Mainstream Media
Before it actually occurred, many in the blogosphere speculated that Congressional testimony by comedian Stephen Colbert was intended to distract from concurrent testimony. If that was the case, from the perspective of mainstream media, the ploy clearly worked. Saturday’s Providence Journal, for example, dutifully covered the “controversy” over the Colbert performance. Unless I’ve missed it,…
Perhaps it shouldn’t seem odd, but it’s still discouraging to see the editorial board of the state’s major daily paper offer up partisan spin as an unsigned editorial. Consider: The GOP argues that extending the tax cuts for the affluent is good for small business, which creates most new jobs. The Democrats, pointing to dismal…
It’s interesting that this AP article by Sarah Brumfield withholds until the last quarter the information that James Lee actually wanted more extreme environmentalist programming on the Discovery Channel: A man who railed against the Discovery Channel’s environmental programming for years burst into the company’s headquarters with at least one explosive device strapped to his…
The matter still comes up from time to time, in the comments sections, so it’s worth noting that the New York Times has finally (quietly) admitted the truth about the core example of that supposed Tea Party racism: The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example…
Having chided Mark Patinkin for his colum lampooning Republicans (poorly), I think it only fair to note that he’s offered an attempt at some fair-play turnabout. It would be fascinating, I think, for a literature class to devote some discussion time to the differences in sentence structure and related attributes as a means of discerning…
Here’s an interesting observation. The Providence Journal‘s story about Rhode Island’s decreasing unemployment rate may have been headlined “State’s jobless rate declines to 12 percent,” but the lead reads, “The figure is counteracted, however, by decline in size of labor force,” and Andy Smith sets the tone of the article at the very beginning: On…
If you get your news from a mainstream media source, you might not have heard — as Dan Gifford notes — about the apparent likelihood that Senator Al Franken (D., MN) was elected based on the illegal votes of felons: A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at…
Nobody wants to argue against assisting people who are striving to improve their lives during hard times, but when journalists leverage the public trust for naked advocacy, they do readers a grave disservice. Providence Journal reporter Steve Peoples did just that in a front page story on expiring social services programs, last Saturday, and the…
The national press loves the independent candidate and USA Today (h/t Ian Donnis) is the latest to report about them in this year of the disgruntled voter. RI’s own Lincoln Chafee plays prominently in the story and all of the classic Chafee themes are there. First, there’s the typical RI attitude towards “name candidates” like…
Ian Donnis points to the ProJo editorial pushing for an override of the Governor’s veto of the most recent Casino ballot question and reminds us that, not so long ago, the ProJo was decidedly anti-casino. Ian puts the change in the ProJo’s stance towards gambling at around 2006 and some digging in the AR archives…