of homegrown terrorism. Jewell went to his grave in 2007 still dealing with the effects of being wrongly tried and convicted in the shameful court of public opinion that sprung entirely from the fevered mind of the media.

The worldwide press should've learned from that and so many other of its sins. Unfortunately, as the Boston Marathon bombing coverage proved, it hasn't learned a damn thing.

Cracked, which regularly traffics in brilliantly addictive listicles, catalogs the media's failures and counts them down for you.

Cracked: 6 Insanely Reckless Media Accusations That Ruined People's Lives/7.8.13

Tuesday Is Recycling Day

It's been a while since I've done one of these under the old official name of the franchise, but given the recent influx of new readers I wanted to start bringing this feature back to DXM. A couple of nights ago, Aaron Sorkin's HBO show The Newsroom began with a well-written and impassioned mea culpa delivered on-air by the show's fictional news anchor, Will McAvoy. The soliloquy was everything you'd expect out of Sorkin; specifically it presented an important subject, in this case the American news media, not how it is but how intelligent people wish it would be.

Basically, McAvoy issued an "apology" to his audience for his complicity in bringing crap into its collective living room every night and for willingly contributing to the "dumbing down" of the American electorate. He copped to his own failures and promised to try to do better. It immediately reminded me of something I wrote for this site way back in February of 2007 in which I apologized for the TV news media's coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Admittedly, I was "in the closet" at the time -- working for CNN without divulging it here -- and I continued to be a part of the problem until being unceremoniously shown the door a year later. With that in mind, I can't get on too high a horse.

But what McAvoy alluded to during his fictional statement of purpose was correct in the real world: There are literally thousands of smart, dedicated, hard-working journalists in the news media who never signed up to cover garbage; who don't want to inflate every minor controversy or random event to the point where it explodes across the airwaves and pages day after day and night after night; who know that the truth is what journalists strive for and that it and it alone represents fairness, as opposed to some phony concept of forced objectivity; who understand that adding to the noise in the echo chamber in the name of the almighty ratings dollar demeans them and their chosen profession.

There are those who still remind us never to forget 9/11, as if such a thing were possible. I would, however, also remind everyone who takes an interest in being an informed populace that in the weeks just prior to 9/11 the mainstream news media as a whole was almost singularly fixated on trying to terrify every man, woman and child in this country into believing that he or she was about to be eaten by a shark.

And great white sharks have now been spotted off Cape Cod and the West Coast.

"And Now an Apology in the Form of an Open Letter To America" (Originally Published, 2.15.07)

Dear American Public,

I have no excuse. I have no defense.

I am a member of the American news media and have been for some time. This means that on more than one occasion I have -- willingly or unwillingly -- foisted upon you the trite, the inane and the monumentally ridiculous, and done so under the auspices of my supposed right to inform and educate you as to important events which affect your lives. I have been party to the beaming into your living room of seemingly endless video loops of JonBenet Ramsey dressed as a five-year-old prostitute. I have encouraged various interchangable Ken-and-Barbiesque meat-puppets, pompous and breathless, to sincerely attempt to convince you of the hidden threat lurking in your underwear drawer. I have conspired to make you believe that you were, at any given moment, in danger of being eaten by a shark. I have actually written the words "every parent's nightmare" -- more than once, in fact. I have dispatched correspondents to Aruba in search of Natalee Holloway. I have marveled at the ingenuity behind using an episode of Dateline NBC to promote The Apprentice. I've been good friends with Rick Sanchez for sixteen years.

In short, I have betrayed you. I have betrayed your trust.

I have let you down.

Yet I've never felt compelled to humbly ask for any sort of forgiveness for my offenses. I have never felt true shame, both for myself and my chosen profession. Until now.

I'm sorry for the coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

I'm sorry that so many supposedly venerable news organizations have elevated the all-but-inevitable self-destruction of a B-list former-stripper, Playmate, hack actress, gold-digger, tabloid queen, and all-around piece of human flotsam to the lofty heights of near-Shakespearian mythology. I'm sorry that we have treated an absolutely meaningless event as if it were somehow nothing short of a cultural earthquake, sure to send reverberations and tremors throughout society until they shake the very foundation -- the very soul -- of every man, woman and child in America. I'm sorry that we have devoted hour after hour to discussing and debating such asinine subjects as the paternity of this horrid woman's baby, even being willing to proclaim, with a straight face, that its father might be the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor. I'm sorry that we've allowed Wolf Blitzer and Diane Sawyer to look no better than Pat O'Brien and Maria Menounos. I am truly sorry that we have, even for a moment, lent a shred of credibility to the opinions of Nancy Grace.

During the past week, those charged with the awesome responsibility of relaying to you the global, cultural, political, economic and medical news which you rightly expect and demand from us, have instead willingly allowed ourselves to be taken hostage by every permutation of loathsome, opportunistic degenerate -- each claiming to be able to add yet another spoonful of pabulum to the pot we're all too happy to stir. During the past week, hundreds of American soldiers and innocent civilians have been killed in Iraq -- as our focus shifted to one minor celebrity who died just off the Florida Turnpike.

We have failed you.

We have failed ourselves.

The only possible consolation is that many of us are well aware of our own ethical bankruptcy in the continued pursuit of this absurdity. I could explain at length my own feelings in the matter, but better I allow an anonymous colleague of mine to be the eloquent, impassioned and utterly frustrated voice for the thousands currently toiling away on this story at otherwise-reputable news operations across the country:

"I'm sorry, but I did not spend tens of thousands of dollars in school to cover this bullshit. She's a celebrity for fucking the unfuckable; that's not an accomplishment. I actually announced to the newsroom this morning that I didn't go to journalism school to cover a two-bit Texas whore and that, if this was the kind of news we were covering, I could use my diploma for toilet paper. It's unbelievable. BREAKING NEWS??? I'm really sorry that the drug addict OD-ed, but that's what happens when you're an overweight drug addict."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

With Contrition,

Chez

Exhibit A-holes

My little column on Fox News's airing of a four-minute hit piece on President Obama under the guise of being a news item -- now cross-posted in a slightly edited version at the Huffington Post -- spawned a pretty good debate about the current state of the media on my Facebook wall. Most of the back-and-forth has been between an old friend of mine from high school, Norm Kaiser, and someone I only met recently, good guy and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of A History of Violence Josh Olson. Josh's most salient point, what he sort of calls modern journalism's original sin, is the faulty notion by the press that every story has two sides worth giving serious consideration and an open forum to. If you've been reading my nonsense long enough, you know that I couldn't agree more with this assessment; I've bitched about it incessantly over the past few years.

