Month: November 2010

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about what Sean Hannity is,” – Roger Ailes.

The House GOP. Josh Marshall explains. He can run rings around their vapid abstractions.

David Aaronovitch declares, behind the London Times' paywall, that he isn't interested in the marriage of Prince William to what's-her-name. Norm Geras points out Aaronovitch's error:

[H]e's come out and said that he isn't interested and that he shares this lack of interest with many others. Can't he see that, by declaring a lack of interest, he's already partly caved in to the wave of interest he's lamenting? He's helped to feed it by adding his voice to the national conversation. What you've got to do is just totally ignore it. You show your lack of interest by not looking at anything about the royal wedding, not reading a single line, not even mentioning it. You say nothing at all. Like me.

Oh oh! I, too, am done for. I blame Aaronovitch; he set me up.

For those, unlike the Dish, who are following every detail of the engagement, Tina Brown's musings are among the best. Money quote:

What could [Kate] possibly have been doing all those years of trying to look busy? As she put it in the engagement interview, “working really hard” at the family business that sells children’s toys and paraphernalia based in Ashampstead, near their home in Berkshire. Now that she’s engaged to be married to the second in line to the throne, her life is about to get more boring still.

Dan Hopper opines:

Frankly, I’m slightly offended – not about the existence of gay trees, but that no straight marketing person thought that maybe us straight people have also been wanting ridiculous rainbow-colored Christmas trees for years, because they’re awesome? Some of us just enjoy colorful things, tree manufacturers, who are definitely reading this.

When I burn in hell, I'm sure I will be surrounded by rainbow Christmas trees under fluorescent lighting – with HRC logo ornaments and anti-bullying bracelets festooning the bloody thing.

A reader writes:

You wrote, "It would allow one to read, say Ezra Klein, without having to endure the notion of helping the Washington Post." Quite true.  It also might have spared us the noticeable degradation in the quality of Ezra's thinking that has occurred since he's been at the Post.  I still find him insightful, but his bad tendencies (excessive reverence for hacks who offer him access, tendency towards a fixation on inside baseball) have been painfully augmented by walking in the doors of that building, to the point that he's no longer a daily read for me.

The point of this isn't to rag on Ezra – rather, it what got me thinking about the next point.  While we as readers may not experience journalistic institutions as a coherent platform, their writers generally do experience them as a cohesive culture.

I've been working in my current gig at a small think-tanky operation for just over a year, and that's been more than enough time for my way of thinking about policy problems to be shaped by our native approach. I can only assume that something similar is true of journalists.  This can be good or bad; you've got places that seem to be good at fostering good writing, reporting, and thinking habits in young writers – The American Prospect springs to mind – to places that assimilate their writers into a sloppy, sensationalistic, mindlessly establishmentarian, or otherwise problematic writing culture.  The Post is certainly the most obvious example of the latter.

Ideally, you would hope that a world of loosely bound ad-selling groups composed of independent writers would be one where good writers still work in the first kind of institution early in their career, picking up the lessons that you can learn from that kind of environment, but then maintain a greater independence of perspective and style later by remaining actually independent. 

On the other hand, it might be a world where people skip the first stage entirely and try to strike out as an independent brand right from the start.  I don't know whether a world where both good writer-training institutions and bad writer-ruining institutions are weakened is better or worse than what we have now.  I'd imagine that an actual journalist might have a clearer guess.

I think, given the evaporation of most of those good training institutions, the first stage will quickly be skipped. Think of two very different but equally successful bloggers who skipped it: Nate Silver and Glenn Greenwald. Then think of a blogger who has morphed in tone, style and politics as he has moved from one instituition to another: Dave Weigel. Would Nate be Nate if he had been put through the woodchipper of NYT culture for a decade? Nah. Is there a danger of his becoming more repectable and therefore more boring if he unconsciously begins to model the tone of his new benefactors? Absolutely.

Area man reacts to Bristol's dancing.

Exton, Pennsylvania, 8.57 am

That's how the producer of "Sarah Palin's Alaska," Mark Burnett, emphatically described the reality/nature show last month. This is how Palin herself describes it:

"Oh, you are going to see all this subtleties all throughout the next eight episodes. Yeah, I am sending some messages out there. Yeah, what I see in a bear, in any other species in their natural habitat, they are self-sufficient. They are not sitting around waiting for something else to catch that salmon for them and feed them. The Mama Grizzly's are taking care of their cubs in order to make sure that their species can continue, but no, everybody is expected to help themselves in order to perpetuate the species and the success of."

Willow calls an old classmate of hers a "faggot". Guess why:

During the premiere of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" Sunday night — a boy named Tre who went to school with the Palin kids wrote a status update that read, "Sarah Palin's Alaska, is failing so hard right now." The comment sparked an intense response from Willow — who replied on the boy's wall, "Haha your so gay. I have no idea who you are, But what I've seen pictures of, your disgusting … My sister had a kid and is still hot."

Willow followed up that comment with another that read, "Tre stfu. Your such a faggot."

Bristol Palin also got in on the smacktalk — writing a message to Tre saying, "You're running your mouth just to talk shit."