I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
After subscribing for 20 years to TNR I dropped it in '99. It is not worth reading at all. Thanks for confirming that I need not waste my time.
Making stuff up--
just following the lead of our leaders
There is no actual journalism going on today --it's all speculation and wishful thinking
When was the last time there was a fact based/fact checked news story
name one
This is the lasting legacy of FoX --
make it up-speculate and never correct
As consumers of this information --we should end speculation as news and demand facts
weren't they bought by the rite wing?
I clicked on Brooks "See Dick Spin" expecting a repudiation of Dick Cheney. Ooops. I should have drunk my coffee before I made that decision. It was part of the Dick CLARKE smear campaign. How does this guy get away with it/
.. then there's this bit of wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut
Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.
But I am now eighty-one and a half!!!!
Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Guy, you devil you, you should send that joke to Maher, or maybe Crossfire.
how much does the average talking head get paid?
how about brokaw, jennings, et al?
lets consider the ego-stirring of seeing yourself up in lights - when you are a journalist...ya think reporting stays objective when we weigh these 2 points?
money and power/ego - this is what drives 20-21st century people...oh that and giving people what they want - aka sucking up or brown-nosing.
The joke goes to The Daily Show, surely?
Clearly, what I've come to realize is that the one distinguishing personal quality that is required to be a successful conservative commentator is the ability to forcefully, and with complete confidence, articulate a position with no empirical data to back it up.
Trust me, big-university coaches everywhere were saying: "See? At Stanford they actually make 'em go to class. What a blunder!"
Big-university coaches talk like that all the time. They're afraid of being "honked out."
BTW, I was amazed last night watching Brooksy start by saying how he thought the attempt to assassinate Clarke's character was a tactical mistake by the Bush campaign and then spent the second half of the discussion calling Clarke names and describing him as untrustworthy.
Semi OT:
Speaking of journalists etc., the Kalamazoo talk-radio host who provided the "smoking gun" in the Medicaid bribery story has been fired.
Oops, Medicare, not Medicaid.
And I forgot to close tags.
Need...more...coffee!!!
What do anchors make?
It's $7 to $10 million a year.
Easterbrook is a stupid shit. I am a proud graduate of the University of Kentucky and I can personally attest that atheletes were manadated to attend class, study, and complete all assignments. No work, no play. He is clearly talking out his ass. Who fucking reads that guy, complete idiots?
I think Brooks is living a lie - he's really a closeted liberal. Look at all of his self-hating columns where he emulates liberals, penning imaginary speeches or dialog spoken by prominent democrats. Notice how he not only writes about liberals, but actually does so by professing to speak for them.
It's like he's engaging in political cross-dressing, trying on other identities. He secretly likes speaking in a liberal voice, but he's ashamed of himself and hates himself everytime he does it so he uses a defense mechanism - calling himself a "conservative" columnist" - to justify his psychological explorations.
Mr. Brooks is a very conflicted man who needs to keep compulsively lying to his readers and to himself to avoid confronting the aspect of his personality he finds loathsome and shameful.
I agree Brooks is very conflicted. He usually follows up a column that sort of make sense, with some hate-filled RNC talking points column.
One time he even wrote that the GOP is hypocrites!
The Castanza defense. We have an administration that's based it's methods on a Seinfeld character.
Press, I meant, altho they both do it.
OT slightly-Brooks was on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer last night, putting out what is sure to be the administration's latest spin. He said something to the effect that Bush should admit that he didnt get it BEFORE 9/11 but that he sure gets it now,and that the events of 9/11 were a wake up call for action against Al-Qaeda.
Richard Clarke has said that he doesnt think 9/11 could have been prevented but that we should look at the president's actions AFTER 9/11.
This part of Clarke's message is being lost as the press centers on what Bush did (or did not) do to prevent the attacks
We need to keep in focus that the President needs to answer for his actions AFTER 9/11. Bush set up a cynical bait-and-switch that took advantage of our country's grief to drag us into war in Iraq.