Most news agencies these days, certainly the ones that have to fill 24-hours-a-day with cable-friendly content, work off of the absurdly warped assumption that proven reality can be open to interpretation and endlessly debated by those who have a personal agenda to espouse. Basically it's as if, somewhere along the line, the American news media became one big college philosophy class where there's never any right or wrong, per se, and if you can make your case sound legitimately solid enough with enough clever bullshit, your point of view deserves to be taken seriously no matter how flat-out wrong you are. What's worse, the press believes that to take this tack means to remain objective -- that by giving both sides of every single issue that can be easily exploited and politicized equal consideration, it's honoring its commitment to remain unbiased and above the fray. If you're looking for a somewhat pejorative term for this phenomenon, it's been referred to as "the view from nowhere." Cesca also regularly calls it the "both sides meme."

I bring this up because, as if on cue, CNN just presented us all with possibly the most egregious and infuriating example of this kind of lazy, horseshit journalism. It's a piece that could honestly stand as Exhibit A in the case against the media when it comes to pseudo-intellectually reporting on the controversy and indolently allowing themselves room for equivocation rather than doing their jobs and actually parsing fact from fiction -- being the gatekeepers and guardians of the truth. The piece is called "Why Politicians Lie and Why We Want To Believe Them," and it follows flawlessly the formula for a modern day piece of journalism in which nothing is actually stated, no real point is made and little gets resolved to anyone's satisfaction. It paints one of the most ludicrous and debunked conspiracy theories in modern history in colors other than simple black and white, makes the case, as expected, that all politicians lie -- citing examples from both parties -- then turns the whole thing over to an expert, in this case a psychologist, for analysis on why people lie in the first place. Read it and you'll find yourself either aggravated at how obviously devoid of an actual position it is on right-vs.-wrong or at the very least how perfectly representative it is of a few minutes of your life you'll never get back. It's that fucking pointless.

Seriously, this is why the American press sucks.

And this is why things are the mess that they are -- why reality itself can be hijacked by whoever can tell a lie the loudest and most creatively, immediately ensuring that proven fact can be subject to democratic consensus. Because those we trust to give us the truth aren't doing their jobs.

CNN: Why Politicians Lie and Why We Want To Believe Them/6.1.12

Racial Gray (Complete)

The Full Text of the Piece That Appeared Yesterday at the Daily Banter

I didn’t want this to turn into a public back-and-forth, but when I wrote a piece last week for this site on the double-standard when it comes to how news outlets cover crimes which are racially motivated or have the potential to be racially motivated, I knew I might be opening a Pandora’s Box. So with that in mind, and after my good friend and podcast partner Bob Cesca penned a response to my original column here a few days ago, I feel like I want to clarify and expand on my views a little.

First of all, I really do hate the fact that even though my motives are much different and I have to believe more noble than theirs, my opinion gets to be lumped in with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg. I don’t like that it looks like I’m defending them when I’m simply defending a point they’ve made — again, regardless of why they made that point. It should also go without saying that I hope I’m not labeled some kind of racist — or a latent racist, unaware of my own racist feelings, a charge that’s almost impossible to defend against — by those who disagree with me on this. I want to make it clear that while O’Reilly and Goldberg seemed to suggest an equivalence between the incident in Virginia and the Trayvon Martin shooting, I did nothing of the sort; they’re completely different cases and they should have been treated differently by the press.

The issue, though, is larger than an unfair comparison between two separate and distinctive events.

I’m not saying that the media don’t report black-on-white crime. Of course they do. Jesus, in a lot of places — mostly local news markets — it’s almost all they do. The difference — the double-standard — occurs when it comes time to tag a crime as racially motivated or to acknowledge a racial component within a crime. When there’s a possibility of labeling a crime racially motivated, the burden of proof is much higher in a black-on-white crime than it is in one that’s white-on-black. I understand completely the history involved — which Bob outlined nicely — and how and why that can come into play, but I’m still not sure that makes it right from the standpoint of journalistic ethics. From what I’ve seen, it would take a person or a group literally shouting “I hate white people” while kicking somebody’s ass for many in the media to report that a black-on-white crime had racial overtones — and if it didn’t appear at first glance to have overt racial overtones they almost certainly wouldn’t go looking any deeper for them.

Again, I do understand the lengthy and incontrovertible history that deserves consideration, but a group of white people beating up on a black person is automatically very suspicious — as it damn well should be — while a group of black people beating up on someone of another race or ethnicity is deemed, what? Business as usual? Just the way things are? Doesn’t the refusal to even acknowledge the racial element in a story like that — particularly when the coverage would be far different were the roles reversed — speak to Goldberg’s claim that the media may be trying to play a paternal role in protecting a minority community from the bigots who’d automatically label them savages or criminals? If so, is it the media’s job to play that paternal role?

There’s no denying that a news organization can often be influenced, sometimes very quietly, by factors not related to the goal of practicing journalism. On my site I’ve written often about the subtle pressure exerted on news producers to be cognizant of any possible liberal bias within their work — a product of years of accusations and strong-arming by the right — and how that can often lead a news department to overcompensate. True objectivity goes out the window in an effort to ensure that conservative critics are appeased — in other words, in the pursuit of the appearance of objectivity. Likewise, there’s an interesting guideline in place in many newsrooms — occasionally unspoken but often discussed openly — that tips its cards to the incredibly delicate way the press handles the subject of race and minority crime. It works like this: If a crime has been committed and the only description you have of the suspect is, say, a black male, 5’11″, wearing a white t-shirt, you don’t air or publish the description. Why? Well, because obviously that would mean police are currently on the lookout for six thousand people; the description is worthless. But its vagueness and consequent lack of value isn’t really the reason the description wouldn’t be run; there have been quite a few times throughout my career where it’s been acknowledged in my presence, and admittedly even affirmed by me, that a non-specific description of an African-American suspect is unfair to the black community.

