Tag: media

RIP Keith Olbermann’s career. SNL presciently provided it an appropriate premortem tribute:

Richard, as you know, throughout this campaign, I have frequently called for Senator McCain’s arrest. But with this latest celebration of all things Nazi, has not McCain crossed the line and for the good of the country should he not straightaway resign?

Well Keith, I too have been critical of Senator McCain. But to suggest that he has Nazi sympathies I think is rather outrageous.

Courageous? I suppose. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve been called that. That started in high school, with my editorials for the school radio station and my work as equipment manager for the cross country team. So courageous? Sure. Guilty as charged.

He really should have stuck with Sportscenter.

Most of the portrayals of men in the media are heavily weighted towards the negative:

Until recently, gender theorists and media researchers have argued or assumed that media representations of men are predominantly positive, or at least unproblematic. Men have allegedly been shown in mass media as powerful, dominant, heroic, successful, respected, independent and in other positive ways conducive to men and boys maintaining a healthy self-identity and self-esteem.

However, this view has come under challenge over the past few years. John Beynon, a Welsh cultural studies academic, examined how masculinity was portrayed in the British quality press including The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times over a three-year period from 1999-2001 and in books such as Susan Faludi’s 2000 best-seller Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man. Beynon concluded in his 2002 book, Masculinities and Culture, that men and masculinity were overwhelmingly presented negatively and as “something dangerous to be contained, attacked, denigrated or ridiculed, little else”.

Canadian authors, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in a controversial 2001 book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture reported widespread examples of “laughing at men, looking down on men, blaming men, de-humanising men, and demonising men” in modern mass media. They concluded: “… the worldview of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men)”.

The role of mass media in creating and or reflecting identity has long been debated and the findings of some studies have been questioned. Nathanson and Young admitted in their foreword that their findings were based on a small sample. Also, most analysis of media content has focused on movies, TV drama and advertising: mass media genre which are fiction and, therefore, not representative of reality and ostensibly “taken with a grain of salt” by audiences.

However, an extensive content analysis of mass media portrayals of men and male identity undertaken for a PhD completed in 2005 through the University of Western Sydney focusing on news, features, current affairs, talk shows and lifestyle media found that men are widely demonised, marginalised, trivialised and objectified in non-fiction media content that allegedly presents facts, reality and “truth”.

The study involved collection of all editorial content referring to or portraying men from 650 newspaper editions (450 broadsheets and 200 tabloids), 130 magazines, 125 TV news bulletins, 147 TV current affairs programs, 125 talk show episodes, and 108 TV lifestyle program episodes from 20 of the highest circulation and rating newspapers, magazines and TV programs over a six-month period. Media articles were examined using in-depth quantitative and qualitative content analysis methodology.

The research found that, by volume, 69 per cent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavourable compared with just 12 per cent favourable and 19 per cent neutral or balanced. Men were predominately reported or portrayed in mass media as villains, aggressors, perverts and philanderers, with more than 75 per cent of all mass media representations of men and male identities showing men in one of these four ways. More than 80 per cent of media mentions of men, in total, were negative, compared with 18.4 per cent of mentions which showed men in a positive role.

Now, I don’t have any problem with negative portrayals of men per se. Men do commit most of the violent crimes. Men are responsible for starting most of the wars in history. Men do beat up women and rape them. I have no problem with men being portrayed in roles that are consistent with their actual behavior.

Where I have a huge problem with the media is when their portrayals of men are totally antithetical to observable reality. Due to hypergamy, most women marry men who are smarter than they are. So, how can it be possible that in Commercial World, men are inevitably drooling idiots who must be corrected and lectured by their smart, but ever-so-patient wives? And what is the point of this obvious social programming anyhow?

All the commercials in the world aren’t going to convince me or my children that Spacebunny knows more about computers than I do when I’m the one who gets her laptop talking to the printer over the network, just as a bunch of commercials that portray women as being cretins totally unable to prepare food aren’t suddenly going to have my family looking to me for dinner… not unless they want fried eggs and toast that evening.

