The conservative media problem

Most Republican pols refused to call on Trump to admit defeat even after it became obvious to everyone in the real world that Joe Biden had won the election. These pols are undoubtedly relieved that Government Services Administration head Emily W. Murphy finally certified Biden the winner on Monday, 23 November 2020, removing the need for them to duck into a closet every time a reporter approached.

Still, those Republicans aren't out of the woods: one angry tweet from the domestic Dear Leader and millions of Republican voters will turn on the targeted politician.

So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway. However, is it true?

Trump does have a disturbingly firm hold on nearly half the voting population. This Reuters piece, "Why Republican voters say there's 'no way in hell' Trump lost", includes statements from fifty Trump voters, all of whom "said they believed the election was rigged or in some way illegitimate".

Considering the numerous statements from both state and federal elections officials asserting that no significant election fraud took place anywhere in the country, Trump supporters' belief that fraud took place is remarkable. It's also quite bad from a state-of-the-country point of view. Nearly half the electorate believing a lie about a foundational element of our republic, elections, is a recipe for disaster. Worse, Trump's supporters seem willing to believe any accusation he levels, no matter how outlandish. By all appearances, they've surrendered their skepticism and given their judgment over to him.

Yet Trump didn't gain his stranglehold on his supporters through hypnosis. He got it from good old repetition and amplification: he said (often untrue) things, repeated them often, and got others to repeat them as well. It's the way propaganda has worked since the dawn of time.

And while social media, notably Twitter, played its part, Charlie Wurzel at the New York Times noted recent research "that suggested 'social media played only a secondary and supportive role' in the recent high-profile voting disinformation campaign".

Mr. Trump’s “position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media,” the Harvard researchers argued.

The "media elites" would be people like the opinion hosts at Fox News, along with numerous radio talk show hosts. And that brings me to my point.

The researchers are right.

We will continue to be in serious trouble as long as high-profile media figures — mostly on the far right of the political spectrum — give credibility and oxygen to hare-brained conspiracy theories and outright lies.

No question that courage is unknown among most Republican elected officials these days, but they're not entirely to blame. The party has been captured by the rabidly, blindly zealous mob drunk on the fever dreams peddled by irresponsible rabble-rousers, including Trump, who see in electoral loss a massive conspiracy to deny Trump his second term. The mob also has been conditioned to accept Trump as savior, a dangerous position to which to elevate anyone.

This conditioning has happened in plain sight on right-wing media outlets. For years people like Sean Hannity have instilled in their listeners and viewers the idea that their ideological opponents are not their neighbors (and friends and family members, for that matter), but their sworn enemies in a literally deadly battle for control of the nation's soul and destiny. The so-called mainstream media is corrupt and evil, as are elected Democrats. Trust could be given only to the voices on Fox News and other right-wing media.

Seeing in Trump a figure that galvanized the right in a way that hadn't been seen since Reagan, right-wing media glommed onto him, riding his rocket into space. In return for giving him a largely uncritical megaphone through which to send (and re-send, and re-send) his desired messages, he gave them huge audiences. Individual pundits learned that uncritically repeating his talking points was the way to hold those audiences. Dissenting from him guaranteed controversy and audience disaffection.

Giving the people what they want is certainly a recipe for success in business. It's not responsible news coverage, though. It sure as hell isn't responsible political discourse, not when you pander to people's darkest, most paranoid, most angry, most hateful impulses.

Pundits aren't "reporters" as such but they're supposed to color within the lines of the facts. The trouble with right-wing media is that it has long disdained inconvenient facts. If you say that mainstream media disdains different inconvenient facts, you might be right. What mainstream media doesn't do, though, is promote garbage conspiracy theories day after day after day. Mainstream media also doesn't declare its allegiance to a messianic figure and give him its imprimatur of credibility.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what right-wing media outlets have been doing during the entirety of Trump's time in office, and even before then. "Birtherism" wasn't a thing before Fox News and company got a hold of it and repeated it ad nauseam. "Pizzagate" and "QAnon" were plucked from deserved obscurity by right-wing media, then repeated uncritically (and, needless to say, without a shred of evidence) until the audience could sing along.