True, a sketch of a suspect that ambiguous would likely be left out of a story regardless of that suspect’s race or ethnicity, but special attention was always paid to those who were wanted by the police and who happened to be black, often in an effort to avoid inflaming racial tensions or giving fuel to bigots. Of course, again, there’s a history to be considered here, a history of black people being unfairly targeted as suspicious due to nothing more than the color of their skin — see, yes, Trayvon Martin — and maybe it does in fact show journalistic responsibility and an acquiescence to the realities of the world to take that into consideration when publishing or airing a news item. I think this is the argument Bob was making in his piece and he could very well be right. But from a perspective that I hope is as dispassionate as it can be, the question of fairness and paternalism again comes up: Is it the job of a journalistic organization to favor one group over another or to treat one group differently in their coverage — to show it special dispensation or handle it with kid gloves not applied when dealing with anyone else?

One final thing before we hopefully put what I think has been a healthy debate to rest: By talking about this issue I want to make it clear that I’m not at all personally outraged about the double-standard in black-vs.-white press coverage nor am I crying that I’m being racially persecuted, as O’Reilly and Goldberg most certainly were. I’m a white guy living in the United States of America — I’ve got it fucking great. I’m merely pointing out that the double-standard exists and that there’s a very strong argument to be made that it does actually defy the rules of a responsible and unbiased press. Am I hedging a little because of the sensitive nature of this subject — wearing those kid gloves, as it were? Sure am. Is it somewhat cowardly to allow any kind of potential pressure or backlash to influence what I say or the way I say it? Perhaps.

But that was sort of the point I was initially making. Or at the very least, the question I was asking.

Quote of the Day

"You got it."

-- Herman Cain responding to a journalist who asked if he plans to never answer any questions about the incidents of alleged sexual harassment in his past

This is the point where all of us rational people chuckle derisively at the idea that a guy accused of having sexually harassed a bunch of women thinks he can win the GOP presidential nomination without ever answering the press's questions about that alleged harassment. This is also the point where I catch myself and remind everyone not to laugh at this -- because while Herman Cain doesn't stand a chance in hell of ever becoming the Republican nominee, let alone President of the United States, there's nothing the least bit shocking about his assuming that he can go the distance in GOP politics while completely ignoring and even demonizing the traditional media.

What one underqualified political celebrity began a few years ago is now coming to logical fruition with another. Sarah Palin made the admittedly canny decision to not only write off any media outlet which dared to make her pea-brain hurt by lobbing a bunch of pesky questions at her, she publicly rebuked those outlets for demanding she know things; now Cain is taking that concept one step further by both ducking questions regarding a legitimate scandal consuming his campaign and blaming the media for concocting the scandal in the first place. What makes Cain think he can at least somewhat get away with it -- why Palin did before him -- is the fact that Fox News exists. I've said this over and over again so I won't get into it in detail, but the rise of Fox as the dominant bullhorn for Republican talking points throughout the media universe -- a propaganda machine so powerful that it has the ability to influence coverage at other news outlets -- means that a GOP candidate need never suffer through another adversarial interview again if he or she chooses. Cain isn't playing to every American at the moment; he's playing to the Republican base only -- and Fox owns the Republican base, lock, stock and barrel of uninformed monkeys.

If Herman Cain wants to marginalize the responsible press, he knows he pretty much can -- and what we're witnessing may be the shamelessly brazen new model for how Republicans embroiled in scandal attempt to sidestep the quagmire that years ago would've dragged them under instantly: ignore, evade, ridicule, and let the talking heads on Fox take up your cause and launder your sins in their own private news cycle. Cain has simply decided to, as I'm sure he sees it, take the wind out of the mainstream media's sails; he knows that answering a single question will just lead to a flood of others behind it, so why not deny responsible journalists the chance of getting the better of him by denying their right to ask questions at all. Like Palin, Cain is playing the persecution card and claiming that anything that trips him up isn't his fault but the fault of a Star Chamber of unethical journalists who have collectively ruled that he must be destroyed.

Will it work? With the GOP base, which is becoming more and more insulated and insane every minute, probably. With everyone else -- the ones who haven't made up their mind in advance and who are looking for information rather than confirmation -- probably not.

But again, none of this matters for Cain anyway. A gaffe-prone black guy won't win the GOP nomination if there's an equally conservative gaffe-prone white guy to get behind. And a cartoonish pizza salesman with zero governmental experience who in the span of just 24 hours has said, "People that want to be lazy and not help themselves, well, that’s their little boogie-woogie," and "When people get on the Cain train, they don't get off," isn't gonna win the general election.

De-press-ing

I realize I'm kind of outsourcing the commentary right now. That's mostly because I'm busy as hell but also because there's so much good stuff already being written and said about this ridiculous debt deal. Like my BFF Jason Linkins's excellent excoriation of the political press currently running over at HuffPo.

"Way back when this whole saga started, the GOP's gambit was, 'Give us what we want or we will put the full faith and credit of U.S. Treasury bonds into default.' It shouldn't have been necessary to point out to the press that this was an utterly insane, from-the-furthest-reaches-of-Mars position to take. After all, the debt ceiling had been raised many, many times before, without any fuss worth mentioning. If you cannot say objectively that threatening to blow up the world's economy was an extreme position, then the word 'objectivity' is meaningless.

But far from taking an immediate stand against the insanity, the press treated the threatened demise of global society as just another interesting point of view among many. It was an exciting tactic, sure to cause waves in the political waters of the Imperial City. Pop some popcorn and let's see where this takes us! Well, where it's taken us is 'past the brink.' Our political culture has been permanently altered. It has now been deemed an acceptable tactic, in politics, to take hostages and make demands.

It's utterly bonkers. And the press just thinks it's genius! ...

Well... they should own this great mess. The media has ENDORSED: default threats on the American people as a means of making policy. The media has ENDORSED: a permanent state of governmental dysfunction. The media has ENDORSED: their own absolution in failing to adequately cover the unemployment crisis.

And their message to you? 'Kiss our ass, America. You're on your own.'"

He pegs this piece off of a typically self-indulgent discussion that David Gregory had the other day with NBC anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw in which Brokaw honestly said something so unbelievably out of touch with reality and laden with phony objectivity that, as Linkins says, I found myself questioning whether he'd finally lost his mind.