The alarming thing is that if there isn’t any serious social programming intended in this particular regard – whereas there quite clearly is an amount of programming intended in the inclusion of a stock African character in every party or group of friends – then it is simply meant to appeal to existing female prejudices. And that is arguably more alarming, as it suggests that many women are adhering to such concepts in spite of all the easily observable evidence to the contrary.

It’s hard to illustrate their cowardice more precisely than the NYT’s rejection of an anti-Islamic ad copied directly from an anti-Catholic ad previously run in the newspaper:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in “a few months.”

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Mr. Christie said, “I’m not here to discuss the anti-Catholic ad.”

I said, “But I am, it’s the exact same ad.”

He said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “I can’t believe you’re bowing to this Islamic barbarity and thuggery. I can’t believe this is the narrative. You’re not accepting my ad. You’re rejecting my ad. You can’t even say it.”

We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Christians should do every single time anti-Christian propaganda is put forth through the mainstream media and every time anti-Christian views are displayed by irreligious individuals. Force them to publicly expose their hypocrisy. Force them to admit that they are actively taking sides in the cultural war. Force them to finally recognize that they are not secular and neutral as they feign to be, but are actively working against the survival of Western civilization.

“With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart. Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.”

He was 43.

The left-liberal mind never ceases to astound and amuse:

Beheadings Raise Doubts That Taliban Have Changed

The Taliban took the four men to the main bazaar in a southern Afghanistan district at evening prayer on Sunday, regional government officials said, denounced them as government spies because they were carrying satellite phones, then beheaded them in front of local residents who had been summoned to watch.

Three days later, on Wednesday morning, the director of a relatively progressive radio station in eastern Afghanistan was found stabbed to death in his car. His back, stomach and chest had been slashed, and his throat slit, according to the man’s brother, who said his head had been nearly severed from his body.

Just doubts, mind you. Sure, they may be beheading people for carrying mobile phones and all, but we don’t actually know for sure that they are still totalitarian religious fanatics firmly planted in the seventh century Anno Domini. This article tends to raise an obvious question. If public beheadings are not enough to convince the NYT that the Taliban has not changed over the course of the eleven years of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, what would suffice?

Not that the Taliban policies don’t possess a certain appeal. I will readily admit that if they promised the public beheading of all iPhone users and to slit the throats of progressive media figures, I’d be at least a little tempted to consider voting for their presidential candidate in preference to Obama or Romney. There is a silver lining in every cloud.

Napolitano’s show is done at Fox:

Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” on Fox Business Channel, arguably the most hard-hitting conservative show on TV, is being dropped by the network later this month in a major shakeup of the lineup.

Given the way in which the strong leftward tilt of the mainstream media distorts one’s perceptions, it’s always important to keep in mind that Fox is a centrist, status quo institution. They’re not good per se, but only in relation to the ABCNNBCBS cabal.

When evidence cited proves the precise opposite of the claim it purports to support:

Look – in the era of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Schaal, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Lisa Lampanelli, Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, Whitney Cummings, Melissa McCarthy, Anna Faris, Kathy Griffin, Chelsea Handler – are we really still having this stupid discussion? As this list shows – and this is, of course, just a random and minor sampling – not only are there lots of funny women around, but they’re being funny in many different ways.

That’s it. That’s what is supposed to prove that female comedians are as funny as male ones?

Tina Fey – not funny
Amy Poehler – not funny
Sara Silverman – so not funny
Kristen Schaal – who?
Kristen Wiig – all right, she’s moderately funny
Maya Rudolph – not even a little bit funny
Lisa Lampenelli – who?
Amy Schumer – who?
Samantha Bee – who?
Whitney Cummings – She’s attractive. She’s not funny.
Melissa McCarthy – She’s fat, which is admittedly funny. Otherwise, no.
Anna Faris – She’s cute and amusing in certain roles.
Kathy Griffin – Actually anti-funny.
Chelsea Handler – Not funny.