We're still living through, and dying from, the public-health catastrophe that is "Masks don't work" (and its relatives, like "the virus is a hoax" and "masks are dangerous"), another patently false and actively harmful garbage conspiracy theory that panders to the most delusional wishful thinking.

Now the choir's belting out "Trump was robbed" and the audience has, again, learned the tune by heart.

It would certainly help if more Republican lawmakers and officials would condemn bullshit when they hear it. But it's just as important to condemn the right-wing media that is peddling the bullshit to an eager and largely uncritical audience. By ginning up a fake reality that caters to the audience's dearest wishes, those media outlets encourage that audience to behave irresponsibly and to demand flatly unrealistic and often dangerous policies.

Mendacious right-wing media outlets poison our body politic just as surely as a heroin dealer poisons an addict.

The body politic can't even begin to recover until right-wing media stops injecting the poison of lies, bullshit, paranoia, and hatred. The rich men and women funding and/or controlling those media outlets know this.

It's time to put their feet to the fire — to make them confront the sickness they've induced in their audiences.

Trump and condolences

Trump said something insensitive to the widow of a soldier recently killed in Niger. She also said Trump struggled to remember her husband's name. And Trump has been in a name-calling spat with a Congressional Democrat, Frederica S. Wilson, over not just his initial remarks to the widow but also his subsequent efforts to deny that he said what he said. Even White House chief of staff John Kelly has gotten into the fray, backing his boss and belittling Wilson.

This is a big deal to the family, of course, and I can't blame them (including the soldier's mother, who has also weighed in) for being upset.

However, why the hell are the rest of us following this story?

Trump didn't commit gross malfeasance here. He was simply Trump, a man who doesn't feel empathy — who, by the evidence of a lifetime's worth of stories, doesn't even comprehend it on an intellectual level. And be honest: most of us are not good at consoling even those we know well, and the most skilled and empathetic can drop the ball now and then.

So at a human level, however much you may hate Trump, cut him some slack about the call. You might have stuck your foot in your mouth, too, if you were simultaneously contending with the other demands of the presidency.

His subsequent denial and fight-picking with Wilson are a different matter, of course: he was a whiny idiot for getting into it with her, and Kelly lost a lot of his own patina by joining his boss in the pile-on. Whether you think Wilson behaved appropriately by calling Trump out in the first place, Trump and Kelly have made things worse for the White House.

But again, this is business as usual for Trump the troglodyte. It's a classic distraction from his other woes, a distraction that takes advantage of the halo the country has built up around the military since Reagan's days. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even had the gall to say to a reporter, "If you want to go after General Kelly that's up to you but I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate".

It's important to know that the White House press secretary has the same contempt for the First Amendment and the role of the press in our republic that her boss does. Nevertheless, again, this is something we already knew: any Trump loyalist is going to parrot his undemocratic sentiments and probably shares his authoritarian instincts at some level.

So, whether or not you believe Rachel Maddow's hypothesis (which some might call a conspiracy theory) that Trump picked this fight to distract from diplomatic missteps in Chad and adjoining West African nations, the fact is that the Trump administration's inflaming of the controversy surrounding this condolence call is a deliberate distraction from bigger issues.

Stop rewarding the media for keeping this story alive.

And media, stop falling for the oldest trick in Trump's playbook. Get your heads out of your asses. Tell us what he doesn't want us to know — what we need to know.

Whom do you trust?

The New York Times has a piece on how just one uninformed tweet about supposed busing-in of anti-Trump protesters went viral. The buses, it turned out, had been chartered for a tech conference.

The guy who made the original tweet claimed he was a busy man who couldn't be expected to check every little fact, and he seemed genuinely surprised his tweet went viral. Um, okay. Tweet in haste, repent at leisure.

Still, the people who made the tweet viral aren't exactly blameless. In this day of so-called "citizen journalism", you're responsible for what you share.

It's popular in some quarters to deride the mainstream media as untrustworthy and biased. In the strictest sense it's true that big-name news outlets make mistakes and have implicit (or explicit) biases. However, it's also true that they have policies in place to keep them from intentional errors, and for the most part the people who work at these outlets don't do it for the money: they do it because they believe in reporting the truth.