The Devil's Triangle

There are moments when Peter Daou comes off as a bit too much of an ideologue for my tastes, but a lot of the points he's making this morning on the debt ceiling fight, politics and the media are tough to argue with.

"Think about it: in a nation where Casey Anthony gets unlimited air time, how many Americans really understand the intricacies of the issues facing them? Most Americans can’t tell you where Europe is on a map, how can you expect them to assess the efficacy of Keynesian economics? And that’s not blaming them. Economists can’t even agree on the basics. So what ends up filling the knowledge void is the brashest, loudest, most confident-sounding voices. Voices of supposed authority and alleged principle. Rush Limbaugh, for instance. Or Sarah Palin. Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Bill O’Reilly.

Echoing those ‘voices of authority’ are Republican politicians and the right’s online denizens. Conservative pundits and columnists lend it all an air of seriousness. And the media, desperately seeking to appear 'fair,' give an uncritical national platform to those voices. Not to mention Fox News, which pipes a steady stream of propaganda into millions of American homes. The triangle of establishment, media, and Internet comes together and conventional wisdom is created and/or changed. Pollsters then dutifully register that shift in sentiment and the media regurgitate it.

There’s simply nothing comparable on the Democratic side."

In my lifetime at least, the Republicans have always been better at creating conventional wisdom out of whole cloth than the Democrats -- and it's one of the many reasons the Dems come off as perennial losers.

Fault Lines

The Nation's Ari Melber spells out simply and concretely what the debt ceiling fight is about (and here's a hint: both sides aren't equally to blame for it):

"This fight started with a partisan threat to sabotoge the economy in order to extract policy concessions, but then, when Democrats offered most of the concessions, it ricocheted and morphed into something else: a high-stakes lightning round of intramural GOP posturing. Right now, we are living through a Republican primary for economic policy. The results may hurt the nation -- an externality that Republicans have widely acknowledged, lending bite to their bark -- and no one seems to know what you do with an army that wants to keep fighting after there’s no land left to conquer."

Melber goes on to pick apart the "balance bias" America's journalists regularly engage in and how, especially when it comes to the debt ceiling story, its inherent dishonesty screws us all.

Ceiling Our Fate

From a good piece by John Avlon in the Daily Beast today:

"This is a political crisis manifesting itself as a fiscal crisis. Deficit reduction is no longer the real goal. Principled differences have been abandoned. Instead, there is just the struggle to survive politically without taking the nation off a cliff. It is a failure of divided government, and that’s why the two prime time speeches last night offered a preview of campaign 2012...

As you watch this drama play out over the next seven days, don’t forget that this is an entirely forced fire-drill. The debt ceiling has been raised more or less automatically in the past -- 77 times since JFK, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan and 7 times under George W. Bush. Republicans were not rushing to the ramparts then -- consistent with their heightened concern over deficits that comes only when Democrats are in the White House...

Nonetheless, this is the first time in American history that the debt ceiling vote has been held hostage by hyper-partisan politics. It won’t be the last. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to put this genie back in the bottle."

Avlon's final point is something I've grappled with quite a bit over the past year or so -- the idea that there's really no way back at this point and what we're witnessing right now is the new model of politics. Get used to this kind of dysfunction on a massive scale because the often civil -- and occasionally begrudging -- compromise that was the hallmark of the political system of our parents' generation has been shot full of holes and now lies bleeding on the ground, I think well past the point of resuscitation.

The question is, why? What created the furious polarization that's so intransigent that it honestly, as we're witnessing right now, has the potential to flat-out drive this country off a cliff? I realize I've worked in the media for years so I tend to see things through this prism, but I really do think it's the sheer volume of ostensible "press" outlets that's to blame. I've said this more than once but it bears repeating yet again: The internet has made everyone a king, turned the whole world into wannabe journalists and the problem has become that you can't tell who's full of crap and who's actually telling the truth anymore; what's more, it's that constant flow of information from everywhere you look that's rendered the truth, seemingly, more or less moot. Everyone presents their view as fact; each person or outlet uses those kinds of "facts" to further bolster his or her views; the noise grows louder and louder; the sides diverge and every single subject becomes politicized, able to be regarded as a this-or-that fight and fiercely argued over by an endless, ever-increasing supply of partisans; no one even hears the other side anymore because it's now possible to get your news in ways that do nothing but confirm your already intractable biases; objective reality vanishes.

Put it this way: Nothing Lawrence O'Donnell says on MSNBC matters one bit in the big picture because no one but those who already subscribe to the beliefs he espouses are watching and if they are they don't believe a word of it. He's wasting his breath for an hour every night. Fox News? Don't even bother going there. It's an entire network created for the sole purpose of and thoroughly devoted to preaching to one very specific choir -- which is why no matter what happens in the real world, viewers of Fox will never see it, at least not the way it really happened. They'll get the funhouse mirror version of events as filtered through the talking points that come down from the top and trickle directly into the mouths of Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy.

Last night, President Obama called for compromise, a position for which he's taken plenty of heat from his own party -- maybe fairly, maybe unfairly. John Boehner, on the other hand, did exactly what his base expected him to do, what it demanded of him. He stood frozen in place, a man determined to burn America to the ground if that's what it takes to make his political point, protect his base's perverted values when it comes to taxes for the ultra-wealthy and ultimately return a Republican to his rightful place in the White House. He knew he could do it because he knew he could blame the president for it and his base would never know any vividly contrasting reality because all it would hear is the version of the story presented by Fox News. Which is why the people Obama spoke to were those Americans he called "collateral damage" in this ridiculous battle between the two extremes -- the independents who are fed up and who've had enough of this crap.

The problem is, they'd better get used to it. It's not going to get any better. This is just the beginning.

Al Jeering

Okay, so I'm sitting here working and I've got MSNBC on in the background. Given that it's six o'clock and therefore time for The Cenk Uygur Mush-Mouth Hour, I was ready to get up and change the channel when what I saw made me freeze in my tracks and made my jaw drop.

I think I remember hearing something about the Reverend Al Sharpton being given a fill-in gig on MS, but I figured it must've been the result of some absurdist, feverish dream I had after eating Mexican food too close to bedtime.

