Note: Today marks the beginning of a regular column here on NewsBusters called "Media Roundup." It'll keep track of that day's media news. Feel free to post a link to other stories you see in the comments for each entry.
Sugar Ray Nagin is still in the news for that horrible chocolate comment. I found the back tracking to be even more ridiculous than the original comment; "Do you know anything about chocolate? How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talkin' about." I know enough about dark chocolate to know that when you pour milk on it you get more of a chocolate cereal than a delicious drink. Calls to determine where that leaves Asians in New Orleans went unreturned.
Readers of the Louisville Courier-Journal may not know what we're talking about. Their Ombud explains:
Nagin's reference to "chocolate New Orleans" had been edited out of that same story in these pages. Instead, our version read, "Nagin also promised that New Orleans will be rebuilt and again will be 'a majority African American city.' " So, what gives? The short answer: We messed up.
There has been a lot of messing up by the media lately. Susan Orlean apparently messed up when she promoted the fact that she is rich because it "calls severely into question the journalist's ability to identify with the ordinary people about whom one is called upon, at least once in a while, to write." What the heck, it wouldn't be the first time journalists hid the truth from the public.
CNN finally hired a conservative talker, Glenn Beck. Media Matters is all flustered about the whole thing, but in the end they are just ticked off they are going to have to watch another hour of conservative TV every day. In a typically liberal hate-filled discharge, Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle referred to Beck as being "just to the right of Attila the Hun." That stale old line gets used a lot, like Attila the Hun was a modern Republican. I will therefore start using these phrases for liberals; "just to the left of Benedict Arnold", "just to the left of Julius Rosenberg", and "just to the left of John Walker Lindh."
There is still no word on kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll, and one reporter is asking for prayers. Die hard secularists that they are, many newspapers are pleaing rather than praying. Forget for the moment that the legal definition of prayer is the request of a complaintant for aid or relief.
Hugh Hewitt got a look at the journalists of tomorrow with a visit to Columbia School of Journalism. Don't get your hopes up for a change in reporting:
The "blue" nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro. Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities. No one had a background in the physical sciences. No one owned a gun. All supported same-sex marriage. Three had been in a house of worship the previous week. Six read blogs. None of them recognized the phrase "Christmas Eve in Cambodia"--though Shapiro not only got the allusion but knew the date of the John Kerry Senate speech in which he made the false claim about his Vietnam war experience. Three quarters of them hope to make more than $100,000 as a journalist, 11 had voted for John Kerry, and one for George Bush (three are from abroad and not eligible, and one didn't vote for either candidate). I concluded by asking them if they "think George Bush is something of a dolt." There was unanimous agreement with this proposition, one of the widely shared views within elite media and elsewhere on the left. The president's Harvard MBA and four consecutive victories over Democrats judged "smarter" than him haven't made even a dent in that prejudice.
The last 3 or 4 paragraphs of that article are worth reading. I won't spoil it for you, but it looks like the future of the media is going to be up to the bloggers. On that note, don't miss Peggy Noonan's take on mainstream media flaming out fast.