The easily confirmable fact is that all of them in their entire careers combined haven’t produced half the amount of humor as Frankie Boyle does in any given five minutes on Mock The Week or in ten minutes of standup:

Mock the Week is great and you can always tell the best comedians, because they are the ones who regularly crack up the other comedians. What I found particularly amusing about the various collections of his most offensive jokes is that they don’t even include his ruthlessly offensive explanation for why Katie Price dates cage fighters. Number eight was edited out at some point, but it was this joke:

“I’ve been studying Israeli Army Martial Arts. I now know 16 ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back.”

Another thing to like about Boyle is that he can take it as well as dish it out.

I hadn’t previously read Jonathan Rauch’s popular article on introversion in The Atlantic. It’s simple, but pretty good, although I shudder to think that many people actually regarded this as containing much in the way of new information.

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that this blog appears to be a stronghold of introversion, which may help explain why it has such a hard core, but relatively small readership. For example, I actively dissuade what could be considered extrovert-style commenting – generally described in these parts as comment diarrhea – in which the commenter leaves many multiple one-line comments as they occur to him. And I’ve also noted that many of the blogs with bigger traffic tend to have more and shorter posts.

It has never bothered me that more people might prefer other blogs to this one, nor did I ever wish to imitate them, but I did find it puzzling that so many people like to regularly read blogs that essentially say nothing, and say nothing so succinctly. I’m not talking about aggregators like Drudge and Instapundit, you understand, but the sort of blogs where the commentary on the Republican debate is four lines or the contents of their meals is a frequent topic of conversation. I’ve tried reading several very popular blogs on occasion, and to be honest, I not only could not read them regularly, I couldn’t even figure out why anyone was reading them. Ever.

It couldn’t be described as an intelligence thing either. Some of these bloggers were quite smart and very successful, others perhaps not quite so much, but the one thing they had in common is that a) their average post length is very short, both in terms of the selections from the links provided and their own writing, and b) their readers’ average time on site is measured in single-digit seconds. That latter fact has always puzzled me too. Who reads anything except Twitter or market prices in less than 10 seconds? How is that even possible? I understand that those who are checking back to see if there is a new post or not will tend to drive down the average, but why would there be so many multiples of post-checking in comparison with incidence of readers actually reading the posts?

If it is true that extroversion and introversion have fundamentally different styles of communication, then these differences should translate to blog writing, blog commenting, and even blog readerships as well. This may also explain why most of the early big bloggers completely failed as book authors… authors tend to be introverts, for obvious reasons, whereas the more visible bloggers who attracted mainstream media attention are more likely to be extroverts and extroverts are seldom able to focus long enough to complete a coherent thoughtcomplete book. SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi of Whatever is an interesting case; is he an extroverted geek who is able to focus himself long enough to complete his books or an introvert who enjoys performing in public on occasion? Since I find tend to find his approach to both his blog and his books rather scattershot, I suspect the former, but I wouldn’t bet much on it. The Prince of Wängst strikes me as extremely introverted, as does Roissy. Ann Althouse’s blog, on the other hand, appears to be of the extroverted variety.

To what extent the blog matches the blogger, or the readership, for that matter, I don’t know. It’s more of an impression than an observation and I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about what blogs fit which category. As should be obvious, like most of the readership, I am rather strongly introverted myself, which is why I always find it both bizarre and amusing when I am accused of writing things solely in order to attract attention. That is the classic extrovert’s projection at work; they simply cannot imagine that anyone would not want to be on stage or appear on TV.

As for Rauch’s article, the best part of it is where he describes the concept of social fatigue. At every social gathering, there is the inevitable moment when the mundane chatter surrounding me like an aural miasma appears to crescendo, grow ever more incoherent and frenetic, until it finally all fades away into the blessed silence inside my mind.

Occasionally someone will notice that I am paying absolutely no attention to the conversation and ask me what I am thinking. This is a mistake. But because I am sufficiently civilized, I never answer truthfully. There is no benefit to sharing the dark thoughts inspired by an overdose of social exposure, and anyway, it’s nothing that a little time alone won’t cure.