Al Sharpton. As an anchor on an NBC property. Al fucking Sharpton.

I've now been sitting here watching it in disbelief and I'm hoping that somebody can at least tell me that this is Sharpton's first night on-air in an official capacity, because what I'm seeing and hearing at the moment -- the incoherent shouting, the inability to complete a thought, the jarring pauses and painfully amateurish moments of dead-air -- leaves me thinking that there's simply no way in hell that the largest media organization in the world would allow an embarrassing, unmitigated disaster like this to happen twice.

This preening, pompous ass shouldn't have been given the reins of a show to begin with, but if NBC has anything approaching a specimen cup full of credibility left -- and call me crazy, I know -- it'll pull him off the air as quickly as possible. It's one thing to have made a conscious decision to lean progressive -- it's another thing entirely to try to play to that demographic's dumbest common denominator by surrendering its air to the left's most shameless, carnival-barking boob.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"It would've been funnier if the camera was actually set up by pedophiles."

-- Commenter "MoMo316" at HFBoards in response to the news that Chris Hansen of NBC's To Catch a Predator had been busted cheating on his wife through the use of a hidden camera

Why don't you have a seat right over there, Chris. Would you like a giant, ice-cold plate of irony while you wait?

What say we bring back this classic from the archive, shall we?

"Idiot vs. Predator" (Originally Published, 3.1.07)

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more malignant hive of ineffectual, Pavlovian dolts than the programming department of any television network in America. It's the kind of place where words like "imagination" and "innovation" are never more than a mission statement away, but the adventurous spirit behind them -- not to mention the risk that such a spirit invariably requires -- is happily disregarded at a moment's notice in favor of a safe bet or proven formula.

The clearest possible example of this lies in all those instances in which a show was canceled after literally one or two episodes. The flip side of the coin is that when a show does unexpectedly become a hit right out of the box, it's all but assured that network executives will immediately begin A) oversaturating their prime-time lineup with the thing until it becomes the mass-media equivalent of the Ludovico treatment from A Clockwork Orange, and B) desperately clamoring to get their hands on as many shows as possible which follow the same basic format. The folly of the former tactic becomes clear when you realize that Who Wants to be a Millionaire, once a breakout hit, is no longer on the air; the folly of the latter, when you think back to how many shows at the beginning of last season bore a striking resemblance to Lost and have now also been permanently banished to TV's Phantom Zone.

But no single hour of television has proven, at one time or another, every unprincipled, anathematic trait inherent in modern network programming than, surprisingly, Dateline NBC. This is not to say that NBC's long-running TV news magazine hasn't been a showcase for some excellent journalism; it most certainly has. It's simply that the true reason for its very existence -- to say nothing of its prime-time ubiquity -- seems to have never actually been about journalistic excellence.

Back in the late-90s, during the final glory days of NBC's prime-time hegemony, it was almost impossible to turn on the TV and not be granted an audience with the chiseled visage and soothing baritone of Stone Phillips; the show was literally on four-nights-a-week at one point. While this kind of prevalence might have suggested an unwavering faith in the content of the show at the highest levels of NBC, the reality was nothing quite so noble.

It was mostly a matter of saving a few dollars.

For those who don't understand how the television business works (or in many cases used to work, before huge entertainment conglomerates solved all the networks' programming problems by simply buying them), just because a show is on NBC, ABC, CBS or FOX doesn't mean any of those networks actually owns that show. A network has to buy it, typically at a hefty price. A show like ER used to cost NBC a small fortune -- an expense which was offset by the fact that the show was insanely popular and therefore raked in a very big fortune in ad revenue. (Incidentally, I have no idea what NBC is paying for ER these days but whatever it is, it's too much; the show is painfully average -- and the network knows it. A good rule of thumb: you can tell that a former hit is on its last legs when the promos for it feel the need to constantly remind you that it's "as good as it's ever been." If you're an actor on a show that's described in this way, you know it's probably time to call your agent, put off buying that new Aston Martin Vanquish and work something out with your coke dealer.)

But NBC owns Dateline outright; it's technically a product of the network's news department (why I feel the need to qualify that statement will become evident in just a second). What that means is that above all, the show represents one monumentally important thing to the network -- arguably the most important thing: it's cheap programming. During that period in the late 90s, Dateline NBC was no ratings bonanza, but it wasn't costing much either; it was less expensive to pack the schedule with Stone Phillips than it would have been to pay a production company for a show that might not have broken even.

The "innovation" and "imagination" of the programming executives were willingly ceded to the desire to "please" the "stockholders" and consequently "keep" their "jobs."

But then, not long ago, something unexpected happened: a few more people started watching Dateline.

What led them into the tent damn sure wasn't any of that boring "excellent journalism" stuff; it was the attraction that's been guaranteed to lure curious crowds across America for generations: a good, old-fashioned freakshow.

So began the ascendency of Dateline's popular, profitable, panic-inducing and thoroughly pointless series, To Catch a Predator. By now you probably know the drill -- in fact, if you believe the hyperbolic promotion, you or someone you know has already been outed as a child-molesting degenerate on national television by the dashing and intrepid Chris Hansen and his Turtleneck of Justice. For the uninitiated, it works like this: Hansen and crew team-up with police and a group which cleverly calls itself "Perverted Justice" to nab internet predators in the act. They pose as teenagers on-line, luring unsuspecting men -- and they are always men -- to a predetermined location somewhere in Suburbia, USA. Driven by the diving rod in his pants and the promise of an opportunity to use it on some teenage or pre-teen boy or girl, each hapless deviant leaves the comfort of Mom's basement and descends upon a typically modest home -- borrowed from a volunteer -- which in reality has been transformed from Rockwellian to Orwellian with the addition of enough hidden cameras to keep Room 101 busy for months. Once inside the spider's lair, the pervert in question usually meets an actor whom he believes to be the object of his on-line affection, but before any deal can be sealed -- SURPRISE! Out pops Hansen with what can only be described as the ultimate cock-block.

It's occasionally entertaining -- and occasionally painful -- to watch the erstwhile Romeos squirm like pigs stuck in a chute. They sweat; they twitch; their eyes dart around the room futilely trying to locate that hole in time -- the one that might whisk them away and back to the moment just before they made the worst decision of their lives.

