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Scene: White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Saturday night
Dramatis personae: Stephen Colbert (Comedy Central “talk show” host), Pres. George W.and Laura Bush, other government functionaries, the White House press corps
The news: Colbert ‘s rapid fire monologue and satirical video skewer Bush, Bush’s policies and the press corps, leaving no survivors — it’s like the story about the emperor with no clothes: Colbert is the little boy who points out the emperor is naked
The result: An obviously displeased, if not angry Bush, a chilly audience response, and zero coverage in the traditional media
It’s the last result that’s the most interesting here. While the blogosphere is all atwitter about Colbert’s performance, the mainstream media (MSM) focused instead on the scheduled appearance of a Bush lookalike and the president’s self-deprecating humor. Colbert’s short, caustic monologue was hardly mentioned.
In fact, the only MSM reference to Colbert’s performance was in the professional trade publication, Editor & Publisher.
Bloggers are accusing the MSM of being overly sympathetic to the president by choosing to sweep Colbert’s edgy monologue under the carpet, and instead playing up the Bush and Bush-lookalike shtick that immediately preceded Colbert’s appearance at the podium.
Well, the media are not conspiring to hide Bush’s foibles and open criticism of him. The media are instead just plain lazy.
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ninety years ago on march two nine
a new york evening sun newspaperman
don marquis
came to work early one morning
to discover a large cockroach
diving headlong onto the keys
of his typewriter
marquis printed in his march two nine one nine one six column what
archy the cockroach had painfully
typed all night
it began
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the
body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon
life
i see things from the underside now
since archy could only operate one key
at a time his nightly
compositions lacked both
capitals and punctuation
as time went on archy wrote less free verse
and more prose
but his observations remained at once
witty satirical and at times poignant
he spent part of his time
debunking the spiritualism fad
then in vogue popularized in part
by the author sir arthur conan doyle
he criticized prohibition and the follies of politicians
like this criticism of
hitlers ambitions in europe
archy had wise observations about life
in general like
procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday
archy had a friend mehitabel the alley cat
who also had many past lives
together archy and mehitabel and their assorted
non-human friends opened a window
into human society and folly in nearly 500 entries
as archy followed marquis from the sun to colliers magazine
and elsewhere
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Courtesy of Boing Boing, we have word of these two developments in the recording industry’s non-stop battle against file sharing.
The RIAA has filed suit against a Georgia family, asserting that the lady of the house had infringed on the copyrights of several recording artists by sharing the files over the internet.
The family has no computer, so one wonders how the RIAA will manage to convince any judge the case has merit. Perhaps the woman, Carma Walls, has an 802.11b card implanted in her head.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, a judge threw out an RIAA suit against 14-year-old Brittany Chan. A previous suit against Brittany’s mother for file sharing had failed, so the RIAA requested a ruling permitting them to go after the girl. The judge dismissed the case, saying the RIAA had failed to provide necessary documentation.
The RIAA has filed somewhere on the order of 3500 suits along these lines, in an effort to stem the flood of files being shared worldwide on the ‘net. It’s a futile battle. For every Brittany Chan or Carma Walls, there are probably hundreds of file sharers storing thousands of mp3′s on hard drives, iPods and CDs. Stopping file sharing is like nailing jelly to the wall.
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But of the two, I’d rather keep Geena Davis/Mackenzie Allen around for a while.
OK, I admit it. I am a sucker for TV. I have given it up several times in the past, but always end up returning to suckle at “The Glass Teat,” to use SF author Harrison Harlan Ellison’s phrase.
ABC premiered Commander in Chief last fall, starring Davis as a female vice-president who ends up in the seat of power. She is a political independent, a former academic with three kids and an understanding, politically savvy husband. Her running mate, a Democrat, picked her to appeal to that demographic, but as he lies in his sickbed, makes it clear to her that she has to step aside to let the Speaker of the House (played by Donald Sutherland) take charge.
After some internal conflict, she refuses, taking the oath of office at the end of the first episode.
The second ep was also pretty good, as we get a glimpse of the problems Allen and her family face professionally and personally as she settles into office.
Later eps lost the initial lustre and viewers bailed out. There were apparently some problems between the creator/writer/producer Rob Luria and ABC, too. They sacked him, replacing him with veteran TV writer/producer Stephen Bochco of NYPD Blue fame.
Then CiC went on hiatus, which is thinly disguised TV biz shorthand for, “we’re not too sure what to do now. We don’t have enough episodes in the can to run while we figure it out. So we’ll pull it off the air, run some other drivel in its place, and try later.”
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Back in the day, before I was a high school physics teacher, I was a newspaper reporter for two smallish dailies. So I have more than a passing familiarity with the journalistic trade. Blogging, technically speaking, is not reporting, since it frequently includes commentary by the writer/editor/publisher of the blog. Reporters are supposed to leave personal bias out of their work.
While blogging is not reporting, it is a form of journalism, and should observe the same ethics that professional journalists follow. When bloggers cross the line of ethical behavior, they demean this vibrant new medium.
Michelle Malkin is a conservative pundit with an eponymous website/blog. Like fellow commentators Ann Coulter and Debbie Schlussel, Malkin revels in using biting invective, making extremist pronouncements, and being a loud anti-liberal, anti-Democrat gadfly. Malkin, Coulter and Schlussel have adoring fans who eat up their brand of commentary like some audiences love Jerry Springer’s show.
Recently, a group of students planned to protest the appearance of military recruiters at the University of California-Santa Cruz. The students sent out a press release about the protest, unwisely including their personal contact information. Malkin blogged about the protest, slinging the predictable extremist invective about the unAmerican activities of these liberal fifth-columnists, and published the students’ contact information on her blog.
Her acolytes responded by flooding the students with hateful and threatening e-mails and phone messages. Word got out, and soon supporters of the students were sending hateful and threatening e-mails to Malkin. (She wisely does not publicize neither her phone number nor her physical address.) Malkin of course used these e-mails as ammunition on her blog, saying her rights were being infringed, etc., etc.
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