Open Mouth, Insert Foot, …

Posted on 27 July, 2020 by wjjhoge

Fox News reports that Brian Stelter may have breached the confidentiality agreement that is part of the settlement of the defamation lawsuit Nicholas Sandmann brought against CNN. Sandmann’ lawyer is quoted as saying, “This retweet by @brianstelter may have cost him his job at @CNN. It is called breach of confidentiality agreement. Brian Stelter is a liar. I know how to deal with liars.” The retweet in question speculated on the amount paid by CNN in the settlement.

Pro tip: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: … a time to keep silence, and a time to speak …”

Well, Its Name Is Cable News Network

Posted on 4 April, 2020 by wjjhoge

Jon Gabriel has a post over at Ricochet suggesting that CNN might do well to change its format back to news reporting.

If CNN wants to survive our fractured media landscape, they need to take desperate action: abandon their failed politics-only format and return to news and information. …

You know, actual news and information. Families who keep the TV on all day would just leave it on CNN. Those taking a break from the home office would dip in every few hours for the latest. Over time, the network could replace high-priced pontificators with calm newsreaders. The public would be better informed and perhaps further mitigate the pandemic.

Yeah, and with better ratings, ad revenue would increase.

BTW, tonight is the anniversary of the most important news story I was ever involved in reporting. It was in 1968 when I was 20 years old. As the evening newscaster on a clear channel AM station I had a cumulative 2,000,000 listeners that evening—more than almost any CNN program.

Newspeak or Newsspeak?

Posted on 19 March, 2020 by wjjhoge

So far, the MSM and Big Tech haven’t been able to exercise sufficient control over the Internet to install an effective memory hole function. For now, they’ve been limited to trying to change the debate by trying to change the usage and meaning of words. There’s an odd kind of precision in their sloppy language that tries to strip words of their nuanced meanings.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well–better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

…

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

One of the problems with the Internet is that it can gum up the works when Our Betters want to erase their previous statement which are no longer politically correct. The Main Stream Media’s previous use of the now-raaaaaacist terms Wuhan virus or Chinese virus are too well backed up to allow them to credibly challenge Donald Trump’s using them. Their words won’t disappear, and too many people remember what they meant when they were spoken.

We need to remember that in the Real World 2 + 2 = 4.

Sometimes I Feel Like a Bowl of Petunias

Posted on 29 January, 2020 by wjjhoge

There’s a scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the use of a spaceship’s infinite improbability drive causes two guided missiles to be changed into less threatening objects several miles above the surface of the planet Magrathea. One becomes a whale which asks all sorts of questions about its new situation as it plummets to its death. The other is a bowl of petunias which simply says, “Oh, no, not again.” That’s pretty much my reaction these days when I hear someone claiming to be a victim because he was truthfully quoted. I’ve had to endure multiple LOLsuits alleging defamation because this blog wrote truthfully about certain people.

The latest bit of such whining comes from Don Lemon, Wajahat Ali, and Rick Wilson. They are upset because of a Republican ad which uses a video clip from CNN which shows them expressing their distaste for Trump supporters. Wajahat Ali would have us believe that he is being bullied by being truthfully quoted.

Yeah. Right.

My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has a post up appropriately mocking Lemon, Ali, and Wilson. Go read it.

Consider the Source

Posted on 21 October, 2019 by wjjhoge

CNN has a post up titled Elijah Cummings was a man of dignity and discipline.

It’s by Jesse Jackson.

Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Skipped the “Debate”

Posted on 31 July, 2019 by wjjhoge

I was working overtime on a new project last night, so I skipped watching the CNN-sponsored Democrat news event in Detroit last night. Now that I’ve read some of the coverage, it appears that I may have missed something interesting. One thing that stands out is which candidate generated the most Google searches during the debate.My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has been following the Williamson campaign since March. When he covered Williamson’s campaigning in South Carolina last March, he was the only national reporter on the story. If you’re not reading The Other McCain, you should be.