For his part, Hansen casts himself as the avatar for every parent living in fear of the lecherous wolf constantly banging away at the other side of his or her child's computer screen. He furrows his brow with concern and reminds the unlucky deviants what they were ostensibly expecting to find when they walked through the door. (Just once, I'd love for one of them to be quick-thinking enough to jump up and say, "Actually, I'm here for you Chris Hansen, because I'm from ABC's new show, To Catch a Hack Journalist!") After listening to the inevitable litany of outlandish excuses, Hansen then figuratively throws off the comfortable blazer and puts on the inquisitor's robes, really going for the throat: he opens his manila file folder and begins reading the filthy words of each fiend back to him. Needless to say, it's comedy gold.

This is all followed by the unfortunate sap being taken into police custody.

Thanks to the Hansen Traveling Circus, Dateline NBC -- a show that once populated prime-time for practical reasons more than anything else -- has become a minor breakout hit. The programming executives at NBC now have the best of all possible worlds: an inexpensive show that can bring in a few advertising dollars and be peddled as nothing less than a service to the community. Paddy Chayefsky can rest peacefully in the knowledge that every single thing he predicted about the future of network television back in 1976 has come to putrid fruition.

In spite of its moderate popularity though, To Catch a Predator has had its very vocal detractors, for some reasons which should be obvious -- and a few others that aren't.

It seems impossible to defend someone who traveled a hundred or more miles in the hope of being rewarded with sex from a fourteen-year-old, and I certainly don't mean to do that. Still, on-line sting operations have always made me slightly nervous simply because of the questionable tactics employed by police and the somewhat nebulous nature of the charges typically filed against the accused: "attempting to solicit sex from a minor."

Early in my career, I worked with a meteorologist named Bill Kamal. He and I were little more than acquaintances, but for the most part he seemed like a decent enough guy -- despite his affinity for wearing large hoop earrings and pirate shirts when not on-air. Kamal was obviously a great fit with Miami and continued to work there long after I'd left -- pretty much right up until October 24th, 2004; that's the day he was arrested for driving his Corvette all the way up to Ft. Pierce to meet a young boy he had met in an on-line chatroom called "Boyzformen". The boy had said his name was Billy, and had claimed to be fourteen-years-old. The boy also claimed to have already had sex with an older man. The boy, of course, wasn't a boy at all; he was a St. Lucie County detective -- and he arrested Kamal on the spot. Inside Kamal's car, police found condoms and a water gun.

Like the guys on Dateline, Kamal rattled off a list of ridiculous excuses as to why he had toys in his car, not to mention child-porn on his computer at home. Eventually though, he was convicted in court and is now sitting in a federal prison, no doubt dazzling his fellow convicts with his impressive knowledge of cloud formations and the resilience of his sphincter.

Now make no mistake, Bill Kamal didn't drive 160 miles to chat about baseball and that new Green Day album -- not with the price of gas these days; Kamal was there to have sex with a teenager. The problem of course is that he didn't. In fact, not only did he not have sex with a fourteen-year-old-boy, there never was a fourteen-year-old-boy. He was always chatting with a grown man, regardless of what he may have thought. And that may be the problem: charging someone with soliciting sex from a minor when there wasn't a minor anywhere in the picture to begin with seems slightly underhanded; it relies fully on what Kamal thought was happening and what he intended to do about it.

I realize that this argument can essentially be applied to any kind of police sting operation, but such is the fine line between intention and execution.

Why couldn't Bill Kamal have simply said, "I knew it was a grown man all along -- that's just my fantasy?" In Kamal's case, the reason was probably because he had a trunk full of toys and a glove-compartment full of condoms (although even that could ostensibly be explained -- which Kamal of course attempted to do). Still, there's no law against possession of a concealed water gun. Once again, it relies on an intransigent knowledge of what was going to happen. At this stage of human evolution, Philip K. Dick's "Pre-cogs" are still only the stuff of imagination.

Chris Hansen and the investigators involved with To Catch a Predator have of course found a way to get around the "Hypothetical Victim" quandary; that's where the actors-pretending-to-be-teenagers come in. At the very least, it can be argued that they provide the dirtbags with one last chance to do the smart thing and back out. Yet again though, what's to stop someone from saying, "I figured it might be you Chris, but I came anyway because I wanted to be on TV. I'm sort of insane and act irrationally a lot of the time -- did you know I can also make myself invisible?"

This debate is entirely academic, particularly when Hansen and company actually have at times put more kids in harm's way than they've probably protected.

Just ask the town of Murphy, Texas.

NBC is still receiving letters and e-mails, not only from angry residents but from even angrier city councilmen. Their outrage stems from an "occupational hazard" involved in the production of To Catch a Predator -- one that's easy to overlook yet becomes glaringly obvious and gravely serious once recognized:

The show is drawing potential child-molesters into quiet neighborhoods.

You're probably aware of the phrase "Not In My Backyard" -- well, neighbors in Murphy, Texas weren't pleased when Dateline decided to lure alleged rapists to their backyard. They were even less pleased when police were forced to chase some of these guys through their backyard; when bags of drugs were found in their backyard; when the push to make exciting television was putting their backyard in danger.

A letter to NBC from a Murphy city councilman says it all:

"It was (the residents') streets, not yours, not Dateline's... You held a sting at a house within sight of an elementary school. An elementary school that had an early release on the day of your sting. A house right in front of a bus stop for our school children."

The councilman goes on to figuratively grab NBC executives by the throat -- stating a rather interesting fact which challenges the supposedly benevolent and judicatory intentions of To Catch a Predator: not one case for sexual solicitation was filed as a result of the sting in Murphy, Texas. While this denouement does admittedly come as a bit of a shock, the goal of the entire effort should never have been in question and should surprise no one. It was never about justice; it was always about money.

The formula for deducing any objective has always been simple: consider the source.

80% of NBC/Universal is owned by GE; the other 20% belongs to Vivendi. Both are publicly traded companies, which means that nothing at NBC is done without the stockholders in mind. When money is the goal, truth becomes nothing more than another commodity. Occasionally it's an advantage; occasionally it's an impediment.

Bottom line though: if you're looking for altruism, you're barking up the wrong peacock.