The guy who tweets out a random observation may believe he's reporting the truth, too. But does he really care whether he's doing so? The guy who tweeted about the buses didn't care.

If you don't trust the mainstream media, whom do you trust to tell you what's going on in the world? Anyone, whether you know his motives or not? Only those who say things with which you agree?

In that case, you might as well be talking to yourself. And in fact, if you take your distrust far enough, that's exactly where you'll wind up.

Media and a movement at the University of Missouri

A New York Times piece by Austin Huguelet and Daniel Victor centers on the effort by a student photographer to take pictures of a tent city protesters had erected on campus.

The article paints a sympathetic portrait of photographer Tim Tai and other reporters, while implicitly demonizing the protesters. One professor of mass media is singled out for an exceedingly un-journalistic remark: "Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here." (The reporter in question wasn't Tai.)

This is an astonishingly sloppy piece by the Times. Nowhere does it indicate that the reporters even tried to contact the protesters to get their side of the story. Bits of quoted remarks suggest that the protesters might have been trying to protect an area set aside for their own privacy; this is an impulse anyone who has ever been the unwilling center of a media story (e.g., a natural disaster) can understand.

When one is in the midst of a newsworthy event, there will be unwanted scrutiny. If you had a hand in creating that event, as the protesters did, you have a lot less room to complain of that scrutiny. That doesn't mean you have no room to complain. You haven't entirely given up your privacy. The Times' article is deeply unfair to the protesters. It's the kind of piece that makes people suspicious that the media exists solely to report on — or perhaps to gin up — conflict.

Olbermann's gear shift

If you watch ESPN you probably know that Keith Olbermann was suspended for the rest of this week for tweets regarding Penn State University students.

The details don't interest me. What does interest me is why Olbermann keeps getting himself into this kind of hot water.

When most of us get mad enough to lash out indiscriminately, we literally can't think straight. If we can think straight enough to put together a cogent argument about why we're mad, we're not mad enough to lash out indiscriminately. Olbermann isn't like most of us, though. He can put together a cogent reason for being mad, but still demonstrate the lack of self-control associated with, say, road rage.

I get why he gets pissed off about things. Stupidity and hypocrisy are his buttons, and you can imagine that those buttons get pushed every single day. ("Should they?" is a good queestion: going around in a state of perpetual outrage isn't healthy, or fun.) But it seems like he has no "off" switch. Or perhaps a better analogy would be, once you get him into gear, neither he nor anybody else can put the brakes on, or even get him into neutral.

He'd have a better employment record, and would be a more effective advocate for the things he believes in, if he knew how to switch out of fifth gear.

A telling sign

The online New York Times includes, at the bottom of each article, a list of other articles in the same section or the same topic.

For a piece on a new TV show based on Eddie Huang's memoir Fresh Off the Boat, the related articles are all TV-related. Wait, that's not true: there's a piece about ticket sales for the Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But of links to other articles about Asian Americans, nary a one.

If the piece had been about African Americans or Jews or Hispanics, I'm pretty sure there would have been links to several other pieces about some aspect of those groups.

I think this speaks volumes for the low profile Asian Americans have in the mass media.

Perhaps this is only numbers talking: Asian Americans are only a small percentage of the U.S. population. I strongly suspect Native Americans are in the same boat, profile-wise, and for the same reason.

Conservative vs. mainstream media

Conor Friedersdorf's recent piece in The Atlantic, "How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File", is pretty much exactly what its title promises.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.

Sooner or later, ignoring reality comes back to haunt you.

"Please don't talk about me when I'm gone"

In a New York Times article, the gunman who killed twelve people in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, was described thusly by the chancellor of his undergraduate university, UC Riverside:

“I think he was kind of quirky, just the way you expect smart people to be,” the school’s chancellor, Timothy P. White, said in an interview on Saturday. “Quirky in the sense that he probably had a wry sense of humor. He kept to himself more than he socialized. But he was social. He wasn’t a hermit or an introvert. He wasn’t a loner.”

It sounds like this man was groping for a way to describe Holmes as a weirdo without getting the university sued.

