Stories to Watch: 5/4/11

OK, so I've got the mobile versions up at my blogspot blogs and, for good measure, I added a printer-friendly button at the bottom of each post. This weekend, I'm probably going to add javascript animation to the buttons on the Tumblr blog. Busy, busy, busy. Now here's the news...


President Obama decides against releasing postmortem bin Laden photos. But Fox's Shepard Smith threatens a FOIA request. It probably wouldn't go anywhere, since the reason for keeping them locked up could arguably be termed "a matter of national security." But how ironic is it that Fox is now the home of "screw national security?"


Mittens Romney's campign chair quits over the candidate's constant flip-flopping. That might scar.


House Democrats will force a vote tomorrow "on repealing billions of dollars in oil industry tax breaks." A tough choice for the GOP; dance with them what brung 'em or face the "in the pocket of big oil" ads with dinging gas pump meters in November.


Speaking of House Republicans, they took another hopeless whack at repealing healthcare reform and micromanaging women's decisions to abort. Reminder: they still haven't done a damned thing about jobs. Apparently, they believe they were elected to be grandstanding jackasses. We'll see how that works out for them.

Finally, there are at least three gullible Republican senators.

Griper Blade: A Self-Inflicted Wound

I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps, and the story in our family was is that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months, right. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain. That’s why you know the, this idea of making sure that every single veteran when they are discharged are screened for post traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need, that’s why its so important.
-Barack Obama, Memorial Day 2008

Turns out that wasn't 100% true. It wasn't Auschwitz, which was liberated by the Soviets, but Buchenwald. It wasn't Obama's uncle, it was Obama's great uncle -- which of course, is like calling your second cousin your cousin. I called my Great Aunt Lula my "Aunt" Lula, even though she was my grandmother's sister. Maybe it's a midwestern thing, but I'm guessing it's a pretty common familial shorthand nationwide.

So the big deal is that Barack Obama said that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz. As "gaffes" go, this is nowhere near as glaring as confusing Sunnis, Shia, Iran, and al Qaeda might be. In terms of which is more topical, politics and religion in the middle east rate a little higher...

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Griper Blade: The Incomplete Story

It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last. [STATIC] I asked to see one of the barracks. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, 5 to a bunk. As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling towards the latrine. I saw it but will not describe it.
--Edward R. Murrow, 1945, broadcasting from Buchenwald Death Camp, Germany

The idea of the "objective" reporter is a recent development, historically speaking. Edward R. Murrow wasn't the objective observer. Whether reporting from the rooftops on the London blitz or from the newly liberated Buchenwald, Murrow's reporting was emotionally charged -- and opinionated. It was Murrow who said, "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home," and stood up to Sen. McCarthy.

Today, the objective repeater of facts has replaced the crusading journalist. Except when the facts are problematic. Today's news media are so afraid of perceived bias that they report things that aren't factual and give them the same weight as fact. Global warming deniers and creationists are given time in the news, in order to tell "both sides of the story." But there's only one side to these stories and this supposed "other side" is pure horsecrap. The only reason that we don't often hear from Holocaust deniers and people who think the world is flat is because those particular groups of nuts haven't dropped the bucks on high-powered PR firms. Pay someone a million and you'll be a talking head on CNN, arguing that the sun orbits the Earth or that the greatest threat the US faces today is a middle eastern third world nation and its WMD.

This is what FARK founder Drew Curtis refers to as "equal time for nutjobs."

...in some cases there flat-out isn't another side. Take moon landings for example. Any time moon landings are mentioned in the media, they always have to go get a paragraph of comment from the nutjobs who think the moon landing was faked. This is not up for debate; the moon landings happened. Equal Time for Nutjobs is the kind of article that gives equal time to a group that doesn't quite deserve to have its voice heard...

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