Category Archives: cable tv
Don’t Question Authority
The Justice Department has labeled Fox News reporter James Rosen a co-conspirator with Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Kim was charged with violating the Espionage Act for divulging classified information. The feds used the co-conspirator charge to violate Rosen’s first amendment rights. They snooped through his personal email account, phone records and his parents’ phone number. The way Eric Holder’s Justice Department sees it, asking questions about classified information (i.e., journalism) is illegal.
Kirsten Powers reminded readers that the Obama administration and its posse have had it in for Fox News from the get go, insisting that Fox isn’t a real news operation. Much of the mainstream-media remained silent on that charge though Jack Tapper would be an exception. When Tapper asked where the White House got off saying thousands of Fox employees don’t work for a media organization Jay Carney replied, “that’s our opinion”.
Obama recently told Ohio State students not to question authority. Looks like he really meant it.
Pack Up Your Troubles
The president is so down in the dumps that ABC’s Johathan Karl asked him if he was out of juice.
The sequestration gambit to cause Americans as much misery as possible seems to be flopping. The FAA managed to leverage a 4% cut in spending growth into a 10% across the board cut in air traffic controllers. (Congress put a stop to that and promptly hopped on planes and jetted home.)
The whole thing struck me as a weird kind of job action by The Man – Obama. James Taranto saw it the same way in the WSJ.
Shelter in Place
Law enforcement seem to love the media until they don’t. The digital wanted poster of the two Boston Marathon suspects was displayed on millions of screens and quickly led to the demise of suspect number one, and the capture of number two. The same media, however, inadvertantly gave away police positions with initial images of the search.
News Not Fit to Print
How do you draw an editorial cartoon about murdering babies after botched abortions? Especially when readers won’t know what you’re talking about because the national media are ignoring the story?
That’s the case with the Gosnell murder trial in Philadelphia. I’ve been following it for a while on Fox News and a few blogs like Breitbart but nobody else (except the Philadelphia Inquirer and other local outlets) seemed to be covering it. That is until Kirsten Powers blew the lid off in a USA Today article about the curious incuriosity of the mainstream media.
With the cat out of the bag, others, including Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic and Megan Mcardle in The Daily Beast, began to question the media lack of interest. By that time it was Friday, the traditional bad news dump day.
Woodward
Jimmy Carter’s former pollster, Pat Caddell, thinks Obama is the most Nixon-like president in 40 years. Wonder what Woodward thinks? Considering the way some of his colleagues have turned on him, Mark Steyn thinks Woodward is “about one news cycle away from being revealed as on the take from the Koch brothers and the real father of Trig Palin.”
None of that for Kathleen Parker – “This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script.”