I’m Not Sure How Much of These is Satire

Posted on 19 April, 2019 by wjjhoge

The Babylon Bee was in top form yesterday. First, it zinged the Collusion Truthers.Then it zapped a sizable crowd of Trump supporters.Donald Trump is a flawed individual. While the Mueller Report does find that Trump and the people around him did not engage in the “collusion” with a foreign power during 2016 election (or obstruct an investigation into something that didn’t happen), it also reveals some of the tawdry behavior that went on during the election campaign and its aftermath.

OTOH, imagine that Hillary Clinton had won the election. Would the Democrat’s interactions with Ukraine have been investigated? If so, would she have refrained from exercising executive privilege to conceal any special counsel’s report?

I’ll leave it to the Gentle Reader to puzzle through that exercise in alternate history.

Where’s the Kaboom?

Posted on 25 October, 2018 by wjjhoge

The real news is that at least one of the bombs was fake.

CNN’s Bottom 20 List

Posted on 1 September, 2018 by wjjhoge

Actually, it’s a bottom 21. The Daily Caller has a list of 20 bungled stories carried by CNN plus the “we never lie” Michael Cohen/Lanny Davis/Robert Mueller story of the past week or so. Although CNN hasn’t doubled down on all of them like the Cohen’s-Gotta-Rat-Out-Trump fantasy, many have gone uncorrected.

It’s a long piece, but real the whole thing.

Is the reason they have CNN in the airports to make the TSA look good by contrast?

Don’t Know Much About History

Posted on 10 July, 2018 by wjjhoge

CNN’s Legal Analyst: The Founders never envisioned Supreme Court justices living past their 50s (H/T: The Washington Free Beacon)

Here’s the roster of the first six justices of the Supreme Court who were a nominated under the Judiciary Act of 1789 by George Washington and confirmed by the Senate:

John Rutledge, confirmed 1789, born 1739, age 50
John Blair, confirmed 1790, born 1732, age 58
John Jay, confirmed 1789, born 1740, age 49
William Cushing, confirmed 1790, born 1732, age 58
James Iredell, confirmed 1790, born 1751, age 39
James Wilson, confirmed 1790, born 1742, age 48

Four of the original justices lived past their 50s: Rutledge, 61; Blair, 68; Jay, 83; and Cushing, 78.

UPDATE—In fact, at least one of the Founders, the author of Federalist No. 78, explicitly stated that lifetime judicial appointments were critical to the proper functioning of the judiciary.

Upon the whole, there can be no room to doubt that the convention acted wisely in copying from the models of those constitutions which have established GOOD BEHAVIOR as the tenure of their judicial offices, in point of duration; and that so far from being blamable on this account, their plan would have been inexcusably defective, if it had wanted this important feature of good government.

Read the whole thing.

Time for an Intervention?

Posted on 2 February, 2018 by wjjhoge

Sarah Hoyt has a piece over at PJ Media suggesting that CNN has become a Trump-Rage-Aholic and that it’s time for an intervention.

You know when the crazy uncle gets to this point, it’s time for detox.

Well, it does seem that CNN is powerless over Donald Trump and that their life has become unmanageable.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE—The sticking point may be coming to believe that there’s a power greater than themselves.

Women and Minorities Hardest Hit

Posted on 20 February, 2013 by wjjhoge

Soledad O’Brien out at CNN.

Really, is CNN still on?

Friday’s Asteroid

Posted on 10 February, 2013 by wjjhoge

First of all, asteroids aren’t caused by global warming. They’re the floor sweepings left over from the formation of the planets billions of years ago. Some of them are pretty big. Indeed, one of them, Ceres, is large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. Most of them are tiny.

Several tons worth of the tiny asteroids collide with the Earth each day. Almost all of them burn up in the atmosphere as meteors. A few make it to the ground as meteorites. Every thousand years or so, a large meteor weighing tens of tons smacks into the ground releasing energy equivalent to a nuclear weapon. This happened in Siberia in 1908. Larger, Earth-shattering kabooms occur every few million years when an asteroid several hundred metres (or larger) in diameter hits. A large strike about 66 million years ago ended the Age of Dinosaurs.