Of course, none of this has stopped NBC from pretending that the aim of To Catch a Predator is to actually catch predators -- and in some ways, that's the most egregious disgrace of all. Although a debatable amount of Schadenfreude is ripe for the picking every time a Hansen Home opens for business, that's not the kind of thing NBC can promote -- remember, Dateline is, nominally, a news show. Instead, the network uses the most sure-fire and time-honored tool in any modern news department's promotional vault -- the one that brings 'em in every time: fear.

Put simply, To Catch a Predator preys on your fears.

It preys on your belief that the violation and infestation of your home and family is never more than a mouse click away.

And guess who put that belief there in the first place?

Predator, and shows like it, likely couldn't exist were it not for the months and years of promotional carpet-bombing that came before them. Nothing gets the attention of the masses like a potential threat, and those whose job it is to sell you the news -- an item which ironically didn't need to be sold in years past -- know that full well. This is why there aren't simply meth users -- there's a full-blown meth "epidemic." This is why it is imperative that you and your family tune in tonight to get the latest important information on the Bird Flu. This is why each time there's a tragedy somewhere else in the country, your breathless local news anchor will -- without a doubt -- ask, "Could it happen here?" This is why you're probably scared to walk out your front door. But that's no use; the vermin have now found a way through your defenses and they're coming for the thing you hold most dear: your children.

Thank God, Chris Hansen is there to stop them!

If money is the goal, and truth is a commodity, then fear is the ultimate weapon.

This is not to say that there aren't dangerous people trolling the internet, looking to have sex with kids; there are. But never in the history of malfeasance -- in the history of anti-social behavior -- has there been an infringement that's easier to prevent. Contrary to what many opportunistic fear-mongers would have you believe, the boogeyman isn't actually living inside your child's MacBook; he's more than likely two time-zones away sitting in a dank one-bedroom apartment wondering why his mail-order bride is divorcing him and taking his kids -- or possibly why his new NAMBLA card hasn't arrived yet. That doesn't exactly rise to the level of clear and present danger. All you have to do to get rid of him is turn off your damn computer. All you have to do to ensure that his screen name never sullies any monitor in your home to begin with is talk to your children. If your twelve-year-old is spending a lot of time in chat rooms called "Boyzformen," it's safe to say that he's asking for far more trouble than the pathetic jerk on the other end of the line; that guy's just buying into what's advertised. Is he potentially dangerous to the world outside the Matrix as well? Possibly -- but once again, when it comes to keeping them safe, educating your children is far more than half the battle.

For God's sake, don't leave it up to Chris Hansen, NBC or the network programming executives.

They're just in it for the money.

Quote of the Day

"Media catnip."

-- Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post's description of Sarah Palin last night on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, as he reacted to the not-the-least-bit-surprising revelation that Palin was quitting her "One Nation" bus tour halfway through

The Fast and the Furious

You're never gonna believe it -- no, really, I mean, who could've possibly seen this coming? -- but Anthony Weiner is checking himself into rehab. The exact reason, no one knows and, let's be honest, barely matters.

Believe it or not, this latest development more than anything else that's happened so far in this completely by-the-numbers scandal makes me think that Weiner needs to go away and not show his face anywhere near a position of power for a while. Yeah, what Weiner did was colossally stupid, but I was with him as far as the argument that he should be allowed to let the people of his district decide his fate. Trying to cheat that fate, though, by hauling ass off to treatment as the pressure mounts against him -- because he knows full well that no one's going to try to oust him as long as he's "sick" and if he can make the case that none of this was his fault -- is something more than just dumb; it's craven cowardice, bald-faced opportunism, and it shouldn't be tolerated. Tweeting naked pictures wasn't a symptom of some sort of disease that he needs to get help for -- it was just an asshole narcissist loving the fact that he could regularly stroke himself to all the attention he was getting from hot co-eds who wouldn't give him the time of day if he were nothing more than Dr. Weiner, DDS, from Boerum Hill.

But if you believe Weiner, once he gets out of rehab and can presumably claim that he's "clean," he's not going anywhere but back to Capitol Hill. And really, why shouldn't he? Why should Anthony Weiner heed all those calls for his resignation, the ones coming from the GOP and from his own party's leadership, if he doesn't want to? Morally and ethically, sure, he's damaged goods and the scandal may be political kryptonite to him for a while. But Weiner understands something that inexplicably seems to escape the millions of other people who happen to also be living in the year 2011; coincidentally, it has everything to do with the nature of the very social networking tool that got him into so much trouble.

People will forget -- and they'll forget quickly.

Weiner knows that all he has to do is ride out the rapids for a little bit and eventually the waters will calm because, quite simply, our collective cultural consciousness will move on to something else. Our psyches have been trained by the hyper-fast nature of the modern media not to dwell on anything for too long; as the speed with which we can connect to each other increases, our attention spans naturally decrease. Weiner understands this very well because he was availing himself of a form of communication that forces us to think only in 140 character fragments when he got busted. He slipped up precisely because he was moving too quickly, reacting unconsciously, doing without thinking; he hit one wrong key on a keyboard and accidentally sent a picture of his crotch out to the entire world. Imagine that, the kind of power each of us can wield without even thinking, with the push of a couple of buttons and within the span of five seconds.

But that's exactly the point: The more it becomes commonplace to think -- or not think -- this way as a society, the less of an impact anything will have. The news cycles grow shorter, our cultural ADD becomes more pronounced and intractable, our ability to fixate on anything for too long vanishes.

Wait a little while and everyone will forget about the Weiner scandal. The first sign of a new, shinier car that drives up the block and the lapdog press will go after it and all but ignore the one they've been relentlessly chasing for the past couple of weeks. America as a whole? Hell, a lot of us have already moved on from Weiner's escapades, chalking them up to business-as-usual in the swamplands of DC and going right back to our lives or to whatever next big thing is on the verge of grabbing our national attention. Maybe it'll be the new Rebecca Black -- who went from nobody, to Twitter-mocked laughingstock, to huge star, back to nobody in the span of a couple of weeks. Maybe it'll be Golden Voice Homeless Guy -- who went from desperation, to revelation, to sensation, to inspiration, to investigation and vilification, also within the span of a couple of weeks. Story arcs that used to develop over weeks and months now take mere days.