UC Riverside has over 18,000 undergraduates at present. Are we supposed to believe that its chancellor just happens to be familiar with its most notorious recent graduate? Anyway, if White had any idea who Holmes was he wouldn't have had to theorize about Holmes' sense of humor.

Tim, this is why big institutions have spokespersons. Let them do their jobs.

But White isn't the problem, though he contributed to it. The problem is that articles that try to read the tea leaves of an attacker's life after the fact are useless. They seek reasons and explanations: laudable goals, but impossible to attain. Time-limited reporters scurry about looking for anybody who might have known the subject, digging for factoids that can be put together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces.

The reporters and their news organizations call the result a portrait of the killer. That's a lie: what they have is a connect-the-dots sketch. The reporters have an image of the subject in mind before they start interviewing; what they want from the interviewees is a dot that can be fitted into that mental image. That's why all these reports sound the same, and also why they're universally a waste of time.

Murdoch as godfather

Courtesy Daring Fireball, a pointer to an AdWeek article by Michael Wolff about the Murdoch empire's resemblance to the Mafia.

It’s all about the organization. It’s an organization all about doing what Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine your boss imagines Rupert wants done. There are few companies as large as News Corp. that are so devoted and in thrall to one man.

(There's at least one other large company that operates that way: Apple Inc. It was curious that Gruber, of all people, didn't make that point.)

While my instinct is to mistrust pile-ons of the sort that ... well, just about everyone is indulging in at News Corp.'s expense, I can't help believing that the characteristics displayed by Fox News -- endemic, brazen hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement, most notably -- would not be tolerated were they not implicitly endorsed right up to the top level of management. I therefore have no trouble believing Wolff's withering take on Murdoch and News Corp.

Americans need to know more

This Newsweek article, provocatively entitled "How Ignorant are Americans?", is pretty popular on The Browser right now. At first I wasn't inclined to pay it much heed: hand-wringing about American ignorance is its own cottage industry, and has been for decades. However, I finally read it and was mildly encouraged by a bit of research noted at the end of the article:

For years, Stanford communications professor James Fishkin has been conducting experiments in deliberative democracy. The premise is simple: poll citizens on a major issue, blind; then see how their opinions evolve when they’re forced to confront the facts. What Fishkin has found is that while people start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs of the budget.

However, that brings us to the problem of what constitutes a trusted source of information. Far too many people mistrust the news media these days, and I'm hard-pressed to argue that they're wrong. I doubt anyone can claim that his or her favorite news organization hasn't made mistakes that cast doubt on its trustworthiness. Also, no one can say whether factual errors are caused by sloppiness or bias.

A more troubling question is whether enough of us want to find trustworthy sources of information. If you believe most media observers, most of us seek out media outlets that present news slanted to reinforce our beliefs. It could be because we think we're in a culture war and we need to support our allies. It could be because we're so confused by the claims of every media outlet to be The Source Of Unbiased, Reliable Information that we've thrown up our hands and simply handed ourselves over to whatever source is least likely to insult us. Whatever the reason, this pernicious habit of balkanizing ourselves into echo chambers is a tall, perhaps unbreachable obstacle to getting to Fishkin's promised land of a well-informed population capable of determining rational responses to its problems.

Planted callers on talk radio

Courtesy of Tablet, "a new read on Jewish life," a piece that discusses fake talk-radio calls, calls scripted and performed by paid professionals. The calls are never revealed to be scripted.

One actor who auditioned for the "Premiere On Call" service decided to look into his would-be employer:

[He] learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.

The next time you find yourself getting emotional over some talk show caller's tale, you might want to consider the possibility you're being played.

It's bad enough to wonder whether Glenn Beck is a fiery truth-teller or an outrageous character portrayed by an entertainer coincidentally named Glenn Beck. Now we have to wonder about the callers to his show, too?

We assume talk shows are fueled by ordinary people responding to the host and guests. We expect that what we hear are the honest sentiments of people motivated enough to call in. We're inclined to believe their stories, to allow ourselves to share their emotions. They can shape our attitudes about issues of great import.