Certinly we should learn what we can about how to prevent future attacks on US soil... but we need to hammer Bush on his actions AFTER 9/11.
In all fairness to Easterbrook, a careful parsing of the sentence War Liberal posted reveals it to be less than clear as to exactly what it means:
***********
"In the past four seasons, all four of his senior classes have left by either May or August of their senior year having earned their diploma, giving Gottfried a 100% success rate in graduating his seniors since 2000."
***********
"All four of his senior classes" would seem to refer to those students who were still in school. If they leave early for reasons of academics or to go pro or if they transfer to another school, they aren't part og "his senior classes" anymore. I can think of at least two or three players who have left Gottfried's teams in the last couple of years which given the limited numbers of players in basketball would put a bit of a dent in that 100% graduation rate.
I'm no fan of Easterbrook but I live in the state of Alabama and one thing "The University" is not famous for is graduating its players in any revenue generating sport. You want to see high grad rates, look at the women's gymnastics team.
Easterbrook isn't making stuff up in this case--the WaPo and IHT both ran articles on the grad rates of the sweet 16 teams. 4 of the teams were over 50%, and UA was not one of them.
A 100% senior grad rate isn't that special if your total grad rate is less than 50%. It just means that your players are dropping out before they get to their senior years.
Let's pick our battles better, folks. Otherwise we are guilty of the same shoddy research that we accuse Easterbrook and Brooks of.
Excellent post by Sherpa Josh.
While it is commendable that the UA has been able to keep some seniors on their squad and graduate them (all 4 this year), that statistic is grossly misleading.
The Alabama Roster has 15 players every year with a significant turnover each year. The fact that every senior graduates is meaningless unless it looks at every player on the team over that 4 year time period (from when those 4 players were freshmen) and see their graduation rate.
My guess is that it is still significantly less than 50% or they would have publicized that.
Shoddy reporting on both sides. Of course Easterbrook should be taken to task because he has the courage to put his name on his work, while Atrios feels free to lie with impunity...
What I should think Easterbrook and his ilk would care about is the fact that their work is so shoddy that at this point, any allegation that they've made stuff up seems credible, whether it turns out that they're actually guilty in a given instance or not.
Here's a trivial example: some weeks ago Mr. Easterbrook was going on about same-sex marriage. This naturally required him to refer to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He then included a throwaway cute paranthetical about the SJC being named by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Okay, yes, absolutely trivial. But completely wrong. Massachusetts is an old state with some archaic usages embedded in its government. The legislature's formal name is the General Court (or, for dress-up occasions, The Great and General Court); the word "Judicial" in the SJC's name is necessary to distinguish its function from that of the legislative branch.
It's not an important point, but it's the kind of thing that points to rotten fact-checking. Or no fact-checking at all. As in, why should you believe a word the guy says, unless there's independent confirmation from someplace reliable?
Give Easterbrook credit in his long history of writing that he actually looks for and analyzes numbers, facts, figures, etc. He actually has analytical ability, unlike a lot of bloggers and journalists that just repeat what they are told or hear or believe.
When you think about it, blogging is just crappy re-reporting of other people's thoughts. And Atrios is an expert at this.
http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaab/ne...=yhoo&
type=lgns
Read...this debunks some of the myth surrounding college basketball and its athletes.
Verdict: Easterbrook not proven guilty of "just making stuff up again."
Easterbrook referred to a low graduation rate among those who get "a men's basketball scholarship to 'Bama" -- in other words, freshmen.
War Liberal's "rebuttal" uses coach Gottfried's 100% graduation rate of seniors -- which is a different stat, and doesn't indicate how many freshman made it to senior year.
Easterbrook might be wrong (maybe 100% of freshmen on basketball scholarships eventually become seniors and then graduate), or Easterbrook might be right (maybe less than 50% make it through) -- but War Liberal hasn't given any evidence to reach the first conclusion rather than the second.
This was poorly argued on WL's part. Atrios, I'm disappointed that you didn't spot that.
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