Again, Weiner knows this.

He just has to hang on and make it through this patch of rough weather. If he can do that he'll be fine. And not to worry -- it won't last long.

Picture of the Day

Developing Story: This Is Why the Mainstream Press Sucks

(via @Taurusbone)

Quote of the Day

"I don’t fault any one host for throwing a party, or any journalist for attending... But the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover."

-- The Washington Post's Dana Milbank on the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner being held this weekend

Donald Trump is just one of the celebrities who've been invited and who will be in attendance.

And that's just one of the problems with this now grotesque tradition.

It used to be known self-deprecatingly as "the nerd prom"; these days it's anything but.

Gone in 20 Seconds

I touched on this briefly yesterday but it's worth elaborating on a little bit: Last night journalist and dick Nir Rosen was on Anderson Cooper's show to apologize for comments he made via Twitter about the recent sexual assault of Lara Logan. He took responsibility, called himself "a jerk" -- which, as alluded to above, doesn't even begin to cover it -- and once again announced that he had resigned his position as an NYU fellow.

What he didn't do, though, is really explain why he said what he said.

And you know something? I honestly believe that's because he can't explain it.

Asking somebody why he or she posted something really dumb on Twitter -- or anyplace else on the internet -- without giving a second thought as to the consequences of those actions is like asking a four-year-old why he wrote on the wall with a crayon. The answer will always be a dispirited, "I'on't know."

Last year I wrote a piece published here and at HuffPo that took a look at whether technology had advanced past our ability to think and to control our own rampaging impulses.

Here's what I said at the time:

"Through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter -- and, yes, even through texting, e-mail and blogging -- we've removed the need for context and contemplation as a prerequisite to opening our big mouths and can now spout an opinion to each other or to the world, occasionally with dire but all-too-avoidable consequences, without giving it, literally, a second thought. We've fractured and fragmented our communication skills to fit the new model of speaking -- one that only requires 140 characters, with as few vowels as possible. Our brains haven't evolved as quickly as our ability to express ourselves. We're officially a nation of knee-jerks...

Just a decade ago -- maybe even less -- the notion of taking a little while to think things over before rendering a decision still seemed like the wisest course of action, an action in and of itself. Now? Take even a day or so to measure your options and it's considered glacial -- because 24 hours, one full news cycle revolution on cable and in talk radio and the span in which 850-gazillion tweets were fired back and forth on Twitter, is like an eternity to us. While you were sitting there analyzing, Mr. Smarty Pants, everyone else was actually doing."

Particularly with Twitter, which is a form of communication that's just about as id-friendly and as instantaneous as it gets, we can now broadcast whatever idiotic impulse we have to the entire world.

Unfortunately, as was said so perfectly in The Social Network, "The internet is written in ink." Those little words on that little screen on your smart-phone may feel like the ultimate form of ephemera, but once they're out there -- they're out there.

Rosen just learned that the hard way.

Quote of the Day

"Identifying lies told by powerful political leaders -- and describing them as such -- is what good journalists do, by definition. It's the crux of adversarial journalism, of a 'watchdog' press. 'Objectivity' does not require refraining from pointing out the falsity of government claims. The opposite is true; objectivity requires that a journalist do exactly that: treat factually false statements as false. 'Objectivity' is breached not when a journalist calls a lie a 'lie,' but when they refuse to do so, when they treat lies told by powerful political officials as though they're viable, reasonable interpretations of subjective questions. The very idea that a journalist is engaged in 'opinion-making' or is 'taking sides' by calling a lie a 'lie' is ludicrous; the only 'side' such a journalist is taking is with facts, with the truth. It's when a journalist fails to identify a false statement as such that they are 'taking sides' -- they're siding with those in power by deceitfully depicting their demonstrably false statements as something other than lies."

-- Glenn Greenwald, attacking the almost comical hackery of James Rainey and Howie Kurtz, who seemed to mock Anderson Cooper for having the temerity to call out the Mubarak government for its lies

I'm certainly not Greenwald's biggest fan, but credit where credit is due -- he's absolutely right on this.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"It boggles the mind that a major outlet could read these obviously satirical, fake quotes and treat them as the real deal."

-- Gossip Cop, engaging in a little schadenfreude after an embarrassing mistake by Us Weekly

Really -- does it?

You sure about that?

Is it really that easy to tell the difference between parody and reality when reality is such a perfect self-parody?

Granting Asylum: Update

You know, Bill Maher's really kind of gone to the dark side during interviews lately, being more bitter and preachy than funny, but he made a great point a little while ago on CNN.

While no one's more excited than me to watch the clown car crash that will almost certainly be Michele Bachmann's rebuttal to the State of the Union address tonight, why the hell is anyone actually carrying the thing? Bachmann certainly has every right to voice the lunatic delusions swirling around inside that tiny hamster cock of a brain of hers, but no one's saying the cable networks or anyone else for that matter have a responsibility to indulge her by broadcasting them to the world. Essentially, the "Tea Party" is nothing but the ultra-nationalist al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade of the Republican party; yes, its leadership and many of its members claim to be above partisanship when it comes to directing their substantial and largely unfocused outrage, but that's really only because they want to see the country move so far to the right that its nose is pressed against the wall and they don't feel like the GOP is doing enough to make that happen. In other words, they're just Republicans who feel like the Republican party isn't being Republican enough. Show me a Democrat who professes to also be a tea bagger and I'll show you somebody in the final stages of syphilitic brain atrophy.

And yet the enabling of Bachmann and the rest of these assholes will mean that the right will be given the opportunity to air its grievances against the president's message not once but twice tonight. And why? Because the cable news channels like trainwrecks as much as we do -- precisely because we like them, because they know we'll be watching.

The Washington Post: CNN Defends Airing Bachmann Speech/1.25.11

Quote of the Day Last Week

"Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you've got? That's a question that I think has to be asked. It's certainly possible that we've all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I'm not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people."

-- Matt Taibbi, posted over at his Rolling Stone blog not long after the Tucson shooting

Yeah, I'm late to the party with everything these days. Good news on the horizon, though, folks -- really good news. I'll be getting into it a little more over the next couple of days; suffice it to say, output here is likely to finally get back to respectable levels by this time next week.