That's how it should be. That's how it must be. We must believe that these people, whom we only know indirectly as faces and voices on TV or just as voices on the radio, are genuine human beings just like ourselves. That belief is what holds us together as a nation, as a society.

If we stop believing that what we hear is genuine, if the putatively ordinary people whom we only know as voices and faces cease to be real to us, then we cease to care about them. We cease to care what happens to them. They become no more important to us than characters in a book or a movie.

That's why blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction is so dangerous. That's why treating "reality" as entertainment is such a despicable, even evil, act. It diminishes our trust in one another. And that trust is what holds us together.

Producers, if you're using Premiere On Call to pretend you have more interesting listeners than you do, you aren't polishing your show: you're undermining our society.

[UPDATE: Edited to clarify that the people I'm talking about are those we assume to be ordinary folks just like us.]

"How Bloomberg Does Business," Aram Roston

A piece in The Nation shows how well Bloomberg LP, the "media conglomerate" whose majority shareholder is New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, protects its interests. The conglomerate's assets, which include Bloomberg TV, seem to coordinate their efforts remarkably well. (A Bloomberg TV spokesperson denies that the news organization participates in such joint efforts.)

(Thanks to The Browser for the pointer.)

More on the HuffPo acquisition

Further to my thoughts on AOL acquiring the Huffington Post, Daily Beast contributor Randall Lane explores the deal's slightly odd terms:

AOL, even after its spinoff from Time Warner in 2009, remains a public company. So why did it pay almost completely in cash? (Just $15 million of the [$315 million] transaction is in stock.) Because while AOL clearly believes fully in The Huffington Post, Arianna and her squad just as clearly don't believe fully in AOL.

"AOL stock? Uh, no, we'd prefer compensation that will hold its value in five years, thanks."

Fellow Beast contributor Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) thinks the deal is "a slow-motion train wreck and will end in disaster." Not all his arguments are convincing but enough of them ring true that I'd be worried if I were an AOL shareholder.

Lyons portrays the match as salespeople meeting journalists. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong "is a sales guy," implicitly making HuffPo the journalists. One problem with thus romanticizing HuffPo's work is that HuffPo was routinely criticized for being a story aggregator, like Google News, rather than a content creator, like the New York Times. Story aggregation is to be strictly circumscribed at AOL: the leaked "AOL Way" slides (see my earlier entry) make clear that AOL is determined to keep all clicks in-house.

(Nothing wrong with story aggregators, by the way: I'm one myself, after all. However, I'm not charging you to read this.)

Lyons speculates -- whether his tongue is in his cheek, I don't know -- that the acquisition is part of a long-term strategy to consolidate outlets for ad dollars:

If the problem is that we have too many organizations chasing after the same ad dollars, why not roll everyone up and give advertisers fewer choices? Then we can bump the ad rates up. It worked in broadcast TV, when we had three big networks and they operated an oligopoly.

(Speaking of consolidation, the Daily Beast just merged with old-school newsmagazine Newsweek.)

The best tidbit to come out of Lyons' article is the probable reason HuffPo was available for acquisition:

Huffington and her partner Ken Lerer had raised $37 million in venture funding, much of it from Softbank Capital. In June 2009, as Softbank grew impatient for a return, the VC fund had installed Eric Hippeau, one of its partners, as CEO of Huffington Post. In our conversations, Hippeau talked about how he was determined to build a “strong and independent” business—which in the world of tech and media is code for, “We’re for sale.”

Hippeau, Lyons reports, is not joining AOL as part of the deal. 'Nuff said.

Lyons quotes Gawker's Nick Denton, pithily summing things up:

“AOL has gathered so many of our rivals— Huffington Post, Engadget, Techcrunch—in one place. The question: Is this a fearsome Internet conglomerate or simply a roach motel for once lively websites?”

Lane's and Lyons' pieces only strengthen my conviction that AOL just threw a pile of money down the drain -- again.

AOL buys Huff Post

Via Daring Fireball, a pointer to a New York Times article on the acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.

This comes on the heels of the apparent leak to Business Insider of an AOL internal slideshow describing how the company will achieve a higher profile and greater profitability. My cursory perusal of the first third of those slides suggests that AOL's profit-oriented mindset and strong desire to secure the largest possible audience will not mesh well with HuffPo's strong political stance.