This Friday’s asteroid will miss us. If it were to hit, the energy release would be roughly equivalent to a 2 megaton nuke, inconvenient for the local neighborhood but hardly Earth-shattering.

We frequently discover new asteroids. One was discovered in 1998 as the long blue streak in this archival image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This Just In–Scorpions Sting Frogs

Posted on 23 September, 2012 by wjjhoge

CNN found Ambassador Stevens’ diary on the floor of the sacked compound in Benghazi where he was attacked. While they did not directly use any of the material in the journal, they did derive tips from it or use it to confirm other sources. One bit of information led CNN to report that the ambassador felt that he was on an al-Qaeda hit list and concerned about security in Libya.

The State Department has attacked CNN for its reporting, claiming that the network breached a confidentiality agreement with the ambassador’s family. Ann Althouse is having trouble buying the government’s line.

If the argument is that CNN broke an agreement, I want precision and I don’t see it. I repeat that I’m glad CNN got this information to us and didn’t supinely pass along the State Department’s talking points (which were wrong).

Yes, it looks as if the State Department is more concerned with covering up its mistakes before, during, and after the ambassador’s death than telling the truth. Stacy McCain writes:

While CNN’s conduct is certainly subject to criticism, that pales in comparison to the “worldwide significance” – the legitimate news value — of the story they were reporting. Attempting to distract from this important story by trying to indict CNN before the court of public opinion? Predictable and wrong …

Completely predictable. Governments caught screwing up will misdirect or lie. Journalists should understand that even their favored politicians will. It’s their nature.

Just as a scorpion will sting a frog, dooming both, so a lying politician can pull his pet journalists down with himself.

The Backpedaling Begins with CNN

Posted on 30 August, 2012 by wjjhoge

CNN actually checks the facts on Paul Ryan’s speech and finds:

Verdict: True, but incomplete.

A more accurate finding might be Inconveniently True.

There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

Posted on 14 August, 2012 by wjjhoge

Some folks are all atwitter over Soledad O’Brien using leftist talking points as the prep for an interview. There’s little new here—except for Ms. O’Brien being clumsy enough to get caught.

Bias in the newsroom is old hat. Barry Goldwater once said:

I won’t say that the papers misquote me, but I sometimes wonder where Christianity would be today if some of those reporters had been Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Et Tu, Wolf

Posted on 13 August, 2012 by wjjhoge

Wolf Blitzer held Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s feet to the fire over bogus claims that the Ryan budget as passed by the House of Representatives will change Medicare coverage for those currently on Medicare. Video here. Indeed, his plan doesn’t affect anyone currently 55 or older.

The left is losing control of the narrative, and they’re starting to panic. It’s going to get very, very ugly.

Kimberlin v. Blogosphere—Late Edition

Posted on 30 May, 2012 by wjjhoge

Fox gets with the program and begins coverage. Video here. Ed Driscoll wonders why CNN let Fox scoop them on the Swatting of one of their contributors.

Questions are being asked about abuse of the 501(c)(3) status of Brett Kimberlin’s not-for-profits.

A Lack Of Technical Difficulties

Posted on 8 March, 2012 by wjjhoge

Before he died, Andrew Breitbart promised a vetting process for the President to replace the one the Main Stream Media failed to do in 2008. The first bit of tape has hit, and, as the blogosphere talks about it, the left is beginning to push back. It’s a bit strange that they would push back so hard if, as they say, the first tape is insignificant.

The main Breitbart site has a post up with a video of Soledad O’Brien shooting herself in the foot while interviewing Joel Pollack, Editor-in-Chief at brietbart.com. The post asks these questions:

[W]here was the media four years ago? Why didn’t PBS air the entire footage, uninterrupted, without overdubbing so as to actually hear the remarks? If the video was “nothing,” why did Olgetree hide it?

Good questions? I might have an answer to the one about PBS having to overdub commentary to hide the original audio. Unlike another president’s embarrassing tape, this one didn’t have an 18 minute gap.

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