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Telling it like it is


Overheard today by me:

Woman to friend: "I just can’t vote for someone with the name ‘Hussein.’ I know it’s simple-minded of me, but I can’t help it."

Not only is it simple-minded (your words, honey, not mine), it’s ignorant and racist. It’s just no way to pick a president.
Nevermind his education, his experience, what he has devoted his life to, what he stands for, what he could do to make the lives of Americans better. Nevermind all that — it’s the middle name that decides it!

But then again, I suspect it’s an excuse, a polite way to say, "I just can’t vote for a black man."

And from the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll: 13 percent believe that Obama is Muslim. (He is not. Warning — link is a pdf. This particular stat is on page 26.) Oy.

Dr. Laura believes that Silda Spitzer drove her husband Elliot, the governor of New York, to spend $80,000 on prostitutes because she wasn’t a good enough wife. It’s the woman’s fault. What else is new? please.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Headline: "Device helps fat kids cut TV time." Article: "A monitoring device that cut TV and computer time in half helped young, overweight children eat less and lose weight, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

And it worked without creating a lot of conflict between parents and their kids, they said.

"It reduces all of those battles. The parents have to make one decision. After they make the decision, the device does the rest," said Leonard Epstein of the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, whose study appears in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine."

Did you hear that? Another way for parents to do even less — the device does all the work! I mean, we don’t want conflict between parents and children. Because we know parents now don’t have the ability to put their foot down anymore. And even if they did, why bother — the device will do it for you!

Fear-instilling piece from The Daily Mail in the U.K.: "Single and cohabiting women are increasingly much more likely to commit suicide than married women, a Whitehall report showed yesterday.

Here’s the catch, ladies — before you go out and rope yourself a husband to save your life, read more of the article, which clarifies: "Single males are around three times more likely to kill themselves than husbands." So it makes perfect sense to create a headline and opening lede stating that single persons are more likely to kill themselves. But why do that when we can wag the old finger at the girlies.

This piece by Steve Salerno from Skeptic saved me from going bald this week. In fact, I think I want to have this man’s babies.

"We have a fanciful metric that’s just a compilation of opinion, which is layered with further opinion from passersby, and then subjected to in-studio analysis (still more opinion). All of which is presented to viewers as … news. The problem for society is that giving headline prominence to meaningless or marginal events exalts those events to the status of conventional wisdom. "Reporting confers legitimacy and relevance," writes Russell Frank, Professor of Journalism Ethics at Penn State University. "When a newspaper puts a certain story on page one or a newscast puts it at or near the top of a 22 minute program, it is saying to its audience, in no uncertain terms, that ‘this story is important.’" The self-fulfilling nature of all this should be clear: News organizations decide what’s important, spin it to their liking, cover it ad nauseam, then describe it — without irony — as "the 800-pound gorilla" or "the issue that just won’t go away." This is not unlike network commercials promoting sit-coms and dramas that "everyone is talking about" in the hopes of getting people to watch shows that apparently no one is talking about."

 

 

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