And the idea of giving Arianna Huffington "oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone" strikes me as downright weird. What does Huffington know of managing such a diverse portfolio of properties? Why wouldn't AOL have a half-dozen more competent internal candidates available?

AOL smothered Netscape because AOL's management couldn't figure out what to do with such talented engineers. AOL has demonstrated no creative vision, none, in its entire history. Technologically and socially, AOL is a joke. Its sole claim to fame is that it kept sucking dialup fees off of people long after broadband was thought to have killed dialup.

The trouble with AOL's acquisition of HuffPo, from my perspective, is twofold:

1. HuffPo's contributors never had to worry about a big corporation looking over their shoulders, until now. How long will they and Huffington herself be immune to the pressures from above?
2. I very much doubt HuffPo's internal culture, which I can only imagine was pretty loose, will mesh well with the tightly structured, highly bureaucratic organization described in the leaked AOL slideshow.

AOL, I daresay, will have the same trouble with any acquisition that it had with Netscape: its bureaucratic dedication to trendspotting as a substitute for creative vision will suck the life from and crush the souls of any imaginative and creative people that join the company through those acquisitions. The best will leave, sooner or later, and AOL once again will find itself without anybody to do the real work of generating good content (or making good technology, as the case may be).

If I had to bet, I'd say Huffington sees this as her best chance to make real money off the Huffington Post brand. She'll stay at AOL just long enough to fulfill whatever contractual terms were required for the sale. Then she and most of the other HuffPo writers she brought to AOL will head for the exits. Their audiences will follow them, not the Huffington Post brand. All Huffington and her cronies have to do is not to let their credibility be too badly tarnished during their stints as AOL employees.

Limbaugh responds

Media Matters excerpted a segment from Rush Limbaugh's 20 January radio show in which he attempted to explain his "ching chong ching chong" gibbering the day before:

... Normally when you watch these things the translation is either simultaneous or else the foreign language spokesman will speak for a while, pause, the translator will translate it, then resume, then the translator will translate, then resume, and what I noticed was, it was the first time ever, they just kept going, both sides of this. So I'm saying, well, I -- I -- I have no idea of what Hu Jintao is saying, I wanted to report to you what he was saying, but there was a translation [sic], so all I could do is tell you what he said, which I did a remarkable job of doing for someone who doesn't know the language.

...

...

...

I'm sorry, I couldn't speak for a moment, as I had to pick my jaw up from the floor.

If I believed that Rush Limbaugh were a comedian as subversive as Stephen Colbert, that would have come off as a carefully considered, maybe even brilliant bit of self-parody.

However, Limbaugh's not a comedian. He apparently thinks of himself as an entertainer (see below), but he's no comedian, and he possesses neither the talent nor the intelligence to pull off subversive humor of the quality of Colbert's. What we got above was a stunning bit of chutzpah.

Perhaps a Yiddish term is appropriate, as Limbaugh continued by invoking a man who speaks only English and Yiddish, but for his livelihood pretended to speak many more languages:

But back in the old days, you know, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn't speak. But today [chuckles], today the left is exercised. I mean, I -- that was racism, it was bigotry, it was insulting. It wasn't. It was a service. I insulted the ChiComs. I insulted the ChiComs, I insulted 3000 years of Chinese history. I did, I insulted -- wait, here, let me find it here, there's a state senator in California by the name of Leland Yee, he's from San Francisco, and he claims that I owe the Chinese community an apology for mocking the speech. [apparently quoting] "State senator Leland Yee [of] San Francisco called on conservative radio personality" -- that's a new one -- "Rush Limbaugh to apologize to the ChiCom community today for mocking Chinese President Hu Jintao's speech."

Let's pause right there for a moment, and work backwards to analyze Limbaugh's impaired logic.

First of all, Limbaugh -- intentionally or not, we'll never know -- uses the term "ChiCom" in his (apparent) quotation of Senator Yee's statement. If you're a Dittohead, "ChiCom" is Limbaugh-speak for "Chinese Communist." Not being a Dittohead I don't know why he feels the need to abbreviate, but there it is. However, Yee did not use that term, nor the term "Communist," anywhere in his statement. According to multiple sources (including the SF Weekly, SFGate, and the San Mateo County Times), here is what Yee actually wrote:

Mr. Limbaugh owes the Chinese community an apology for this pointless and ugly offense.

Forget trying to mimic Mandarin, Rush, you need to learn to read English first.

Now, let's get back to the estimable Sid Caesar. Caesar, as Limbaugh notes, is a comedian, one of the giants of early television. One of Caesar's trademark riffs was speaking long passages of unintelligible gobbledygook that was nevertheless curiously suggestive of actual languages, such as Italian. Of course, Caesar performed his bits as part of comedy sketches on his TV shows. Is that what Limbaugh claims he was doing, performing a comedy sketch? Why, no: "it was a service."

Rush, you can claim you were playing the fool, as Caesar did, or you can claim you were performing a service for your audience, but you can't claim both, even in your weird little world. (By the way, I've heard your original "service," and to mention your extended gibbering in the same breath as Caesar's inspired verbal gymnastics is deeply insulting to Caesar.)

So I'll take him at his word: Limbaugh thinks he performed a service to his listeners, and did "a remarkable job" of it to boot.

You know, Rush, I knew ten-year-olds when I was growing up who performed the same service to their Asian classmates. By your standards, they, too, did "a remarkable job" even though they didn't know the language. Curiously, though, they didn't seem to take the same kind of pride in their job as you do: they only performed their service when no adults were around, and only when they outnumbered their Asian audience. When I was older, I learned the name of this service: "race-baiting."

Those ten-year-olds' excuse was that they were ten. What's yours?

I thought about continuing to quote from Media Matters' excerpt of Limbaugh's show, but what's the point? He race-baits at the level of a ten-year-old, and he defends himself with words and logic that only a ten-year-old could accept.

Is he still pulling 20 million people to his show? That's kind of a sad commentary on this country -- as is the ringing silence from most quarters on Limbaugh's gibbering. Aside from Asian-American elected officials, no one seems to be all that upset. I've seen more commentary and criticism on the Huckleberry Finn bowdlerization.

Limbaugh the bigot

Courtesy Agence France-Press, an article about the criticism of Rush Limbaugh for the most juvenile kind of anti-Asian bigotry. Speaking of the delay in translation that tripped up People's Republic of China President Hu Jintao's joint press conference with President Obama:

"He was speaking and they weren't translating. They normally translate every couple of words, but Hu Jintao was just going, 'ching chong, ching chong, chong,'" Limbaugh said, continuing his imitation at length.

The article quotes Reps. David Wu and Mike Honda smacking down Limbaugh in forceful but statesmanlike remarks. Thank you, gentlemen, but on behalf of us private citizens more evolved than Limbaugh I can afford to be a little more direct:

Rush, shouldn't you make it a little less transparent what an ugly racist pig you are?

Do your advertisers care that you're so singlemindedly intent on pandering to your fellow bigots, or is that exactly the demographic they want?

AV vs. text

In case the absence of "multimedia" in the form of pictures, embedded video, and embedded audio in this blog wasn't a clear enough sign, I'm biased toward plain old text.

I can cite all kinds of reasons, most of uncertain validity to normal people. However, the bottom line is that for the most part, the material I would find most compelling to mention, news footage, is just as readily communicable in plain text. I can gloss text far more readily than I can scan audio or video, too, which means I don't have to spend a lot of time to hit the highlights of a piece. This turns out to be incredibly important if, like me, you tend to lose hours in dictionaries and encyclopedias because you're endlessly fascinated by nearby or related items. It requires a good deal of willpower, and the aforementioned skimming ability, to prevent myself from losing even more hours on the Web. (I will not lightly sojourn to TV Tropes again, having been unable to tear myself away for the better part of twelve hours during my first visit.)

So I tailor this blog to suit myself as a visitor, which is a little weird, but there it is. Oh, and did I mention it's a hell of a lot easier to manage a blog whose contents can be represented as text files rather than multimedia presentations?